David Eisinger

Journal > Dispatch #9 (November 2023)

Posted 2023-11-01 under #dispatch

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 and all the local playgrounds. I decided to run the Bull City Race Fest half-marathon despite having to rest my ankle for the last week of training (result, certificate). I faded pretty hard down the stretch, but still managed to finish in under two hours – not bad for an old.

Tech

At my job, I did a cool project working with data from a Freematics car telematics device. I built a data exploration API using Gin and learned jq to truncate enormous JSON objects¹. I also got to, just like, drive my car around to test things out.

I also made some updates to my golong tool to prep for a fantasy NBA draft. Now it can munge multiple CSVs of data and supports multiple position eligibility² and average stat projections³. It worked great, and my team’s looking solid so far. I’ll open source it one of these days.

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):

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, and I’ve been listening to his stuff ever since. Check out “For You” (or really any of it – it’s all good).

Website

I made a few updates to the website this month:

• Created a music page that aggregates all the MP3s I’ve uploaded.
• Imported all the posts I’ve written on my company blog into an “Elsewhere” 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 and Pandoc, 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 (keeps my links in numerical order). This might be useful to other folks & might be worth rewriting in Go and releasing.

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
• 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

Reading:

• Fiction:
  • The Secret, Lee Child & Andrew Child
  • Red War, Kyle Mills
• Non-fiction: Step by Step Mixing, Bjorgvin Benediktsson

Links:

• The Tascam Portastudio 414 Let Me Fall In Love With Music Again

  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

  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

  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

  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

  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.