--- title: "Dispatch #9 (November 2023)" date: 2023-11-01T00:00:00-04:00 draft: false tags: - dispatch references: - title: "EDM Song Structure: Arrange Your Loop into a Full Song" url: https://edmtips.com/edm-song-structure/ date: 2023-11-02T03:01:04Z file: edmtips-com-05su6g.txt - title: "The Tascam Portastudio 414 Let Me Fall In Love With Music Again" url: https://www.gearpatrol.com/tech/audio/a45461959/tascam-portastudio-414-mkii/ date: 2023-11-02T03:06:19Z file: www-gearpatrol-com-6mp4nk.txt - title: "The internet is already over - by Sam Kriss" url: https://samkriss.substack.com/p/the-internet-is-already-over date: 2023-11-02T03:10:20Z file: samkriss-substack-com-5indyq.txt - title: "Why Culture Has Come to a Standstill - The New York Times" url: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/10/magazine/stale-culture.html date: 2023-11-02T03:15:31Z file: www-nytimes-com-yrjrte.txt - title: "The Real Reason You Should Get an E-bike - The Atlantic" url: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2023/10/reasons-to-get-e-bike-emissions-climate-change-benefits/675716/ date: 2023-10-29T18:17:07Z file: www-theatlantic-com-biphm9.txt - title: "The beauty of finished software | Jose M." url: https://josem.co/the-beauty-of-finished-software/ date: 2023-11-02T03:13:08Z file: josem-co-8ssbyq.txt --- It was nice to have a quieter month after so much travel this summer. We got a few extra weeks of warm weather, which meant a few more weeks of biking with Nev, and plenty of time at the [museum][1] and all the local playgrounds. I decided to run the [Bull City Race Fest][2] half-marathon despite having to rest my ankle for the last week of training ([result][3], [certificate][4]). I faded pretty hard down the stretch, but still managed to finish in under two hours -- not bad for an old. [1]: https://www.lifeandscience.org/ [2]: https://capstoneraces.com/bull-city-race-fest/ [3]: /journal/dispatch-9-november-2023/bcrf-result.pdf [4]: /journal/dispatch-9-november-2023/bcrf-cert.png {{}}Little girl races from the slide, bunny in hand, while Dad stoops with a proud smile at the playground.{{}} {{}}Little pumpkin on the porch, proudly showing off her matching blanket and gourd buddy.{{}} ### Tech At my job, I did a cool project working with data from a [Freematics][5] car telematics device. I built a data exploration API using [Gin][6] and learned [`jq`][7] to truncate enormous JSON objects[^1]. I also got to, just like, drive my car around to test things out. {{}}Dark terminal scoreboard showing Nikola Jokić highlighted atop a fantasy hoops leaderboard with 3,062.5 points, ahead of Embiid, Antetokounmpo, and the rest of the NBA elite.{{}} I also made some updates to my [`golong`][8] tool to prep for a fantasy NBA draft. Now it can munge multiple CSVs of data and supports multiple position eligibility[^2] and average stat projections[^3]. It worked great, and my team's looking solid so far. I'll open source it one of these days. [5]: https://freematics.com/products/freematics-one/ [6]: https://gin-gonic.com/ [7]: https://github.com/jqlang/jq [8]: /journal/dispatch-7-september-2023/ ### Music I'm still having a blast with the Novation Circuit Tracks I got last month. I came up with a track I actually really like, which I'm calling "Radiatus" (which is a [type of cloud][9]): [9]: https://cloudatlas.wmo.int/en/clouds-varieties-radiatus.html It's really fun once you've got all the parts set up just to _play_ the Novation, bringing drums and leads in and out -- that's how I recorded these tracks. I imagine it'll only get more fun as I learn how to better twiddle the knobs to change the sounds. We'll see -- maybe I'll come up with 2-3 more cloud-themed tracks and release an album! My phone (and yours probably) sends me these photo slideshows periodically, and I'm an absolute sucker for them. One recently featured a track by [Lack of Afro][10], and I've been listening to his stuff ever since. Check out "For You" (or really any of it -- it's all good). [10]: https://lackofafro.com/ ### Website I made a few updates to the website this month: * Created a [music][11] page that aggregates all the MP3s I've uploaded. * Imported all the posts I've written on my [company blog][12] into an "[Elsewhere][13]" section -- I'm pretty proud of some of this stuff and wanted to make sure I have a copy of it I control. I was able to automate a lot of the process with [Nokogiri][14] and [Pandoc][15], but I still had to manually review every post, which was a fun trip down memory lane, though some of my old ideas are BAD. * Polished my [Markdown link renumbering script][16] (keeps my links in numerical order). This might be useful to other folks & might be worth rewriting in Go and releasing. [11]: /music/ [12]: https://www.viget.com/articles [13]: /elsewhere/ [14]: https://nokogiri.org/ [15]: /elsewhere/pandoc-a-tool-i-use-and-like/ [16]: https://git.sr.ht/~dce/davideisinger.com/tree/cc3cebb27c7d0340747a9ba0a406da2ad475a634/bin/renumber I'm really happy with Hugo -- it's simple but flexible enough to handle every challenge I've thrown at it. Building and maintaining this site has brought me a lot of joy this year. ### This Month * Adventure: head to upstate New York for Thanksgiving, run [Troy Turkey Trot][17] * Project: make another track as good as that one 👆 and finally build that music workstation * Skill: get better at playing along with a click track; [write songs, not just grooves][18] [17]: https://troyturkeytrot.com/ [18]: https://edmtips.com/edm-song-structure/ ### Reading * Fiction: * [_The Secret_][19], Lee Child & Andrew Child * [_Red War_][20], Kyle Mills * Non-fiction: [_Step by Step Mixing_][21], [Bjorgvin Benediktsson][22] [19]: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/635346/the-secret-by-lee-child-and-andrew-child/ [20]: https://www.vinceflynn.com/mitch-rapp-17 [21]: https://bookshop.org/p/books/step-by-step-mixing-how-to-create-great-mixes-using-only-5-plug-ins-bjorgvin-benediktsson/9946155?ean=9781733688802 [22]: https://www.stepbystepmixing.com/ ### Links * [The Tascam Portastudio 414 Let Me Fall In Love With Music Again][23] > For the past ten years or so I've been a musical rut, playing the same half-dozen, half-written songs on guitar once every other blue moon and listening to the same handful of punk bands I listened to in high school. I’ve been a musician for most of my life. Between church choirs, garage bands, and a cappella groups, I’ve been involved in organized (but never professional) music-making for the better part of several decades. But, after so long uninspired, I thought that maybe the musical part of my life was mostly behind me. Until the Tascam Portastudio 414 MKII brought it all flooding back. * [The internet is already over][24] > Where you go, what you buy; a perfect snapshot of millions of ordinary lives. They were betting that this would be the currency of the future, as fundamental as oil: the stuff that rules the world. > > They were wrong, but in the process of being wrong, they created a monster. * [Why Culture Has Come to a Standstill][25] > If there is one cultural work that epitomizes this shift, where you can see our new epoch coming into view, I want to say it’s “Back to Black,” by Amy Winehouse. The album dates to October 2006 — seven months after Twitter was founded, three months before the iPhone debuted — and it seems, listening again now, to be closing the door on the cultural system that Manet and Baudelaire established a century and a half previously. * [The Real Reason You Should Get an E-bike][26] > Today’s happiness and personal-finance gurus have no shortage of advice for living a good life. Meditate daily. Sleep for eight hours a night. Don’t forget to save for retirement. They’re not wrong, but few of these experts will tell you one of the best ways to improve your life: Ditch your car. * [The beauty of finished software][27] > It does everything I want a word processing program to do and it doesn't do anything else. I don't want any help. I hate some of these modern systems where you type up a lowercase letter and it becomes a capital. I don't want a capital, if I'd wanted a capital, I would have typed the capital. [23]: https://www.gearpatrol.com/tech/audio/a45461959/tascam-portastudio-414-mkii/ [24]: https://samkriss.substack.com/p/the-internet-is-already-over [25]: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/10/magazine/stale-culture.html [26]: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2023/10/reasons-to-get-e-bike-emissions-climate-change-benefits/675716/ [27]: https://josem.co/the-beauty-of-finished-software/ [^1]: I was getting back complex nested JSON structures containing arrays with thousands of elements. To truncate all arrays in a JSON response to two elements, you can do `curl [url] | jq 'walk(if type == "array" then .[0:2] else . end)'`. [^2]: An NBA player is often eligible as both a forward and a center, for example. [^3]: NFL projections are typically season-based, NBA are per-game -- the tool can now take per-game projections multiplied by projected games played to get total points.