January 26, 2008 – 11:08 pm
Last night my Time Machine drive kinda went bye-bye and it forced my to delete a bucket load of files on my system’s drive to make way for a folder I kept on that drive of design work…shoot! Where did all my music work go? I feel sick. Oh crap!
OK, panic over! I had mysteriously put my In The Red Deeps stuff inside that design work folder I rescued from the backup drive before I reformatted it. Oh that was scary! From me writing “shoot” to “OK, panic over” was probably less than two minutes but I was already heading towards a hissy fit of tears and tantrums. I was trying to pacify myself by thinking “I’ll be able to laugh at this one day” and “it’s just 0’s and 1’s, don’t cry David. Big boys don’t cry”. Frightening stuff! Who would have thought a blog post could be so full of drama? So stop reading this right now! Stop it and don’t come back until you’ve backed up everything that is precious to you!
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January 26, 2008 – 10:28 pm
As of last summer I was doing all my music and design work on a PowerMac G4 Dual 500MHz with 512mb of RAM running OS X 10.3 Panther (roar!). When it became evident that I couldn’t put off upgrading any longer I decided that I wanted to get a laptop. A MacBook Pro to be more precise. I reasoned that it would not only be a far quicker machine than I was used to but I could realise my long held dream of being to work out on the balcony, splayed spread-eagle on the living room floor, under a tree in the park or just somewhere other than my desk. Great! I figured it would take me quite a while to save the $1500 odd for one. Bummer. Then I figured it would take me a mere fraction of that to get a mac mini that could tide me over while I saved up over all those summers for that coveted piece of aluminium and whizz-bang Intel chips. So that’s what I did.
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January 12, 2008 – 2:04 pm
…for now
I made a few changes and tweaks to the weaker parts of the user experience at In The Red Deeps dot com. A wholesale redesign isn’t on the cards because for the time being I like the design just fine and refining the rough edges will keep me satisfied for now. The refreshed site is live today and these are changes I made.
Latest: I still don’t know. I’ll leave it be for now.
Wallpapers: I came up with a real simple solution in the end. Originally the system was you clicked on the thumbnail and that opened a new browser window with a html page that had three links offering the three sizes. You click on the link and it opens the jpeg. I didn’t like that system because I felt there were too many clicks between the thumbnail (which is kinda small) and seeing what the wallpaper really looked like.
The new system is you click on the thumbnail and a near full size preview opens in the same browser window (actually over the top of the thumbnails), then on top of that large preview I have the size links. Clicking on the size link opens a new browser window straight to the jpeg. Simple and effective.
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December 29, 2007 – 12:01 pm
Just a quick update on what I’ve done so far. As I said in the last post, I had some functional changes to do to make things a little easier on the user.
Archive/mp3s: I merged the Archive and mp3 sections into one called music. I relabelled the mp3 blossom to music, and switched off the archive blossom. In the future I’ll probably make that into the shop link. Now when you click on the link there’s a intro page explaining the section, a latest section where I can highlight the newest item, and along the bottom there’s a very simple navigation to the albums/singles/EPs that is present on every page. When you hover over a streaming mp3 I’ve added some very simple user feedback that lets them know something is happening. It also states on the page whether the mp3s there are downloadable or not.
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December 15, 2007 – 8:35 am
In The Red Deeps dot com is the oldest site I currently have online. I went back to it the other day to see if I could come up with some ideas to make it a little better. I found that I liked the overall look and feel of the site, but didn’t like the content areas (the sections that house the content) much and I felt that I really needed to come back to this project with fresher eyes and give the site a bit of a refresh.
One thing that has really changed about my thinking is that as creative as I try to get in my sites, I try to also think as a user. Meaning that my thoughts go through a filter that checks to see if a particular idea will hurt the user or help the user. I obviously want a visit to any of my sites to be a positive experience, not one of confusion and frustration. And too, I don’t want my users missing out on something because I didn’t make it easy for them to discover a feature or section. With this in mind I went back to In The Red Deeps dot com to first look at what needed fixing before I got to wire-framing aesthetic changes. These are the main points I came up with;
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December 9, 2007 – 9:49 pm
After literally months of procrastinating over whether to have my photography in my main flash site or whether to have them in flickr, I’ve set myself up with a flickr account! The reasoning is that it’s more of a side thing than something strictly to do with me design work. (I’m talking about unedited photos here.) For those of you who don’t know what flickr is, it’s basically a website service for sharing photos (and a whole bunch more). I’ll post photos here to the blog every now and then, or you can see them yourself by going to
http://www.flickr.com/photos/davidamcclain/ .
December 9, 2007 – 1:28 pm
I’ll tell you the story of the second time. The first time was a long time ago, it was temporary, and it doesn’t really count.
So.
One day I realized that in the past two years I hadn’t much to show for myself in regards to my music. I had written very little, and what I did have was crap. I was in a creative rut that I couldn’t seem to get myself out of. So I had the idea that I should make a website for my music thinking that A) it might be fun, and B) if I had a website out there I would look like an idiot if I had a site for a band that hadn’t written any songs. (Alas, it turns out that the “B” wasn’t enough of a motivator - but more on that another day.)
It turns out that it was quite fun and as I was building the site it I thought “maybe if I get good at this, I can do this for other bands” and from there that little germ of a ‘maybe’ got under my skin more and more. And here I am writing a blog about it all.
November 24, 2007 – 3:49 pm
I like to make plans and I like to break them down into lists. Like I said in my previous post, getting things down on paper or TextEdit helps me get my head around it. Plus I’m quite good at forgetting ideas, especially the good ones. So here is my list of (some of) what I want to get done in 2008.
In no particular order.
- Record demos for all the “gifted” stuff. I’m running a little low on studio equipment so I’ll settle for just getting the dam things down on tape. For me that’s a major part of writing. I can’t get a full grip on a song unless I listen to it.
- Part of what I want to start doing is to make physical things. As a minor part of that I have some ideas for t-shirts I’d like to make and if they come out good, maybe see about selling some.
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November 22, 2007 – 8:53 am
Amongst the various things I try to be and the many hats I try to wear, at the heart of everything, is the desire to create something. Musician is the one hat that trumps everything in terms of importance to me. It’s more a part of me than anything else could ever be and yet it’s the one thing I do the least work on and have the least to show for. This frustrates the heck out of me. The main reason this is (and it’s not always been like it is now) is that I need to be in a very certain and delicate frame of mind. Anytime I create something, I’m inspired first. But with music that inspiration needs to be a billion times stronger and maybe most importantly, I need to be totally alone! Like nobody in the house kind of alone. And generally, I need to feel sad. I’ve been very very lucky that in the past few years I’ve not been “alone” and certainly not sad, so music gets put away to gather dust in the corner.
But…!
I choose to not let it be this way. So from now I’m going to learn to create in the company of love, security and get something meaningful dusted off and done! Gifted Children of Dead Lovers will be my baby step forward. This album right now is basically a collection of songs written back when I had the dubious gift of being alone and sad, and some songs written in those rare fleeting moments since then that I have found that massive spark required to get me to write in the uncomfortable presence of happiness. I’m going to revisit each and every song (ten I think) and rewrite the kinks out of them, record them and most importantly release them.
I always seem to fall short of my potential. It’s conceivable that I over estimated my potential and the reality is that I just suck but I really don’t think that’s the case. This album could be a very big step towards doing something that finally a step towards where I should have been years ago (before a 9-5 got in the way) in terms of the level of my creativity. I may not have an awful lot to show for myself at the moment, but trust me, it’s a whole lot more than I had just a few months ago. I’m sick of not being the real me, I’m sick of living in this shell of maybes and I will rectify this. Today.
Putting things down on paper (or TextEdit) helps me think things through. Helps inspire me. Hence this blog. By helping myself (baby step by baby step), maybe we can help each other be creative, productive and beautiful.
