The Perilous Quill

This is my new and improved blog, a kind of consolidation of various online presences. Actually, this is a revived blog that I had started a few years ago that got abandoned. It lacked focus so I am making this one a bit more focused.

Art, Animation and Music are three kinds of expression that I was very passionate about when I was younger and kind of got lost along the way as I pursued a career in IT & software development (going on 20 years now...).

Music has been rekindled in the past decade, and I am finishing up an 24 month certification program through Berklee Music (Online) -- specifically, a Master Certification in Orchestration for Film & TV. I will be done in September 2011 (next month at the time of this writing, actually finishing in 20 months because I am doubling up on classes for this last term). I started learning music back in 1981, with guitar lessons, and then took a year long class in Music Theory in high school, and taught myself a lot of other stuff along the way, including Celtic & Middle Eastern styles. I've also been in and out of several bands and one of the culminations of my multiple threads of musical study is a project called Alhazred -- a lush fusion of progressive rock, space rock, heavy metal and classical/symphonic.

My passion for Art & Animation is much older, I first started studying drawing and painting formally around age 10. I say formally in the sense that I started studying the art books my dad had, learned construction & composition techniques, etc., because I really wanted to be a comic book artist. I used to make my own comic books, too.

Animation -- always loved animated films, whether it was stop-motion creatures like King Kong or the Cyclops from The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, or Disney films or the great cartoon shorts from Warner Brothers. My yearning to make animated films started when I was around 13 -- the original Star Wars had come out and I learned everything I could about filmmaking, visual effects, model building and animation.

While I kept at all of these things all through high school and my early 20s, various things led to me slowly abandoning them. But not anymore!

So, this blog will be basically along these lines, reviving my old passions and sharing various ideas and projects. I can't promise it will be updated regularly.

One further thing... one major impact having a career in software development (and system administration/IT) has had on all of this is my passion for the Linux operating system. Therefore, with very few exceptions, most of my creative endeavors are done on Linux these days. This includes my Berklee certification. So part of this blog will be me expounding on using Linux for multimedia projects and what is available that corresponds to similar software on Windows or Mac OSX (in some cases, it's the same software!)