holy jeez you guys, my life

(Note: I just lost the previous version of this post to an unintended page reload, so if this sounds hurried or messy, that’s because it’s 4am and deal with it! <3)

I’m at CCRMA, Stanford’s music technology department, working towards a masters. I just found out two really cool things: I got a fellowship for my entire tuition, and they extended the program to two years! They gave us the option to stay on for two, and I’m definitely going to do it. I’ll get to do research on my own and have a slightly less insanely-compressed course load. Awesome! In the mean time, I’m busy to the point of total exclusion of all other life activities, getting there at 10AM and staying til 1 or 2 in the morning every day.

My classes are insanely cool! Signal processing is especially sweet, in that I am finally motivated to learn math because I know exactly how I’ll apply it). In the other classes, the lectures have stayed pretty high level (though that might be because these are intro classes open to anyone), but are on topics that I am completely in love with, like physical interaction design and implementing interactive audio interfaces. Those classes also have really big final projects, so their depth is more in forcing you to experiment and try things yourself, which is great. I’m really looking forward to coming up with ideas for those projects, but so far have been too preoccupied with normal homework to spend much time thinking about ‘em.

I did manage to squeeze in some hacking on non-school stuff the past few weekends. This past one, I went to the Google HTML5 Game Jam with ganz, and we made this sweet little time-killer: http://mikerotondo.com/ninjaleap/ (works in Chrome & Safari, not Firefox). The whole experience was a blast, as we got a lot of playtesting in and heard feedback from lots of folks, which helped us tune the game’s interface & difficulty curve to make it a really solid package. And then we won the contest!

I’ve also been doing some work on Artikulator with Luke, which is sweet as always. We had a design & code sesh 2 weekends ago where we put together our v1 features list, so now we have a firmer design to work towards, which feels great. I promise it will come out someday!

My classmates at CCRMA are incredible too, lots of super impressive work ethics combined with maniacally creative minds and thoughtful and fun personalities. I love it! We’ve had a few spontaneous jams here and there, and tomorrow some of us are invading the 20.4 channel listening room to play tunes for each other and share music.

So, that’s really it! CCRMA is my life right now. Before that, I had a really needed period of running around the east coast seeing friends, and then zeroing out back out here, doing absolutely nothing for a few weeks. But now it’s non-stop work, and I love it so very very much.

I think that’s about it!