deathmtn

Deadlifted. Did 5-3-1 instead of 5x5. It took way too long to recover last time, so I cut down on the amount of work.

November in review:

## Work

- Did not get a contracting gig because I said that I wouldn't eventually want to go full-time, which is fair.
- Got a contract accepted by Client A. Started work and was able to accept payments from another country. One PR got merged, then things stalled out because I couldn't get parts of the app working on my machine. The client is cool and very reasonable, but this may end up taking a lot of time (in the calendar sense), so this kind of contract may not be sustainable re: how much money it brings in.
- Got a gig with Client B. There's things I like about it, but I found that I don't think I can do this kind of work often enough to make significant money.
- Started a scraping product POC. The concept I proved is that I don't really want to fight rate-limiting.

## Life maintenance

- Removed several objects from the house; cleared up a few piles. Things are still a bit chaotic in here, but there was a lot of cleaning this month. Put in grip stripes in the bathtub in what I feel is a pretty snazzy pattern.
- Voted, publicly commented at a school committee meeting.
- Emailled friends within what I think are reasonable reply timeframes all month.
- Did a decent (way more than enough in practice) amount of D&D prep, such that the two games I ran were run well, I thought. (TBH, the game is often fun even when I don't run them well, but I do feel bad about those times.)
- Set up my PiHole. It's been working perfectly.
- Dealt with some condo stuff.

## General education

- Only put out one podcast episode
- Read 100 pages of Piketty, then lost steam.

## Family

- Had a good at-home Thanksgiving.
- The guy got vaccinated.
- Had a good conference with the guy's teacher.
- Went on a hike with the guy's friends family. Kid socialization is tiring to set up these days, largely because of COVID. Depending on what omicron does, may it'll be easier after these vaccinations?
- Guided the guy through a short Pikmin 3 odyssey of rapture, ending in a tragic low when some of his Pikmin died.

## Audio learning

- Vocode tool instrumentation improvments, particularly on the pd side. Learned how to write pd extensions in C. Realized a big flaw in my comparisons.
- Finally got Jack working so that it can handle all of the audio on my computer.
- Made steady progress in the Puckette course, in both understanding synthesis concepts and in understanding pd.

## Art

- Wrote my first song with pd: Searching the Bog. I liked how it turned out.
- Put together another dungeon synth demo. Needs a few more iterations.
- Got Curse Notice mostly written.
- Made the Fucking Bible.

This month felt dominated by client work, that is thinking about it, not actually doing it. I felt like this month was wasted, and I still feel bad about not pushing as far forward on the vocode tool, but now that I look at the rest of the stuff I don't feel that bad. Audio learning is happening, family and kid stuff is going well, the cleaning will have a lasting effect, and I got some fun stuff in.

orange cone abandoned for months, please remove

cone is lonely

- Finally got my booster scheduled.
- Got Curse Notice into just-good-enough shape to use, though there are plenty of issues. I encountered some interesting html-to-svg-to-png probems that I should write about.
- Took the guy for his second shot. There were far shorter lines because they limited the clinics to appointments only. The guy panicked a little, but less than last time as well.
- Made dinner. Hooray for Processed Food Night!
- Scheduled D&D with less advance notice than is optimal because I had just noticed that I misread something as being a week later than it actually was.
- Did some yoga by following along with a yoga podcast. It's a surprisingly decent format for it, provided you've been to a yoga class before. We're not the #1 Yoga Team over here, but there were only 2-3 moments in which we had no idea what was going on. I needed it, as my hips and lower back are ossifying.

38-minute run. 12 pull-ups.

I think I don’t exercise my distance vision enough during the day. It felt kind of weird to be looking far away. I should do that during my typing breaks.

- Cleaned out the coffee maker.
- Paid bills.
- Dropped off, picked up, dropped off. There was a lot of drama in the pick up when I called the guy out for being excessively mean about me not understanding something he was talking about. He doesn't know how to take criticism yet.
- Got groceries.
- 30 mins. of work for Client B.
- Two hours of work for Client A, all of which was not the actual work, but trying to get things running so I can do my part.
- Vacuumed the stairs.
- Tried to work out additive synthesis math for myself. I'm sort of getting closer to it clicking?
- Spent a couple of hours on Curse Notice, a stupid web app. That's not a great use of time re: Overall Goals, but I kinda needed to just do something easy tonight, though.
- Emailed a friend back.

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

- Dropped off, picked up, dropped off. Lost the better part of the hour because I left too early to pick up. I wanted to do some errands beforehand, but those errands only took a few minutes. After that, I could have walked home, but then I'd have to walk back to school right away. So, I just wandered the neighborhood.
- Did some work for Client B. Added their Slack to my phone for a couple of hours, but it made me anxious, so I removed it.
- Recorded a podcast segment.
- Folded laundry, which, traditionally — and subconsciously — I shirk.
- Watched the FM synthesis lecture. I often really want to pull away in the first five minutes of these to do something more tangible, but I learn a lot every time I sit with it. This time was no exception. Among other things, realizing that the modulating signal is just vibrato is really helpful. I went over the equation about the multiplication of the cosines with different phases several times. Every time I watched it, I felt I got it, then tried to verbalize it and couldn't. Will try more tomorrow.
- Cleared our good name at the library, re: allegedly not-returned book; picked up the new Captain Underpants, which was a big hit as always, as well as my depressing Sackler biography.
- Made dinner.
- Went to the electronic music study group. Got a cool preview of the next homework, which will be useful if I ever get a gig making game show stings. It was nice to air that I thought that sideband frequencies can be lower than the fundamental because that had been rattling around my head.
- Dug up and filled out medical forms for the guy. It took nearly an hour and a half.

November really got away from me. I'm going to have to look back through these to see what happened.

Today in unreliable narration: The guy is telling me that he was rolling nine-sided dice at school.

10-minute run, 12 pull-ups. Was going to try to pick up Christmas presents after drop, but it turns out nothing is open at 8:30 AM.

Heh, via GitHub, I learned that Twitter is betaing showcasing NFTs.

People will complain, but they’ll still use it.

Hmm, Pikmin was the greatest thing in the world to the guy until an hour ago, when some Pikmin died, and it literally brought him tears.

The guy is old enough that I can leave him alone while I go to another section in the library for a few minutes.

Today, I came back to find him Legosplaining to some random mom.

I feel like it's very easy to tip from almost no screen time to hours and hours of screen time per day once a kid starts doing something relatable with their screen time.

12 pull-ups.

Pikmin 3 has the best “let me teach you how this works” experience I have ever seen. It took someone with near zero knowledge of video game conventions to full immersion in an hour.