Week 2: anger rising, rising, falllling...

Sill working on my video-mixer patch. Getting down to the wire, hope I can finish it before midnight as I'm getting killed with reading in my other class, booking equipment + teaching + helping people catch up on what they've missed in the 2 classes I'm TAing, mixing a documentary & meeting with clients... Time for myself, expecially to be creative, is at a premium and I feel like I'm not getting the most out of this exercise, especially looking at my 'mates' work.

I'm trying not to treat these as excuses, but I would feel a whole lot better about learning the language here if I could just spend some more time with it. I feel like it needs to be daily, not on/off. I'm sure my instructor would agree. Once I finish this documentary mix next week I feel like things are going to get better.

I feel like the tutorials are helpful and I've been option-clicking everything, it all makes sense but it still doesn't come together in my head in terms of pointing me to action. (JB, thanks in advance for getting me the paper-copy of the manual, I think it will help!). I am relying heavily on looking at existing patches and applying what works out of them for me, which means I still don't totally understand what I'm inputting into the patch. I felt like this last time I started working with this program (and then left it alone for a long time) -- I understood the very basics and then got slightly lost. We'll push ahead this time.

Edit: does ANYONE know WTF the function of the "prepend append" message box is? I just don't get it. I know the flow of the router chooser/drop-down box works/depends on it, but why? I can't find this in the tutorials or ref manuals by searching.