For starters, I decided to quit school. Back in 1997 I suffered from a severe depression, and parts of it have tagged along until this very day. I don’t really have the energy to focus on both studies and on my personal wellbeing right now; and if I have to choose the answer is obvious.

It sucks that I had to quit when I only had the last semester left, but it’s for the better. Now I will have time to focus on myself at my own pace, without the projects in school adding their weight to my shoulders.

But I still got a fair bit of knowledge with me from school. Maybe not that much that’s actually new to me, programming-wise, but it did open my eyes for .NET and ASP.NET, which are actually great platforms. Despite being from Microsoft.

I actually got a nice idea for a programming project the other day. One of my friends is the lead programmer for xmms2, the next generation of the xmms audio player.

XMMS2 is a redesign of the XMMS music player. It features a client-server model, allowing multiple (even simultaneous!) user interfaces, both textual and graphical. All common audio formats are supported using plugins. On top of this, there is a flexible media library to organize your music. See the features page for more details.

We are a whole bunch of people who hang in the same IRC channel, and a lot of us have a lot in common in our music taste. There’s been some discussion about setting up a server with a jukebox, where we can upload some music, have it played, and have some request features to move a song to the next position in the playlist.

I’m going to write this from scratch now. There already exists one called Otto, but quite frankly it has a horrible interface and was pretty annoying to configure.

So I intend to make my own, using Ruby on Rails and a really spiffy interface featuring that latest buzzword, AJAX. I’ve even gone so far that I registered a SourceForge project for it. The grand unveiling will be in a week or so.