Matthew C Good : Musician, Web Developer, Hobbyist.

It sure has been a long time since this sucka has seen any activity, and all of my matt-good-fanboys are all like, “why hasn’t he written, that pansy-sailor!” Okay so real life hasn’t been anything nearly that interesting (nobody’s called anybody a “pansy-sailor” lately), but nevertheless there ARE a few items of note that may explain why the blog has seen such little activity as of late.
1) Well – um, I packed.
Kristin found this awesome cool bigger nice-looking apartment a few months ago, and we had the sucker locked in for a long time. While we were anxiously waiting, it sort of became a fairy-tale, or myth, or something. Like something that “one-day” would be nice, but will probably never happen. Well, it started happening. We packed up stuff in our kinda junky small one-bedroom apartment and headed for the nice two-bedroom. Lets just say that there was a lot more crap in that tiny place than we thought would fit. Good times….
2) Moving
We moved – parents came and helped, saw the new place, visited nashville a bit. that was neat-o. Thanks to my very good greenville friends, Seth and Ian, we got everything moved in without any major incidents. In-CREDIBLE. Thanks, guys.
3) Car trouble
It had to happen. Car trouble. The dreaded plague of american life, the bane of my existence. We had bought a new (to us) car – nissan altima – for kristin, and it was having some problems starting – turns out its the alternator… and its not that hard to fix. But at the SAME TIME what has turned out to be sort of an old junker Toyota Corolla has this demon-possessed wiring problem that prevents it from starting, and spins up all the engine fans in the car WAY fast and you can’t shut them off, draining the battery. Anyway, it was sort of a lot to bear all at once, and car problems really bother me more than they should. On the upside, I changed my own alternator and that was kinda neat. If not a little scary.
4) New Furniture / IDIOTS
Well, we have an actual living room now, so we got some new furniture. The idiots who came to deliver it – well, as I mentioned before, they were IDIOTS.
Kristin notices that the finish is a bit irregular on the coffee table, and these guys, being the rhodes scholars that they are, say “no problem! We’ve got a MARKER! Yes, a marker. So they get out this thing, color on our furniture, and subseqently leak ink-nasty all over our brand new carpet. Uncool. Then they ask us to use our soap and towels to clean it up, getting ink on our towels – unprofessional and uncool. THEN they rub so hard into the carpet that it is no longer just stained, it is ALL MESSED UP. The pile is not… piling. Unprofessional, uncool, and just plain destructive. so anyway kristin’s upset and I’m in the middle of all this between the rental complex, kristin, and the furniture store. yowza. But I stick it to the man and they replace the carpet. w00t. they’re still going to be replacing/fixing a lot of the furniture.
Of course, they didn’t actually bother to call us and let us know when they were gonna replace the carpet. No. Instead, these workmen randomly showed up at the apartment, and (not speaking very good english) said “Carpet?” Kristin, a bit confused, asked if they were there to replace the carpet. They repeated, “Carpet?” Kinda odd. They were also really confused as to why there was stuff like A COUCH, TABLES, CHAIRS, A BOOKSHELF, AND A TV in the room that they were supposedly going to recarpet that day. It was an odd experience for her, I’m sure. But it all worked out
5) Revenge of the Car Trouble!
I’m an idiot. I left the lights on in the Altima for a while and it killed the battery. I had jumper cables, I thought “no problem.” Well, they were short, scary cables – one was sorta um… frayed?? Well anyway, it didn’t work, because as soon as I made the final contact, the alarm started going off… I didn’t even know we HAD an alarm. so i’m pissing off the neighbors late at night – anyway, we’re getting into really boring minutiae here but…. we eventually got it jumped, but man I felt dumb.
6) The antidote to feeling dumb is…
…Getting a promotion! w00t! Had my annual review, nothing even remotely negative. I had sortof weaseled my way into doing the job of somebody more advanced than my position for a while, so they eventually realized that, and gave me a new title and a fairly hefty pay raise. I went from being a Web Developer (which really means “some guy who can lay out a site with tables and photoshop and dreamweaver”) to Programmer (which really means “we would make you a software engineer, but we’d like you to have a little more experience first”). Personally, just by the sound of it, I think Web Developer has more prestige. Programmer sounds a little…. “code-monkey”-ish. But – its a bit step up, and I’m gonna keep kicking butt and try to hit the SE mark next year, after I get my MCTS cert and maybe take some classes, and roll out this dang project we’ve been working on. GOOD THINGS.
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oh… and I soaked my cell phone – I’m blaming Sonic, but that’s another story altogether. Its toast, so until I get another one, email is best, or call kristin.
But that’s my life in a nutshell. Been a kinda good, kinda stressful month or so. That’s why I haven’t really put out any new songs or anything. Please forgive me, I hope to resume that soon, and with a vengance.

I’ve been wondering what the next step is going to be for me. After so much build-up towards getting a “real job” (and finally getting one), it’s been nice to sit back and sort of adjust to that and enjoy it a bit. But in about four months I will have been here for a year, and I’m the kind of person that constantly wants to better himself, so I’m wondering what form my next step or few steps will take.
I’m not talking about changing jobs, its too soon for that by a couple years and I really like the one I’ve got – so why risk a crappier one with no potential for gain? I’m talking about things like certifications, advanced degrees, and career direction. Defining exactly what your next goal should be is as tricky as it is important, but finally having worked a while I feel like I’m better equipped to make those sorts of decisions now.
Things I’ve decided: I’m going to get the Microsoft Certified Web Developer cert. There are two tests for this, and I’m about half way through studying for the first. Also, I’m moving away from web design and toward more of a straight Software Engineer position professionally. At the same time that happens, I want to start doing some more freelance web development work, which will allow me to be creative with design without me having to dedicate my career to it. I’m just more interested in the “codey” aspects of software, and there’s less of a ceiling on the SE side of things.
Things I haven’t decided: A lot. MBA? Grad school for CS? And would grad school be local night classes after work, or would I try to get in to the best one possible and take off work for two years while I study? Also, where do I want to be in CS? The finance world is basically taking data, doing minimal manipulation, and outputting it. What about scientific or think-tank-type cs? physics modeling, etc? THAT would require a phd. and perhaps luck. And of course, there’s the important question of how to make yourself outsource-proof.
From slashdot:
“Grad school is the snooze bar on the alarm clock of life.”
I like that. While I’m not making any decisions for the immediate future (I’m pretty happy with what I got going on right now), it’s good to be thinking about these things…. my subconscious knows a lot more about what I really want than my conscious does. Are other people (esp. recent grads) feeling similar things? What are you doing in response to those thoughts?

Well, I’ve been posting on my blog slightly more regularly, *that’s* for sure. It might not always be inspiring, but at least its there.
A few days ago, I packed all my recording gear into my car and drove to Greenville to record my friend Jakob Eckeberger’s new band live. Jake and I were in Amnesty Letters together back in the day, along with three other brilliant persons. Jake’s new band is a blues thing – which is unexpected and very cool. Chris Matetic from Lexington (RIP) drums on it, and Jake’s wife Katie sings. She… rips it. She’s freaking ridiculous-good. I didn’t catch the name of the bass player, mostly because I’m socially awkward.
So on friday I left for Greenville after work. Later that night, a bunch of us went out to Pokey… (High-school friends, pokey is a 24-hour truck stop about 10 minutes away. It was/is typically the only food place open at the crazy hours of night we’d get hungry.) It was pretty good. I ate some Chicken Fingers for Kate, who regretably was off being her own person in Boston or something.
Early start on saturday – 10am. Building was locked until 11 am (oh, Greenville, how I don’t miss that at all), setup until 12. We’re tracking live, everyone playing in the same room at the same time, really loud. Everything’s bleeding into everything else’s microphone, and its great. jake has to work at 3:30, so at this point I’m thinking we’re gonna be in a rush. Once I got everything set up, I didn’t even bother listening to it to make sure it sounded okay – just got levels, tried to figure out the songs on piano, and hit record. A few hours later, we had knocked out the three songs we wanted too, plus a fourth (A cover of “Chain of Fools”) just for fun. I remember in Amnesty Letters that it took us about 6 months of steady work to record a 4 song ep, so it was super-refreshing to knock out four songs in less than 3 hours. I needn’t have worried about the time I guess. Tons of fun. I pretty much botched all the piano though. Ha.
After that came overdubs – which reminded me why studio work takes so long. Nobody playing overdubs really has any idea of what they want to play for them, so you spend about half an hour trying to come up with something for the part, figuring out exactly what was played before, that sort of thing. For just a few little overdub parts, it took us until about 12:30am. then teardown and stuff while tired, I got to bed at 2. The stuff sounds pretty great though.
Sunday was a low-key day. Church in the morning (I miss St. Pauls), then potluck (I miss St. Pauls), and then an episode of Firefly. Hung out with the Katie and the Caitlin mostly. Then I went home. Long boring drive. I was pretty much the saddest ever. Being back at Greenville was strange, leaving my friends again was heart wrenching. Unfortunately, this stage of life is where we know we have to cut the veins from our heart and transplant it somewhere else. And then we do it. Good God.
Guess I can’t follow that very well. I put some piano in some of my tunes. It was good to see people again.
Oh and I’m going to be starting a thing called “new song monday.” Perhaps inspired by Dan’s NaNoWriMo effort, every monday for the forseable future, i’ll post lyrics and a demo to a new song I’m working on. Please leave comments. After there are several songs up there, I’d like to have people vote on them. Perhaps the winners will be the ones I end up recording. Good idea? Bad idea? I dunno, perhaps you will tell me.