Tag: brooklyn

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Black and white photo of Dave Brubeck at a piano with text: "SORRY, NERDS 5/4 IS DAVE BRUBECK DAY"

Dave Brubeck Day is tomorrow, so a very happy Dave Brubeck day to all who celebrate.

I broke my guitar tuner last week. In the process of purchasing a new one, a new microphone ended up in my shopping cart. I tried it out during our weekly jam—massive difference. This one has much more definition than the old, cheapo mic. So much definition that I was slightly afraid of it when I started singing. It will take some getting used to for sure.

In other musical news, a couple weeks ago at the local, two guys were talking about getting together for a jam. Someone overheard the conversation and said “JP plays bass!” I was very clear about my ability, or lack thereof. They said, “perfect” and I thought that would be the end of it.

Friday night one of them walked by, clapped me on the back and said “you’re hired”. My immediate thought was oh shit.

Now, I give this jam even odds of ever happening. Just in case, I should probably practice a more.

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Photo of a number table tent on a wooden table. The number is "86".

On my Birthday, we got 86ed from some place in Park Slope (see photo). The woman behind the counter wasn’t all that impressed by my attempt at humor after she handed over this number. Perhaps she’s tired of the not so original reference, or maybe she thought it was some sort of middle-aged 67.

I did up a very quick app (I’m using the term very loosely here). Thanks to generative AI, I spent less time on this digital version than on laying out the printable version I was using before. It’s just a little tracker to help me stay on the right dietary path using the DASH diet (from the days before the government added beef tallow to its recommendations). After using it for a week, I made a couple tweaks and am pretty happy with it. You can check it out here: Simple DASH Diet Tracker, if you’re interested in such things, the code is on Codeberg.

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Photo of a massive pile of dirty snow stored (and blocking) a street near a park. There is a street sign for "Court St." in the photo.
Snow removal elsewhere is snow acquisition in Red Hook. Photo credit: Angela Lin

This week, we moved house or apartment, as the case may be. It’s been a little hectic to say the least. For instance, I think I’ve spent the better part of three working days packing, and almost immediately unpacking the kitchen. It’s also exercising muscles I’ve been neglecting at the gym making, which is making me feel creaky.

The move out was uneventful thanks to an amazing NYC moving crew. They whisked everything away in short order despite having to move the truck twice to let others pass due to the lingering snow. Dismantling the bed frame required some consultation and discussion. Even if we had the instructions, they were probably in Italian.

Moving in was even faster. There was a space in front of the building and a service elevator to get everything upstairs. Shortly after the movers departed, cupcakes in hand, leaving us among many boxes, we went to the local for a couple pints. That was the goal I was working towards for a couple days. Since the new place is only a 5 minute walk from the old, it’s the same local I’ve known for the last 16 years. Some things change, others remain the same.

While we’ll be settling in for a bit, the new place is already starting to feel like home. We’re getting used to different noises and idiosyncrasies like which cabinets don’t close quite the same way as the others. I even managed to find dig out the various electronics and cables needed to set up for the Friday night Jamulus session.

Finally, what move wouldn’t be complete without at least one trip to Ikea? On ours, we encountered the absolutely massive snow pile in Red Hook pictured here. The streets around the ball fields are closed and filled with 15 foot high piles of grey snow.

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Photo of a yellow trail blaze newly nailed to a tree. The round blaze has text on the top reading "Midwood Loop" and "Prospect Park Alliance" on the bottom. The Prospect Park Alliance logo is in the middle.

This week’s picture comes from Prospect Park. In all my years exploring this park, I don’t recall ever having seen a trail blaze. Judging from the shine on those nails, this one looked newly placed and I wondered if the trail markers were new. Well, through the magic of the information superhighway, I can confirm that these are (relatively) new: The formal nature trail system was launched in August.

Otherwise, it’s been quiet around here. I think I’m still trying to settle back into the day-to-day routine after the holidays and a bit of a break.

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Photo of a sticker depicting a pizza box guy drawing holding a rose, with the text "New York City Democratic Socialists of America". The sticker is on the restroom wall of a Brooklyn bar and other stickers and graffiti are partially visible.
Oven fresh!

This week’s random photo comes from the wall of the men’s in an unnamed, Brooklyn bar. Regular readers will undoubtedly know the place. Glad to see that they used union printers for these stickers.

The holidays are now officially upon us. Just for fun, I’m going to keep a running count of how many times I hear All I Want for Christmas is You between now and the 25th—I think I’ll hear it at least 10 times. I broke a long-standing, personal tradition of buying nothing on Black Friday. The rationalization was that I saved hundreds of dollars on something that was truly needed (just not at this moment). While this made financial sense, dismounting my high horse is painful.

Given the long weekend, I hoped to make some progress on a couple projects. That didn’t happen, and not just because I was spending time spending money. Now, there is something to be said for rest and relaxation, but I feel like I squandered some time when I could have been establishing forward momentum.

I did manage to “fix” one thing that has been on my list though. Over the past few weeks, one or two of our jams were plagued with really poor audio quality—the musicianship was, of course, stellar. I’m not sure if it was the server configuration, or network congestion. Since I can’t do much about the latter, I updated my Jamulus server docker image with the hope that it might improve things. Rather than building from source, I’m now using a precompiled distribution. In theory, that really shouldn’t make a any difference. But, I wondered if I might be doing something wrong, especially with the dependencies. The initial test sounded great. The real test, however, comes when we all connect to jam. Wish us luck.

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