My first weeknotes. I have no idea what I am doing.
I’ve put down some notes about projects I worked on this week, and other things.
Phonography
The Quiet American has lots of great tips and links out. Many are stale. Thanks be to the people at the Internet Archive Wayback Machine. Please Donate.
One of the links is this guy and he’s got lots of great diy wind protection for mics.
I added several sources of field recording related forums, mailing lists, and blogs, to my regular reading list.
Wrote some processing tools (using pydub/ffmpeg) to minimize the time I spend preparing preview files, and then used them to process all the raw audio files from a couple of different projects: 3 nights in Death Valley and 2 days of stormy weather near home.
staging to also sort out, finally, what the HPF should be set to for my two pairs of mics so I don’t have to mess with that either. Ideally I get to a workflow (record → preprocess → review → label entry → still + audio = video) that minimizes my toil and is fairly automatic.
upload one part of one of the DV nights is next.
I feel like this was good progress, but I would also like to see something delivered. Making it easier to deliver feels good.
Photography
Edited a couple of photos in LR using Adrien Sanguinetti’s ideas. It’s been fun and I’ve enjoyed the results.
Made a couple of prints for a friend and mailed them off.
Made a very small number of photos while in Santa Cruz this weekend.
Considering a project on utility pole typologies. But I don’t want it turn out like my horrible catalog of bicycles in Como, which I discovered I hated as soon as I “finished”.
I think I’m at that frustrated stage of photography. I want to print more of my own photos but I seem to always find a flaw, or the workflow is tedious and takes too much time, or the number of photos to sift through is overwhelming. Similarly I’d like to make more photos but it always seems inconvenient to go somewhere to make them.
30-days progress
I have struggled quite a bit with actually getting out or making time to exercise this last week.
Notebooking and other writing
I used my notebook enough this week, but it’s had less pages filled than in past weeks. I’ve been reading fiction. And working a lot.
Nearing the end of nb 24.1, but I can probably get another week in.
Thoughts, Ideas, Questions
AIs are already here, the slow version. I’m glad there is prior art on this. But I wonder how inexact that analogy is to today, and how applicable. At best I see corporations (made of groups of people) just using today’s computer based AI as a tool. But obviously that’s a hot take.
When I think about it, it’s weird to me that we still talk about these two guys (Julius and Augustus) pretty regularly. Not like nightly news regularly. I am not a Rome obsessed person, it just seems to come up more often that other historically important people like Charlemagne or that Hapbsburgs. There are others. That lead to the next topic.
Why exactly is it that ancient Egypt is so prominent still today? This is after listening to the Fall of Ancient Civilizations podcast a couple of weeks ago. Is it the prominent Great Pyramids, made by one family over a short period of time? Is it the fact that they have a written record? Or that their tombs, the ones that weren’t robbed, are well preserved because theyr’e in a desert? Longevity? Location, along one of the great rivers? The garish, to today’s taste, style?
Based on the Stross lecture linked elsewhere here, how do I go about looking for historical parallels to patterns that are playing out today?
Culinaria
baked some bread, but this time I used mostly bread flour. The last time I made these loaves it was ap, and I complained that it was too wet/weak. It squished too much when I cooked it. This time it was too tough. Toasts real nice though.
Not as much other cooking this week as I would have liked. Probably working too hard.
Had a burger at an asian fusion place, it was like half way to being a banh mi, flavor wise. Jalepenos and cilantro, and maybe the cucumbers were pickled like the veggies on the sandwich. It was excellent and I would definitely do that again.
Reading
Mostly getting wrapped up in This Night’s Foul Work, more than Neuromancer this week. But also I notice some more problematic choices in the work than I was aware of last time I read a Vargas book. Nobody’s perfect.
The March 16 Iceland Eruption. Natural disasters are my sports. Wait that doesn’t sound right- I’m not rooting for the natural disaster!
Lantern Rouge and NBC Sports recaps of the Paris-Nice cycling race.
I need to find out where Pogocar was, but the short version.
What’s the next race again?
Try to remember who actually won it this time.
RRR. Loved it, everything about it. There should be more memes and gifs from this movie. There probably are, just not in my echo chamber. Wish we could have found the original audio that the actors were speaking and singing in, but Hindi was as close as we could get.