What’s On My Plate For This Week

Lots of bits and pieces are floating around my desk this week.

I’ve been chasing further qualifications in Logic Pro, since obtaining my Level One certification last year. After a number of unanswered emails, I finally found someone in Hong Kong who offered the required course. However, they quoted me a price that was 2.5 to 3.5 time s the going rate for such courses in London, NYC or LA! Suffice it to say I’m not feeling that generous right now. So I’m making enquires about courses in other parts of the globe and seeing if I can combine them with my travel plans for the next year.

In the meantime, I’m working through the excellent Logic Pro 8: Beyond the Basics (required for Logic Pro level 2 certification) and the various packages I’ve bought from MacProVideo.

I haven’t blogged much lately about my studies with BerkleeMusic. At the end of last year I finished a Specialist Certificate in Orchestrating and Producing Music for Film and Games. Right now I’m partway through a Master Certificate in Guitar (2 courses of Guitar Chords, 2 of Jazz Guitar, Blues, Classic Rock, Rhythm and Groove Guitar and Funk/R&B Guitar). This week I have assignments on Drop 2 chords and Jimmy Page style soloing. (Surely I should write something in the future about my “need” for qualifications!?!)

In my own time I’ve been working a lot on open voiced chords, especially 7ths. My rhythm playing really did get stale for a long time there. I’ve been working on some fresher and more open arrangements of standards, trying to get away from the chord sound I’ve (lazily) relied on for years.

These past weeks I’ve been on a massive reorganisation binge. Part of which has been taking almost all my DVDs out of their cases on putting them in storage folders. I was getting sick of throwing/giving away DVDs largely because of our (Hong Kong) space problems. Part of this has involved cataloguing *everything* we have in Delicious Library. This week I’ll finish that task.

I have a small pile of sample DVDs I’ve collected in the last year – some bought and some free from magazines that I need to import properly and arrange. I’m starting to realise how bad a job I’ve done of organising my sample and music libraries. I used to be a file ninja a decade ago and now I’ve become so sloppy. Maybe it was the old limitations on file name size that made me think a lot harder about what names I gave to files and the folder that I organised them into.

We have, at least in the short-term, stopped going to church. This is something I will blog about in the future. It’s not a faith thing – more a practical thing, why can’t people bother to learn our names and say hello occasionally thing. The last straw for us was reading in the newspaper about the church’s plans for a massive high rise redevelopment of their site (yes, the article I cited on Twitter). I have to make time to think and pray about where we go from here and whether to communicate with the church about our decision (did they even notice we weren’t there?).

For the first time since we moved to Hong Kong, I have all my books on one set of shelves, in one room, in order. Well, actually all the books that are not in long term storage. Not surprisingly, such an arrangement took a bit of work and has subsequently sparked a lot of ideas.

I’m almost finished the process of going through my whole iPhoto library (currently 11,463 images) cleaning up the events and folders, getting the meta data right and assigning ratings. Once I’m done with that I will try again to get the Aperture library working properly and move onto creating some albums.

The GTD discipline has helped me a lot recently. I finally have all my projects, right down to grocery lists and small chores in OmniFocus and am using one physical inbox for all incoming materials (thus breaking scores of lifelong bad habits). The last few weekly reviews have been exhausting, yet richly creative. I won’t go so far as to say I feel “in control” but I certainly feel a lot better about the disparate range of responsibilities I face.