Wednesday 28th of March, 2001
Up, breakfast, bath and off to the Central Location. After the Enter Key Fright on Monday, I decide not to take the G4 keyboard with me. That would be tempting fate. I should get a carrying case for it (and the USB music keyboard as well).
When I get to the Location, the recxeptionist is obviously more interested in planning her weekend on the phone than telling me which room to go to, so I wander off upstairs. After a couple of minutes, the receptionist comes steaming after me, asking what I want. I had been just about to 'phone Denise, to see what room she is in, but the receptionist shows me in to the right room, where Denise isn't yet, but another of the peope working on the Project, Ben, is. After the introductions and so forth, we chat about computers, data and sound engineering (which is Ben's other trade) until Denise turns up Richard comes back from parking his car, and later Andy, who is doing the server-side dynamic stuf (and is writing all sorts of indecipherable code).
Everybody but Denise (who is using a house iMac) has a laptop, Richard has two, a powerbook and a PC which he's planning to use as an NT4 FTP server. So I need to go tinkering with the TCP/IP, making more Configurations which I'll presumably sort out one day.
We get an overview of the project and it takes a couple of hours to get the networking sorted out. Then the rest of the day is spent copying different languages into the pages in Dreamweaver and making sure that the graphics are all connected (each buttin needs to be in the requisite directory, even though they are all, at the moment, identical - they will be translated at some point in the future).
I'm so transfixed by it all that I don't get my lunch until 5:00, by which time it isn't really lunch anymore.
When I get home I call Woodstock to apologise about not geting the fliers to her and suggest I e-mail them as a 4-up TIFF file (which has worked pretty well so far) and as a GIF in the body of an e-mail. This seems to be an acceptable solution.
After all that tinkering I've done the Powerbook is behaving strangely - it takes a few restarts to settle down. And I plug one end of the USB cable into the Mac, but forget to plug the other end into the USB music keyboard, which makes me think that that has decided to play silly buggers with me as well. But it all sorts out.
I finish rereading Guards, Guards, and do some ambient techno-style plinking. I wonder whether, since I haven't really got my heart in the genre, it could ever be convincing. It is a deceptively simple genre - there may be only a handful of sounds and loops in total, but when it is done best, they are put together so artfully that you don't notice how simple it is - repetitive but not boring and never dull. I worry that the piece I'm working on is guilty of these last two crimes and is flawed in conception, but I need to follow through to a certain point, even if it can't be described as completion per se.