Blog

Futzing with jekyll was enough to make me stop blogging, I spent some time and moved everything over to hugo which seems super fast and it’s nice to not muck around with dependencies.

It’s been a couple of years, but I got a new music product pushed out. This was entirelly for fun. It was written, tracked and mixed during lunch-hours and periods of insomnia. It’s hard to say what any of it means, but it makes me happy to listen to it.

As someone who plans and works towards efficiency, having a little one has taken a bit of adjustment. I’m doing my best to accept and move on and reduce my resistence to change. Trying to hold on to almost anything of my past life and schedule has been destroyed by a constant need to adjust and adapt. For the last eight years, I’ve worked out at 5:00am. The alarm went off at 4:30, I would get dressed, scarf down a protein bar of some kind and hit the workout. As hard as I tried to keep this up and as quiet as I attempted to be, somethign would awaken the little one or she would be fitful enough that I couldn’t focus on my workouts. Everything has shifted to a night schedule. The workout begins after she goes to sleep. ...

Probably the most difficult life adjustment I’ve had to make with the little on is accepting that I have to cut corners in everything I do. Every meal has to be cooked as quickly as possible. There’s no time to clean up a paint job, or make another pass at weeding a flowerbed. Life is completely timeboxed and if I want to take more than and hour or so on something I have to get up earlier or stay up later. ...

I’ve been thinking alot about operations lately, how to move forward and how to keep people intersted in the work that they do. One of concepts that makes me really respect how esty performs is their focus. They seems to have a great ability to focus on a core set of software and development processes and not be distracted by every new option that comes along. There is a constant stream of new software, ideas, new libraries, etc … that offers a better, simpler, shinier way to do something. I am impressed by the discipline of Etsy to remain true to what they feel is the right way to operate while still being undeniably successful. ...

Two months down in 2013 and I like to check in with year goals and progress. The primary priorities this year are coding and math. I’ve pushed aside reading aside from lunch hours and have done almost nothing with music. Spare time is so minimal now, I have to make the most with what little there is. By the end of day, after dinner, cleanup, a bit of time with the little one, I have maybe an hour to work. I’ve been spending most of this time working on code. I have completed codecademy work in both ruby and python. I think I’m to the point where I need to stop doing little excercises and start working on something real in order to learn anything. ...

I’m about 99% positive that most of the progress I’ve made in my life is due to my teachers. Not the good ones (there were a few, but not enough), but the bad ones. The awful, lazy teachers who did nothing but make me want to have the revenge of living well. I can think of two math instructors I had who worked hard and tried to communicate, and I did great in those classes .. but the rest mostly walked through the same lesson plans they used for decades. ...

2012 was a pretty hard year to catorize and looking back at music/book purchases it seems to be one of continuously paring down the unnecessary. For that last 5-6 years I’ve been working to puchase less to make sure that I actually read and listen to what I own. There are the occasionnal trigger purchases, but many fewer than before. I am trying to pare down, reduce and throw away that which is unnecessary. ...

My big reading project for this year was to read everything written by and about David Foster Wallace. Here are the final stats: 300+ journal articles (interviews, criticism, etc) a few hundred hours of audiobooks, tributes and interviews 17 books (~5874 pages .. with Infinite Jest as 20% of the total effort) It was a good project, a lot of fun and a bit of a challenge to be in that mindset for nearly nine months of reading. It wasn’t exclusive, I also made it through 25-30 other books so far this year. ...

With life about to get a lot busier, I wanted to finish a bit of music. For the last year, every piece of music I wrote I hated immediately afterwards. I threw out a half-dozen tracks and started over. Most of this was done very quickly, often recording single takes and cleaning up afterwards. The production is a little sloppy at times, but I focused mostly on the song itself, ensuring the form of the tune was tight and the melodies memorable (which is a change from my usual focus on texture).