deathmtn

Herman stayed with the show [Mad TV] until exiting six episodes into the third season. He wanted to leave the show to do other projects, but Fox would not let him out of his contract as they considered him too valuable to the show. So he got himself fired by screaming all his lines during read-through.

Kudos! That is amazing.

Aw crud. Something’s wrong with my left wrist. Got weak and stiff after an hour of typing/mousing. Hopefully, it’s from sleeping on a different side to avoid sleeping on my shot arm or some other one-time cause.

Nine-minute run, 13 pull-ups. I feel unaffected by the flu shot.

- Had a meeting with the school social worker about what social skills we want the guy to work on this year and about how the groups will be set up.
- Got groceries.
- Got a flu shot.
- Checked out my last hunch about what's wrong with the vocode tool, but I couldn't really figure out a way to prove anything. I tried getting the real and imaginary results from the FFT by casting its result to a complex array, then putting it back together for the inverse FFT by putting complex numbers together from the real and imaginary results. The result (when applied to a simple decompose-recompose case) were fine, but that doesn't mean I'm correctly interpreting real and imaginary results because as long as you put them back together in exactly the opposite of the way you took it apart, it's always going to be fine. So, that was a waste of time. Had I looked at the JUCE code first, I would have seen that the float array that you pass to it gets reinterpret_casted to a complex array, so it is actually correct to interpret the result that way.
- Chatted with a colleague about ways to survive in programming outside of corporate situations, the risk of saving everything for retirement, dealing with Jonathan Blow, and successful people losing their minds. At one point, someone with a username like [something]Dong joined the call, and we thought we were going to get zoom bombed with something horrible. Turned out that it was just someone showing up for the upcoming meeting, so we moved to another Zoom room.
- Made the vocode tool log signals as a bunch of numbers to text files.
- Made dinner.
- Went to MCG, heard some good morin khuur tracks, among other things.
- Had trouble comparing sets of 200,000 numbers to each other (though diffing helped with finding out when they were identical), so I tried graphing them in OpenOffice, but I couldn't trust it or anything I found online. So, I made my own tool for graphing text files full on numbers. Disturbingly, it may be revealing that I'm not even copying the source audio correctly? There's a lot of horizontal lines in the graphs (and lots of identical consecutive values in the text logs). Maybe I'll find the truth of the matter tomorrow.

20 burpees, 12 pull-ups.

Heard a guy go on and on to a Trader Joe’s employee about how rents are too high in Cambridge and how landlords don’t do maintenance, which is true. He made a point of saying he wouldn’t pay one dollar to live in Cambridge.

So, that’s “normal lonely customer” territory.

Then that employee left, and another one came by, and he started saying exactly the same thing.

Netflix suspends trans employee who tweeted about Dave Chappelle special

You know how this kinda internal discussion is going. A lot of lip service is being paid to employees, whose only leverage is being able to quit, while executives 100% know they don't care about anything but dominating markets, and of course, making themselves billionaires. Which they can't do without retaining these employees. So, of course, the "our door is open let's continue to have conversations" bullshit is going to happen.

Now, if they had a union, maybe there would be more than one move for these employees.

On another note, I'm sad that Dave Chappelle has expired. A lot of them seem to do that. People tell them they're great, they get out of touch with actual people, then they start talking about shit they have no idea about. And, sadly, age itself may have something to do with it.

As someone old enough to remember when Dennis Miller was funny, I guess I should look out for this kind of thing.

I had a dream that the guy was around three years old and said, "Let's get my dinner." So, I said OK, let's get it!

Then, I realized he was a ghost.

This may have been what happened in the movie The Sixth Sense. While it's hilarious while conscious, it was absolutely terrifying in dream form. It woke me up.

Other dreams:

- Friend was going to drive me to New York, fell asleep while driving. I took the wheel, and we crashed at his place, where I found that he had a lot of walnuts and walnut-related products with dubious health claims printed on them.

- I was at my old job and talking about how my old manager was all hype, no substance, and a coworker nodded along. This one was a little lazy, subconscious. It is really just one of several memories, with detail erased.

Unsure what I should buy for $7 online, including shipping. Maybe a USB power supply? Yo-yo?

I received $7 from a milk price fixing class action suit. Every step of the way, I felt like I was being scammed. But I got the money (or at least the MasterCard gift card not tied to my name or address) without giving up more than my email and name. (Though years ago, I think I did have to upload a receipt?) I’ve probably done at least $7 of worrying about being tricked, all in all.

- Made some small changes to Illuminated Corridor.
- Watched some Puckette lectures. Did most of Homework 2. After a couple hours of WTFs, I came across some nice monitoring objects and got most of it done.
- Went to the study group. It was interesting to see other people's patches. All three remaining regulars made significant headway on the homework. (I got the least far.) I think we found our modus operandi!
- Read with the guy. We finished Into the Volcano!

In retrospect, doing that homework ate up a quite a bit of time. I should start these earlier and spread the work out across the week instead of doing it the day of the study group. I guess my bad student habits are fairly well internalized.

From A History of Video Games in 64 Objects:

Due to technological limitations, Baer’s console could only display three moveable dots on a black screen. For "graphics," players had to attach col-
ored transparent plastic overlays to the screen,
such as a tennis court or the outline of a maze.

Some assembly required.

Baer dubbed his invention the “Brown Box" named for the faux wood self-adhesive hastily applied to the box’s siding to seem more appealing to investors.

Faux wood paneling is practically a blessing upon humanity compared to its modern-day equivalent, blockchain.

It’s a perfect day for lapsang souchong, it turns out.

- Got the guy to try a boiled egg. He rated it "OK", which puts it in the top percentile of all foods.
- Went to an outdoor lunch with the guy's friend's family.
- Took the guy to the library.
- Recorded some parts for two dungeon synth pieces, came up with a third. My hand hurt later. These parts aren't taxing at all, but it's still repetitive motion with the purpose of getting a specific result. So, I should have a timer for when I play the guitar and take breaks, just like I do with typing.
- Had a FaceTime call with my parents. The guy doesn't really communicate well over video, but he likes seeing his grandparents, and they like seeing him. It ends up being a whole lot of him going on and on about things he never explains, then wandering off and us wrangling back. At one point, he just picked up book and started reading it. I guess it's better than not doing these, though?
- Arranged those pieces; actually finished the one I started today: Illuminated Corridor.

- Made Big Breakfast.
- Took the guy to climbing.
- Recorded a podcast segment.
- Got some party favors and miscellaneous dollar store junk that amused the guy.
- Messed around with the Hugging Face API to see if I could replace a local GPT-2 model that I occasionally use for jokes. Certainly, it would be easier to deploy elsewhere if I needed to than the local model. The models I tried via the API all seemed to not be able to respond to long text chunks, and I didn't know enough about them to figure out why.
- Actually listened to a few of the riffs I've recorded in voice memos, picked up the guitar the MIDI pickup, and recorded two of them as MIDI in NanoStudio. Then, I wrote some accompaniment for them.

I was kinda tired all day. It's been an intense week, in retrospect.