I’ve had a long, hateful relationship with soundcloud.com.  For whatever reason I’ve always viewed them as creepy and underhanded and untrustworthy.  Unfortunately for me they integrate with every site I ever share music to so I’ve grudgingly set up accounts for each of the writing and recording challenges I’ve worked on since… forever.

Everytime they do something to screw over their user base I try to get away, but just like Michael Corleone they always pull me back in.  Not this time, I think.  Recently they announced they were cutting off all of their free accounts at 15 files.  The outrage was pretty intense.  Just go to any musician subreddit and you’ll see some grade A fury.

A few minutes ago I received an email from soundcloud saying, effectively, just kidding!  We’re not choking off anyone’s accounts.  Isn’t that nice of them?  What a great buncha folks, doing right by the people they were trying to screw.

Yeah, thanks but no thanks.  Consider this chord cut.  It’s going to screw up how I share music on this page, and on the Lizardfish page, and on the 50/90 page.  I think fawm.org is still okay, and I never used it for RPM.  Hearthis.at can post single songs here, but not albums.  I’ll just have to deal with that.  I’m not going to run the risk of some corporate stooge having a stupid idea that messes up my musical workflows.  Hearthis.at, bandcamp.com, alonetone.com.  They will get the job done.

Maybe I’ll dig around reddit for other options.  I’ve seen a few threads discussing this topic but I haven’t really read them yet.

Thanks for not screwing us, Soundcloud but no thanks.

As a wise man once said, I’m out of control like a tootsie roll.

Yesterday I drove to work in a snow storm.  It took me an hour to get from point A to point B.  This morning I drove to work without a snow storm.  It took me two hours to get from point A to point B.

Do you have any idea how little sense that makes?  Do you have any idea how infuriating that is?  I mean I just wanted to get to work, right?  In good conditions today it took twice as long as it did in bad conditions yesterday.  Why?  Can someone explain it to me?

At least the view was nice….

Now that all the snow has fallen off the trees, all of this winter wonderland shit has turned into what it really is… an ugly mess.  Don’t believe the hype.  Winter sucks.

Being two goals off the pace seems okay.  Being three goals off the pace seems impossible to make up.

Last night the Bruins beat the Hurricanes 2-0.  Yet again they waited until the 3rd period to unleash the offense.  I think I would feel more comfortable with our first place record if we could maybe score some goals in the first two periods.

The Boston Bruins have played 28 games.
David Pastrnak has 25 goals.

Three goals off the goal-a-game pace.  That seems like an infinitely larger hole than being two goals off the pace.  I don’t know why.

The next game is tomorrow night against Chicago (10-12-5, he said with a snicker).  Hopefully Pasta will score 7-8 goals and hopefully most of them will come in the first period.

When you listen to tech podcasts with regular security segments it’s likely your head will be filled with internety fears.  It happens to the best of us, and today it happened to me.

After listening to Grumpy Old Geeks talk about switching to a new browser I figured I’d pretend that I know about this kinda stuff and installed Brave.

It seems okay so far on iOS, macOS, and iPadOS.  We will see how it holds up.

Ran some errands tonight that required me to drive through downtown.

I just read the following from a Washington Post article:

It has been snowing in Worcester for 42 hours. (If you’re really looking to escape the snow, 42 hours is enough time to drive from Worcester to Florida twice.)

It hasn’t been that bad in Methuen, but I did have to shovel out this morning after shoveling out before bed last night.  I expect to need to do some shoveling out when I get home from work tonight too.  After all that work yesterday my sleep watch numbers were spectacular.  Surprised?  I’m not.

Jen worked from home boh days.  I probably should have, but after being the only person in my group to not drive in yesterday I felt a little guilty about not driving again today.  As it turned out I had nothing to worry about.  There was snow on the highways, but there was more sand than snow and apart from slushy ruts between lanes it was mostly clear.  I kept a steady 35-40 mph the whole way in and there was very little company out there.  I made it to work in about an hour.  I consider that a minor Christmas miracle.

Slight change of subject, I haven’t touched my guitar since Friday night.  I’ve been a little afraid.  I would imagine that with all the pain and abuse I’m taking from the shoveling it would be expected that playing would hurt… I mean, I’m hurting all over anyway so why should playing be different?  Still… I’m a little scared.  The band will likely take the rest of the month off before trying to look into a possible booking in early February.  I don’t think I want to wait that long.  Maybe I’ll try to write and record a few things just to keep playing a little.

When I was in school I was playing saxophone all the time.  When you play a wind instrument your body has a way of telling you that it’s too tired to keep playing.  For the sax, it’s a reed instrument so you have to put the mouthpiece into your mouth and your lips and your jaw create an airtight seal around it.  When you reach a certain fatigue point your lips and your jaw stop being able to create that seal.  Your body literally tells you that you are too tired to play and you need to stop for a while.  There is a part of my brain that has decided that is the explanation for why two of my fingers effectively stopped working on Friday.  I don’t practice enough, therefore my stamina is way down.  We take a lot of short breaks during rehearsals that allow me to rest my hands a little bit as we go.  I didn’t have that on Friday.  Maybe I just reached the point where my stamina was all used up and I ran out of gas.

Maybe?  We hadn’t played a gig in over a year, and there were long stretches without rehearsals where I was barely playing at all.  Maybe the reason I went to shit halfway through the set was because my body was telling me that I was too tired to go on.  I like the sound of that WAY more than arthritis, or some other terrible thing.

Maybe I just need to practice more.

Maybe if I shovel enough I’ll be all jacked and playing for an hour without stopping will be easy again.

Maybe.

It occurs to me that I should have waited until about game #40 before starting this.  Oh well.

Last night while the snow was piling up outside the Bruins were beating the Montreal Canadiens once again.  This time 3-1 with another sweet 3rd period come back.  I was able to listen to some of the game (including all three Boston goals) on the radio.  Pastrnak scored once (Marchand didn’t score at all).

The Boston Bruins have played 27 games.
David Pastrnak has scored 25 goals.

The next game is tomorrow night against the 16-10-1 Carolina Hurricanes.