Monakhos

Well, I finally got around to upgrading my blog. It’s all pretty and 2.3.1ish now. Let me know if you see anything broken, but I think we’re good to go.

I started making some of my own music. It’s crazy synthy music kinda inspired by modern classical and free jazz, more or less. You can check it out on my MySpace page. Next up is some collaboration with some friends around here. Hopefully I’ll get that posted soon.

I just realized today that I think that Halloween might be my favorite holiday. Sure on Christmas you get presents and on Thanksgiving you get to eat lots of food, but Halloween is fun because (at least in my neighborhood) you get to see a bunch of little kids (less than 6) running around with their parents in fun costumes (not ghouls and goblins, but princesses and frogs and magicians) coming to your door asking for candy. It’s so much fun.

I’ve forgotten how it feels to take an objective look at one’s life and get rid of all the excess. All the junk that’s been cluttered up. Maybe it’s not always junk, but just stuff that’s never used. I cleaned out my office area at home last Sunday and felt really good. I’ve been cleaning a lot of my virtual junk recently too (extra RSS feeds, old files that I’ll never need again on my computer.) It’s very refreshing.

I always know the feeling I’ll get, so it’s surprising that I’m not better at it. I guess it’s just Mara manifest as laziness or procrastination. I need to work on that. There’s still a lot of clean up to do, but it’s feeling better already.

A month and a half since my last post. And another full month before that one. I haven’t had much monakhosy stuff to say in a long time, so let’s just start writing.

My old job ended. The company decided they didn’t really like our product and would rather use a recent acquisition’s version of the same thing. Some people stayed behind to support the old product and work with the new one, but about half the team had to find new spots. I could’ve stayed in the company in another division, but I happened to have already had my resume out, so within two days I had a new job. Interesting that the first time I had seriously applied for a job was three days before I actually needed to find something. Well, I didn’t really need to find something, I could’ve moved in the company, but you get the point.

The new job is nice. As opposed to cubicles, we have one big room and big tables we sit at. It may sound like a downside with no personal privacy, but after a few years in a cramped cube, having open space is nice. And it’s not like anyone is looking over your shoulder, so the privacy matter is really a non-issue. My old job was shirt and tie and later business casual. This job is casual. Flip-flops, jeans, and a t-shirt. That’s nice too. Some people say it gets old, but I don’t really mind dressing up occasionally, so when I feel tired of it, I can. It’s a lot more creative environment and a lot smaller too (8 people in my group and 50 in the company as opposed to nearly 100 and 5000 total.) I’ve been there about three months and I’m loving it.

Music. Lots of music lately. I got a nice old vintage Ludwig kit off of craigslist to replace my current Gretsch bop kit. The jazz sizes just weren’t doing it for me anymore in a rockier atmosphere. Synthesizers. I like them. I’m currently almost done building a basic one from synthesizers.com. Until I add more modules at the end of the month I’ll have a nice little two oscillator modular analog synthesizer. A lot of cool sounds come out of that thing and I’m sure I’m only at the tip of the iceberg.

I like languages. But I never seem to get around to learning them very well. Hopefully that’s in the process of changing with Esperanto. I’ve been working with Jon lately and attending the club he started. It’s pretty easy to learn (I really started studying Sunday and already have a vocabulary of 150+ words) and a good stepping stone to other languages. So should a refresher on French be next or my dream of Russian? Who knows. I probably need a few more months of this first. Check it out. I know Jon’s talking about making some of his pages Esperanto, so there will be plenty of material to practice reading!

There’s other stuff, like the crazy movie Holy Mountain I watched last week. I doubt you’ve heard of it, but it’s really interesting if you don’t mind violence and [lots of] nudity (it was made in the 70s and isn’t rated.) It’s all about a quest involving mystical traditions, the occult, and alchemy to achieve immortality. It may be hard to find, but Netflix has it as does the Naro!

Anyways, maybe I’ll write more often now. I certainly remembered how to write a blog post judging by the size of the scrollbar.

I had pretty much forgotten about Zaadz until yesterday when I got an email from them and didn’t immediately archive it. I always get a bunch from one of the groups I’m in, and I just mark them as read and archive them away in the vault of my email archives. This one for whatever caught my eye. I surfed Zaadz a little last night and plan to do some more tonight. If you haven’t joined up yet, you should! See you there!