I mean, I've known that this day was on its way for a little over six months. It's not exactly catching me off guard or anything. But the fact that it's 100%-real-and-happening is almost too much to take in. I mean, seriously. I'm sitting at my kitchen table, trying to hack this post together, and I've got a man from Scotland in my shower. For those not in the know, Tim Max Power Morriss, my best man, is a bit of an import model. I literally met him in person for the first time a week ago today, but I've known him for over six years. We met on InternetDJ, where he responded to a collab request. We quickly discovered that we had much more in common than music, and we developed a truly amazing friendship. And now he's here in the states, feeding me a steady diet of PG Tips and home-made bread with Marmite, and it's awesome and wonderful. We've played videogames and worked on music; we went to see Carl Cox live in Detroit last weekend; and we've just been doing everything we can to catch up on all of the 'bro-ing out' that we missed out on during high school.
This wedding represents all that I've been working towards for the last 3 years of my life. All I've wanted was to marry Caitlin, settle down, and to make a life for myself. And it's all coming together, and very nicely. But it's still pretty terrifying.
I mean, this is real. Super-real. I'm never going to ever be able to be unmarried, now. No matter what happens, I will permanently be a part of Caitlin's family, and she a part of mine - for better or for worse. It's scary. This is the Real World. This is the "adult stuff" that I always thought of as 'happening in the distant future'. Well, it looks like the future is now.
Tonight's my last night as a single man. It's also my last night of getting to hang out with Tim. The last week has just FLOWN by. I can't believe how quickly everything's happened. It's just a whole lot to take in at once. This time next week, I'll be getting back from the freaking BAHAMAS. And a week from Monday, I'll be going back to work as a married man, supporting a family.
Later on this afternoon, I'm going to be signing some papers regarding a mortgage. That house we've been waiting to hear back on, the little two-bedroom ordeal in downtown Goodrich, a bike ride away from the coney? Yeah, if all goes well, we'll be closing on it in a month or so.
I've never been more scared in my entire life... but I've also never been more excited.
It's a real shame that last summer was so hectic. I spent most of my time working - and by "most of my time", I mean "well over half of the hours that I spent awake were spent engaging in some form of work-related endeavor". I don't hate work - on the contrary, I rather like my job (and that's probably the only thing that made this last summer even remotely tolerable) - but I wish I'd had more of a chance to just sit back and be a human. It sounds kinda pathetic, but I've grown to take real pleasure in the most mundane of tasks - doing the laundry, cleaning the kitchen, going grocery shopping, and tidying up around my house - because when I'm doing those things, well... that means that I'm at home.
I spent virtually no time at home this summer. I woke up every morning sometime between 7a and 9a, flew to work, and got home late every night. Yes, there were exceptions - but by and large, that was the rule. The last summer of my life as a single man was spent being a card-carrying workaholic. I don't necessarily regret it... but, well... opportunity cost, people. I'll never have a summer as a 20-year-old again.
A lot changed over the summer, though. I've learned so much about programming - I'm about 90% of the way to putting a real and serious web app into production, I feel extremely comfortable doing systems-administration-type server automation (with bash and ruby, the latter being the most pleasant language that I've ever come into contact with), and I've even gotten pretty good at using vim. (I'm actually writing this post up in vim right now - it feels really natural. There's something very, very beautiful about being able to do just about any text-editing operation with only one or two keystrokes.)
But I've missed writing - I've missed it a lot. I've fallen very out of touch with my inner writer. Right now, I'm sitting on a park bench outside my apartment. The evening air is cool and refreshing, and I just finished a slightly-strong-but-drank-it-anyway cup of Earl Gray, and I have to say that I haven't felt this relaxed in a very long time. There's something awesome about writing - you get into this zone where there's almost a direct link between your mind and the words on-screen, and it's as if everything else in the world fades away, if only for a moment. I mean, seriously - I'll be the first to admit that my blog isn't terribly interesting, and that I highly doubt that very many (if any) people actually take the time to read it. This place is just place for me to dump my thoughts from time to time - a memoir that's being written as it happens - and that's probably the beauty of it. I don't have to worry about writing funny or interesting material so that I can keep a loyal readership, and that's extremely liberating.
It's so gorgeous out here right now. I really wish I'd gotten to spend more time outdoors this summer. I guess that it's taken me this long to realize how much I miss Gaylord. I don't necessarily miss all of the people or situations that are inseparable from the experience of "living in Gaylord" - I'd never go back to stay - but I really miss just being able to go outside whenever I wanted. The woods were my haunt - in retrospect, I did a whole lot of growing up on those trails systems, out behind my house. When I was a kid, if I wasn't on the computer, I was probably out in the woods with my dog. Summer or winter, there was always a lot to do and see out there. In the warmer months, I'd spend hours biking back there. (Before the DNR cracked down on ORV stickers, and before they started really patrolling the cross-country ski trails, I even used to spend countless hours zipping around on my minibike. I never hurt anything - my tires were too big and the bike had too little torque to rip up the terrain - and it was a blast to race around back there.) When I was maybe 14 or so, my buddy Donald and I discovered some massive hills (I've written about them here plenty of times) and we were back there ALL THE TIME. The Hills were a place of wonder - it always blew my mind that they even existed - that I had the good fortune to live in such close proximity to those sandy slopes of awesomeness, and that they'd been there all along and I'd never known about them. We'd go flying down them in the summer (never crashed, though most of my friends did at least once) - and in the winter, it was the perfect spot for sledding. School would get out at 3:10p, and if the stars aligned just right, my buddies and I would all be home by 3:30p. We'd suit up, vow to do our homework after dark, and be on our way through the woods by 4p - I'd be lugging my snowboard, and my buddies would be hauling sleds. We would sled and snowboard and carry on until dark. When it got too dark to see clearly, we'd haul all the way back to my house - probably half a mile or so, by my estimate - where my mom would be waiting with hot chocolate and cookies (or occasionally, muffins). We would hang out and play videogames - sometimes Warsow, sometimes they'd bring down their Gamecube - until their parents called and demanded that they GET HOME RIGHT NOW YOU GUYS WERE SUPPOSED TO BE HOME AT SIX! - and I'd go do my homework and listen to trance on my laptop. Those were good days.
But these days are good days, too, and I'm sure that in two or three years, I'm going to be sitting outside with my laptop on a cool autumn evening, writing about the time that I wrote about the time that I went sledding and biking in the woods. Life is funny like that.
I'm going to get this out of the way really fast here, before I forget... about two weeks ago, I wrapped up the track that I was talking about during my last post here, so here it is on SoundCloud:
It's a glitchy, hard-hitting breaks track in a style all my own. Everything's from scratch, blah blah blah - the usual. I've never really done a proper breaks track before, but this one was a whole lot of fun.
Moving right along! So over the past few months, I have become a thoughtful modern Redditor. I tend to spend most of my time in /r/sysadmin and /r/gamecollecting. I've really gotten into collecting older consoles over the last few months - my current collection includes 2 Sega Genesises (Models 1 & 2), a SNES Mini, a N64, a modded XBox (with tons of SNES, NES, and Genesis games), a Dreamcast, and most recently, a Sega Saturn. I've had my eyes on a Saturn for years - I remember finding out about NiGHTS into Dreams back in... man, that must have been back in the summer of 2006 - and ever since, I have been dying to play it. I was at my local shop - Retro Replay - last weekend, and I finally decided to bite the bullet - I walked out of there with a Model 2 Sega Saturn, 2 regular controllers, and a 3D Controller. That was pretty much one of the best days of my life as a game collector. Something just really excites me about having an older, kinda-rare console with a ton of history behind it; the fact that there are a lot of awesome exclusive titles for the system doesn't hurt things, either!
The only problem with the Saturn being kinda-rare is that the games are also kinda-rare. As I collect for fun, not value, I see no reason to take rare games from the market (and therefore out of the hands of the value collectors), so I knew that as soon as I got a Saturn, that I was going to have to get a modchip for it, too.
For this, I turned to none other than Racketboy. I'd recommend him to anyone looking to do this - the shipping was fast (now granted, I apparently only live 1.5 hours from Rackeboy HQ, but still!), and the chip worked perfectly the first time. Installation was extremely straightforward.
Speaking of installation... I promised the guys at /r/gamecollecting that I'd do a write-up on the installation process. While there's already a comprehensive tutorial on the subject at Racketboy, I figure that it can't hurt to do one of my own, too, so let's get to business.
MATERIALS:
- Sega Saturn (Model 2)
- Modchip - CR 2032 batteries (optional)
- electrical tape
- solder
- small, thin pieces of cardboard (easily sourced from battery packaging)
TOOLS:
- t-shirt
- soldering iron
- long, thin Philips screwdriver
- scissors
- nail file (optional)
NOTE: Just to get this out of the way, this modchip WILL NOT allow you to play original (i.e., not burnt) import game discs. You need some sort of Action Replay or something for that. You CAN, however, download the disk image and change the region with the Sega Saturn Region Patcher, then burn it.
I got home from Vacation Bible School around 11:30p on Thursday night, modchip in hand. Despite the fact that I needed to be at work at 9a the next day, I figured that I'd waited more than long enough to make this happen. I was about to start tearing my Saturn apart when it hit me like a ton of bricks - I had no CR 2032s. This was a problem because the Saturn, being a disc-based system, manages its gamesaves via onboard memory that runs from a battery backup. If I got my Saturn modded and was able to play any games that evening, I wouldn't be able to save my progress, so I made a quick Meijer run and grabbed some batteries.
Here's a shot of the modchip. The Saturn's copy protection scheme involves a a ring of data around the outside edge of the game disc; the modchip intercepts the cable that runs from the CD drive's laser to the motherboard, and fakes the system into thinking that it's read the copy protection data. Pretty clever!
The hardest part of the whole process was probably disassembling the Saturn. Some of the screws were super tight (there are 5), so to keep from damaging the table or the top of the console, I put a t-shirt between the table and the Saturn.
Here's a shot of the Saturn, topless.
See that white cable there? That's the cable that goes from the laser to the motherboard. Gently pull it from its socket...
... then plug it into the modchip, like so. Now, at this point, you could plug the modchip directly into the motherboard, but I found it easier to solder the wires in place first (as it gives you a bit more room to move - the wires on this particular chip were just the right length for the job; your mileage may vary).
Remember how I mentioned that cardboard? It's about to come in handy. I took these photos with my iPod Touch, so this probably isn't the clearest action shot, but what you see there is two small squares of cardboard, cut from the packaging from my batteries. The next major step in the modding process is to solder the blue wire to the pin 14 of the chip that's on the left side of the circuit board that runs the CD drive, in the front. Anyhow, to simplify the process of soldering the wire directly to the pin, wedge the cardboard between the pins on either side of pin 14 to form a sort of makeshift cover for the other pins, and solder away! (Note: pin 14 is the 14th pin to the right on the side of the chip closest to the front of the console.)
Look to the left side of the console. The brown circuit board is the console's power supply. On the bottom right corner of the board, there's a small white plug (or something) with 4 pins. Solder the red wire to the second pin down.
I used some electrical tape to hold the wires down and out of the way of any moving parts, but probably any decent tape will do. Now is also a good time to actually plug the chip into the motherboard, seeing as how everything's all soldered into place now. In the rare event that the chip doesn't fit, you might have to shave a tiny bit off the sides of the connector with a nail file. The fit should be pretty tight, but DON'T FORCE IT. The chip is pretty fragile, and it's better to be safe than to be sorry!
Well, if you did everything right, the chip is installed, and your Saturn should be ready and raring to play backups! Put the top back on the unit and screw it back together.
If you pop the cover off the back, you'll see where the CR 2032 save battery goes. If you're like me and you had to run out and buy one, now's a good time to pop it into place. The battery goes in positive-side-up.
So I plugged my Saturn into my TV, and put in my burnt copy of NiGHTS Into Dreams. It passed the disk check...
... booted...
... and there you have it, people. The chip worked perfectly, the first time!
Now, sometimes if I put a burnt disc in while the system is on and running, it will read as a CD+G, not a game disc. In that situation, simply turn the system off (via the power button - the reset switch doesn't seem to work for this) and turn it back on so that the system boots to the game, not to the Saturn OS.
If anyone has any questions, feel free to ask in the Comments section and I'll be glad to try to help in any way that I can! Modding this little guy was a whole lot of fun, and I'm just blown away by the games that I've gotten so far - like Sega Rally, Batsugun, Cyber Speedway, NiGHTS Into Dreams, Virtua Fighter 2... I could go on.
Racketboy is an AMAZING resource for the Saturn - really, for all things retro. Most of the information from this article was adapted content on his site, so here's credit where credit is due. To be honest, this is basically a re-picture and re-write of a tutorial that I followed to mod my Saturn - I just wanted to document the experience on my blog, in hopes of sharing it with others more effectively.
Well, I'd keep blathering on about the wonders of the Sega Saturn... but I think I'm gonna go play mine. :D
A great many significant things have happened since I wrote in here last. I am finding that unless I am very consistent and strict with my personal time management, that I don't have time to do the things that I have to do - which means that I never end up with time to do the things that I want to do. These days, I spend 90% of my time at work (or at church); what little downtime I do have usually ends up getting devoted to my beautiful fiancee (more on that later!), and when she's done with me, well, I end up getting around six hours of sleep a night.
But that's okay with me. I love my life. I have a great place to live (the Man Cave!, and I'm surrounded by wonderful people. After so many years, I finally have a working relationship with my mother, father, and brother - all at the same time. (I won't go into details, as I don't think that it's appropriate for me to air my dirty laundry on my blog, which is fairly public... but I've not always had the greatest relationship with my immediate family. It brings me a lot of happiness to say that this is no longer the case.)
I've taken on a lot more responsibility lately at work. When I first started at Ideal Machinery - almost a year ago - I was just an extra pair of hands in the warehouse. We buy and sell manufacturing machinery and parts, so I spent a lot of time cleaning and identifying parts, and tearing electronics cabinets apart and sorting the components (which I actually really enjoy doing). Well, a few months ago, my boss decided that my talents would be better used elsewhere, so he moved me into the office and put me in charge of making all the computers run smoothly. I've been doing some lightweight web development and database optimization, and I've had the priviledge of building and deploying a few new machines. As a newly-converted Mac guy, I don't see myself getting to build new systems for personal use in the near future, so I enjoy getting to do that at work. I've gotten to learn a lot more about *nix, too... I've been able to pick up quite a bit of bash and ruby, and I've learned a lot about how *nix systems work (which is important, since all 5 of my servers run SME Server, Ubuntu Server, or Mac OS X 10.6 Server!). I've been earning a lot of geek points lately. :D
As I mentioned earlier, I'm engaged now! On May 9, 2011, I finally broke down and hooked the love of my life up with a ring and a promise. I made her go on a bike ride with me, and while we were out on the trail, I dropped to one knee and popped the question. With great enthusiasm, she let me know that she had no intention of refusing such an offer... she literally grabbed the ring from my palm, shoved it onto her finger, and started jumping up and down, screaming. It took me a good five minutes to get a real, actual "yes" out of her, and I made her let me re-propose so that I could put the ring on myself, like I was supposed to! We've set the date for November 11, 2011 (11/11/11! I'll be in a whole lot of trouble if I ever forget my anniversary!), which is not only an awesome calendar date, but also the date of our third anniversary of being together. If you read through this post, to the part where I mention "meeting Lynn at the library" (that's what I called her, back then), well... that was the day that we first realized that we needed to be together for life. This realization came upon us at the library that evening. It's just kinda crazy that I've been writing in this blog for over three years, I guess... I've never kept up with anything for this long.
I've been forcing myself to allocate time to work on music. I've switched back to FL 8, as it's easier on the system resources; I really tried to use Ableton Live on my MacBook, but right now, I just don't have the time to devote to learning a new piece of software - I want to spend what little time I have to work on music by working on songs. I've been using a few new techniques lately, too, and they have really helped me to actually complete songs. I've got two songs that are about 90% done - all I need to do is mix them down properly and tweak a few things - and I'm about 70% of the way through another (so expect more music posts soon!). I just picked up some M-Audio AV40 near-field monitors; last summer, I picked up a used pair of M-Audio BX5As, but they were really beat-up, they didn't match (one was a Deluxe monitor, the other just regular-sized), they had power supply issues, and one died on me (I think the power supply went) a few months ago, when I was wrapping up a song. In light of this, I got the AV40s new. I got a pretty good deal on them, too! I haven't gotten to actually use them for production yet, but I have listened to music with them a bit, and they sound phenomenal. I can't wait to put them to proper use!
In closing... here's a track that I have really been enjoying lately:
After living in various basements, tents, and dormitories for the last two years, it's finally happened.
I am writing this blog post at my kitchen table.
My kitchen table. Let that sink in.
What I'm saying right now is that I am sitting in a kitchen that I have claimed for my own, at a table that belongs to me (and that no, I haven't finally taken over the upstairs of my girlfriend's parents' house). I HAVE A MAN-CAVE.
It's actually pretty nice, believe it or not. I got an extremely good deal on a nice little one-bedroom apartment, and I now proudly call it my home. Yeah, I'm sleeping on an air mattress, and yes, I have a ridiculous-looking floral-patterned sofa (which, by the way, is the most comfortable sofa on which I've ever sat or slept), but it's ALL MINE and NOBODY CAN MAKE ME WEAR PANTS WHEN I DON'T WANT TO.
It's almost intoxicating. I'll be brushing my teeth in the morning, when all of a sudden, it dawns on me - THIS IS MY HOUSE. Finally, after TWO YEARS, not only do I have my own room again, I have the entire house that it's in, too!
The apartment's just great. I'm in a dog-friendly building, so that means that the apartment complex had to put brand-new carpet in before I moved in. The faucets and sink all look new and shiny, and there's a fresh coat of paint on the walls. It's got a ton of closet space, and it came with a refrigerator, a stove / oven, and a dishwasher! It's absolutely perfect, and for the price, I plan to be here for a good long while.
I don't have all my music gear set up yet, unfortunately - I managed to blow the power supply on one of my M-Audio BX5a near-field monitors while working on my last track (which has not been released yet, by the way... stay tuned!) and I've not yet been able to tear it apart to see if I can fix it. Honestly, though, with work and such, I've not really had much time to work on music lately anyway. Maybe later on this summer I'll bite the bullet and spring for a new pair of BX8a's, or perhaps some KRK Rokkits (I've heard great things about those).
I did get a chance to work on some music stuff last night, though. I don't think I ever mentioned this, but I "discovered" techno and minimal last summer, and I'd have to say that it's changed my life. I still enjoy trance, and I love indie dance / blog house / electro / whateveryawannacallit to death, but there's something refreshing about being able to enjoy something that's so raw, stripped-back, and atonal as minimal. I guess it gives me some sort of false sense of sophistication or something; all that I know is that I've gradually adopted a personal philosophy of minimalism - doing only what I need with as little (and as simply) as possible. It's a little hard to explain, and it's a bit out of the scope of this blog (as I don't really feel comfortable discussing my personal beliefs and philosophies on here), but it's changed me somewhat - for the better, I'd like to think. It's helped me to think a little more abstractly (at least with regard to art, anyway) - and that's never a bad thing.
Here's a solid minimal track that I've been listening to a lot lately:
... anyway! I totally got sidetracked there. As I was saying, I got the chance to work on some music last night. I just picked up a MacBook (secondhand, from a friend, and for work, so no judging), and I've been trying to learn to use a native DAW. (I miss FL terribly, but this thing's infinitely faster and more stable than my Windows machine.) I've shifted my attention back towards Ableton Live, specifically because I like the idea of playing my stuff live. As part of the creative process, I hooked my iPod Touch up to my MacBook via S1 MIDI Trigger and custom-designed a controller layout:
I used it to make an extremely simple tune, and I just jammed with it for awhile, tweaking the S1 layout as I went. It was a whole lot of fun, and I'd eventually like to incorporate some of my other MIDI controllers with the setup soon. (Free plug for S1: It's an AWESOME iOS app. I wish I had an iPad because of apps such as this. I can create a MIDI controller with as many knobs, sliders, x-y controllers, and trigger pads as I wish, and I can link ANYTHING to ANY note-on, sysex, or MIDI-CC event on any channel. It's a thing of beauty. The editor's a little fiddly (as are the knobs, at least on such a small screen), but it's more than worth it.)
Maybe I'll have to record a minimal jam and throw it up here. I do a lot of cool things that I should better document... I feel like I have the means to make some of my memories more indelible, but that I never take advantage of it (for time's sake, or just because of laziness/indifference).
Well, I need to minimal-jam my way off to bed. I've got work in the morning, and I need to get up in time to make myself a lunch... from the food that's in MY fridge. My life is way more awesome than I deserve for it to be.
Anybody who knows me as a musician knows that I'm a big proponent of Image-Line FL Studio. It's the software that I've spent the most time in, and the workflow is just awesome (for me, anyway). It's not that I think that other workstations are inferior, either - I've spent quite a bit of time in Ableton Live and Propellerheads Reason, as well - but FL just has some features that I can't function without.
That being said, anybody who knows me as a musician well enough to know that I'm a FL guy also knows that, for the longest time, I've refused to upgrade from FL 8 to FL 9. FL 9 has been out for some years now - at least two, possibly more - but I've just not seen any reason to make the jump. I'm an old man in some respects - I really, reeeally don't like change. Well, about a week or so ago, I got a new hard drive for my laptop. I don't have everything reloaded yet, and a friend of mine approached me and asked me if I wanted to do a quick collaboration with him. He's a FL user as well, but he's been using 9 since it came out and has no reason to move back to 8... so, as an experiment, I installed 9 and gave it a shot.
Within five minutes, I was hooked. I hate to say it, but it's true.
The UI is a lot slicker and easier on the eyes. That's a big deal for me, as I usually end up working on music late at night (it's what, almost 4:30a right now? Yeah, this is when I have the time to do my own projects). Also, the whole situation where you can mute pattern clips from the Playlist is pretty nifty - that's been a long time coming, IMO. (Pattern clips just rock, period.) I'm not the biggest fan of the new sidechaining method - I feel that strapping 8 Peak Controllers across one mixer channel and running the sidechain kick through that is a whole lot more flexible, but that's just me, and I'll be the first to admit that the Peak Controller method is not very intuitive (but boy is it ever efficient when you wrap your head around it!).
There are some new features and tools that I've not checked out yet, but I plan on getting more familiar with it when I have time (and there's no telling when that'll be). I'd like to get back in the habit of posting clips and WIPs on here like I used to, way back in 2008 or something. (I am so old.)
Speaking of such, I think I'm going to go work on a track now, then maybe crash for an hour or two. I've gotta get up around 8a tomorrow... I've got an impossible amount of calculus to do this weekend.
Oh joy.
-K
PS - Oh. Also. I'm considering a re-skin for this blog soon. We'll have to see.
We're Getting Married!
-
Remember that guy that I used to hang out with in the Gaylord Biggby
Coffee? Well I guess he likes me because almost three years after we met he
has asked ...
