On Tuesday night I made the mistake of eating something before going to bed, giving me terrible heartburn all night. Upon waking I embarked on a 24-hour fast, subsisting on Harney & Sons Cinnamon Spice Tea (which is pretty amazing stuff); tomorrow I am going to break my fast with a big breakfast somewhere, probably the cute Midfield Airport Cafe so I can look at tiny airplanes as I stuff my face with pancakes. Now THAT’S a GOAL! :D

Other than working on the big Javascript project, I continued yesterday’s podcast gear setup by setting up the old Macintosh with the old audio interface, as well as trying out the new microphone stand (which is awesomely solid). Add to that the completion of a huge overnight data backup, the tidying and sorting of a zillion little pieces of junk into plastic ziplock bags, and some research into a possible storage solution for the rest of the Living Room Cafe, I’d say it was a pretty productive day overall. Detail follow! (more…)

Today I did some work debugging network code for the UCLA project, getting a whole bunch of different computers to talk to each other on the same network. Since this is the first time I’ve ever written such code, I’m discovering all kinds of interesting special cases that we need to account for…whee! Still, I managed to squeeze in some personal goal work to maintain momentum!

Work Stuff!

The project is called Science through Technology Enhanced Play, a joint research project between UCLA and Indiana University for which I’ve been contracted as a developer through my buddies at learning sciences consultancy Inquirium. We’re coming to the end of year three, and the last big trial with the kids will be in about a week! One last-minute feature we added was “remote control” of the main presentation app that runs on a giant screen, and to do this we had to add a network communication layer between the browser-based clients and the NodeJS-based app server. Because we made some reasonable assumptions about the system architecture early on, adding new features has been pretty smooth, but the network architecture means having to come up with new ways of debugging stuff. Which leads to ridiculous setups like this:

I have three computers and a tablet with five screens on the same network, tracing through four separate running programs as it runs. This is the first time I’ve had to debug something like this, so it’s an interesting challenge. Since I happen to LIKE debugging systems, it’s been nice to wrap my head around some new concepts too!

Community Stuff!

Yesterday I sent out the invitations to the informal Groundhog Day Resolutions Review group, and we have a small number of people now in the private group. Introductions have been posted, and comments have started to flow. I’m not sure how this is going to go, but I think we’ll just take it one day at a time and see what develops!

Podcast Gear Enabling Music Composition

After dinner I spent a few hours setting up and testing the podcast gear. First I went through all the cables and wrapped them tidily. Then I plugged in the audio interface (an old M-Audio FastTrack Ultra Pro), set up the microphones (two Audio Technica 2035 condensers), and routed the cables. That’s when I discovered that the FastTrack Ultra Pro is no longer supported on the latest Mac OS! Garrr! Fortunately, I had a smaller audio interface called a Mackie Onyx Blackjack that I’d acquired specifically for at-home recording tests, but had never gotten around to unboxing it; the FastTrack used to live at my friend Sid Ceasar’s photography studio where we record our podcast. I managed to get everything hooked up and working after a bit of mysterious futzing with some microphone features that no longer are needed at home, and did a quick audio recording test using our podcast music bed in Propellerhead Reason, which you can hear below:

There are some level issues, and I’d forgotten that I had Sid’s microphone tuned a bit different to equalize our voices, but overall everything works. I’m bummed about losing the ability to record 4 microphones at once, as the Onyx tops out at 2. However, I can still use the FastTrack Ultra on my 2007 Macbook Pro, though I have had my eye on the FocusRite Scarlett 18i8 for several years as a comparable replacement. Tomorrow the new microphone stand comes in, and then I think we’ll be set to record podcasts again, with video coverage even!

As a bonus, the podcast gear bring my Music Composition goal a little closer, because now I can make noises in the microphone and see what they sound like. Unfortunately, the Onyx audio interface does not have a MIDI port so I can’t plug-in my ancient Kurzweil SP-88 full-size piano keyboard, but I do have a smaller first-gen Axiom 25 USB keyboard that might work for note entry. Kind of scary! I will have to face the music soon!!!

Next Steps

The rest of the week is going to be rather intently focused on fixing network code for work, so I’m going to have to find something that’s easy to do to maintain momentum on my GHDR Goals. I’m finding that just making a bit of progress every day has felt really good. The days have been long, and I haven’t seen anyone face-to-face in days, but it feels like I’ve been productive. I am starting to feel a bit antsy about not having made a new product, so maybe I can spend an hour tomorrow thinking about that and call that my GHDR work for the day.

---

Monday was the first day of putting my fancy new TRACKER into action. I went down to the office at 7AM and printed out an Emergent Task Timer (ETT, not the ETP) to see how that worked out for the day along with my goal tracking; I wasn’t sure if it would be a productive day or not, but I was determined to give it a go. Got a few things done. Getting used to the idea of not trying to finish everything at once…a hard expectation to break myself from. What made it a bit easier was recognizing that the goal I selected, “compose a song”, was going to take a LOT of learning. (more…)

Sunday was Chinese New Year Superbowl Sunday, and I spent most of it in a kind of sleepy haze. I did manage to squeeze out a few things related to Groundhog Day Resolutions, and looked into some of my local printing services. (more…)