Month: January 2020

Make That Four Days

You know what?  After four days of practicing, my fingertips are hurting.  I guess I am having a little bit of a callous issue.  I didn’t think that would be a problem, but here we are.

I said I was going to run through some of our more challenging songs.  I didn’t.  I just noodled for about half an hour and then tried to play along with a few Jeff Beck songs.  I still had most of Rock My Plimsoul in my head, and I can still nail that perfect solo in I’ve Been Drinking (it’s really simple but it’s one of my favorite solos on any instrument ever).

I’ve played the SG the last two nights, after playing the Les Paul the previous two nights.  Part of me is thinking that maybe the SG might be the go to guitar for at least the first set tomorrow.  I’ve never played it at a gig before.  Maybe it will have it’s debut.  We’ll see.

It is a little dusty though.

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Time to Get Ready

Today is a good day.  I got a bonus from work today.  That’s good.  I got my tax documents from work too.  By the time this posts my taxes might even already be filed because my wife is amazing.  That’s also good.  I just spent my lunch break working on a time sensitive issue and I figured it out with a minimum of stress.  That’s good too.

The RPM Challenge starts in less than nine hours.  That’s good, but I highly doubt I’ll be awake at midnight to celebrate.  We have a gig tomorrow night.  That’s good as well.  I’m not nearly as stressed as I was for the last gig and that is doubly good.

There are some things that royally suck but I am not letting them bring me down.  The triumph of authoritarianism over democracy is progressing in the US Senate right now as the republican party makes a farce out of the constitutionally mandated impeachment process.  That royally sucks.  I am beginning to think that secession is a viable option.  Brexit takes place today.  Midnight Brussels time, 11:00PM London time, That’s 6:00PM Boston time, I think.  That royally sucks too.

I’m weighing the good against the incredibly bad and choosing to ignore the fact that, in the grand scheme of things, the bad is infinitely more important than the good.  Today I am deciding that the good will outweigh the bad even though that is amazingly, shockingly naive.  Screw it, I’m going to Disney in a couple of weeks.

For now though, I have to start planning my packing for the gig tomorrow.  I need my Les Paul and my SG, my Bassbreaker 18/30 and my Vox MV50 with the 12″ cab, my full pedal board, the handful of new cables I bought (bright orange so you can see them from space), a couple of backup pedals (looking at you, Keeley D&M Drive) and power cables for each one, the microphones, stands, and cables I took home from the rehearsal room recently, the little pick/slide holding microphone stand attachment, and a new glass slide.  Then I’ll go to Mike’s house and get the rest of the mics, stands, and cables, my gig bag with all my emergency stuff in it, and the little stand I sit my amp on when we play.  Oh yeah, and I have to change the strings on both guitars!  Can’t forget about that!

Sunday after the gig I’ll put the amp and the pedal board (and the associated cables) back into my room where they currently sit (see the pic from last night), Setup a mic, stand, and cable on that amp and on the Bassbreaker 15 that is not leaving my room for the gig, then plug those into the 16 channel USB interface that I also took home from the rehearsal room recently.  I will plug the USB cable into my MacBook and make sure I can get both mic signals into GarageBand.  Once that’s done, I’ll be ready to record guitar parts in stereo.  When I record the acoustic guitar or a vocal or a saxophone I can just swing up one of the mic’s that will be on a guitar speaker and use that.  I also dug out my little acoustic guitar pickup that I got a few years ago and still haven’t taken out of the package.  I can use that to record as well.  I’ll keep the laptop and my iPad and my iPhone good and charged so if an idea comes to me I can play it into one version of GarageBand or another.  Once that’s all taken care of I just have to… you know… write a shit load of songs.  Yikes.

This year is a leap year so we get a whole extra day for the RPM shenanigans.  So really it’s no problem at all this year.

Yikes indeed!

But it’s still a good day.

 

Now It’s Three Days

Yesterday I said I had practiced three days in a row but it was only two.  Tonight it’s three days in a row.  I didn’t play through either of the sets, I just played scales and bad blues scale riffs for 30-40 minutes or so.  I did play through an amp and I did use my pedal board.

Actually I played through two amps at once because I am crazy like that.

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If I get the chance tomorrow I’ll probably pick and chose a few songs from the set list that are a little more challenging and run through those. Tonight I poked around with some pedal settings. The analog delay is set for a slap back, the reverb has a new setting that seems to be working. I set up a decent boost level. Things like that.

Oh and I played the shit out of the ol’ blues scale.

HTML Restrictions Suck

Well that’s no fun.

Back in the old days when I was writing on Blogger I could embed all sorts of fun stuff into my posts.  Anything you can put together inside of an HTML tag was fair game.  I used to put all sorts of goofy mp3 players and countdown clocks.  With both a gig coming and RPM about to start I thought it would be wacky to find some countdown clock websites that generate HTML code and put ’em onto a blog post.

I looked at three or four.  No dice.  They all use an HTML tag that wordpress.com blocks.

Aw, fiddlesticks.

Two days and about 4.5 hours until the gig.

One day and 7.5 hours until RPM.

That would have been so much cooler if it was a countdown clock.  Bummer.

Oh well, have a flyer (again).

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Lunch Time Post

Hello and welcome to today’s lunch break blog post.  Enjoy!

There is a lot of stuff going on today.

Last weekend I found two scary looking problems in our cellar.  We have a water leak somewhere and it’s ending up underneath the floor tiles.  It doesn’t seem like a lot of water, but it’s damaging the tiles a little.  I think I know where it’s coming from but I need to get a plumber in to look at it.  While I was investigating that I noticed that some of the HVAC duct that runs along the basement ceiling was actually coming apart.  There was one spot where the duct was detached from the ceiling and it looked really, really scary.  It looked like the ceiling wanted to collapse.  That’s not in any way what was going to happen, but that’s how it looked.

So step one is get the scary looking duct checked out and step two is bring the plumber back.  The HVAC folks came this morning just before I punched in to work.  All set.  It was just a couple of brackets that popped lose and there was nothing wrong with duct itself.  Sigh of relief.  The problem was fixed, some extra support was added, and life is good.

While the guy was here working I heard from my step son that he left his insulin pod at home.  Yikes!  I told him I’d bring it to him once the tech left.  Unfortunately I couldn’t find it.  I looked everywhere.  He said maybe it was in his car and he went out to look.  Nope, not in the car.  I ripped the living room, dining room, kitchen, bathroom, and his bedroom apart.  Nothing.  Where the hell is it?  I retraced my steps and looked everywhere again and finally found it.  It seems like he kicked it way under his bed.  All set.  I had to take a little personal time off from work while I drove up to the high school but that was okay.

When I got to the high school it was a little weird.  A police car followed me into the parking lot.  I don’t mean that to sound ominous, we were just driving along and he just happened to be behind me.  No big deal.  I parked in the front parking lot and he parked in the driveway… next to another police car.  Okay, two cops.  I then noticed that across the lot from me there were two more police cars.  Okay, four cops.  Was something going on?

I don’t think so.  The two parked in the driveway walked into the building together and they were super casual.  Just two coworkers hanging out.  I didn’t see the two cops from the parking lot, but no one inside was acting like anything out of the ordinary was going on.  I wonder if there was a D.A.R.E presentation or something.  Still, given the atmosphere in our country these days, seeing a bunch of cops at the high school was a little bit unsettling.

152/365 - Why so many cops at the high school? I saw these two and two others.

Back to the house, I pulled into the driveway and parked as close to the house as I could.  With a snowbank still on the side of the road, we are parking three cars into a driveway that is more or less exactly the length of the three cars end to end.  We need to park as close together as we can.  No wasted space.

I think I could have gotten a little closer today.

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And that’s my day so far. Fascinating, eh? Still need to schedule something with the plumber. It will likely be for next Thursday because telecommuting makes stuff like this easy.

Oh yeah, and I setup a trello board for RPM2020.

Tonight’s plans include making dinner for Jen and Harry, WATCHING PICARD EPISODE TWO (SQUEEEE!!!!!), and practicing the effin’ guitar!

HoHoHo, everyone.  Hope your day is going well.  Happy lunch break!

Complicated Math

In my last post I said that I have practiced three days in a row.

After publishing said post I acquired a slide rule, an abacus, and a graphing calculator and proceeded to work on some highly advanced mathematical equations. The results of those equations proved definitively that today is not in fact Tuesday. It is in fact Wednesday. Given that this week’s practicing happened on Sunday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, I can now correctly state that I have only practiced two days in a row, not three.

QED

Two Days in a Row?

I practiced again tonight.  That’s two nights in a row.  Oh.  My.  God.  Woah, wait a second… I was at a band practice on Sunday too so I actually practiced THREE NIGHTS IN A ROW!!!!

Last night I played the first set on our rough draft setlist and the first two songs on the second set.  My playlist for some reason skipped a song from set 1 though and I didn’t notice until later.  Tonight I started with the song I missed and then did the whole second set and the first song from the third set.

It wasn’t quite as thorough as last night.  Last night I played through the full rig I am planning on using at the gig, and I stood for the whole time and I didn’t take any breaks.  Tonight I didn’t have the house to myself so I played through an app on my iPad while listening to the playlist on my phone.  I also had to take a break when the love of my life came home and we had to shuffle the cars around and I sat down for a lot of it.

Still… I played for a solid hour for the second night in a row.  I am shocked.

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Hypocrisy Continued

Call this one hypocrisy continued, or maybe SEO kinda works.

I’m referencing something like three older posts here, but to sum up:  I honestly do not care about how many hits this page gets, but I started using a couple of simple Search Engine Optimization techniques recently and it seems like it works.  Also, my job title is programmer/analyst and I do enjoy getting wrapped up in statistics, even when they are meaningless and show that I’m a hypocrite.

As previously mentioned more than a couple of (dozen, probably) times, when I first started blogging (on Google’s Blogger, 2008-2012) I was posting multiple times a day.  I then, for absolutely no reason, moved over to wordpress.com (2012-2016) and continued my ridiculous posting habits.  Next I moved to medium.com (2016-2017) and I think the frequency of posts started dropping before opening up a new wordpress.com account (2017-present).  At first I was posting a lot but it dwindled considerably over time until last June 1st when I decided I was going to post every damn day again, for literally no reason.  That has turned into multiple times a day, just like it was in the beginning.

While I was using the original wordpress account I started tagging posts.  I don’t remember why or when exactly but it seemed like a good idea at the time.  At some point, possibly when I started this account, I started using post categories as well.  As my interest dwindled between lets say September 2017 and May 2019 I stopped tagging and categorizing and just posted.  After reading a reddit post on SEO a couple of weeks ago I went back to categories and tags.

Just focusing on the current wordpress account, when I look at the numbers from the start (March 2017) there was a pretty small but steady stream of hits for the first few months.  As I started losing interest, the hits went down considerably.  The numbers in the Spring of 2019 were down something like 75% from the numbers in Spring 2017 (and lets not forget, 0.25 * 4 = 1, m’kay?  We aren’t talking about lots of hits here.  Not even close).

Last June when I started posting regularly (and writing longer posts, not just throwing up random pictures) the numbers went up again.  By the end of the summer they were back to where they were at the start.  Something odd happened in October though.  I had one post (I don’t remember what it was, but it was just a random picture) got a ton of hits.  There was one day where my numbers skyrocketed (again, for me skyrocketing doesn’t mean the same thing as it does for let’s say Mashable, or the New York Times, or any real site that isn’t just some stupid fat putz mouthing off).  The counts for October 2019 were the highest they had been since the account was created.

Two days ago January 2020 passed October 2019.  There are still 2+ days to go this month and I’m already quite a bit over that previous high.  Again, before you start thinking ol’ Robbie should monetize or any bullshit like that, we’re only slightly above single digit numbers here, m’kay?  Never lose site of that.  It’s pretty important.

So there I was, looking at the Stats and Insights page (wordpress.com users know what I’m talking about) and seeing the current month as my most viewed month in almost three years.  Cool!  Then I thought to myself, I wonder how the numbers on the first wordpress.com account looked.  I logged out and tried to log back in as the original user.  I couldn’t remember the original user’s email address (I don’t use my main personal email address for any of my wordpress.com accounts).  I had to dig through my email to try and find the right user name (I don’t use my main email address, but I do forward all emails from the burner accounts to my main email, so they were there for me to dig out).  Once I found it I had to trudge through the depths of my pea brain’s memory to find the password.  I found that too, eventually.  No need to reset it.

Two things surprised me.  First, despite not having touched that account since 2016 it still gets occasional hits.  Not a lot, just a couple each month.  I didn’t expect that though it does make sense as I can see some posts that were ported from that page to this one still get hit here.  Whatever.  Second, the numbers from 2012-2016 weren’t all that different from my numbers over the last seven months.  On average they were higher back then, but not too much higher.  There were outliers though.  January 2020 is the highest hit count for any month on the current account.  There were 4-5 months on the old account where the hits spiked in a gigantic way.  We’re talking triple the hits we’re seeing today.  More than triple.

The moral of the story is, sure it’s fun to see the numbers on this page growing a little… but don’t get cocky, kid.

QED.

Practice Goal Achieved (for today)

Raise your hand if you’re sick of guitar/Lizardfish/gig posts.

On second thought, don’t raise your hand.  I don’t care what you think.  Here’s another one.

Earlier today one of the guys in the band submitted 2/1/20 Set List Draft #2.  I was in the middle of my lunch break at the time so I typed the list into a Google Doc and sent it around, and then went to hearthis.at and built a playlist of the entire list and shared that around too.  I had an ulterior motive for that one though.

Jen has a work dinner thing tonight and I knew she wouldn’t be home until late.  Tonight is a dad night for the kids so I had the house all to myself for an hour.  I took that new playlist, ran my phone through a blue tooth speaker, plugged in the guitar with the full pedal board, turned up to (slightly less than) gig volume and played.

I made it into the second set, only one or two songs.  I think one song was missing from the first set though so I have to check on that.  I played for an hour solid without a break.  I did have some real pain in my left hand for about two songs but it lessened as I went along.  By the end of the hour I was noticeably tired and it was getting hard to bend the strings.  That’s time to stop for tonight.

I played a lot in a short time.  Notice that I did not say I played well.  I guess I still have to work on that.  My improv skills are down to about 10% right now, Captain.  I need to open a ticket with engineering and get Geordi LaForge to work on that for me.

The gig starts almost exactly four days from now (9:00PM on Saturday).  I need a lot more practice.

I’m pleased with my dumb ass for the moment though.  I’m proud of me, fat boy.

My ears are ringing.

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