The following is a list of a few random things that were going on between getting our first vaccine shots on March 17th and March 24th while I forced myself to take up a bit of counter space at a favorite coffee shop to eke out some blog stuff.
Has the vaccine stolen my mind? How’s my new internal 5G connectivity working out? Maybe I got a placebo? No way, my arm feels like someone punched me hard, but my brain is not participating to deliver meaningful thoughts that offer up compelling ideas. Racing against the clock due to an early lunch necessitated by an afternoon meeting demands that I find some deep productivity right now and make it good. I need to find some way to blame my wife, as she’ll proofread this before it’s published, and I’d like to at least have some good snickering as she reads this half-hearted attempt at something.
Two days later, my arm no longer hurts, but my brain is not much more functional than it was then. I’ve been sitting in this coffee shop now for nearly two hours, and just a minute ago, did I even bother opening a draft that I feel should just be discarded, but seeing these thoughts feel as distant, I may as well add them to this trash container. When I arrived earlier in the day, I got caught up in conversation with someone whose last day here was this morning. Then Trent Gill, a.k.a. Trently, a.k.a. Whimsical Raps, started streaming one of his Mumble-Code sessions on Twitch, where he’s working on Monome’s Norns instrument. I don’t have one, but there’s something undeniably interesting about listening and occasionally watching Trent work through a coding session.
All of a sudden, it’s later yet again, but I did learn of barista Kaylie’s horrific accident a few years ago when she and a friend, pushing a car at the side of a road, were hit by a drunk driver, nearly costing the girls their legs. Kaylie was in the hospital for three and a half months and in a wheelchair for a full year before she hit rehab. And of all places she could have ended up, she was at Hacienda Rehab, notorious for a patient in a coma impregnated by a staff member. Through this tumultuous time in a 17-year-old’s life, she was told she’d never walk again; well, here she is, standing in front of me, relating the story that happened just three years ago. While Kaylie is battling the PTSD that comes with such an experience and subsequent depression, you’d never know it if you encountered her some random day at this coffee shop.
One user who also happens to develop “units” for the Orthogonal Devices ER-301 Sound Computer put out a call asking if anyone was interested in writing documentation for his package of “Accents.” Seeing I wasn’t getting far with my personal writing, I thought this might be a good exercise, so I volunteered. These Accents are elements or units that are building blocks for assembling synth voices or acting as modulation sources on other units within the ER-301. I chose a unit I had no experience with that seemed particularly difficult, and so I got to try to understand amplitude modulation, better known as AM, which turns out to be a 135-year-old process, which only worked to prove to me that 135 years later, we humans, by and large, are not very smart entities. As I finished up with the bulk of that unit, Joe the developer, asked if I’d help out writing the documentation for another unit, this one named Points. Points is a take on the envelope generator, a.k.a. ADSR, that was first created in 1983 for the Yamaha DX7, the first incredibly successful digital synthesizer. I’m currently trying to understand how levels and time work as I study page 26 in the old DX7 user manual and integrate that with Joe’s addition of bringing modulatable curves to the equation.
Something that can hold up blog posts is my need for images to accompany the writing. One distraction after another has to pass before I finally get tired of seeing the accumulation of draft posts, and I get busy grabbing shots that end up being far simpler than the grandiose plans I had in the first place. By the time I’m frustrated I just grab my phone and take the photo to throw up here, kind of like this screengrab from the Orthogonal Devices forum. That’s what I was doing tonight so I could pass on nearly half a dozen drafts to Caroline before letting them see the light of day.