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We are down to less than 2 weeks to graduation time. I’m freaking out about how much school work I still have to do. I can’t believe it all has to be done in less than 2 weeks. I will definitely be cutting back my hours at work for the next few weeks to ensure I can do whatever I can to finish these classes once and for all. I haven’t worked on anything super productive in terms of personal projects recently. I did however play with XBMC for the first time which I am taking quite a liking to. There are a few features that I would need revised for it to better fit my purposes, but based on how open and well documented everything is on the project I don’t think I’ll have a problem writing some scripts to bridge the gaps. I have been working on a side project for my aunt the most frequently of all my outside projects. I have been putting together a prototype/beta setup to try and get the idea off the ground. I will share more once I have stuff up online, don’t want to give anybody any ideas until I get mine out first. Well, got some school work to work on, and the American Idol finale to breeze through. I have almost finished my 3rd book on my Kindle. This last one has taken much longer with all the goings on, but I’m looking forward to completing the Assasin series by Robin Hobb and moving on to something else.

With all the work I have been doing outside of school I have very quickly fallen behind. With only 4 weeks left before graduation I have much to catch up on and much to make up for grade wise. Strangely over the last couple of days I felt more inspired than I have in a long time to create and work on projects. Not only this but to plan for the future. I have set some more goals for myself. I definitely want to be moved out into my own place in the next 6 months. I also want to take the Introduction to Piano course that Saddleback offers in the evenings. I have always loved the sound of the piano and the music that has been created for it. I came across a long time composer I had not heard of last night thanks to the TV show House. In this last weeks episode the show opens on a ballet rehersal and the piece the orchestra is playing I had not heard before. I decided to research and see if someone had recognized it. Sure enough someone else had posted the question and someone whom recognized the song was kind enough to post it as the Second Movement of a piece entitled Company by composer Philip Glass. I had never heard of Mr. Glass before and started sifting through his work on Amazon playing various samples. I came across a Piano Solo Collection of his with a multi part piece entitled Metamorphosis which I have not stopped listening to in over 12 hours. It is a contemporary piece that is minimalist in how few notes are actually used to create the many moods the piece takes you through. It is repetative to those that aren’t big on Techno or any other type of beat based songs where all you have is an instrument and time to create feelings. I purchased the CD through Amazon’s MP3 Download site this morning and am very satisfied. I must say Amazon is impressing me a lot recently. I love my Kindle and am quickly growing to love their MP3 store. The downloads are incredably fast and they have a wide selection of niche artists.

I have begun working on a personal project that I will be undertaking with my aunt in the Real Estate market. I’ve started to construct a prototype and hope to have a beta version completed shortly. That is coming along quite nicely. I also have picked up another work project involving net booting servers and hope to learn a lot with that project. I have considered setting up a netboot server at home for a while. I’m not entirely sure what I would use it for or what I would netboot exactly, but I have always been facinated with the idea.

I also am looking through open source music database projects and music managers. I have used Amarok in the past, and tried Songbird. Both players have features I like, but have things missing that I want. I’m looking for something like a cross of both plus some more features. Here is a list of features I looking for:

• MySQL database (for expandable programming)
• Intelligent Shuffle (IMMS style)
• Wireless iPhone Sync (including playing stats)
• Multi Room Audio Expandable
• Network Audio Playback (PulseAudio)
• Intelligent Playlists and Play Times (i.e. no Christmas music in February, but an emphasis in late November/December)
• Automated Indexing (Purchase a song and it should be auto categorized and added to the appropriate playlists)
• Songbird Style Visualization using Flickr photos in a PS3 style slide show with falling photos)
• Playback Music Videos when available in place of a given Song for visual aspect

These are just a few of the things I’m taking in to consideration. I will be storing my music on my server in an SMB share off of Windows. I want to have new music placed in there well organized and managed.

Things seem to be flying past faster than I can have a glance at them. Two midterms are done, albeit I’m not very satisfied with how they went, the only redeeming hope is that most kids weren’t very content with their performance on them either. My last midterm for this round is on Tuesday of next week, which is also the next round of project due dates. I’m hoping I can go into the week better prepared than last time so that I’m not getting only 4 hours of sleep a night for several days in a row. By the time I was done last time I couldn’t stay awake in class and whatever they were saying went in and out the other side.

On a slightly higher note I setup my office yesterday at IMARC. Kinda funny to have an office at a company I’m not yet officially hired on with and that I only do part time work for, but I like it :). I also came across the program of my dreams yesterday. I’m not quite sure why I never searched for it before, but it adds an “Always on Top” option to every window on Windows. It also has support for transparency and process priority changing all from the title bar of a window. This is perfect so that you can keep those little windows on top of everything else like your media player, chat windows, or in my case VNC to my iPhone. That way I can do everything on my iPhone without ever having to actually pick it up. I will have to get a second charge cable because it is draining my battery very quickly but that is to be expected. The program, if you’re interested, is called PowerMenu. Well, I’m going to attempt to finish up one of my projects now. Hopefully I can stay focused long enough to get through it.