goings on…
So June is two weeks old as of yesterday. We went for her checkup and the doctor was very pleased with her progress. She is ahead of her weight range by 1 ounce and last night her umbilical cord fell off. Yay! It’s remarkable how much your world actually changes when you have a child. Lys and I were joking before she was born that it was going to be some magical switch that turns on right when she is born and suddenly we’d become “mom and dad” along with all the traditional trappings that those words conjure up. Funny thing is that the joke was on us and that it really did change us completely. The thought process is now totally different and upside down and of course, all for her. We don’t make a move without thinking about her now. In fact, just sitting here writing this, I am wondering what she will think of this blog when she is older. Pretty wild!
So, I went back to work this week. Got a chance to get out of the house for a while and go teach some drum line stuff. I hate to say it, but I think I am done with the high school teaching gig. And it’s not that I have an undisciplined group that doesn’t want to learn. Quite the contrary, actually. They hang on my every word and are so eager to learn new things. I think it helps that they saw one of their own members join the corps last season so now it seems that drumming in a corps is not an out of reach goal for them.
At any rate, it’s not the kids. I think I just can’t get the same joy out of it that I did when I started out. I was nobler at one time. It was about seeing them light up when they “got it.” Watching some kid finally figure out how to play that part or the excitement in the air when they knew they did a good job and not a job for me but a job for themselves. But alas, it seems the romance has worn off a bit and now it’s like “I have to teach the fundamentals of a flam accent AGAIN?” I guess I still get a little excited when I see their victories and I do like being a part of it. Perhaps it’s all just a bit of the winter blues. At this point though, I am infinitely more excited with the goings on at Dream…
Dream has now become my compositional creative outlet. I got a bit sidetracked the week leading up to June’s birth and a few days after that but now I feel like I am totally back in my head as far writing the drum parts for the show. I finished the opener (after the aforementioned setback) in record time. Even with a computer crash and losing a whole days work! I think it represents some of my best work. Not only that, but it seems we have an overabundance of talent in the drum line this year to achieve it (crosses fingers in case I just jinxed myself). I don’t know if I would call last year our “breakout” year as a drum line even though we came so close to the title (two-tenths of a point!!!) but I would definitely say that this year we are out for blood.
Also on the home front, since I will be spending so much time with June and since she does sleep a fair bit, though usually not at night. 
, I have started the process of overhauling my website…Parking Lot Sounds.com. The website is now fully integrated with Revver videos so that I can not only earn money through google advertising (which is still doing quite well) but every time a video is played I am earning ad dollars with Revver. Revenue from Revver was slow to start but has recently really picked up steam and I am averaging about 400-800 video views a day! That is a load off of my server since I used to host all the flash files myself. I finally went through and “optimized” the google ad code so that it’s not such a blight on the pages. I now have a a much bigger ad box (went from 428×90 to 728×90) but through changing the colors and orientation, I think it blends in with the page a lot better. Plus I changed the referral link on the side. It too is now bigger but now rotates the ad between google pack and firefox plus google toolbar and changes colors to catch the eye. Hopefully that will lead to more referral clicks since they make the most cash (2 bucks a click with verified download!)
Probably the biggest change to the site though, is the slow adoption of RSS feeds. I have a podcast that is basically promotion for the website (the podcast has totally become it’s own beast as well) and through the podcast I got a suggestion that I should put up feeds of the videos so it’s easier to tell when an update is made. I thought it was an excellent idea so I set out to the task of creating RSS without some automated tool (like wordpress for example). What I found is that there really isn’t any free software on the market to accomplish this easily. But since Dreamweaver CS3 let’s you code xml, I decided that I would write the RSS feeds myself. WOW!!! How something so simple can quickly turn into a nightmare. XML is hard!!! At least the RSS specs for XML are quite difficult. I spent the last couple of days dissecting some feeds, doing some research, and learning the xml tags for RSS 2.0 spec. It’s seems now that I have got the hang of it but it’s still a really tedious task. I have decided that I will code some basic feeds and then let feedburner mash up the feeds to provide more functionality. If you don’t know what that means, then don’t worry. Just head to the site and check out the very few feeds I have done.
So that’s the goings on…
PS. if you any of you have a good crack for Acrobat 8 professional, could you please send it my way. My copy just died.