Switched over all of my lines from Verizon to Visible. It was a very simple painless process through the app and I’m seriously going to save about $2400 a year for (seemingly) comparable service. Bananas.

I generally don’t download lots of apps on my phone or regularly try things but dammit, my mind gets twisted up over podcast apps for some stupid reason I can’t put my finger on and I cycle through using pocket casts, overcast and Apple Podcasts on a regular basis. Just me?

Make no mistake, Karen Carpenter was a master at playing drums

You know what? The sunflowers and the grasses are the creek’s popsicles…

My son, having breakfast at the creek one morning in September.

When I first began my PM journey, I felt this immense pressure of needing to know everything. Over time I have transitioned into being curious about a given use case and amp up the empathy around the problem statement. So glad to not have that pressure anymore.

I setup Starlink in September of last year and I am genuinely impressed at how it has stood up to storms, high winds, heavy snow without missing a beat on performance ~160 Mbit down/ ~18 Mbit up. Only had one outage and that was while I was sleeping.

I’ve been messing around with my drums and mic setup and I think I’ve dialed in the sound how I want it. One of the things I’ve been practicing is taking a song with lots of space and introducing little snippets of tension in the time without losing the pulse. Super fun exercise, and when done right, downright musical (not saying I have achieved this). Here’s a snippet of the song “Eat the Elephant” by A Perfect Circle that I played my own drum interpretation over:

“What are all of those pipes?”

This is what brought me over to micro.blog from Mastodon, somehow on Mastodon I was always missing posts or conversation context, haven’t run into that here and worth the price of admission.

Japan’s Only Cymbal Manufacturer

Such a lovely video. I often think about what I spend my day doing at work, it’s not a craft what I do (industry folks may disagree), this is pure craft.

Regarding 1Password and Safari, it definitely is working better using Edge. I suppose I could migrate to iCloud Keychain but I’m too lazy to go through that effort. Edge has been pretty good (certainly better that Chrome). Once you disable/hide all of the Bing and AI crud, it’s a fairly fast and decent browser. I do appreciate the vertical tabs feature quite a bit.

The issue I was running into with Safari is that extension just wouldn’t load or save the password for a given site. Reinstalling the extension didn’t help any. I don’t necessarily blame this on Safari or Apple, I know 1Password made some annoying changes when they released 1Password 8, but it was working fine for months and then it just decided not to. I keep 1Password because I’m in some grandfathered plan from eero (back before Amazon bought them) that now I pay nothing for 🤷‍♂️

In praise of buttons www.nubero.ch/blog/009/

Lately, 1password and Safari have not been getting along. I can A/B with Edge (or Chrome or Firefox) and the extensions work so much better on them. Might be time to go back to Edge.

I just discovered that there is a text version of NPR and I wish more websites did this: text.npr.org

It is bitterly cold today in central Nebraska. Wind chills of -38 degrees Fahrenheit to be precise. Absolutely gross. I could have chosen to binge watch a show or two in bed all day, instead I chose to play drums for 5-ish hours.

During my teens, playing along for hours with headphones, to Pearl Jam or Nirvana was fun, but created a lot of fatigue due to shitty headphones, blasting the music way up to counter the loudness of the drums. As I resolved to pick up the drums again, I knew that not only protecting my hearing would be important, but also recording my playing to listen back on what I can improve on would be vital.

I came across various YouTube drummers recording their videos and noticed their drums didn’t appear to be closely mic’d, in fact I couldn’t detect microphones at all. Reading some of their equipment descriptions led me to this crazy little product from Yamaha: the Yamaha EAD-10. It’s a little stereo microphone that attaches to your bass drum and connects to a brain/processing unit (the mic also can act as a trigger for your bass drum, and you can purchase separate triggers to attach to your snare, toms etc for added sound capabilities).

This little device has been absolutely amazing. I can connect my smartphone or laptop to the brain and record audio from my drums in near studio quality.

Here's what it looks like on my bass drum:

Yamaha Companion App: Rec ‘N’ Share

Yamaha has a companion smartphone app called Rec ‘n’ Share available in the App Store or Google Play Store. This app is what makes this equipment shine. The app is functional and fairly basic (certainly could use some better design touches) but it really makes it easy to either record your drums/practice session and organize them or load a track from your music library to play along to (it even has some ML features that can split the instruments of a track so you can mute them and record your parts into the track). Its main premise is to also record video from your phone as well as the drums track so you can share on YouTube (I have no intention of publishing on YouTube).

My Practice Sessions

I made a commitment to play at least one hour every day. Thankfully I have stuck to this since August when I got my drum studio set up. When I purchased this mic back in November of 2023, my sessions immediately increased to averaging several hours every day.

Here’s a sample of a drum track. I literally started a new recording on my phone, the app gives me a countdown from when I press record, and I played for a few seconds then stopped the recording and shared the track via Airplay to my Mac (the app bounces the track to a .M4A file but I can also extract a .WAV).

Here’s a sample of just the drums:

And here’s an example where I stripped the drums with the app from a song I recorded with one of my old Seattle bands and recorded a new drum track to the original instruments:

There literally is no step 3 to this! I plug in and press record and voila! I have been extremely happy with the results, and it allows me to analyze what areas to focus on if I’m in a practicing mindset, or just jam at all hours to my song library.

15-year-old me would be truly amazed at what technology has enabled me to do musically, and this technology has brought back a joy that I haven’t felt since I was 15.

The amount of hurdles Apple puts you through to buy a song in iTunes, download said song, and have it appear in your Apple Music library as a downloaded track is simply astonishing. They used to do this well.

The Evolution of the Trap Set lecture by Winton Marsalis

Such great story telling in this video

Highs of -4 degrees in a few days. Painful.

I’ve been using my watch + AirPods as my “dumb phone” for the past few months with decent success. Going back to T9 would be a little much https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/06/technology/smartphone-addiction-flip-phone.html?unlocked_article_code=1.Lk0.nAJa.9G0LbxiLxsq-&smid=url-share

Icy fog

2024, with occasional introductions

Hello, and thank you for stopping by. I’m John, married to wonderful Erin, and father to a lovely 3-year-young lad named Mario. I have been living in central Nebraska for the past year and half (relocated from Seattle) in a mostly rural community.

I work as a Product Manager, developing analytics applications for contact centers and social media engagement teams. I have been doing this now for almost three years and it has been one helluva a ride so far. Prior to working in product, I spent 20 years in contact center/customer support strategy, operations, and technology, primarily in the mobile data space.

Music, in particular drums, are where I would ideally spend all of my non-family time. I played for many years in Seattle with multiple bands and projects. My career ultimately led me to pause all of that for a bit (10 years!) and I only recently started playing again now that I have a 24/7 space and no neighbors to be concerned with.

I was previously on Micro.blog under the @withoccasional handle. At the time I was testing the service out, I don’t think I knew what I really wanted. I was sitting on the fence with regard to Twitter at the time and had stopped posting there for a bit. I treated Micro.blog as a twitter replacement, I don’t think I realized at the time how tired I was of social media in general (this was probably 2018 timeframe).

Long story short, with Twitter falling apart and Meta seemingly looking to support some openness with Threads, it made sense to me to sign up again and truly use the service as an aggregator for people and blogs I follow across the internet as well as a place to publish long-form writing in the hopes that it is interesting enough for my son to read sometime in the future.

After two and a half years, Covid strikes the household again. How to keep a 3.5 year old entertained is beyond me.