Musicalmidget’s Blog

I’ve been working away pretty much all day everyday for the past week on the new MyBB Mods site, which is starting to take shape nicely now. There’s still a few issues to work out but most of the development is now on the admin side of things. I don’t know when it’ll be ready to go live though, so you’ll have to keep an eye out for information on that front.

What originally began as a relatively simple process of adding some new features to the site and perhaps improving the look a little bit, has blown into what is essentially an entire rewrite from the ground up. As I’m sure you can imagine, writing any site from scratch can be a little testing at times. It’s easy to get frustrated when things aren’t working as they should and it sometimes gets a little tedious when you’re at it for long periods of time. But, I’ve got a new “toy”, shall we say, that’s great for when you need ten minutes out from lines and lines of code.

It’s actually a little more than a toy. Enter, the brand spanking new Yamaha DGX-620 (with visible mess and clutter in the background).

A few weeks ago, I thought it would be a good idea to look for a new keyboard. My old one is quite outdated now and doesn’t even have full sized keys. I’m not really a pianist, but I am a budding composer. With both composition and orchestration modules to deal with in my third and final year of university, I thought it would definitely be beneficial to have a keyboard around, particularly if it was the full range and able to connect the computer for MIDI in/out. I had a look around online and went to a number of music shops and quickly realised that the budget I’d set originally, was only really going to get a much newer version of what I already had, in terms of functionality at least. So I upped the budget a bit, and came across the DGX-620.

This thing is absolutely huge. I knew it was a full range piano, but we thought it was going to fit in a specially cleared space. Boy were we wrong! The only place up here where it’ll fit and still connect to the computer, is slap bang in the middle of my floor. So, it gives me much less space for the moment, but each time I turn around from the PC, it’s there. That means, when I’ve been typing and typing lines of code all day and start to feel a short break is needed for my own sanity, what do I see when I turn around? “Well, since it’s there, I may as well play it for ten minutes“. And, ten minutes later, I’m refreshed, in a calm state of mind and ready to get back into it.

There you have it. That’s what’s been keeping me sane recently. It’s also hopefully something that’ll help me pass third year and be worth the trek to find it. It’s certainly something that relieves computer-related stress. I need to learn something other than Bill Bailey’s “BBC News” theme though.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 25th, 2007 at 01:56 and is filed under Music, Personal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.