I’m going to set myself a goal for this month: to actually finish something. Whether it’s a song, or a website or a story... I’m going to work on something until I consider it complete.
And then, perhaps, I’ll actually publish that piece.
If it’s a website, that wouldn’t be a big deal; I’ve done several. The one I’m currently contemplating is an overhaul of an existing freelance project. Up until I came onboard, they were using full pages for each section. Meaning that if I made a change on the menu, I had to make that change on each page, as each page had their own menu. So very much in dire need of an overhaul. The tricky part is that the owner has no interest in updating. I don’t think he knows what he’s missing, so my goal, if I go that route, will be to make a site the he likes enough to pay me for it.
I have an embarrassing amount of music clips in my project folders. I can’t even call them unfinished songs, as I think the longest of them comes in a 32 bars or something. Mostly they’re just loops.
Similarly for my writing folder. Mostly short stories, some longer pieces, some are just a sentence or two of an idea. Fleshing them into something I think worth publishing (or, at the very least, posting here) would be a worthwhile goal.
Another option that I considered after writing this (And am editing the next day after originally posting), is fixing up my bass and/or guitar. I have an old hollow body guitar, as well as a bass down in my workshop, both in pieces. The guitar (I’d have to look to see what brand) is a hand-me-down from my dad, a guitar he purchased after remarrying. His second wife played guitar, and he decided to take a stab at it. Thankfully that marriage didn’t last, nor did his desire to learn to play. I’ve had the guitar ever since. I’d taken it apart as a kid (dumbass kid) to paint it, but never got much beyond sanding the neck a bit. I even still have all the parts in a box somewhere.
The bass guitar, which I believe is an old Carvin bass, came into my possession via an old college roommate who skipped out owing rent. He left behind the bass, I guess as some sort of payment. The bass I actually did manage to dismantle and sand down to wood. I’m not sure I have the parts, but of the two, I’d rather have the bass functioning, more so than the guitar.
It might be a tough goal to meet. Much like everything else in my life right now, the desire to accomplish something is there, but the drive is practically nil. I find that during the day, I’m more energized to work on something. However, I’m kinda supposed to be doing actual work during the day. Not screwing around trying to create something I can take a bit of pride in. And by the time the evening rolls around and the evening “chores” have been done (go for a walk, figure out dinner, clean the kitchen, etc.), any energy I had for creative pursuits has faded.
Every week feels more and more like Groundhog Day.
It’s 7:53am on a Saturday morning. I’ve been up since 5:16. Woke up to the sound of the cat barfing. Which seems like an apt simile for 2020.
On March 12th, which was a Thursday, I arrived at work and started my morning routine; put my lunch in the fridge, poured some coffee out of my thermos, setup the laptop, and launched the necessary programs I typically use during the day. Opening my inbox, I saw an email from HR stating the growing concerns about COVID-19. They asked that everyone work from home until the following Friday. I remember thinking “sweet... work from home for a whole week!”
What a naive thought that was.
You know the rest of the story, unless you’ve been under a rock. Businesses, the economy, people’s livelihoods, all took a major hit. Every day I’m thankful that I have a job I can do remotely full-time. A lot of people weren’t as lucky.
Having done full-time remote work before, I had an idea of what to expect. This time, however, there was COVID-19 to also deal with. I work in my basement, and there’s one small window that lets in light. It’s the quintessential man cave. Previously, after working several days in a row and not leaving the house, the wife could tell I was getting a bit squirrelly and would take me to our local pub and meetup with friends and talk over a pint or three. This “mini-reset” always helped and the next couple of weeks would be fine.
I don’t have that outlet now thanks to the pandemic, and the worst of it, it seems like my pub has gone under and will not be opening again. That hurt more than I expected, honestly. The wife and I have been going there for at least 10 years. We’ve become friends with the crew. We’ve introduced our friends to the pub, and several of them became regulars. We were always invited to the “Regulars” Christmas party, where they shut down the bar to patrons and had insane drink specials ($2 for a pint that normally cost $5? I’ll take three please!). It was our “Cheers”.
That’s gone. Nearly everything else is closed, though some restaurants are opening patio seating now. But it’s not the same. I don’t have that outlet to turn to when my brain is slowly turning to tapioca after working too many hours, with the gray walls of my basement and whatever is on the turntable playing in the background (lately, it’s been the classical station on the radio).
So we walk the neighborhood. I go to the grocery store. Clean the house and do yard work. Stuff I used to do because it needed to be done is now stuff I do because I’m bored. Today is Saturday, and my big plan is to sweep and Swiffer our wood floors. Life in the fast lane baby.
The routine is slowly getting to me. Parts of it I very much look forward to; my morning coffee and yogurt with granola (banana on the side, please) at 10:00am. Poker Friday nights with the boys (more on that in a bit). Sitting on our recently completed deck, talking about the day’s highlights and lowlights with the wife over a beer and glass of wine. But the sameness can be maddening all the same. The problem with this forced routine is the lack of spontaneity. Aside from messaging my group of friends and asking who’s wanting to meet up at the pub after work, I’m also missing having lunch with co-workers. Realizing that what I packed just isn’t going to do it, and deciding I want to go out for lunch instead.
Getting on the motorcycle and heading west to wherever is still an option... but stopping in at a local watering hole, or visiting a touristy spot, or seeing some live music isn’t. Riding is still nice, but it’s not the same.
One bright spot is the poker games on Friday nights. I’ve been playing with this same group of guys for many years, some for more than 15. We’ve done White Elephant poker parties, have yearly trips planned that have seen us go from a cabin on Lake Anna, to camping along the Shenandoah River (both in Virginia), to a house along the shores of Lake Winnisekape in New Hampshire, and celebrated birthdays by renting casino equipment, hiring dealers, and dressing up in tuxedos. This is a great group of guys and one of the brighter sparks in the dull existence of my world as of late.
While not the same as getting around the poker table and handling cards and chips, we’ve managed to make it work, via Amazon Chime and pokernow.club. We’ve tried various poker apps with varying degrees of success, but for the past 6 weeks or so, we’ve been using Poker Now, and it’s been great. And the frequency with which we play has increased fourfold. Previously, we would try to get in a game once a month. Now it’s weekly, and occasionally twice a week.
Sometimes I think having the poker game at the end of the week is the only thing keeping me sane.
Getting out in the fresh air, and walking the neighborhood helps too. That can get a bit boring, but recently the wife purchased two different types of trash picker-uppers. One the “stab it” kind, and the other a “grab it” kind. We’ve gotten in the habit of grabbing a trash bag, our trash picker-uppers and collecting trash throughout the neighborhood. Makes the walk a bit more interesting and it make the ‘hood a bit nicer.
Now that the weather is starting to turn, I wonder how the lack of walking will affect the mood. Exercise is important; I know I don’t do near the amount I need to. When it gets cold, it gets harder to convince ourselves to bundle up and go walking.
I’m more than ready for this pandemic to be under control. Completely tired of the selfish and stupid people who want to have their parties and their weddings and not wear masks and live life normally. I get it. I want that too, but the only way we’re going to get there is if we get it under control. Congregating in large groups without masks is not the way to do it.
God dammit, I’m so sick and tired of the people who have their heads buried in the sand.
The last several posts have all referenced my struggles to get i-am.ski up and running in a manner that I was striving for; namely, to be able to update this site using just my iPad Pro in the simplest manner possible. If I had built i-am.ski with Wordpress or CraftCMS, or one of a half-dozen other available CMS frameworks, it would have been a simple matter of loading up a web browser and pointing it to the admin backend and posting from there.
But I went and got all pigheaded about this.
I like trying new things, and as I’ve stated before, wanted to simplify the site as much as possible. Just my words, and not much else. With this in mind, I chose Jekyll. Jekyll doesn’t have a handy admin backend from which I can submit my entries. Each page, whether it’s a post such as this one, or a page like my About page, is written in Markdown. Which is fairly straight forward once you get the hang of it. What I didn’t want was a bloated and confusing admin area that I had to navigate to create just a simple blog post. Don’t get me wrong, those kinds of CMSs have their place; Two of my othersites both use CraftCMS, and I’ve built a couple of other sites on Wordpress. They’re great tools when you have a beefy website to build.
Jekyll is a static site generator, meaning there’s no database that I need to configure. Just flat files, utilizing the Liquid templating language. And after weeks of trial and error, I finally have a workflow I’m comfortable with, with tools I enjoy using (that’s always a big plus), all from my iPad Pro, which is a great piece of technology. Here’s the breakdown:
Hosting:GitHub Pages. Quite frankly, this was the most difficult part of getting i-am.ski up and running. I have a hosting service that I’ve been using for more than 10 years now. But after a lot of research and trial and error (mostly error), I decided to move the i-am.ski domain off of my hosting, and put it on GitHub Pages. The beauty of this is that Jekyll has built-in support for GitHub Pages. When I make changes to the layout, or I submit a new post, GitHub Pages runs the required updates to spit out my changes. Simple to use and, amazingly, free as well.
Version Control:Working Copy. Working Copy is a git client for iOS that does everything you would expect a desktop git client to do. There was a bit of a learning curve, but, like most things, once I started using it often to update the site, it became a lot easier to check-in files to GitHub Pages’s repositories.
Editor:Textastic. I’m forever tweaking the site, and while I (think I) can update the files from Working Copy, Textastic is just a neat little text editor. Again, it’s for iOS, and supports syntax highlighting, SSH and FTP connections, and sports a host of other features.
Writing:iA Writer. Here’s the thing: I like apps and programs that are well designed, and get out of my way. I could, with minimal fuss, update not just the layout and code of i-am.ski with Textastic, but the blog posts as well. Textastic is fully capable of working with Markdown and would have been a viable solution when it came time to deciding what I wanted to use to actually write my posts. Cheaper, too.
I am, however, a sucker for a well-designed app. And I liked the look of iA writer. At $29.99, it’s certainly one of the more expensive apps I’ve purchased. I went back and forth for a couple of weeks before finally pulling the trigger and purchasing it. Quite risky for me, given there’s not even a free trial for iOS. But I’ve not had a single moment of buyer’s remorse since.
So there you have it; GitHub Pages hosts my site. I use Working Copy to checkout and check in the files I want to work on. Textastic for when I want to make changes to the layout or style sheet. And iA Writer for writing the content.
That’s the current state of i-am.ski. Next post, I hope to talk about the current state of SKI, as in, me, myself, and I. Stay tuned.
After ignoring the site (once again) for awhile, I took another stab at getting my personal domain hooked up with the Custom Domain feature that’s available in Github Pages. I think I finally, finally cracked it, and now I’m publishing posts from my iPad, to Github Pages, using Jekyll as my CMS, Working Copy for version control, and iA Writer to actually write the posts. Huzzah!
The key, missing bit in having people who visit i-am.ski was setting the A records for my domain on my hosting provider. I’d set the CNAME record as described in the Github Pages docs, but I had completely missed the step where it described how to setup the ALIAS, ANAME, or A record. I thankfully found a medium.com article that outlined the 2 key steps needed. Once I read through that, everything clicked into place.
Now I have no excuse to write more often. Everything is working smoothly.
It's finally starting to come back together. Somehow I managed to wrap my brain around the whole update-the-site-from-the-iPad concept, and I seem to be back to posting to this blog like normal. Well, almost normal. There's still a few minor issues to iron out as I see it:
Fix the templates so I'm as close to the original Ghost theme I had going (there was a ton of CSS I wasn't using, started with a different base theme this time)
Work on integrating iA Writer (strictly for aesthetic purposes.)
Categories! Need to create or import the current category template pages.
And I'm sure there's more to do that I'll think of down the road.
But holy hell, I'm finally updating my site from the iPad. That's pretty amazing in my book. This little iPad Pro 11" is a pretty amazing little machine, and being able to utilize even more of its awesomeness it just...well, awesome.
Once again, testing to see if I can figure out an ipad solution. I think I have several "testing" posts now floating around in the ether. Not sure where they disappeared to.
Oh well. Take 424235!
edit
Whoa. Holy crap, did I actually get this working? Did I find a solution that actually works?
If I smoked, I'd go have a cigarette. This has been a long process in getting this all setup. I'd rather have used iA Writer, and that's strictly because it's just a more elegant program for writing, but honestly, right now, Textastic is bombastic.
I'll worry about iA Writer later. For now, let's get comfortable with Textastic and Working Copy.
After a failed update and a couple of months of apathy, I'm finally back to having my site looking how I want. Simple and clean is the name of the game here.
The fallout took place when trying to update Ghost and basically things did not go well. I wasn't in the mood to troubleshoot (again!) after that first go round, so I figured I'd revisit later. Later became days, which turned into weeks... before I knew it, five months had gone by and I was still looking at the "I broke it again" html page I'd thrown up.
I decided to move on from Ghost, and opted instead for Jekyll, a static site generator. The big benefit here is there's no need for a database. No database means less maintenance, less overhead, fewer options for script kiddies to try to take over my site (who'd want to??). It also uses Markdown which is something I've been wanting to get more familiar with.
I'm also going to collect all my previous posts (at least those that I can find) and import them here. There are posts from Wordpress and Blogger that date back quite some years. I plan on dating them when they were originally posted, so there will be posts back from the early 2000's. I won't be posting items that were simple one liners ("It's snowing!" for example) and would've been better off as tweets.
Now on to the fun of importing entries and ripping out all the extraneous markup that some of these tools add. Joy.
I think the end goal that I have in mind for this website — aside from the obviousness of blogging — is to be able to update from wherever I am. As I’ve switched to Jekyll, this isn’t as easy a task to accomplish, as say, something built on Wordpress, or even Grav. Both of those CMS’s have Admin areas that you load up in a browser to compose your pages in. As far as I know there’s no admin plugin available for Jekyll. Not that I’ve looked that hard.
I’m intending to write most my posts on my iPad. I know there are various Markdown editors available, but currently I’m using the iOS version of Scrivener. I’ve setup a project where I’ll write my posts, that is currently synced to Dropbox. Currently I’m using iA Writer, and will hopefully get this to sync with Dropbox, or similar. This isn’t something that’ll be completely fool proof anytime soon. After all, I’m quite the fool and excel and breaking stuff. I’ve also finally uploaded the site to the domain, so I’m not just talking to myself on my local machine. Now I’m talking to myself in the great wide open digital domain.
There are still a few things to button up before I’m completely happy:
Being able to creat a post and seamlessly upload it to i-am.ski
I haven’t tested how images will look yet
Still need to setup RSS Feeds (not that I’m at all popular, but you never know and it’d be nice to have them setup in advance. Besides, once they’re in place, they’re low-maintenance)
Fix the icon in the footer
Get descriptions for each category in place
Code refactoring; I suspect there’s a lot of unused CSS that I could remove
Otherwise, I feel pretty good about the state of the site. Good enough to currently show it to the public at least. The list above can be worked on in my spare time.
I'm not having as much luck as I'd hope getting an iPad-only solution to posting entries here. I can't get my Dropbox to sync after following Tyler Hall's entry. I know it's possible...but maybe not possible with my host, which is currently a VPS on Dreamhost. I'm sure it is... I've just not been smart enough to figure it out as of yet.
Another option which I think I'll explore is utilizing Github Pages, and point the i-am.ski domain there. Assuming I can get it working (Github Pages has built-in support for Jekyll right out of the box), there will be the added benefit of becoming more comfortable with Git. I use Git daily at work, and while I'm not near as gun-shy as I used to be, if anything goes awry and I need to use some other git commands, then I tend to get a bit nervous. Particularly when I end up having merge conflicts, or similar issues.
Otherwise, isolation goes on. Given the time I've been spending in my basement where my home office is, I've been wondering how hard it'd be to add another window. Probably more money than I want to spend on this house.
In one of my previous entries, I mentioned that I have a hard time getting better than proficient at something:
one of my bigger shortcomings -- at least in my eyes ( and if you think there are other, bigger ones, please keep it to yourself, thank you very much) -- is my lack of digging deeper and really getting to know how to work with, and learn what it is I'm tinkering with. So lately I've been trying to focus on just one Digital Audio Workstation (DAW). I've been working with Bitwig, because it's still fairly new (v3.0.3 as of this writing), and somewhere down the road I'd like to be someone other people turn to to learn this software. Then I can brag about how I've been using Bitwig since v1.0. I even have the badge to prove it. A bit childish and maybe narcissistic, sure... but it's the small things.
Like any piece of creative software, whether it be Affinity's Photo or Designer, Scrivener, or Ableton Live (Bitwig's main competitor in the DAW field), they're all easy enough to do something basic up front, but the real power comes from digging deeper, and learning the ins-and-outs of the software. And of course, the more one digs, the more complicated the software can become. Bitwig is no different, so I've been trying to break it down into smaller bits, making the knowledge easier to digest. The smaller bits also help with trying to keep focus, an issue I'm constantly struggling with.
I'm not, however, taking a very practical approach. It would make sense to start at a high level, learning the basic interface to an expert level. I know the basics well enough to feel comfortable working through the project.
So yeah, that looks complicated and crazy, but I feel comfortable enough with it that I don't need to focus on it. Instead, I've chosen to start my deep dive with one of the synths that Bitwig provides. Phase-4 is a four oscillator, phase-manipulation synth. Each oscillator is identical in purpose, and differentiated by color: red, blue, yellow, and magenta (why they just didn't call it purple...). The four oscillators are fed into a global filter area, and there's also a global area to the left of the filters that house the pitch, glide, shape and mod.
Breaking it down to just the one of the oscillators, the primary control for each is the Shape knob, which affects the overall amount of phase distortion applied. Right above the Shape knob is a menu which you can click and drag to change the oscillator setting. These will be familiar settings, with Sine, Saw, Pulse Width, etc. This changes the algorithm for the phase distortion.
As an aside, there's a great video from Dave Linnenbank that talks about Phase Synthesis. In the video he's using Bitwig, but the principles apply to other DAWs and even analog synths. Watch it if you're at all confused about this particular form of synthesis. I certainly was/am/will be.
The Mod knob (heh) next to the Shape knob sets the maximum amount of phase modulation allowed from any source. And the four smaller knobs to the right of the Mod are setting the individual levels of modulation, each associated with their oscillator based on their color.
Now multiply that all by four. Four oscillators each with four ways to modulate the other oscillators and you have a tool for creating some very rich sounds. There's much more to say about the Phase-4 synth, and I've barely scratched the surface. I'm hoping to play with this more in the future, and update this post (or even create a new one) with some examples of the sort of sounds you can create using the Phase-4 Synth.
