Nick Storr’s interwebs page

Holy frijole.

I really haven’t been a fan of Telstra, and now that Optus are expanding their 3G coverage in Tasmania I’ve been sorely tempted to switch back, and upgrade my handset in the process . The main thing that’s been stopping me is that I can’t get out of my Telstra contract without paying a hefty early termination fee.

But I’ve just done a look back over the last few months of my mobile bills, and I’ve gone about $40 over my plan on a regular basis. And that’s being careful. So I could have put my Telstra phone in a drawer, started a brand new Optus plan on top, and had the same out of pocket expenses with more call time available.

Of course I could also just make less phone calls…

It’s come down to the fact that I’ve got a bucket-load of work to do over the next few days, and I need to seriously put my head down and get it done.

How on earth did I get so busy all of a sudden? Two voice recording sessions this week for the cartoon job (plus some potential re-takes to do at some stage), the revision stage of this esession job, a hefty bag of T3E homework from the get together on the weekend (as well as another behind the scenes video to hack together) and now I’ve gone and agreed to throw some keyboards and backing vocals on an old friend’s project (and he’s working in Pro Tools, so I’ll have to remember how to use that particular flavour of arbitrary limitation software.

We’re hoping to finalise our house-buying ventures this week as well, and some semblance of a personal life would be nice to squeeze in there too, if I can swing it.

To be fair, the T3E stuff has been kicking around for a good while, and it’s my own fault I’ve let it slip until now. Plus I didn’t have to agree to this keyboard/bg vocals job, but I want to… dammit .  It’s a good dose of ever-so-slightly-cheesy-but-very-well-executed symphonic metal, and a nice change of pace from the wacky, cliched, and serious tunes that my other three current projects provide respectively (I’ll leave it to the reader to divine which project corresponds to which adjective ).

But for now, the room next door is full of noisy animators playing with their Wii and talking about colour-blindness, so I think that’s my cue to go and have lunch.

I’m still impressed with the internet. It’s become such a standard fixture so quickly that I think we often take for granted the things we can do now.

I’ve just sung a jingle for a client in the USA. He found me on esession, asked me to submit a quote, and now I’ve uploaded an MP3 mix for him to comment on. If he’s happy, I’ll send him the stems. If he wants any changes, I’ll re-do the appropriate parts, and send him another version. Money has changed hands, and more will do so when we’re done. It’s all very simple and straightforward and it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that I’m doing business with somebody on the other side of the planet.

So I just wanted to say hooray

I arrived at work this morning to find my first ever esession request, along with a personal followup email from an esession manager to verify that I’d received it, as the deadline was fairly tight. I like that touch - it’s reassuring to know there are actual people on the other end. I replied to say thanks and to let them know that I was checking out the request immediately, and got a very quick response. Most impressive.

I must admit I’m a bit new to all of this online vocal malarkey, so I’ve taken a stab at a quote based on what I’ve been paid for vocal sessions locally. If we can reach an accord, I get 50% up front, then I’ve got the weekend to do the tracking, send it over to hit the radio-waves in the USA, and get paid the remainder.

Pretty cool

Hmm, well I tracked my Macbook problem to a bad RAM module. So I’m back up and running, albeit with only 1GB to play with.

It’s weird to imagine Apple computers using humdrum components like RAM… From their promotional material you’d get the impression that they ran on magic and rainbows and love.

Oh, and smug. Let’s not forget smug.

I’m sure nobody at Cupertino will be losing sleep over it, but Nick’s great Mac experiment of ‘07-08 is officially over. My once-revered white revision 2 Macbook, having moved from “a couple of teething problems” to “inexplicably temperamental” (with a diversion to “warranty-replaced hard drive” land) has finally reached what I now believe to have always been its ultimate destination of “useless piece of crap”.

I wanted to love it, I really did. The user experience when the machine is working is absolutely second-to-none. Intuitive, smooth, streamlined, easy. But the caveat to the dumbed down user interface is that when something breaks you get very few clues as to what has actually gone wrong. Shiny shiny isn’t much help when you’re looking for an error code or some other information that might actually help you to, oh I don’t know, maybe diagnose the problem. As it is, you’re left with trying various combinations of words describing your symptoms into google, usually to find nothing but other hapless users with the same problem, and no more idea than you of how to resolve them.

And that’s the thing - for an allegedly superior platform which, in the words of Apple’s own marketing spin, “just works”, there are an awful lot of users out there griping about their shiny machines NOT working. And not an great deal of wisdom out there to help them. So we wander through about a million different sites which regurgitate the troubleshooting mantras ”reset your PRAM” or “repair disk permissions”, and ultimately resolve on “Oh, I took it to the Apple store and they replaced my hard drive/RAM/logic board”. I applaud the no-questions hardware replacement, but why not just design and build the things to a higher standard in the first place?

Look, I never really bought in to the “just works” thing, I’m not unrealistic in my expectations, I realise that personal computers are complicated devices. But I’ve got two Dell laptops at home and they both run pretty much without a hiccup. One is six years old, and the other is NINE years old. And they’ve NEVER not worked. The Macbook has run about a year, probably about 10% of which was spent in some state of disrepair.

Well, as of this morning it looks very much like we’ve just bought a house - yay! Nice little 3-bedroom jobby in Blackmans Bay, with a garage under which will transform very effectively into a studio for myself and my nefarious requirements.

Rather exciting!

It’s a slightly scary time to be hoisting quite that much debt up onto our shoulders (I’m listening to a news report with the Treasurer being quite pessimistic as I type this) but ultimately it was something we’ve wanted to do for a long while, and there’s never going to be a perfect time. Fingers crossed and all that - and at least we’re not going to be pouring money into somebody else’s investment.

I have had it up to here* with the construction next door. They seem to be removing the majority of the pub and replacing it with different pub, and the sound of power tools vibrating through the wall for the majority of the day is rather annoying. Sounds like angry whales crossed with a trip to the dentist.

And they’re apparently going to be doing it until Christmas!!!

Good thing I don’t work in a recording studio or anything.

Oh wait…

* - not an entirely successful turn of phrase without a visual referece, on reflection. Imagine me holding my hand up above my head and it works (marginally) better.

Ahhh, the indescribeable joys of house-hunting. What started as a whimsical “what if…” discussion a week or two ago has snowballed into a fully fledged procedure. Almost a plan if you can fathom it!

So we’ve been talking to financey folks, and to real-estatey folks, and generally getting frustrated in all the ways that one normally gets frustrated in this situation. Disagreements over details, money, over-zealous family members, balancing notions of “conventional wisdom” against doing what feels right… Actually it’s a lot like planning the wedding, now I think about it.

And that worked out pretty well

Ok, so my resolve lasted all of a couple of hours.

Can’t say I’m in love with the cover though - for some reason they’re not selling the traditional style cover in the shop here. I don’t know if they’re going for a more “sophisticated” audience or what the story is. Honestly, isn’t this much better?