frozen octopus

A week or so into having a MacBook Neo A18 8GB 13” to go along with my MacBook Pro M3 36GB 14”. So far, bouncing between the two feels really seamless. I like having the smaller size for moving around our place to do random things in different places.

The only times, so far, I can notice a difference between the two is booting it up when it is powered off. It takes a lot longer logging in and connecting to the Wi-Fi.

I thought not having the keyboard lit up would bug me more. I got the indigo one so the keyboard is a little dark at night. Daytime it is totally visible.

I’d recommend it for sure to friends/family. Neo is going to rule for traveling with. We were a little anxious traveling with the fancy Pro. This little laptop feels made to toss in a backpack and go. Bonus points for not having a massive power brick.

Spent some time at the rehearsal space last night getting warmed up for a show tonight. Finally got around to practicing a thing I stumbled across online. You play steady 16th notes on the hi-hat with the snare on two and four. With your kick you cycle through placing a kick in each possible slot. It was interesting seeing which patterns were problematic. For me “-ooo” was really rough on the kick drum.

I am really starting to respect exercises where you need to cycle a kick or snare through all the possible notes in a measure. When I was studying jazz comping, there is a similar exercise. I go back to it almost every day when I am practicing on my legs or desk.

These kinds of exercises are wonderful because they expose the small wrinkles and help you iron them out in your playing. Pretty much instant results in your normal playing when you work on these cycles.

Recommend

Play each one slowly for a while and relax. Let the muscles get used to doing each one. 

Positions

Key: o = hit drum, - = rest

o---
-o--
--o-
---o
oo--
-oo-
--oo
o--o
o-o-
-o-o
ooo-
-ooo
oooo

Some call it runway and 10,000 feet. Some call it earth and stars. Some call it trees and forest. It goes by many names, but they are all ways of symbolizing perspective.

Coming up with the theme is the fun part. Actually taking the time to do the perspective work is the hard part. I use the GTD system, which has around five horizons of focus that I am supposed to review.

I have them dutifully set up in my tasks app, which I dutifully skip every time they come up. Then I feel guilty about not taking stock and planning ahead. I think the hurdle for me is actually asking myself the questions. I love reviewing, thinking, and planning. But being the interviewer and also the interviewee at the same time is too much for my brain.

I've been messing around with Claude Cowork lately. So I decided to build a skill for maintaining my horizons of focus (perspective). I'm have it scheduled out to ask me the questions I need to answer to figure out my horizons of focus. It then records my answers to a simple text file that is the source of truth for my perspective.

It has instructions to always read that text file before helping me plan my day. The results so far are when I get my daily briefing, it is adding notes to the tasks I need to do with things like "this task aligns well with something you mentioned in Horizon 3: Goals and objectives".

Being reminded of the horizons like that is giving me a little boost to get that one done or going. This is a work in progress, but it is fun slowly building this robo-friend.

A while back, I made a shortcut using Apple Script that opens up all the folders in Finder where stuff collects. When I run it, an obnoxious amount of folders pop up. I am forced to close them all one by one, which is really annoying. But while I am in each folder, tasks and ideas are getting into my flow a lot more. My folder structure is getting a lot flatter. A lot of images are getting converted into text and put into where they should actually be.

Weekly might be a lot more sane for a folder cleaning task like this. I do think daily is making doing this a little less anxiety-producing though. Making decisions on a couple of files a day is a lot less mental stress than a week’s worth of stuff.

As a bonus, processing image files is breaking me of the habit of taking a screenshot to remember something. It is quick to take one, but it is just kicking things down the line for future me.

Always be learning, right? The current thing I am getting my head around is how to use Claude Cowork as a personal assistant. I signed up for a workshop and I am slowly and intentionally getting things happening.

My end goal with the workshop is to have the robot assistant help me with all the band business stuff. Something like I add shows to a show spreadsheet and merch stock levels to a merch spreadsheet. The robot assistant would check them for changes or levels and then create tasks for me.

Getting merch, shows, and podcast minutiae more automated would help me so much. We'll see how it goes.