deathmtn

- Picked up, dropped off, picked up, dropped off.
- Moved the bedroom AC into the basement.
- Did some laundry.
- Cleaned the dead bugs from the dining room ceiling light fixture. Personally, I think this is heroic.
- Dropped off a bag of clothes at Goodwill. (Also bought five tapes.)
- Had lunch with a friend. Kind of re-realized how free I am right now? I should really try harder to maintain this.
- Got some new light bulbs. I'm really into the brighter dining room, but no one else seems to care.
- Looked around at foreign exchange rates and services that will exchange currency for you.
- Revised my contract based on a review by a friend, sent it over. Felt like that took forever, but it was only two days.
- Walked the field with the guy, who wanted to measure it with his steps. One length of the field turns out to be 338 of his steps.
- Made dinner.
- Picked up the guitar and and converted some of my voice memo riffs into the next part of one of my songs. I'm not sure it goes.
- Started another song with a riff I came up with while trying to record for an existing song.

I'm listening to the new Worm…on tape! (They give you the digital version when you order a tape, but I wanted to try hearing it on tape first.)

It is heavy and funereal, a really good blend of Thergothon and something like early Amorphis. It feels really monumental.

The medium doesn't make it heavier, but I've come to really like that you put it on, and it just plays. You can't easily flip to something else or even easily pause it in my case. You just have to sit with it, even if there's a moment that isn't meeting your whims.

I'm listening to the Comments

33-minute run, 12 pull-ups.

- Deinstalled the guy's AC and moved it to the basement.
- Today's objects that I got rid of: A box and a corporate trinket. Small, but it's something.
- Made a tool to drop all of my Pure Data snapshots into a web page so that I can compare them to the Juce snapshots without getting confused.
    - The fft from the carrier has a way larger average magnitude in the Juce version. That's an early difference I hadn't noticed before.
- I noticed the pd version had a high-pass filter way at the beginning of the pipeline, in a different subpatch. I added a high-pass filter to the Juce version, and now magnitudes are much closer, but still off. The result audio has a "shape" that seems more correct, but the carrier qualities are garbled.
- Made dinner.
- Replied to a friend's email. Replying to friends actually isn't that much effort anymore, now that I'm in the habit. So, I could drop it from these lists, but being able to write it down may be part of what makes it easier to start.
- Wrote a draft of a contract. This wasn't that bad, but I really hated starting it. Also, I'm not sure it's tight enough.
- Read some more Piketty.

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

Whoops, slept ten hours. I guess I’m not going to be getting up at 3 AM every day.

- Ported my old Back Again? Chrome extension to Firefox. There was actually very little porting necessary. Mostly, I just had to learn how to load Firefox add-ons in dev mode, how to pack it (you just zip it), then where to submit it. They tell you there is a wait time of 3-4 weeks to get your extension reviewed. But mine was approved in little over an hour.
- Dropped off the guy.
- Got groceries.
- Cleaned the kitchen recycling container, which got dirty despite us mostly putting dry cardboard and rinsed out cans in it.
- Emailed *two* friends back. This is kinda becoming easier!
- Spent several hours logging more intermediate signals on both the pd and Juce sides, then staring at the graphs and wondering what's similar enough and what is. Caught a bug in which I was extracting the real and imaginary values from a FFT result after I had mutated it with an in-place multiply. The sound at the end is getting closer to what it should be, but is still hilariously bad.

There's something internetty about Matt Levine's writing voice that makes him an accessible finance writer. I just realized what he reminds me of, cadence-wise:

Two important stylized facts about bank deposits are (1) they can be withdrawn at any time and (2) a dollar in the bank has to always be worth a dollar. If you have money in a checking account, you can go to the bank and ask for it back, and they have to be able to give it to you in full immediately.

This is how Robert Hamburger writes.

I put Back Again? out for Firefox.

5x5 deadlifts.

Ksassjsss do

^My phone just automatically typed that. There’s something wrong with the capacitive touch layer, I think. But it’s intermittent. For example, now it’s fine. I wonder if touching a certain spot pushes in the plate too much?

I guess the questions I have to answer if this doesn’t go away are: Do I get yet another old iPhone? Give in and get an iPhone I don’t like? Get a Pine Phone? Give up on having a camera and voice recorder with me all the time and get a flip phone?

Welp, I’m up. I was thinking about what to do about my phone breaking down, and other similarly small but awkward problems like online spaces that I like but in which I dislike a few users. I had a very hackneyed dream in which I was trying to capture a bunch of action figure sized guys and having a lot of trouble.

- Picked up, dropped off, picked up.
- Emailed a friend back.
- Read some Blindsight and Piketty.
- Reviewed a friend's article, helped test it.
- Emailed another friend. I feel like I'm actually maintaining friendships as I should for once!
- Got some magic books and a joke book from the library for the guy.
- Did as much of homework 3 for the Puckette class as I could. Did end up finally making subpatches work for me, though.
- Followed up on some due diligence stuff for the condo. I don't like having to remind people to do stuff, but what else are you going to do.
- Made dinner.
- Went to the Puckette study group. I'd like us to be moving along more quickly, but given that I'm moving slowly myself, there's not much I can do about it. I'm still really grateful that four people are still showing up, like seven weeks in.

I feel like today really got away from me, but some things actually did get done, now that I look back at it.

I proceeded to open the head and remove the brain down to the track of the ball. The latter had entered a little to the left of the median line at the back of the head, had passed almost directly forwards through the center of the brain and lodged. Not finding it readily, we proceeded to remove the entire brain, when, as I was lifting the latter from the cavity of the skull, suddenly the bullet dropped out through my fingers and fell, breaking the solemn silence of the room with its clatter, into an empty basin that was standing beneath.

The referenced brain is Lincoln's. Imagine holding Lincoln's brain.

Maybe one of the logical conclusions of optimizing systems that have people in them?

We had been assured that the body would remain intact-~the muscles electrically exercised, the body flexed and fed, the corpus kept ready to return to active duty should Heaven experience some inconceivable and catastrophic meltdown. Everything was reversible, we were told. And yet-there were so many who had Ascended, and not even the deepest catacombs go on forever. There were rumors of dismemberment, of nonessential body parts hewn away over time according to some optimum—packing algorithm. Perhaps Helen would be a torso this time next year, a disembodied head the year after. Perhaps her chassis would be stripped down to the brain before we’d even left the building, awaiting only that final technological breakthrough that would herald the arrival of the Great Digital Upload.

From Peter Watts’s Blindsight.

10-4-4-4-4-12. I have started to dread this workout because I’ve been away from it, but it’s actually less effort than any run involving the hill.