I will start posting again!

- Alexis.

Man, after 4 days of barely leaving the house so that I can finish a paper for the important-sounding Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing 2009, it felt amazing to actually bike over to the climbing gym and get up on the wall again! Also you wouldn't think it matters but something helped me be notably more agile and swift, and I'm pretty sure it was losing 3-4 lbs. during the past week.

Not saying I don't suck balls, of course. But my ol' pal Sarah said that they are going to Jack's Canyon (it has a website?) again this weekend which gives me a chance to get some lead-climb training from her and Josh and I need all the help I can get. I can only do outdoors climbing when someone else is (due to acute lack of the car) so I'm pretty excited.

I've set my mind on the first 'computer-is-your-friend' program I want to work on. Here's what's on the whiteboard (The 'Penis Sizes' histogram had to be erased, whiteboard fans. Sorry!):

Not going to get into it much but in a nutshell: Wouldn't it be nice if your desktop had icons for only things you're working on right now, instead of either nothing but a pretty background (the minimalist approach) or everything ever created (the not-so-minimalist approach). There's a little bit more into it, but if you think that'd be nice, you'll like this.

I've been aching to put the tunes in my head down for a while now, so I finally went back into looking for a decent, easy to learn and cheap music sequencer for Windows. Naturally, I googled for 'Garageband Windows alternative' or something to that effect, having heard all the best things about it. Pretty soon I found Mixcraft had recently gone version 4, finally adding MIDI support (which is the reason I hadn't even tried the first time I found out about it). I've only gotten to play with it for the last hour or so, and so far it's pretty sweet! It's very rich in features considering its price compared to the price of 'serious' DAWs, and the interface is clean and intuitive. As always the pain (at least for a beginner) is finding decent samples, but other than that and a couple graphics glitches, it's looking really good and very fun.

Anyway my trial expires tomorrow (it goes for one week but I only got a chance to play with it today) so I might as well post what I made in the hour or so I've been working with it. I think it stops being able to mix down when the trial period is over. 

(download link)

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