Show Me The Money

There’s nothing quite as sure to keep you popular in the opinion polls as handing out free cash. In a measure reflected around the world, our generally underwhelming head of government, Kevin Rudd, is handing out around $900 to most people across the country. As the cash bonus gets dished out over the next month, it seems that everyone already has plans for what they’ll be doing with it. And i’m certainly not going to buck the trend.

It has come at a great time for me: i’ve just returned to university for the year and need (well, maybe ‘want’) a few new geek-tools in my ever-expanding arsenal. First on the list is a new external hard drive. I’ve been thinking about this one for a while, as my excellent LaCie Rugged has nearly evaporated through use as my OS X Time Machine drive. It was always supposed to be a music-only drive for taking to gigs, but I never got around to purchasing another.

After spotting an article at Scott Hansen’s blog about RAID devices, I thought this might be the way to go for dealing with the graphics, sound and video onslaught that this uni year will bring – not to mention taking some pressure off my LaCie and MacBook Pro. In my research, I came across this excellent looking G-Technology G-RAID2 (they’ve updated to the G-RAID3, but the price jump doesn’t justify the addition of an eSATA connection for me). Using this bad boy as my Photoshop and Final Cut swap drive is going to make life much easier. And i’ll be netting myself a tidy 1TB of extra storage space. Good times.

I’d also like to thank K. Rudd for allowing me to update my uni-related software… First of all Pro Tools. Bloody Pro Tools. I know there are a lot of lovers of PT out there, but most of them come from a film sound, or live sound background. Not me. My first experience with sound production was Ableton Live and for me, there is nothing as intuitive and enjoyable to use on the market. Not to mention stable: PT has been a nightmare from day dot on my MacBook Pro. It seems that Digidesign, the makers of PT don’t care much for their lowly light-version customer (PT LE), and would rather release a new version than fix what people are already using. Let’s hope that it works this time, because i’m not looking forward to another semester of battling my software to make the most basic of sounds. ‘Industry standard’ doesn’t hold much weight these days.

Finally, i’ll be grabbing myself a student subscription copy (lasting around 12 months) of Maya. I’ve only spent 2 hours with this program in my first tutorial of the semester, but already I can see that not having a copy at home will leave me at a disadvantage. I have no real desire to pursue 3D modelling and animation as a career path, however I can see that a good understanding of the concepts within Maya could be helpful at some point. Only time will tell if it’s another Pro Tools-esque program that will bring those grey hairs on a little bit quicker.

So, Mr K. Rudd, I would like to extend my thanks to yourself and your well directed vote grab… I mean financial stimulus package. As a young student of this proud country, i’ll be injecting 100% of it immediately into the ailing economy and nerding it up like i’ve never nerded before.