Austin, TX
As soon as I fall asleep, it will be Monday morning when I open my eyes. I rarely look forward to Monday mornings. Aside from the obvious reasons, part of it is that fact that there are people I work with who I only hear from on Sundays. That’s weird, right? I know they’re busy and all, but it’s the sort of the thing that turns Sunday into extended prologue to Monday and that’s no go.
I wrote a really fun post on Saturday, but it wasn’t really the sort of thing that goes here. That got me to thinking about doing a spring cleaning of my online presence and reorganizing what goes where. I don’t think Squarespace will be the platform for this Other Thing I’m thinking about, but I’m not sure what will be. I don’t enjoy using Blogger, I think I’m over WordPress, but there are some interesting new-ish options out there. Wix looks solid. Weebly seems functional, although it’s a little odd that it’s owned by Square (not Squarespace), isn’t it? I love the idea of Penzu, but it’s a poor fit for this other thing. Anyone have any experience with these, or any other suggestions?
There’s a freight train going by about 100 yards from our open window. On weekdays, commuter trains run on the line, but the transit authority only leases this stretch of rail. At nights and on weekends, huge freight trains rumble by, shaking our bed even though we’re four floors from ground level. I love those trains. At night, I can’t really see them but they sound (and feel) like I always imagined a stampede would.
There’s a song I recorded last year, a drone-y thing I made to showcase the ridiculous modifications that Switched On performed on my MG-1. I loved the sounds, but I grew to hate the drum track. It was an ugly snare and kick pattern that I messed with by changing it from 12/8 to 13/8 to 14/8 not because it made any sense, but because I wanted it to be disorienting. Honestly, it just sounded bad.
So…back to the laboratory! I ripped out the drums and shitcanned a high, tinkly piano thing that couldn’t have been more derivative. I replaced the drums with a tom and samples a 1960s drum machine to try to give it more of a bongo feel. The result is a much, much better track:
Ok, I am sitting here just getting angry that I can’t renamed my Chromebook. Someone stole my Google password earlier today. It did them no good as I have gazillion-factor login turned on, but I noticed something that had never occurred to me before: Google kept track of the computer names of the devices that had logged in using my password (yay), which meant it was easy to recognized a Windows computer that wasn’t one of mine. But…I also noticed that Chromebooks just show up as the make and model of the device. That’s fine if there’s only this one in the neighborhood, but we have dozens at the office. You’d think that being able to uniquely identify the machine would be a good thing, wouldn’t you? Grr…
And, if I’m talking about stuff like “not being able to rename a laptop makes me angry”, then it’s probably time for bed. G’night all, and thinks for sticking around while I try to work through a few things.
-RK