Tag: uspol

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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.

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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.

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Last week, I talked about how the four-day work week felt so long. Sad to say, this week’s 5-day week didn’t feel any better. I am off next week, so I’ve got that going for me.

The new song I mentioned last week is starting to come together in this week’s session. We managed to all play in the same key and got through most of it. The drummer is really the standout here, perfect time, they never miss. For the rest of us, it’s just a matter of playing it a few times together. I think it has the potential to be one of our better songs.

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Photo of a sign in an apartment window. The text is "President are temporary. Wu Tang is Forever".
President are indeed temporary.

This week’s random photo comes from an apartment window in Windsor Terrace. While the subject and the verb might not agree, personally, I agree with the sentiment.

I read Deep Work a couple months ago and have since put some of his recommendations into practice. For the most part, it’s been about taking control of my calendar, which–combined with some other practices–has carved out a fair amount of time for me to get more meaningful work done. I also (re)subscribed to Cal Newport’s blog, hence the trio of links below.

We had a particularly good jam session this Friday. I attribute part of that to the fact that I’ve been good about picking up the bass (almost) every day, even if it is just to run scales for a few minutes. The lead singer having sampled some cava prior to the session may have had something to do with it as well. None of these sessions would happen without Jamulus, such an amazing piece of software.

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The July 4th holiday, and the number on this weeknote post provide a potent realization: “Crap, halfway through another year…”

Yeah. Time really flies.

Due in part to that realization, I was thinking of a way to remind myself of things–goal oriented things, not a todo list things. Perhaps a personal, daily newsletter will do the trick. I do check my email in the morning, so that’s a good place to get something in front of me. There are myriad ways to do this; I chose to create a little Python personal newsletter mailer script, mostly for fun. A very basic version is getting sent to my inbox every morning. I’ll see if it helps…

This also gave me a chance to try out Codeberg as a replacement for github. So far, so good on that front. I don’t notice much difference since Codeberg seems to have the github features I use most often (git repos and issues).

In US Political news, congress passed a spending and policy bill this week that seems destined to drive this country off a fiscal cliff so that the most wealthy among us can become more wealthy while the rest lose what meager benefits they have. Also, they opened a concentration camp in the Florida everglades and gave it a cute name to distract people from the fact that they are warehousing people in cages, in tents, in a swamp. I really hope the hurricane resistance of those tents aren’t put to the test.

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