deathmtn

12 pull-ups.

- Spoke to a developer looking for a contractor. The project is cool and is in a domain I'm familiar with (using Node to do stuff with git), and the guy seems like he'd be easy to work with. The thing about this project is that it pays on a milestone basis, rather than an hourly basis. Some contractors prefer this, but it is less predictable. The milestones seem achievable. I hate to say this out loud, lest some curse depend on me, but they look like they're on the easy side. This all depends on reasonable signoffs from the client. I've heard the milestone payments are reasonable, but I'll have to wait until I see them for certain.
- Did some song arranging. Came up with an ending for the next dungeon synth piece in the queue. It is sort of a fake ending. If I feel OK about this tomorrow, it will be complete, "horizontally."
- Watched parts of lecture 5 from the Puckette course.
- Did roughly half of homework 3. It was fun once I got into it.
- Went to the Puckette study group. We had fun and talked about other things we could try, like an additive synth tutorial. It feels like we've slowed down, pace-wise, but we're happy about what we're learning.
- Replied to a friend email. Within the day, even!

20-minute run, 13 pull-ups.

A good zoom out that shows just how insane the vaccine denial situation is:

And CNN, for its part, obviously wanted to dunk on Rogan in their coverage of his Covid diagnosis. The horse de-wormer angle is sensational and more likely to engage viewers. It also has the aspect of being true — Americans were out there trying to take horse medicine. And, given that THERE IS A WIDELY AVAILABLE AND SAFE AND EFFECTIVE VACCINE this clearly made people at CNN feel like they were losing their minds. And, because thousands of Americans were dying each day of Covid at the time, perhaps they felt like dunking, too. Does it excuse the conflation of human Ivermectin with horse Ivermectin? I don’t know?

From an article about Sanjay Gupta going on Spotify and trying to swim upstream against the anti-vaccine misinformation they’re pushing.

- Did some laundry.
- Got rid of five objects (three of them being cardboard boxes).
- Recorded a podcast segment, then realized it may not be accurate. I'm going to have to either do some math and redo it or just drop it. Kind of sucks because I spent a couple hours producing supplemental audio for it. This is one way in which findings like "adding garlic to your spaghetti is great" are better than ones related to psychoacoustics.
- Made dinner.
- Made some progess on the pond song and got Midnight Feast into good-enough state.

He's singing Jingle Bells now. Classic.

After a years-long hiatus, the guy is back to singing in bed.

- Made Big Breakfast.
- Took the guy to climbing.
- Talked about a house priced too well to be the actual price with Katt. We're not looking, but someone tipped her off about it.
- Went to the family fun day until handing off to Katt. I guess the guy is friends again with the kid that turned against him last year.
- Went to the open house of that house. It has a lot of problems and is basically like 12 tiny rooms, but that's still an OK price for the rare single-family. But a jillion people were looking, so that's not going to be the price, and we wouldn't have been able to compete. In fact, some guy bamboozled me on the way home by asking where I had just seen a house. (I was holding the stupid listing sheet.) I told him, and he revealed that he was a house flipper. Shoulda punched him on the spot. Sorry people who were legitimately looking for a place to live!
- Did some minor key remapping to move the tab flipping shortcuts and the vim pane switching shortcuts to place at which I'll hit them accidentally less often.
- Picked up some Shake Shack because I forgot to defrost stuff for dinner in time. (I guess we also could have just made something different.)
- Came up with and recorded more riffs for two of the dungeon synth songs. Made minor arrangement changes to another. These are going relatively well, but I feel guilty (which is stupid) for not doing something more experimental and progressive with my time.

- Looked into why some of the bots haven't posted in a while. For some of them, it was just that the load on the Pi was too high because of some zombie processes. 👀 Bot and Self-Tagging Bot stopped because sometime near the end of July, Wikipedia started giving them 403s for image requests. That one I'll have to figure out later.
- Tried comparing a raw audio version of the input file to the logged version that the vocode tool read. That didn't work, but I found out about the Audacity Sample Data Export feature. That puts out something readable. And indeed, something is wrong with how it's reading. There are very few consecutive identical samples in the original input file. It's a relief to know something for certain.
- Did another call with my dad in which we updated everything on both his old and new computers. I also found out he was using a regular USB cable to connect them, not a Thunderbolt one.
- Recorded more examples for a podcast segment.
- Went to the Halloween store to get Halloween decorations. Decorated our yard with the guy. They look like everyone else's Halloween decorations, but he was excited about it.
- On another call with my dad, I realized that although the Migration Assistant spinner was going, it actually had found the other computer. There was a picture of a computer at the top of the dialog that looked decorative, but it was actually a button. The migration started.
- Did more talking about my current thinking about jobs with the Recurse recruiters. Sounds like they may be able to find part-time stuff?
- On the third call today with my dad, we got him access to Microsoft 365 again and made sure that Excel and Firefox worked. He asked why this was so hard. Well, capitalism basically. Apple stock isn't going to go up if they tighten up migration for older users. Well, anyway, at last, he can use a computer with a working battery again.

35-minute run, 12 pull-ups.

- Dropped off, picked up, dropped off.
- Got on a call to help my dad with his computer. I got him an M1 MacBook Air a month ago. He said it was fine, then I checked in with him a few days ago, and he said he hasn't been able to use it this whole time. Turns out he can't find Firefox or Excel on it because they're not there. I walked him through starting Migration Assistant on his old and new computer. Migration Assistant appears to be hanging, so I gotta do another session with him.
- Recorded some sounds for a podcast segment.
- Replaced most of the raw pointer stuff in the vocode tool with `vector`s so I can stop doing byte math. Verified that the block code works; it can sucessfully copy an input to the output, block by block. When I go back to doing all the operations on each mode, I get out silence again, and the mystery of why there are so many identical consecutive values seemingly in the input is still going.
- Talked to someone about a contracting opportunity (and his side project—he's a composer actually signed to a label). This one seems as safe as you can get for a first gig, but it is still not without risk.
- Helped the guy with his new monster apartment project.
- Watched some videos with the guy. I guess that part isn't work, but finding and prescreening them was. The Lego train one went over well, predictably. He didn't think the Kids in the Hall "I'm crushing your head" sketch was good. He loves doing the bit and has been doing so for weeks. I guess it's just the concept that he likes.
- Replied to the recruiter that's been waiting on me about whether I'm ready to start interviewing. I answered with a question, which probably sucks to hear in a late reply, but it's one I need to know.

10 burpees, 5x5 deadlifts.

- Dropped off, picked up, dropped off.
- Went through more voice memos of riffs. Ten of them were terrible, but I found one that I used to start a new dungeon synth piece.
- Did some arranging on three in-progress dungeon synth songs.
- Did a sanity check in the vocode tool by having it just copy the input out. That worked.
- Chatted with someone trying to get into a PhD program. He currently works two days a week! That's amazing; I wish I had seen if I could have gotten that at my last job.
- Made dinner.
- Watched videos and read with the guy.
- Found out there's something wrong with the way I'm breaking the signal up into blocks. It's super late, so I'll just say this: I've ended up with my program getting killed by the kernel with the message `*** stack smashing detected ***: terminated`. I should have stopped for the night four hours ago.