deathmtn

After one week, I have finished the introduction of Capital and Ideology.

- Went to the school book swap.
- Wrote some riffs (which, of course, could turn out to be garbage tomorrow)
- Fixed the window.
- Met up with some Recurse people at Boston Common. Nice people, as usual. 3 out of 4 of us have to use weird keyboards because we've fucked up our wrists. Going on the T was a bit weird, but the spacing on the train was good. You'd pile up a lot of risk points taking it every day, but I feel OK taking it twice a year.
- Adjusted the ending of Walk Around the Pond Three Times and posted it.
- Started reading what looks like an '80s book that we got at the swap with the guy. The Secret Room Downstairs. It smells faintly musty and reads that way, too. There's sentences like "A flashlight miraculously appeared from one of the supervisor's pockets." Instead, I dunno, maybe "The supervisor took out a flashlight."

- Added a section to the "marchy" dungeon synth song.
- Adjusted the ending of the pond song. That one may be done, structurally. Some cleanup would be helpful, but not essential.
- Added snapshots for info-side sqrt result. Backing up to the reciprocal square root, the pd version seemed to have no infinities, while the Juce one did. However, the pd one did have lots of 10^10s. So, I added back the step in which a tiny number is added to every sample in the signal, and that prevents infinities from occurring after the reciprocal square root step was applied.
- Got more snapshots. Multiplied sqrts seem reversed on the x-axis, but this could just be from the random sampling. Sound is coming out of the tool again, though, of course it's not right.
- Paired with someone on their Node/Docker problem.
- Went to the bank that backs my online bank; turns out they can't help me. As terrible as traditional bank web sites are, maybe an online-only bank was a bad idea for business banking. Still worthwhile for saving, though.
- Read some more Piketty. The tl;dr of the book may end up being: The '80s doomed us.
- Went to the afterschool party.
- Reworked the D&D adventure somewhat.

30? minute run. I ran for about five minutes to the bank, where they said they couldn’t help me, then ran for another 25 minutes. 12 pull-ups-ups.

- Picked up, dropped off, picked up. The guy is the Line Leader is his class. It turns out the Line Leader holds up two peace hand signs (which means quiet) while leading lines.
- Did some dumb business bank account stuff.
- Called the state about getting an ID so I can pay my annual corporation fee.
- Wrote a letter to my congressman and the Secretary of State about their bullshit. They send PINs through email in plain text.
- Paired with someone on their word vector project, which is a fun space to be in. Spent a lot of time trying to not make a web page reload while also using the `onsubmit` event.
- Fixed some logging on the pd version of the vocode tool. There are no negatives or infinities now in the added FFT squares result. (These things are so hard to describe.)
- Updated the graphing tool to represent infinity values when they occur.
- Logged the carrier roots multiplied together. The pd and Juce sides look really different from each other. So, the next thing is to look at the signals between here and the added FFT squares.
- Rearranged some dungeon synth, added a "harmony".
- Went to a web site working meeting, discussed people's in-progress web sites.
- Updated project metadata so that [Observatory](https://jimkang.com/observatory/#view=year&filterMode=some) will be more or less up-to-date now.

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I'm actually going to see what it takes to do this. I hate these guys.

Eight-minute run, 12 pull-ups.

Never forget: The former leader of the Boston Police Union is a child rapist, charged with multiple sexual assaults.

COVID-19 is the biggest cause of death in the police force. The Fraternal Order of Police is striking over a mandate to vaccinate. Total thugs.

One third of the Chicago Police failed to even say whether or not they’re vaccinated.

It occurred to me that I don't have to know everything about DSP in order to start making and selling VSTs.

- Dropped off, picked up (early), dropped off. We had a talk about avoiding getting obsessed with things. (Poppets are the guy's current obsession, and he kept asking to hold the poppets during our walk.) He brought up the Fox and the Grapes, and I mentioned Lord of the Rings. Having read those stories made the concept of obsession much easier for him to understand!
- Rescheduled an interview for a contracting gig when I realized that school had an early release day and that I'd have to pick up during that time. I freaked out a little about making this mistake, but later I realize why this is totally not worth freaking out about.
- Logged more intermediate signals from the pd and Juce version of the vocoder. In the "adding squared rfft outputs" step, the pd version yields some apparent infinity values along with negatives, while the Juce version has all positives.
- Added another riff to a song but decided it doesn't really go. Moved it to a new song.
- Gathered a bunch of kids books that we've probably outgrown to give away. My getting rid of an object a day initiative is going OK so far!
- Did the interview. The interviewer was really stiff. He was obviously following a script, which is fine, but he seemed put off by questions, even though he was obligated to say, no, go ahead, ask your question. (I only had 2-3.)
  - One of the cofounders of this company worked on the first "ranked for engagement" News Feed in Facebook. I'm guessing they're not ashamed of that. I also said I left my last job for ethical reasons, which probably did not excite him.
  - I wonder if there was some miscommunication because it sounded like they wanted someone good with Go, and I explained that that wasn't me.
  - He asked how I wanted my career to go, and I explained that I ultimately wanted to work in audio DSP and that's why I'm going for this part-time job. Then, he asked what I wanted out of this part-time job. I should have just said money because, honestly, why else would I do this?
  - Later, they emailed and said they're passing because of timing, which is fine.
  - That does mean that both of my contracting chances may have fizzled out. (I haven't heard back about my more specific scope proposal on the other thing.) I may have to move on to Plan C, which is to get the same kind of job I had before.
- Made dinner.
- Wrote the D&D recap for the game from two weeks ago and set up another COVID survey. It's not my greatest work, but it's still better than no recap at all.
- Wrote an email to a friend.

The school robocalled me about the guy being absent today. I was him go into the classroom, so for a second, I thought, DID HE ESCAPE??!

I called, and the school office checked for me. No, he's right there in the classroom. Some sheet or something was mismarked.

Next year, he has the option to walk to school himself. Can you imagine how terrifying something like this would be in that context?

OTOH, I walked to school by myself from first grade on.

On the other other hand, my walk was a quarter of a mile, not nearly a whole mile, with no busy streets to cross.

22-minute run, 13 pull-ups.

- Dropped off, picked up, dropped off.
- Went through the potential client's code.
- Read client's milestone descriptions and corresponding payment amounts. I find them way too open-ended. Wrote milestone proposals that are more concrete, though, there is still plenty of room for interpretations. Weirdly, I think this milestone structure were for a project that I was to write from scratch. I suspect that things are more broken than they think they are.
- Got groceries.
- Read some Piketty.
- Went back into the vocode tool and fixed the problem with everything logged looking like a square wave. The reason was that I did something really dumb and forgot about it. Dumb or no, I'm glad to move on from that.
- Modified the log graphing tool to autoscale the y-axis. In the process, I was able to legitimately name a function `getBiggerAbs`, which I feel great about.
- Made dinner.
- Logged a few more intermediate signals from the vocode tool and the corresponding pd patch. FFT stuff looks possibly right. But the reciprocal square root step yields two very different signals.
- Went to MCG. Among other finds, discovered Super Onze, which plays an electric ngoni. It sounds sort of like an electric guitar player sweep picking constantly.