deathmtn

- Did work for Client A, again fixing things so I can get to what's in the contract.
- Rewatched a Puckette lecture, realized I was confusing FM synthesis with cos signal multiplication, and that's why you don't get sidebands from cos signal multiplication. You need to add signals in order to get sidebands.
- Read some more Piketty.
- Went to the hardware store.
- One of the guy's requested books went to the main library, so I went there to get it.
- Adjusted the pd vocoder so that the block timer could be turned off. Added more signal snapshots.
- Made dinner.
- Started going through Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring again while trying to think of what scale degrees I'm actually playing.
- Did some yoga.

The guy has learned how to assign sizes to problems. So, getting accidentally bumped in line is a 2, spilling your milk is a 5, getting lost is a 10.

He went on to extend the scale and said that the coronavirus is a 12, and global warming is a 13.

- Dropped off, picked up, dropped off.
- Got groceries.
- Did some more re-planning and got even more real.
- Organized a bunch of files in my archive.
- Spent a stupid amount of time looking for the export from my old Twitter account. I think it's just gone. I should have just scheduled some future time to look for it.
- Went to the contractor's roundtable. Oddly, there was a lot of talk about the Tech Workers Coalition, which was fine by me. I didn't know about it, and I applied to be let in.
- I haven't looked at the news part of my RSS feeds in a week, which I thought was good, but today, I scrolled through 500 items or something.
- Made dinner.
- Wrote the rest of the D&D recap.

I got up extra early today, and it felt like a good day, but I only got one of the things in my plan done. But I'm just going to say it was an off-day and see how tomorrow goes.

Bonus swiped a piece of avocado, but he doesn't have the teeth for it, so he kept mashing it in his jaws while scurrying, trailing smushed-up chunks.

I think he still liked it, though.

Eight-minute run, 12 pull-ups.

Heh, I don't know why I bother searching for things like "Berlin Philharmonic bandcamp".

From Capital and Ideology:

To sum up, nearly all property was concentrated in the top decile and most of it in the top centile, while the vast majority of the population owned nothing.
For a more concrete sense of inequality in Paris at the time, note that, according to the cadastre, almost no one in Paris owned an individual apartment before World War I. In other words, one normally owned an entire building (or sev-
eral buildings), or else one owned nothing and paid rent to a landlord.

I’d actually like to know what that ratio is in various cities right now.

I think that during a hard drive or laptop move, I lost my old Twitter archive. It was probably mostly garbage anyway, but I regret posting D&D recaps there.

I just picked up a hard garlic and thought of a good tough guy name: Joe Hardgarlic

- Dropped off, picked up, dropped off.
- I spent way too much time planning out the month.
- Did some more reading and graphing to make the connection between combining the phases of signals and the sidebands that appear in the resulting frequency spectogram. This took way longer than expected. I somehow thought I could wrap this up today.
- Wrote most of a D&D recap. This one is long, partly because of the death of a longstanding character. I think for future recaps, I'm going to have a template, and I'm just going to fill that template out. This is taking up too much time.
- Went to the music tech study group, and we tried to talk the sideband stuff together and work it out in Pure Data. We didn't quite get there, but it was clarifying. I was considering bailing because I was so wiped and feeling bad about my progress, so I'm glad I went.
- Did the dish backlog now that we can safely use the sink drain.
- Did some condo-related accounting.

I tried really hard to deal down (with myself) how much I planned for each day, and I was immediately and brutally shown that was still way too much. I feel like only way to get stuff done is to stay up really late and sleep less, but that's a sure path to self-destruction. So, I guess more planning shit will be tried!

20 burpees, 12 pull-ups.

I was explaining ID cards to the guy today, and he asked what if you just made your own that said whatever you wanted.

Then, I found myself talking about the hologram on the Mass. driver's licenses, and I was like oh man what am I doing

This thing that happened to Fred just happened to us. At least it was washing machine water that backed up.

I was thinking about how habits determine what you do consistently. Then, I thought about how the things I thought went well last month were things that I did consistently, and the things I felt didn't go well were things I did intermittently. (And if you reduce that further, it becomes: The things I spent time on actually got done.)

Right now, the only solid habits I have are working out (I've been working out almost every weekday for several years), and when I was doing the song-a-week challenge, composing regularly for a few months.

So, I thought: what if I could extend that to these things that I want done that didn't get done? The way I make working out done is that I have a few different workouts that I can pick from when it's time to work out. They're not predetermined, which feels less restrictive to me when it's time to actually do them.

I started writing down the things that I want done and putting them into categories, so that I could take an approach similar to that of the workouts. I could schedule ahead of time which categories of thing I'd do each day but decide what I'd actually do on that actual day.

The categories I came up with existed on two axes: domain and uncomfortableness. Uncomfortableness is there because it corresponds to difficulty in my workout options. Sometimes, I do six sets of burpee/pull-up/stretch circuits, and sometimes I run for 10 minutes then do a single set of pull-ups. If I do the latter, then the next day, I try to do something like the former. Alternating keeps the habit from feeling oppressive.

The domains I grouped things into were:

- Work for cash.
- Production. This is making something using what you already know.
- Life. This is life maintenance stuff, like clearing up clutter, doing a special activity with your kid, or fixing a bug in your personal blogging software.
- Edification. This is learning and practicing, both useful and useless. There is a lot of overlap here with Production.

I plotted out what two weeks of evenly going through these would be like. For each domain, I do something uncomfortable, then the next day, I do something comfortable, then the day after that, I don't do anything with it at all. (The exception is the work for cash domain, in which I don't take any weekday breaks.) The amount of time I spend on each domain activity is not fixed or determined by this habit schedule.



In this form, it looks like it might work. Then, I plotted out what these two weeks would look like with actual activity choices, instead of just dots indicating that I'd do something in that domain.



Here, a big flaw is exposed.

I end up doing activities in production and edification roughly once every two weeks. But I can't realistically write an interactive explainer by doing it for two hours, taking a two week break, then working on it for another two hours. I definitely will not finish the vocode tool that way (and that's kind of what I drifted into doing in November).

So I cannot avoid prioritization and the sacrificing of projects just by following a habit plan. I actually still have to decide x will not be done and y will not be done.

Which I kind of knew in the back of my head when I started scheming. I needed to draw something out to prove it, though.

That said, I still think it can help with things that aren't projects. That is, non-time-sensitive activites that don't have an ending and can be frozen and thawed easily, like learning how to use a new DAW or writing D&D material.

I also realized that there's things I neglect doing that are actually comfortable. I could get a lot out of making those habits.

But I still have to figure out what to do about the projects, which I don't think can be tackled well by habits.

They should find a way to make houses out of onion skins.

Well, friendship has ended with climbing. The guy has declared it boring and doesn’t want to go anymore. I have to admit: it did look boring.

Because of my experience with being forced to do things like soccer and orchestra, I’m not going to make him go, but he does need to get out of the house and burn off some energy once a week. We really have no idea what to replace it with, though.

Spent 20 minutes figuring out how to avoid paying $70 for some 5x7" prints of a school photo that I'd have to mail out myself anyway. Snapfish has 8x10" glossies for $3 each and will mail them to wherever you want. Poked around for a way to get the full resolution photo, but the closest I got was grabbing a 600x700px image with a transparent background (which is useful for other things). So, I paid the $30 for the full-res image file, albeit with a background applied. I picked a background that I hope will be easy to photoshop out.

Eight-minute run, 12 pull-ups.

- Dropped off, picked up, dropped off.
- 40 min. call with Client A. We figured out one of the init shell scripts runs differently on my computer than it does on their computers.
- Renewed a permit. Did some personal accounting.
- Got two more Christmas presents for relatives.
- Went over the additive synthesis math again. I got the trig part of it. I need to trace along with why the sidebands appear to close it out, I think.
- Brought up the air purifier and cleaned it. The filters need changing, though.
- Did some thinking about how I should plan December.
- Fixed a couple of issues with Curse Notice. Also, happy to see it almost works on the phone?

Wily just opened over 800 new tabs in Firefox.