One day I thought to myself, "Um, you have a guitar, you have a bass, you have three keyboards, two theremins, a fancy mackie mixer and mackie monitors, and a midi module with thousands of instruments... and even a firewire audio module that will let you bring it all together, so, when are you going to use it to make music other people will hear?"

Fortunately, the RPM challenge came along to motivate me to finally make it happen and actually wire my basement studio that's been collecting dust since I last moved, and it even motivated me to purchase software to bring it all together rather than continue working on the recording software I started writing for Linux in the early 1990s (by day I'm a software engineer at Google, and I spend a lot of my free time writing software rather than music).

All my excuses are resolved. Everything's hooked up, everything's working, and I'm actually letting anyone (who wants to) listen to what I create, and I'm really enjoying the feedback so far.