Category: long story short
-
This is my beautiful house
If you had told 15 year-old me that someday I would be so annoyed by the smudges on the floor that I would be walking around with a spray bottle and a special kind of mop at 7 AM, trying to get rid of them, I would’ve looked at you as if you were a…
-
Trespassers won’t
So I was having some coffee the other morning when I glanced at the deck and saw a face staring back at me, about ankle high, headed toward the corner of the house. It was a little reddish pointy face and my mind had real trouble keying it. Is that a fat little deer? I…
-
Breakthrough
This probably won’t make much sense right now, and even the people who are following my AI project won’t get to this part of the story for at least a month, but Piper summarized a document for me today after days (!) of debugging that themselves were the last step in building out a file…
-
Depicting Piper Morgan
Early on in my LLM-bot experiment I decided I needed a logo for the project (a robot emoji just wasn’t going to do). As I initially conceived of Piper as an “intern” some of the early ideas I generated were a little too much of the “student”: I shared that with my pal Cecil and…
-
Because I don’t have enough to do
I was listening to an audio book by Anthony Kaldellis today and suddenly had this whole idea for a historical novel set mostly in 10th century Constantinople. I already have a working title for it (The Epistrophikon) and a bunch of ideas about settings, scenes, themes, the main character (Hraban or Korvax to the Greek-speaking…
-
Dear diary
Thursday morning. Tomorrow is the 4th. Have a meeting at 8:05 with the other leads to sync and refine tickets. Making coffee. Colleague made a draft overview roadmap yesterday I need to review and start maintaining to help the team see its bearings. I ran into a wall in google analytics yesterday so will ask…
-
Releasing a record is a lot
Last week was a whirlwind. Album finally dropped on streaming, lawsuit underway, lots of work and personal stuff. B’s birthday month in full swing!Now I’m into the “claiming my profile as a first-time artist” on Spotify, Tidal, Apple Music, Deezer? and on and on.I have finally been approved to upload my lyrics to a service…
-
Weaving the strands
There’s a lot going on! The website for the record is launched and pretty close to final, at least for a v1. I’m particularly keen on the semi-hidden per-session notes and photos. The long weekend has given my some time to catch up things and some time to scheme about new things. Next week is…
-
Deep breaths…
I have received my shipment of prerelease CDs (unboxing vid below). So not only can you order a CD now, but if you do it soon, you can actually get your copy before the official release date in June. For now, I’m just savoring that new CD smell. (Cover art by Dave Gray. Sleeve design…
-
Settling in
The first three weeks on a new job, with the ongoing community work supporting other 18F alumni, trying to finish up the website for my record before it comes out next month and get the Kickstarter campaign set up to fund the vinyl version, all within the wild national context we’re all bobbing around in…
-
Merch mocks
Since I decided to run a Kickstarter campaign to try to raise some funds (and gauge the level of interest) for a vinyl release of No One Does It Solo Only, and that means thinking about the rewards at various tiers. I can share more of my thinking on that soon if anyone cares, but…
-
Prankster babies
I grabbed a Lyft today (long story) to head down to the VA on Old Middlefield and fell into a conversation with an animated, tie-dyed, trim-gray-bearded fellow named Max as he drove me to my destination. I forget how we got onto the subject, but it turns out Max is the son of one of…
-
This one time…
No One Does It Solo Only by Layers of Meta is now available for pre-order at Bandcamp: No One Does It Solo Only by Layers of Meta
-
Serendip
Made a last minute choice to swing up to Menlo Park after work to a little place called Bar Loretta, tucked inside a restaurant called Left Bank, apparently on the site Magoo’s Pizza Parlor, the site of the first proto-Grateful Dead show sixty years ago. Billed as the Warlocks still, the show featured the first…
-
What I should be writing
Was just talking to EB yesterday about structured procrastination, but now I have this weird sort of twisted loop where I really do want to at least do some morning pages and write down whatever’s on my mind but what’s on my mind is that the writing I need to be doing right now is…
-
One big union
May day! mayday! Red alert! How are the protests going? I’ve heard they are planned to be daily until not needed. I need to get out there. Feeling like a wobblie.
-
Final countdown
In many ways today, the end of our collective administrative leave, mirrored and bookended the beginning back on Saturday, March 1, when we took stock of the bombshell and searched for survivors. Today it hit home for many of us in the 18F diaspora again that we have been discarded, our service to the nation…
-
The purge
I decided to finally tackle the mess piling up in my office and wasn’t totally surprised to find paperwork dating to my total knee replacement back in November. At some point as I was writing labels on new crisp manila folders I noticed my handwriting was (more) atrocious (than usual) because my hand was shaking…
-
Up on the hill
They say there is a prominent hill in Cumbria that the local Britons called Penn, which meant “hill” in their language at the time. When the first Angles or Saxons appeared, they apparently asked around to know what the name of the hill was and were told that it was called Penn. One of their…
-
More punk than you
Reading sadly of David Thomas’s death at 71 of kidney failure it appears, the legendary founder of Pere Ubu. Remembering how my hipper than thou postpunk mentor and now-famous game pundit Jeff Green told me about first seeing him before a show and wondering something like who the fat guy in the used car salesman…
-
Please stand by…
Something I did yesterday took the site down for part of today. I think it’s fixed now but I’m still having trouble connecting from my home wifi. Cache flow problem, I suppose.