Back from London

What a trip to London! Two weeks! And boy what jetlag I'm experiencing. After a nine-hour flight from Heathrow to Houston on Sunday afternoon, I flew out to San Francisco from Houston this morning for work.

Perhaps I'll do some research to figure out how best to host photos online, or maybe subscribe to flickr for a year and post the very best photos of London.

The only thing that keeps me sane during some of the work I"m doing is the chillwave/synthwave mixes on this youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCwoTj-pZgZZ8DInOXSSLMmA

I simply downloaded everything via youtube-dl to listen to, when Youtube is filtered on a corporate policy. 

Learning about Music

The last few days I've been obsessed with a new discovery: everynoise.com.

From the description:

"Every Noise at Once is an ongoing attempt at an algorithmically-generated, readability-adjusted scatter-plot of the musical genre-space, based on data tracked and analyzed for 3,200 genres by Spotify as of 2019-06-24. The calibration is fuzzy, but in general down is more organic, up is more mechanical and electric; left is denser and more atmospheric, right is spikier and bouncier.
 
Click anything to hear an example of what it sounds like.
 
Click the » on a genre to see a map of its artists.
 
Be calmly aware that this may periodically expand, contract or combust."

This just has me in a tizzy because there's so much music out there and it's so easy to hear snippets of music related to my favorite genres. And you can also discovery new artists of music you already know. In my case I discovered a whole world of children's music and also rominimal, which is a type of minimal techno specific to Romania / Bucharest's club scene. Apparently this music has been popular for 10 years now and just doesn't die. The sample on the page is here. Then I also found a nice article from 2017: https://www.electronicbeats.net/beyond-rominimal-guide/

In general it's just amazing how the site makes it incredibly easy to discover new music.

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I went to the Neue Gallerie in NYC yesterday with a friend with insights to every painting, many of which were part of an exhibition of self-portraits by German artists such as Oskar Kokoschka, Max Bekkman, and more between about 1900 to 1940. Afterwards I learned that eating pizza with knife and fork is absolutely not done, anywhere, and that New Yorkers eat while walking, including on the train, like in Europe. I also learned that country music, with its clean language and simple themes has more appeal to Jews than I'd known of, especially now that there is such a thing as country pop and country rock, genres that have become more popular in the past ten years.

A visit to the Westbury Community Garden

A month ago with the coming of spring, I realized that additional planting ground would be lovely. A balcony garden is all well and good until you see that it takes care of itself on an automated watering schedule.

I tried a couple of time to ask to become a member of the Westbury Community Garden, but no bueno. So finally I visited the garden itself, hoping a friendly member might be there already. And so it was! Unfortunately membership is closed, but maybe there could be an opening later in the summer? I volunteered just to rake and weed, gratis, if only to be among a plethora of vegetables, and maybe this could still pan out.

An artichoke plant! Never seen such a thing before, let alone in Houston

Masses of tall swiss chard

A sea of dill

Young squashes growing, with clover as a ground cover (probably nitrogen-fixing).

Russian word for golddigger

There is none. Russians just don't have such a word. And "one who digs for gold" isn't it.

I was introduced to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Most_Popular_Girls_in_School, and am working through the episodes. Too funny, and witty.

In the space of one day I learned that I'll be in Pittsburgh next week. Made plans, booked travel. And after a call, learned that due to delays (again), Pittsburgh is called off. Probably. But the only people who could give me confirmation are either flying on places or on PTO. Such is the life of consulting. I'm not averse to leading meetings or working through details alone, I just don't like not being included on all planning meetings. Context is important, and knowing what the client has already told us, or the manager, is valuable. How can we project a consistent image if I repeat questions they've already answered? Also I'm freaking out because there's a whole piece of this seven-week project no one has told me any information about. And it's the area I'm least familiar with....

On a different note, the last two weeks have seen me learning about lights again. The last time this occurred I was a freshman in college, hunting for oversized fluorescent lightbulbs with very blue colors most conducive to seedling growth. Now, after six years of a too-dim apartment, I've been illuminating the main room with new lamps, from Ikea and Target. Bought some extremely expensive LED bulbs, but boy do they put out a lot of light. It's amazing how much better everything looks with a lot of light - the apartment looks bigger too. Now there are two reading corners. All that's left is to get a different Ikea Poang chair and we'll be good to go.

Lights without chair. A reading light with an extra large CFL, highest for the fitting, and an illumination lap at highest setting, bright enough to illuminate the whole room. The picture doesn't do it justice.

Battery problems on Thinkpad laptop

The thinkpad t460p I bought a while back has suffered from persistent battery issues. Namely, the latch that fits the battery wiggles from side to side. And once it's loose, it can't go back. Instead of buying a whole new laptop, I've temporarily taped the battery in place so the laptop doesn't die everytime it's moved. But it's not a perfect solution, so at some point I'll just have to go for a new laptop (but for parts off Ebay), which is much cheaper.

Unfortunately fewer posts

Something about the first few months of the year, along with a re-assessment of desires or priorities, made for a drop off in posting. Probably also bad practice. I should practice writing daily.

Currently I'm working on a mini project to see how easily wireless handshakes can be captured at high speed for offline-cracking. There's a lot of little hitches involved, not least the long tasklist of work-related items and demands for different people that interfere.

The other project of course is reading, finding some time to get out of the house and go read in a cafe somewhere. Also buying some new dress pants, going to IKEA for new apartment lighting, and getting a haircut. All in advance of a trip to Pittsburgh next week (if it doesn't get pushed off again).

Currently I'm finding that my music tastes are slowly switching away from ambient towards synthwave/chillwave.

Like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4iZTNUnrh0k

Yellow banana peppers finally being produced on this one of two plants. Not the hybrid variety, just the regular one. Two different potting soils to try out. At the right you can catch a glimpse of the bare surface of another pot that housed some dill, first successful attempt, until this morning, when I threw it out due to an intense invasion of white mildew of some sort. Planted some belated garlic instead.