ben wakeman : : Journal

Catching Up: How Many Plates Can I Spin?

June 19, 2007

Yeah, so much for regular disciplined journal entries eh? Wow, it's been over two months since I've posted anything. It would seem that you only have two choices in this life: you can either have a life, or write about one but you can't have both. So, it looks like this will be one of the obligatory catch-up kindof entries. Here goes:

My Songwriting podcast Take Me to the Bridge has been an amazing ride so far. I've gotten to interview some of the most amazing people. Since my last posting I have interviewed

Matthew Kahler
Craig Cardiff
Vienna Teng
Richard Shindell
Pierce Pettis

It's always so interesting to me to sit and talk with another songwriter to find out how they work, where their inspiration comes from and how they stumbled into the profession. There's always a trade-off though. All the time I spend preparing for the interviews and doing the post-production means less time for me to actually work on my music. It's been rare in the last couple of months that I've sat down and played, much less written unless I'm playing Bluegrass with Ian.

I've also been inundated with work of late. At Digital Positions, we are in the process of launching the ColdFusion-based CMS that I began writing almost six years ago as an open-source project. It's been a tremendous amount of work, but I think boomsocket will be a huge success and make building and managing web sites a great deal easier for folks. In addition to regular work, I've also been teaching Flash and ColdFusion at Emory a lot more lately which is rewarding, but extremely draining. Flash is not an easy technology to teach by any stretch of the imagination.

As if all this is not enough, I've also agreed to work on a couple of freelance web projects for my friend Kristian Bush. I'm rebuilding his personal site kristianbush.com and we are collaborating on another project geared towards songwriters and music publishers.

After much contemplation and waffling, I've made the plunge and crossed over the fence --- I bought a Macbook Pro. I got so tired of dealing with Windows with all of it's fussy drivers, installers, viruses, etc. that I made the switch and I am so glad that I did. Having the new Mac laptop has elevated my work life tremendously. I can use it to do my mobile recordings for the podcast. I can build web applications on it. I can edit video on it. It starts up right away. It's smooth, small and sleek. Okay.... that's enough, it's a damned computer.

Finally, in family news, I could not be happier. I am the luckiest man alive. Summer has kicked in, so there is a lot of time spent at the neighborhood pool. Ian is getting better at his guitar playing everyday and will not get his head out of books. Dylan is as funny as ever. He has really taken to drawing lately. His pictures are these intricate mazes and castles with trap doors and turrets. When I get home in the evenings, we all play Uno together, but Dylan really likes Clue and pillow fighting. Catherine is as beautiful as ever and is of course never swayed from her mission to be supermom. She has such a tremendous capacity for worry that I think she may have developed it into a fine arts discipline. Therefore, my job is typically to be the court jester and easy-going-don't-worry-I'm-sure-it's-nothing-man. Sometimes I actually succeed.