[One-day late] Merry Christmas

« The best of all gifts around any Christmas tree: the presence of a happy family all wrapped up in each other. »
---Burton Hillis

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Musical Holiday

As much as I said I was going to post again, I was shocked at "La voix des jeunes" 's schedule for the Holidays.

As you should know, "La voix des jeunes" is my father's youth choir where I play the Flute, Whistle, and now the Bodhrán. Needless to say that outside of work, it's the thing that keeps me busy.

I don't have a lot of time for anything else except work and music lately, with an event every single weekend until Christmas. It's fine, but it has a consequence: I'm not going to be able to fulfill the professional goal I had set myself for the year.

I'm not worried. 2011 is another year

XML with PHP - Distraction & Relaxation...

I'm putting this project on hold until next week. It's not so bad, I'm taking the four-day weekend to relax. There are two reasons for this. First, I need to write a flute partition for the Advent theme this year.

Secondly, and the biggest, I'm being sidetracked by a massive project in Minecraft. A sudden idea that sprouted from two others.

XML with PHP - Intro

I'm giving myself some homework in this long weekend (for me). I haven't given myself WebDev-related work for quite some time now since I was busy, besides the usual, working on all the design work for the "La voix des jeunes" album (with about two months before things started to slow down again).

It's not necessarily a hard task in terms of logic, but it involved a lot of research/learning from my part before I apply it. It is quite simple. I want to make a PHP application that writes/edits an XML file then renders it.

My goal is to learn an alternate method in dynamically generating content when you don't have the option of a database access. It does happen in local/internal applications.

I'm not going to be the first one in figuring this out, but I will post how I do certain things and dissect the logic behind the madness. I will also post the sources of the information I'm learning as I go along.

Goat Skin Tickler...

I just discovered I have a Blog [not really... lame, I know!]

For the past several weeks I've been extremely busy. The one time I wasn't really busy (Monday), I was taking care of the flu.

For four weeks now, I've been "tickling the goat skin" - I started taking Bodhrán classes. I've been curious about the Bodhrán for some time, and I'm glad I decided to try it. It's been a long time since I had so much fun playing over music.

Then came last weekend. A weekend pretty much dedicated to "La voix des jeunes", my dad's youth choir. The choir has been invited to the second edition of the "Récolte" (Harvest) show of the Moisson d'Art festival in my hometown. The show was on for two nights.



On top of that, we finally launched our album "Tout simplement" (Simply). The album that we literally give away. Yes, we're giving it away. We don't want to make money out of it. The goal of the album for the youth in the group to live the experience of recording an album and to leave the group later with a physical souvenir.

At the time of writing this, 85% of our first batch has already been giving away. We're very proud of this accomplishment. Then the hectic weekend took its toll with the flu I mentionned earlier.


Photo credits: Brigitte Cladère and CanadaMunicipal.ca

Once things start to get back to normal, I will start posting more regularly again.