For the one or two of you following along in real time, this post is a full week late, sorry. I mention so as not to confuse about the dates. Marky Ramone’s Holiday Blitzkrieg was a week ago Friday last Friday, not last Friday.
Timing issues aside, Marky and the band did not disappoint. More than thirty numbers delivered in rapid fire with absolutely zero banter in between. Big thanks to Kenny for scoring the tickets for this event.
In other musical news, the new Jamulus server setup I mentioned last week passed its first live test with flying colors. With the whole band on, everyone sounded great and there was minimal noise. In fact, I don’t think it has ever performed as well as it did in the last jam session. We’ll have to get a few more sessions in before declaring victory, but this is very promising.
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.
Links
David Lerner, a Mr. Fix-it of Apple Computers, Dies at 72 If you were a Mac user in NYC in the 90s and aughts, you may have found yourself at Tekserve on West 23rd more than once. Lerner co-founded the business in 1987 and over the next 29 years, it became a New York institution. I was especially fond of their take a number system that repurposed a few old, classic Macintosh computers. RIP David.
…the Hardest Driving Test in the World. The Knowledge, sounds brutal. I’ve read that it’s so much information to absorb, that it actually changes people’s brain structure.
I’m a Concert Pianist. This Is Why I Seek Imperfection. “This fetishization of perfection might not be surprising, but that doesn’t make it any less damaging. You cannot learn or grow while trying to appear as if you have everything figured out. You cannot talk to God by trying to avoid doing something wrong. Perfection is stagnation.”
Spent some more time on the personal newsletter script I started back in July. It’s in a pretty good place right now and I like getting the updates every morning. I’ll post a quick write-up on my projects page shortly.
This week’s Jamulus jam was just two of us. Thankfully, we weren’t plagued with the same connection/sound quality issues as last week. We started messing around with an original song by the lead singer. It has a lot of potential, I just need to come up with a grooving bass line.
A few months ago, I blocked YouTube on my laptop. It has been effective in moderating the random watching. It also makes it clear just how often people embed and link to YouTube. This week, I changed the YouTube blocking strategy. Instead of the blunt instrument that is the hosts file, I am now using a filter in the Ublock origin browser plugin. This filter allows embedded videos, and lets me go to the site with just one extra click—if I really want to. Let’s see if I fall back into old habits.
We had a very rough Jamulus session this week. Despite the many, many dropouts, the worst I’ve ever experienced, we soldiered through. Let’s chalk it up as an excellent timing exercise. I’m not sure what to attribute the issues to. Could it have been a bad night at the data center, or was my new docker image to blame? Thinking it might be the latter, I tried it again on Saturday, and it was just fine. Fingers crossed, it was just an anomaly. If it happens again in our next session, I switch back to the old image to rule that out.
I took this week off. While some might call it a staycation, I call it a mini-retirement. No matter the terminology, it was awesome. I got some late season sailing in, accomplished most to the things on my to-do list, played some bass, made pizza—an all around good time. Now, I need to gird myself for the return to work on Monday.
Since 2022, I’ve been using a docker image someone created to run our Jamulus server when we need it. It’s quick and easy to set up and it works great. If you’re interested in doing a similar thing, I put together some instructions on running your own Jamulus Server. While I was at it, I noticed that the docker image hadn’t been updated in 3 years, so I forked the repo, updated the Linux and Jamulus versions and rebuilt the Jamulus docker image.
I also did some more work on the personal newsletter (mentioned previously). Now, it also lists the day’s events from a shared calendar. The more dynamic content in the newsletter, the better. Knowing what’s coming up that day is very helpful. I think weather might be next.
Links
Since I had more leisure time this week, I amassed quite the collection of interesting links. So many, that I decided to save a few for next week. You’re welcome.
