deathmtn

I had a dream that I was back in my childhood home, and my grandpa was moving in with us. We didn’t have an extra room, so we cleared space in our kitchen and had to move our desktop computer somewhere else.

I do regularly think about how I’m not prepared for elder care situations, so I guess this was due.

I moved some things up in my D&D adventure so the players would run into them sooner, but I forgot that if you want to move things up in this game you really need to move them up! Fortunately for me, this group has fun with like buying stuff from a skeleton and talking to an unsuccessful berry farmer.

23-minute run, 13 pull-ups.

Black Children Were Jailed for a Crime That Doesn’t Exist. Almost Nothing Happened to the Adults in Charge.

Maybe not the best thing to read if you are not currently in the mood to read about a small racist kingdom within Tennessee, but holy shit, it's quite a metaphorical look under a rock.

- Drop off, pick up, drop off, pick up.
- Spent hours and hours changing the vocode tool to use complex arrays (reinterpret_cast'd to float arrays) to resemble the JUCE tests more closely. There were a lot of cascading changes. It made things worse, and I couldn't even make the simple reconstruction case (hann window, fft, ifft, hann window => should get something close to the original signal back) work. So, as painful as it was, I reverted it. Next step is to properly dump the fft results to csv and json, then graph it. I think I'm going to have to take tomorrow off from this project, though.
- Talked to someone actually making a living by selling his software, which is really cool to see. It is, of course, a business-to-business thing that I wouldn't have thought of. He said he tried working a five-day week but didn't like it, so he went back to a three day week. We also talked about the shittiness of large companies, then he recommended I read Piketty (whose books are huge), which he did by reading ten minutes a day. I'll give it a try.
- Set up weekend climbing, inquired about a playdate.
- Went to virtual Curriculum Night, learned quite a bit about what happens at school. The guy basically will tell you a maximum of three details about his day, and they're all randomly chosen.
- Prepared a mock interview.

12 pull-ups.

Hey, that line moved fast. ✓

The guy was speculating about a planet with the same environmental conditions as our own, but “everything else” being opposite, like cars flying but driving upside down and everyone’s name being whatever their earth counterpart’s name is spelled backward.

Opposites are a murky topic. His friend added that trees would grow people instead of fruit, and people would give birth to fruit.

Undersea cable map. There's a few of them that make me wonder what makes it hard to connect by land in those places.

Nine-minute run, 12 pull-ups.

20 burpees. 5x5 deadlifts at a low weight (88.6 lbs.), very carefully. Due to multiple back injuries in the past I will increase this weight extremely slowly, maybe never.

- Oh, boy. There was an obvious infinite loop in the debug buffer writing code in my vocoding tool. I guess I was kind of out of it yesterday.
- After careful consideration, remapped some keys on my keyboard so that A) I would be less likely to accidentally close tabs and B) I can select text word-by-word in normal, non-vim text fields again! The having to reach to close things is actually good.
- Watched Lecture 2 of the Puckette course.
- Did two loads of laundry.
- Previewed an episode of Batman. Likely to be too intense for the guy. Also, it's one of the dumber episodes. (It's about a werewolf.)
- Got my nephew his birthday present three weeks ahead of it. I have always waited until shipping in time becomes a nailbiter before. Relieved that I didn't let it slip this time.
- Replied to a friend's email. Only a five-day lag!
- Made myself post about freelancing to Polywork and LinkedIn. LinkedIn has this ridiculously bad posting service, where every other posting attempt fails.
- Started feeling mentally tired, so I folded some laundry.
- Watched most of Lecture 4.
- Went to the Puckette study group. Thought I'd have sound working over zoom, but I didn't, but luckily, someone else did. We talked about the lectures, landed on doing the homeworks from the course as our driving activity. We may finally have a format? We also did part of homework #2 together. It was satisfying, but I realized I didn't understand the content of the lectures as well as I thought I did.
- Got the vocoding tool to write intermediate buffers out to wav files for the first step in the process, applying the Hann window. I compared them to what comes out of the pd version, and it's about the same, so there's a lot more to check. But I feel I have a lever to debug with, finally.

Oh, yeah, I should say: I'm currently interested in freelance web dev as well as full-time work in audio DSP. If you know of something that sounds like that, let me know. I updated my resume and everything, so you know I'm serious!

My friend Colby made an app that provides RSS feeds for Twitter accounts. I was using something like this, but it broke down, so now I can see what's up with various pals. (Though I've noticed, there's not a ton of content actually from the people about their lives on Twitter. It's mostly retweets, quote tweets, and statements about Twitter. It was probably the same back when I was on there.)

It's a good combo with Privacy Redirect. When you click through to a tweet, Privacy Redirect will redirect you from Twitter to a Nitter instance, so you can just read the tweet without getting a popup about signing up for Twitter.

10-4-4-4-4-12.

New Small Findings, accidentally about Apple-related stuff.

- Got my vocoding tool to write intermediate signals to float arrays without hitting any allocation problems.
- Wrote some riffs in hopes of making progress on my dungeon synth project. I want to do it so that I have a work that's in a familiar form people can follow in contrast to Sound of the Far Future and my other upcoming project. The problem is every dungeon synth song I start ends up being not ambient, which is what most people want out of dungeon synth. Maybe what I'm doing is more like "imaginary video game music".
- Flopped down for an hour trying to get rid of a headache.
- Got up and took an ibuprofen, which actually got rid of it. I should remember that for next time!
- Took the guy to the library. We actually talked about architecture for a bit while stopping in the old part of the library before going to the children's floor.
- Made dinner. Undersalted the burgers and did not get the pan hot enough, but the guy thought they were good.
- Updated the RSS plugin I use for Small Findings and incorporated a version of Dan's lastBuildDate fix.
- Got the vocoding tool to write an intermediate signal out to a file, sort of. It takes forever, which is a bad sign, and also writes all 0s, but that could actually be what's happening at that stage in the process. There's a lot to debug here.