9 February 2015

I thought it might be a good idea to start documenting my opinions on what is going on in my classes this semester. Not in the sense of taking notes per se, which I already accomplish in class, but more so documenting my personal judgments into what is occurring on my day-to-day. This accomplishes two things:
1. It clearly reinforces in my mind the content that was delivered from professor to student that day
2. It associates emotions to the content learned in class and in my personal study time, thereby establishing a personal value to the content learned, which ultimately strengthens my learning initiatives.
Since I type 145-175 words per minute, this should be a fucking piece of cake for me to document shit quickly/effectively.

So, we're in week 4 at school and I’m progressing nicely in all of my classes. We reviewed file management today in Doug Nottingham’s classes, both in Digital Audio Workstation and Electronic Music 1, and it was nice to see the breakdown of the reasoning behind effective file management in the audio engineering world. As with any engineering field that utilizes file management (NOT just audio), filenames need to define the contents of the file cohesively, and in many cases the creator of the document too. Yes, directly INTO the filename. Most importantly, and I’m glad the professor stated this, because it was an instance of convergent evolution for me, for I didn’t know the professor would share my ideology prior to joining the class, but hey, great minds think alike.

Filenames should never have any spaces. If anything, use underscores. Because, for fuck’s sake, if I need to use basic software to navigate my way to that specific file I’ll fucking kill whoever makes me type Guitar%20Test%20Sheet%20Jason%20Chen%20May%202015.ptf (web site creators, you KNOW what I’m talking about) instead of just fucking Guitar_Test_Sheet_Jason_Chen_May_2015.ptf

Also, I’m glad that our professor is educating us on data backups. I greatly appreciate the requirement to carry an external hard drive to and from school. It was the best $200 I invested in tech hardware for school. All of my school shit gets backed up on there, on my laptop, AND on my OneDrive. Because, for fuck’s sake, there’s no one else to blame but myself if one of these repositories gets fucked due to a virus or drive failure and I have no backups available.

ALWAYS BACK UP YOUR SHIT.

It’s nice to see that I’m not the only power user anymore in my classes. For once in three years, I’m surrounded by the smartest minds the new generation is starting to spit out. These are the students fresh out of high school, they’re not even 18 yet, but they can siphon WEP keys using WireShark from their neighbors like child’s play. These are the personality types that utilize hotkeys as easily as turning on the faucet in their bathroom. These are the types of users that treat their workflow like water, dragging out their Chrome windows and pinning tabs where the circumstance demands it.

For once, I feel challenged to do more.

These statements I am making today in this blog entry are suggestive of an aggressive, opinionated, even dick like outlook, but frankly, after sitting down in two audio engineering labs, once back in 2007 when I recorded my audition CD on cello for music school, and last year in Q4 2014 at a studio here in Phoenix, I can say with measured confidence that the audio industry doesn’t value slow workers. It doesn’t value people that aren’t going to know at least 85% of their power user shortcuts. As my professor says, “All I care is that you are fast”. I’ve now not just seen this in the academic environment, but in workplace too.
It was also nice to see that my experience taking classes in Business Administration with emphasis in Hospitality Management actually paid off. The professor called out seven file name tracks, 3 parameters for the file type, and parameters for each individual file name track. In the restaurant industry, when the head chef calls out the order, do you really think they’re going to tolerate that one junior chef who goes “Sorry, what was that order again?” Or worse, asking a third time.
I get the feeling that I’ll be heading in the direction of a maintenance engineer to start, or perhaps interning directly for an engineer who could manifest positive benefit directly into my portfolio.