frozen octopus

There are two jazz albums left on my list of albums¹. I am trying to get through this year. This means I need to make a decision in two days because my thing is to play a jazz album first thing in the morning while free writing and drinking coffee.

Scenario one is to find new albums and add them to the list. Pluses are I keep finding new music and the morning ritual keeps going as usual. Minus is the number of albums on the list increases, slowing down getting to the end of it.

Scenario two is to loop back on the albums I have listened to and give them another spin. Since I have a massive list of albums I can go back to, I could re-listen to some. Pluses are I am not adding to the list, which would keep me on track to get to the end of it. I could also do things like flagging (or liking or starring) the great albums so I can find them in the future. Minuses are I don't discover new music.

Scenario three is to start the day with other genres for a while. Pluses are I start the day with a different vibe and I keep on ploughing through the list. It pushes me to get through classical and soundtrack albums. Minus is lyrics. I chose jazz albums first thing in the morning because there are no words, so they don't enter my free writing.

If I had to choose between these three scenarios, I am leaning towards number two. Number three is in close second right now. What would you do?

1: There are 263 albums left on the list as of 2026-05-19 7:27 a.m.

Lately I've been noticing I have a lot more energy and creativity lately. It's all due to the robot assistant I am building in the AI workshop I have been attending. What it is revealing about myself to me is how much time I was spending maintaining my to-do list and calendar.

For example, I rely heavily on tags in the to-do app. I also need each task to start with a verb. The robot is going through the app and tagging things using my tags I set up. It also rewrites tasks to start with a verb if it doesn't already. It is quite awesome actually. Minutes saved every day.

There is more of course, but you get the point. I had no idea how much time I was "working" in there. I can feel the energy difference as I get more and more of my shortcuts and process into skills it can run.

Another thing I love lately with the robot is that a lot of someday/maybe tasks I had are getting done. As those are getting checked off one by one, a lot of mental weight, I didn't know I had, is getting lifted. Daily some "ugh" work is getting done. It feels incredible.

Someday I'll get around to renaming 20 years of band flyer images that went from "if I do three a day, I'll get done by autumn" to done in an hour.

A third thing I love is how good it is surfacing redundancy and file tidying. It scans folders and folders of .txt files and lets me know if there is any duplicate info, asks me what to do with it, and then gets it all sorted. Not hard for me to do, but that is perfect work for a robot assistant.

When I go reference something in my notes now, there is the info formatted neatly in markdown language. I go in, get info, and get back to the task. No sidetracks because I have to tidy the file first. Again, more energy and less hand strain.

I am having fun, and things are getting done. I have more time and mental energy to do things like make music. What is different than before? Why couldn't I make music before the class? I could, but while I was drumming, it would remind me I have 20 years of flyers to rename. Now I don't.

A few days into focusing on Six Stroke Rolls (RLLRRL). It's going pretty well actually. I haven't done it at a show yet but it'll get there.

One thing I've noticed is that if I play the chunks from the back of the pattern and work to the beginning, it is a little easier than from the beginning. Who knows why? It could just be me.

• RL
• RRL
• LRRL
• LLRRL
• RLLRRL

Doing a little reorganization for my daily drum task, which was practicing a randomly generated drum pattern for five minutes. I have been noticing that I am slightly practicing them a little less lately, which means it is time to put new tires on the drum practice system.

So I am going to do a little self-A/B test to see if it affects my playing or not. I am switching to one pattern a month for a while. I am very curious to see if unconsciously practicing this pattern only gets it so deep into muscle memory that it comes out while playing a show. Have it be the default pattern to tap when pushing a shopping cart, riding the train, waiting for files to upload.

The Pattern

• RLLRRL

For May, I am going to work on a Six Stroke Roll. It is actually a legendary pattern for doing drum fills. They sound amazing when you loop a couple of them. They sound even better when you move them around the drum kit.

• RLLRRL RLLRRL

Splitting this one in half, looping one of the halves, and then playing the fill pattern is a cool option too. It gets your hands a little time to get ready to do the fill pattern.

Expanding on the Pattern

• RLL RLL RLLRRL
• RRL RRL RLLRRL
• RRL RLL RLLRRL

I rely on an Apple Shortcut to get the current album I am listening to into a .csv that I use to import into this blog. It's been working like a charm so I thought I'd share it here for anyone that needs this. You'll have a log of all the stuff you are listening to in a file you can open up in Numbers or whatever.

Steps

First, add a "Run AppleScript" action and add this AppleScript to it.

on run {input, parameters}

set formattedDate to do shell script "date '+%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S'"       

tell application "Music"

set trackArtist to artist of current track

set trackAlbum to album of current track

return formattedDate & "|" & trackArtist & " |" & trackAlbum

end tell

return input end run

Add an "Append to Text File" action that gets the results of the AppleScript. It up to you to figure out where the file lives.