Category: Generic

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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What the Hell is a Cajon?

I can’t remember when it was, maybe about two years ago?  I was listening to a cover band podcast and one of the hosts was talking about an acoustic duo he played in.  One guy played an acoustic guitar and sang, the other was a percussionist/singer who played a cajon.  I thought to myself, what the hell is a cajon?

It’s this.  It’s a box.  There is a pad on one side of it that has wire snares built into it.  If you slap the middle of the box you get a thump.  If you slap the edge you get a snare drummish snap.

Fast forward to October 2018.  I was in Epcot Center, at the cafe outside of Soarin’.  I was sitting at a table by my lonesome and I don’t remember why.  I wonder… was this Summer 2018 and not October 2018?  Maybe.  Whatever, it doesn’t matter.  I was thinking about a songwriting challenge, either NaSoAlMo or 50/90 and I was trying to think of things that I could do to mix up my usual workflow.  I thought about arranging a couple of songs for acoustic 12-string, a cello instead of a bass, and hand percussion instead of a drum kit.  I never did it, partly because the strings function in GarageBand for iOS kinda blows, but while looking at GarageBand Percussionists in the Drummer function I found one with a cajon.

This past summer, just before another trip to Disney World, I was working on 50/90 ideas and I came back to that guitar/cello/percussion idea.  I scrapped the cello for an upright bass at first, and I declared that all hand percussion would revolve around a cajon… because why the hell not?  Then I got a really crazy idea.  Why have a bass at all?  Why not just go 12-string, percussion, and voice.  That would be way out of my comfort zone.  Then the kicker came to me.  Where I would normally play lead guitar… play saxophone.  Oh we’re just one step beyond now!

Of course I never did any of that at all.

Well now we’re three+ days away from the RPM Challenge and I’m looking for ideas again.  Due to still another Disney World trip (this is becoming a trend) I am going to be in quite the time crunch.  I thought about maybe doing half of the songs as usual, and then half as trippy instrumentals.  Last year I did 20 songs, the equivalent of two RPM albums.  Maybe this year I stick to 10 songs but make it two separate five song EP’s.  Then I thought about that damn cajon again.  How about five rock songs, five trippy instrumentals, and five acoustic songs.  The rockers would be guitar/bass/drums/voice, the trippy instrumentals would be guitar/keys/bass/drums with shit loads of sound effects, and the acoustics would be 12-string guitar/hand percussion/alto sax/voice and the percussion would center on a cajon.  Three EP’s which would let me have a complete RPM project and a complete fawm.org project (which I haven’t even considered shooting for this year).  That sounds awesome.  Super awesome.  Super epic awesome.

Granted there is zero chance of it happening.  I’m going to end up with 10 bluesy rock songs in odd time signatures arranged for a bad power trio.  Eh, that would be cool too.

Three days, 10 hours until RPM officially kicks off.

Tetris

I haven’t plugged it in yet. Let’s hope I got the wiring correct. Fingers crossed.

149/365

I added two Donner pedals, the Harmonic Square pitch shifter, and the Yellow Fall analog delay. I also added the Wren and Cuff Tri Pi ’70 fuzz pedal because after practice last night I decided I couldn’t live without fuzz. I put it before the Klon KTR in the hopes that the Klon’s mid push would fill in the gaps from the Big Muff clone’s mid scoop. If that doesn’t cut through the mix I can add volume with the Spark booster.

Like I said, fingers crossed.

Band Practice Recap or Fuzzy Fun

The main focus of rehearsal last night was working out a set list.  Kevin came up with a rough draft.  I had one little suggestion for a change.  Greg wanted more changes but couldn’t come up with alternatives so we punted.  We ran through the list as it was with the expectation that we’ll edit it during group chats throughout the week.

I had some gear issues.  Four or five songs into the setlist I switched off my spanky new Fulltone OCD ge for a second and then switched it back on and… nothing.  Huh.  I kicked it a couple of times and it came back but started cutting in and out.  I shut it off again and left it that way.  There’s a bad cable in there somewhere.  I’ve been using the backup board at practice while I fiddle with everything on the main board at home.  I mentioned a while ago that I took the fuzz pedal off the main board, but I still have one on the backup board, a Wren and Cuff Tall Font Russian.  With the OCD off I was able to switch the Tall Font on and it was pretty stable.  Okay then, for the rest of the practice I’m using fuzz.

The volume level with the fuzz on was the same as it was with the OCD on, but as soon as the band started playing I vanished from the mix.  The Tall Font is a Big Muff clone and that’s a common issue with Big Muffs.  All of the mid range frequencies are scooped out of the fuzz pedal so there is nothing in the sound of the guitar to differentiate it from the bass guitar on the low end or the cymbals on the high end.  The work around is to just turn up the volume on the amplifier.  I turned up until I could hear myself in the mix again and all was almost well.  The problem now is how things work with the fuzz off.  If I need to play clean the guitar will cut through the mix the way it’s supposed to and the volume change will result in everyone being nuked right out of their sneakers.  The fix for that is to use the volume knob on the guitar.  It doesn’t clean up perfectly the way a Fuzz Face circuit does, but it worked well enough.  I ended up turning the neck pickup volume way down and leaving the volume up on the bridge pickup.  When I wanted clean I just switched pickups.  All problems solved.

After an hour or so we needed a bathroom break and I did some troubleshooting.  I unplugged the cable coming out of the OCD and replaced it with the cable going into the amp.  That eliminated the problem.  Did it actually fix it or did I just get lucky and putzing around put everything into a state where it wasn’t cutting out anymore?  I don’t know.  I do know I needed to turn the volume on my amp back down.  I was happy to be back to overdrive, but I was also sad to put the fuzz away again.  I do so love a nasty fuzz sound, but I’m just more into a good overdrive now.  All these options.

My playing as a whole was okay.  I felt a little weird rhythmically, as in I was rushing sometimes and dragging sometimes and just funky (not in a good way) here and there.  I was trying to keep my hands relaxed and it worked.  No finger pain, no fatigue.  My elbow started acting up again though and by the end of the night it hurt noticeably.  It actually still hurt this morning.  It’s starting to feel a little better now though.

The band sounded fine.  We were focusing on songs we haven’t played in ages so there was rust, but when we hit things that are current for us we were pretty good.  The show on Saturday is going to go well.

I have the backup board at practices but I am definitely using the main board at the gig.  When I left last night I was 100% set on using the Deluxe Reverb as my amp.  By the time I went to sleep I was starting to waffle on whether to use that amp or the Bassbreaker 18/30.  I think I’m starting to lean toward the Bassbreaker.

I need to practice, practice, practice.

Four Days and 10 hours until gig day.