So you might have noticed that I haven’t posted the 3rd part of the Toljari Cycle yet. It turns out that I am awful at estimating appropriate settings for laser cutters, and as such have tried cutting 2 boards in as many days without success (with restricted access to the cutter at NYC Resistor). So everything else is good to go, just that we’re going to have to wait until Monday to see how this all pans out. Stay tuned.
Since I decided to start off the Cycle just a week and a half ago, I didn’t really have time to throw together something fancy music-wise, so I had to make do with what I was already doing, which was re-learning the Kabalevsky.
Why Kabalevsky? Well, it’s usually regarded as a student concerto, which is fine by me: you don’t go from zero to Ysaye in a week and a half, especially when you’ve never played Ysaye before. Plus, it’s a happy little song, and emotionally straightforward.
However, being easier to play did not mean I could hit it out of the park. Apparently, I have much to learn when it comes to recording audio, because either I cannot phrase to save my life, or my room and mic conspire to deaden my sound and I just haven’t noticed because I fail at having recording space.
Oh, right, you might be interested in getting the actual recording. Maybe.
Now, the content of the recording is a little wonky. Like I said before, I can’t phrase pschoacoustically effectively to save my life (no sense in trying to blame inanimate objects), my diction isn’t very clear when the doublestops come into the picture, I had a pretty inconsistent speed, the accompaniment was arranged and recorded in half an hour, and I just plain make mistakes.
It’s not okay, but I shipped.
Despite the date on the post, the Toljari Cycle started last week, not this weekend, but I didn’t know it at the time.
Storytime:
I thought I had enough time to get my ducks in order when I decided that to hell with it, I would kick off this regular release schedule one and a half weeks ago. However, it turns out that what I was originally planning to do for my first coding release was pretty difficult, but I only realized this after I pushed the deadline to halfway into the week after when the release was due. So much for starting off strong. So now I’m just taking something else I’ve done codewise and plopping it in the release box, and hoping no one notices.
So, what’s in the release? Just two of my python libraries, base92 and encryptedfile, that I’ve finally packaged for pypi, so that now one can run pip install base92 or pip install encryptedfile and run code I’ve written. Squee. Going through this process did open my eyes to the fact that pip just plain does nothing to validate packages, though, which is a problem. Why? Well, when the “moar encryption” side of my mind meets the python-lovin’ side, there might be some energy release. Hopefully enough energy to fix pip package signing, or even more hopefully enough energy to get someone else to do it.
But yeah, getting a toehold in the python cheeseshop! It’ll have to be good enough for the next 3 weeks, so you take this release and you like it!
In the previous installment, we saw our brave protagonist pre-commit to a regular release cycle, but then he dropped off the face of the Earth to wrestle with… well, something. I’m sure there was a good reason he stopped blogging after starting again after the longest break he had taken since the beginning of his blogging career (there wasn’t).
But lo! Here our tragic anti-hero comes stumbling from a cave, covered in akrasia and regret! No matter his filthy state: he has a leaf to turn, and no wind is going to flick around that large a leaf (even Hurricane Sandy didn’t do anything to it), so he might as well start building up his spindly coding arms so he can do non-epiphenomenal tasks again.
His first task is announcing a public, regular release schedule, so he can hold himself to it and have people ridicule him when he fails miserably. But surprise! He has already set one out, but in private (which kind of defeats the purpose), where each week will bring a deadline for a different sort of project, rotating among programming, musical, engineering, and visually artistic projects. In fact, he embarked on this schedule last week, but he doesn’t know this. Shall we find out what has been released, and what is being released, and what shall be released? Stay tuned for not one, but two posts in quick succession…
PS. What the hell is this “Toljari” business? Well, it’s a corruption of the lojban Toljgari, and if you’ve been following my github, you’ll notice that I’ve been naming an awful lot of projects after lojban lujvo. Nothing to be alarmed about yet, do make sure I’m not terminally geeking out when I start typing out my blog posts in Lojban though. And the cycle part is partially inspired from Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle, which is a pretty cool name, and why shouldn’t I have something epic in my life?
First time in a long time I played violin in front of people, even if it was just for under a minute. Which means that I’m finally on the road to fulfilling a promise (made to an inanimate object, but really). We’ll see where I can take this: for now, I’ll publically pre-commit to releasing *something* violin created, every Saturday. Except there’s also the fact I want to release code on a regular basis, and there’s that hardware portion of my life that’s been stagnating…
So maybe that plan will mutate, and soon. But weekly releases! With accompanying blog posts, hot off the cuff! I suppose I’m making resolutions early?
And, I’ll cover what’s been going on the last… 6 months. But later.