Lights, Camera, Action!

Well, to say I've been busy is an understatement! In the past month, I...

• Went on a road trip from NH to Austin.
• Broke down outside Cincinnati in 100-degree weather.
• Discovered the car battery and alternator were both dead.
• Got rescued by my cousin's boyfriend, who is a mechanic!
• Had LOBSTER TACOS at Iron Cactus. They were epic.
• Finally saw my little brother after three years! I missed that guy.
• Ate more Oreos than I can count.
• Became the proud owner of my own website...www.markdavidhansen.com! It currently forwards to my band's website.
• Skyped with Staci! Which we need to go again now that I'm not stuck on the road.
• Hung out with an awesome Ukranian, Yasya! She's in town until we leave. I hadn't seen her in over four years.

AND...

Officially started moving our studio out to Utah! That's right, Chris, Adam, and I will be writing and working on all new music this next year, and play shows in the Provo area. I've missed doing music so much! I'm psyched to finally have the whole gang back and just rock out.

Hope you're all having an epic day!

What friendship means

• Being trustworthy.
• Trusting.
• Knowing when it's safe to butt in, and when to leave them be.
• Being a part of the journey, not a face along the way.
• Forgiving.
• Forgetting.
• Saying sorry.
• Knowing you're crazy and not caring.
• Knowing they're crazy and not caring.
• Taking the time to listen not just to what's said, but what isn't said.
• Understanding, as opposed to judging.
• No gossip. About you to other people, or other people to you.
• Sharing in the bad as well as the good.
• No unnecessary drama.
• Caring.
• Inspiring.
• Encouraging.
• Patience.
• Epic dance parties, whenever and wherever.
• Keeping you at heart though you may not be in touch.
• Seeing each other after years and it only feels like a day.
• Acceptance.

I hope you're noticing a common theme among these posts. Every human interaction is based on love. Not the emotional, head-over-heels Hollywood love, but the kind of love endures. It's the kind that parents have for children, friends for each other, husbands and wives, grandparents, aunts, uncles, anyone. What love boils down to is the ability to see the best in someone else and inspire the desire to reach that potential. No guilt. No shame. No blame. No pride. No gossip. No lies. No cheating. No backstabbing. Just looking forward to the future and working each day to make tomorrow better. Progress.

Terrible misconceptions and mistakes you should never make when dealing with the deaf and hard of hearing

Fact: I used to be almost completely deaf in one ear. That makes it very, very hard to communicate with people. And makes you really self-conscious. Especially when you have to wear a box on your hip and a loop around your neck so your hearing aid can pick up what your teacher is saying, and your teacher has to go around wearing a microphone everywhere.

Over the years, I've come across several things that really, really irk me, and for the longest time, I thought they were just me things, but I've come to realize that in almost every single case, these things are largely byproducts of being almost completely deaf from a young age (read: before I even learned to talk).

• Don't raise your voice to talk. It doesn't make you any easier to understand, and if the person you're talking to reads lips, actually makes it harder.
• Lip reading isn't perfect. At best it's maybe 30% accurate. No, I can't magically understand everything you're saying from the other side of the room with absolutely no context. It doesn't make you a super-spy. It just helps you understand what's already going on in a conversation.
• Communication is a two-way road. Whether or not you realize it, I'm trying really hard to understand what you're saying. Please try to make some effort in return. It's appreciated.
• Many deaf people (myself included in this list from time to time) will simply make assumptions about what the conversation was about, or what was said, and try to react appropriately, which can sometimes lead to very awkward situations, such as the oh-so-common "What's up?" "Good, you?" Which gets odd looks, at the very least.
• If a deaf person has gone out of their way to ask you to repeat something, don't say it doesn't matter or is unimportant. If you took the time to say it, and they took the time to ask you to repeat it, it is important. Often this can be inferred to mean "You're not important enough for me to waste my time repeating myself", or simply choosing to exclude that person from your conversation.
• If after a few attempts repeating yourself results unsuccessful, rephrase what you said. maybe it's just the way you were saying it that I was unable to understand.
• Deaf people are very self-conscious, and are just like anyone else. Don't treat a deaf person as mentally handicapped just because they don't hear well, and, as a consequence, may not speak well. It's extremely rude. Hearing loss is not intelligence loss.
• Don't cover your mouth when talking to a deaf person. If I can't see your mouth it's much harder to know what you're saying.
• For those with one-sided deafness, it can be nearly impossible to tell where a sound is coming from in large, open spaces. Rather than just yell, "I'm over here!", tell the person where you are. (This is a big one for me.)
• Deaf people aren't always shy! We just don't always know how to communicate with other people. I, for one, have a very hard time communicating in English, because of the way American culture is. However, speaking Spanish is fairly easy for me, as the culture is similar to deaf culture - being blunt is acceptable, for one, and they aren't so big on the personal bubble thing.
• If I lean over awkwardly and ask you to repeat something, it's because I'm putting my right (good) ear closer to you so that I can understand what you're saying. This goes with the personal bubble thing. Don't get offended. I'm just trying to understand you.
• If you notice me staring at your mouth instead of looking you in the eye, again, it's not to be awkward. I'm just trying to understand.
• Don't try to figure out how well I can hear by pretending to whisper and just mouthing words. For example, mouthing "watermelon" over and over again doesn't look like anything but you saying watermelon. I know how well I can hear, and what I can and can't hear. Frankly, it's rude and annoying.
• Deaf people are also prone to be distrusting, which comes with being manipulated by the hearing world. Let me give a personal example: I am very choosy as to who I let be my friends and actually know me, as I'm fairly used to being ridiculed, insulted, and mocked. As a kid I had my hearing aid stolen from me several times by school bullies.
• Get a deaf person's attention before you start talking to them. Rule of thumb for me: if I'm not looking at you, I won't catch anything you say up until four or five words after I start looking at you, especially if I'm lost in thought or absorbed in work. It has nothing to do with "being a space job" or not paying attention. Tap them on the shoulder lightly or wave your hand in their line of sight. Stomping may work if the floor conducts well, but don't just shout. 
• Being in loud environments is taxing. Deaf people have to work a lot harder to understand what people are saying in these environments. For example, I get nasty headaches if I'm standing next to a set of PA speakers at a dance and trying to hold a conversation with someone.
• For people with one-sided hearing, it's extremely hard to sort out different sounds. For example, I can usually only understand and focus on the loudest sound I'm currently hearing. To do anything else is extremely tedious. (Compare it to trying to find a very dim star by staring right at it. Your eyes are better at seeing dim things when they're not looking directly at it, so if you try to look right at a dim star, it may seem to disappear, and as soon as you look away, it reappears. Try it! It gives a good idea of how I feel trying to hear you, and is a pretty cool little biology factoid.)
• If I have headphones in, your only hope of getting my attention is tapping me or waving in my line of sight. I turn on music and turn the volume up high enough to block out external noises so I can have a quiet and predictable space to focus on. Like I said before, I focus on the loudest thing.

That's more or less it. I'll write more as I think of it.

Being Happy Today

Reasons not to procrastinate:

1. If you care about your grades at all, you will miss out on wonderful, spur-of-the-moment activities with friends. If you don't care about grades, you will fail all of your classes.
2. Even if you don't think you get stressed about the things you procrastinate, you do. That stress carries over into everything you do, and impedes you from fully enjoying the moment, whether it's a movie, marathon run, making banana pancakes, mountain climbing, or whatever else happens to be you hobby. Fact is, it sits there, gnawing a little hole in the back of your mind, and you can't focus 100% on the now.
3. In the end, you will not succeed in procrastination.
4. Avoiding the problem is as good as trying to stick an elephant in the fridge. Sure, you might get lucky and have a fridge with alternate dimensions inside, or maybe it's even a fridge of holding, but most of us don't walk around having those in our homes now, do we?
5. No matter what you may think, you can't make more time in a day than there already is. There are 24 hours, no more, no less. Once each second is gone, it's gone. There's no getting it back. Why waste what little time there is in a day being boring, mediocre, and underachieving? Do something awesome.
6. You can't do anything awesome if you have a lab report, homework, or a paper due.
7. No really, you can't.
8. Everyone has something they really want to do, and the only way you're going to be able to get to what you want to do and enjoy it is if you
• Get through all the things you have  to do
• Do so in a timely manner, and
• Have extra time due to good planning
9. Life is to be enjoyed, not endured. If you're going through every day afraid of getting out of bed, you're probably doing something wrong. It may well be procrastinating something you know you should do, which is just stressing you, and you don't even realize it! Do the things you know you have to so you can stop beating yourself up about how big of a failure you are - which you know isn't true, so just stop the negativity altogether. I give you permission to.
10. If you're not married, you'll have more time to date, meet awesome gals/guys, and eventually get married. If you are married, you'll have more time to spend with your wife/husband and kids, who should be the center of your world. If they're not, you're doing it wrong. (Besides, who wouldn't want to spend time with this little guy?)
11. Putting off 'til tomorrow what you can do today is essentially deciding to put off your happiness 'til tomorrow. You may think you're happy, but unless you're getting rid of your stressors along the way, it'll be hard to keep that level of happiness in the long run, and the crash will be much, much worse.
12. You have much better things to do than worry about what you're not doing.

So what's new?

Well, I haven't written absolutely anything at all in pretty much forever, so apologies to anybody who's actually reading this. Life's been pretty intense, but isn't it always like that?

Anyway, I got bored today, so I decided to find a project to work on. I found something like this that I plan on building in the coming weeks. I think I'll do a lapel mic, though. If it actually works halfway decent, it'd be sweet to use it for live shows.

Anyway, I'll put up some photos and stuff as the work comes along.

Multilingual dilemma (and subsets)

I have this terrible dilemma that makes me hesitate to write in my blog: a lot of what I write, I write for friends in Chile as well as here in the States. A lot of them don't speak English, so I'm hesitant to write at all.

Not really a good situation to be in, because I rather enjoy writing, as it helps me relieve stress. I've tried using simple free tools to translate, but short of hiring a translator, or simply translating and posting again, I don't really have a solution. Anyone have an idea?

Maybe a separate blog?

In any event, life sure has been crazy! Things have finally calmed down, which means I have time to spare, meaning...

• I've started running again! Oh how I've missed that.
• Chris and I made shrimp tacos yesterday. So good!
• I'm finally getting a grip on my classes, and things make sense. Linear algebra has been a beast. Yesterday I finally understood linear maps, which led me to make this comparison in my head:

(As a side note, yes, Emma Watson is pretty. No, she's not my celebrity crush. That's Taylor Swift.)

(As another side note, a special thanks to wikipedia.org, http://harrypotter.wikia.com/, and http://www.fanpop.com/ for the images above)

• ...and I finally have my sense of humor back, as you can tell.

That's really it for now!

A Lot to Catch Up On, Part 1: Android Apps and Music Production

So I'll be the first to admit I've been incredibly lazy in writing. I have a lot of ideas to write about, and frankly, I don't have them all organized super well.

First and foremost, I'd like to give a review of some totally awesome Android apps I've found in the market. I'm big on productivity and such, so you can bet how incredibly thrilled I was to discover when I got home that my phone was literally my new best friend, not because I would be talking to lots of people (I used to be really phone-phobic, but not so much after two years of calling people and talking to them in another language!), but because it would help me keep track of everything I wanted to!

Since I haven't talked about music in forever and a day, I'm going to spend some time to introduce you to my favorite music apps in the market. There is an AWESOME potential here that is definitely untapped as of yet.

• http://chordbot.com/ is the developer of the chordbot app. This thing is super handy, even in the free version! It basically is an automatic accompaniment that you can set to perform various chord progressions (and it's got lots of options, mind you), and then pick a comping style to play them in, and then hear how they sound! This is great for songwriting, especially if you're on the go and don't have an instrument with you.
• FingerPlayMIDI is another great app that can be found at <http://thesundancekid.net/blog/fingerplay-midi/>. This thing literally lets you turn your phone into a MIDI controller for use with various audio production workstations (DAWs) like ProTools, Ableton, Reaper, and a whole slew of others. I haven't gotten much into using it, but the capability is there, and frankly, I'm excited to get it working well.
• A similar app is called TouchDAW, can be found at  http://www.humatic.de/htools/touchdaw/. I know, I know, I'm throwing in tons of links and info, but this stuff is really cool! Honestly, who ever dreamed of the capabilities a phone would have ten years ago? I was stuck fascinated with my totally hardcore Gameboy Color and Pokemon. TouchDAW is similar to FingerPlay, but has a much more developed interface - which unfortunately, to get the best of it, you do have to pay. But it's definitely worth it. In fact, it's made me want to save up to get a tablet...just to use it as a dedicated MIDI controller and mixing board for my computer.
• Also available is Wireless Mixer, which is exactly what it says it is: a handy app that lets you work on mixing projects wirelessly (apparently that isn't a word...yet).
• Heck, there's even a free four track recorder you can download. You can literally write your music wherever you are! I haven't got the pro version yet, but to be completely honest, the free version is all I've needed so far.

So there you have it: the results of my personal crusade for the best apps in the Android market for music production. Granted there are some bugs to work out in a few of them, and maybe advertisements and cripples in the software can be a pain, but stop and think about what this all implies: this is literally a revolution in the music production industry. Especially more so since the Android market is open for anyone to use, and most of the programming is done in Java, one of the easiest languages to learn.