A tomato seed from our veranda compost bucket is going crazy. We now, unintentionally, have a two foot tall, healthy tomato plant growing in our apartment.

If you touch it, your hands smell like tomato. It's starting to flower so next is hopefully a tomato.

The power of compost.

I was thinking about what is the one sentence I would use to summarize January 2024 while watching bands at a show last night. This drum pattern kept coming up in my mind:

R L Both Both

This simple drum pattern blew my mind in January. It's a runway to get off the ground and reach other drum patterns.

Once a week I am visiting designmanifestos.org and reading a design manifesto. They are very inspiring so it's hard to resist temptation to go through a lot of them each visit.

All things on Fake is the New Real are amazing. Hard to choose just one to recommend. It's full of wonderful maps, calendars, and twitter bots.

I am a big fan of the Modern CSS blog. Whenever there is a new post, I schedule some time and dig in. It's easy for me to get into a comfortable groove/rut with CSS and Stephanie Eckles's blog gets me out of it every time. It's a great place to level-up your CSS skills.

I saw in a blog post somewhere about a search engine Kagi Search where you pay $10 a month and it is completely ad free. They offer a free trial version so I signed up to check it out.

I used "1000s of cats" as a test search in Kagi Search, Duck Duck Go, and Google to compare the results. It was very jarring...very jarring.

With Kagi Search, I got a ton of links I've never seen before or haven't seen in a long time. Felt like I was  doing a search on a library computer.

With Duck Duck Go, I got a lot more links I haven't seen before or in a while. Felt like Google of old.

With Google...yeesh. Felt like I was in a shopping mall after searching with the other two. Not a good experience when you compare it to the other two at the same time. It's just missing the random smell of pretzels, cologne/perfume, and some generic dance music.

A client who has multiple locations needed an Appointments contact form where people can select a location. The form submission then needed to go to that location.

We had luck getting it to happen with our Drupal sites. Not sure if this is the best way but it worked for us.

We have a Place content type with an email field with a unique email address for each Place. We set up a View with an entity reference with all the Places. In that entity reference, the two fields are Title and Email (which is hidden).

In the Appointments contact form, you need to set up a new contact email (/structure/contact/manage/appointments/emails). There is a selector for Recipient Type which should be set to "The value of a specific field in an entity reference". There will then be a selector for Recipient Reference which you set to "Place: Email (field_email)" or whatever you named your Email field.

Your forms should now send to the correct location.

I just turned off auto-capitalization on my Macbook. It is wonderful.

I got a count working on the tags for the genres and labels happening this morning. As I add an album I listen to the genres and labels automatically sort themselves.

It isn't a contest to see which genre or label is winning. For me it's the opposite actually. When I see a genre or label in "last place", it makes me want to bump it up in the list. Kind of like music guide rails.

[example at bottom of the page]

Two weeks into my New Year's resolution to get my head around Jazz bop drumming. The hi-hat on the two and four is happening. I had to raise it up about 3-4 cm higher than usual to make it sound good.

A thing I noticed today is it is a lot easier practicing Jazz drumming alone than Punk, Shoegaze, or Psych drumming. It might be because it is new for me. It might be the swing thing is easier to play for a longer time.

Triplets are slowly starting to happen. I am rushing them but that is correctable for sure. When I do get a loop going, it's really satisfying. I've also been filling in a calendar I got at the ¥100 store with what I practiced. If I miss a day, it's no problem but having to write in "got nothing done" on a day is a kick to get something done tomorrow for sure.

I am on to Chapter 2 of The Art of Bop Drumming and I noticed there are micro patterns occurring in the comping exercizes. When I get hung up on a part of a beat in the book, I go to these micro comping examples to isolate the issue. After looping a micro pattern for a while, the comping exercise is a lot less daunting for me.

Downloads:

I got myself a book called The Art of Bop Drumming because I have heard it referenced by at least three drummers on Youtube in the last year.

Brought it to the rehearsal studio and after about an hour, I had a beat going that sounded like an amateur jazz drummer.

I was hanging on for dear life but got it to new born deer trying to walk level. Very fun!

Also fun was taking the jazz pattern and flattening it to punk. Stoked to next 1000s of cats rehearsal.

I was searching around to see if someone has already come up with a text file based way to do music notation before I start to mess around with a way to do it in Text Expander or Shortcuts.

While I was looking around I found Lilypond. It's an open source text based way to write sheet music. It's a little bit more than I need but I got it setup on my laptop for the future. It's going to be very cool if I need to make some drum tabs in the future.

It's very nerdy but very powerful. After ten minutes of playing around with it, I decided to put it away because I need to get drums practiced.

TL;DR: Discovered music at a Denny's and found sushi I need to try.

1. I saw someone with a Chris & Cosey shirt on at the local Denny’s yesterday. The name sounded familiar so I made a note. Turns out they are members of Throbbing Gristle after they split up. Stoked to add it to the MusicBox app which has become a staple app in the last month.
2. We were watching 孤独のグルメ (Kodoku no Gourmet or Solitary Gourmet) and the protagonist of the show ordered some sushi the shop ran out of. As an apology gift, the chef gave him a special roll with saba and gari (pickled ginger). Now I am obsessed with trying it.

A magnitude 7 earthquake off the coast of Ishikawa today at around 16:15. Our place was moving and we're all the way in Tokyo so you know it was a big one. Tsunamis around 1 meter have been hitting the west coast still and it's been three hours after the first quake. The aftershocks seem to be slowing down but there were aftershocks around every 10-15 minutes for a while. Things look pretty beat up there on the TV news. On a day where people are normally partying with their families, everyone had to evacuate to higher ground to wait things out.

Hope everyone is hanging in there on the west coast of Japan.

避難(ひなん)する = to take refuge

Listening to an album is different than having an album on. I can have albums playing 24 hours a day but my maximum for fully listening to an album is about three lately. Fully taking in each song and thinking about what's happening.

The fourth album starts to drift into background music.

The amount of camera gear laying around here reached critical mass. As a self-gift for the holidays, I gave myself the gift of camera gear organization.

Went to the massive electronics store in Akihabara called Yodobashi Camera before rehearsal and did some browsing. It’s kinda insane how many choices there were just for bags.

Since I already have a backpack I love, I went for a thing called a camera box. It’s a Lowepro GearUp Pro Camera Box XL II which is a soft case with velcro dividers that I can throw into my bag for times when I need to film.

Wasn’t too spendy, has two different ways of opening it (flat or standing) and the grey outside/fluorescent orange inside look rad. Everything fits in it perfect with the adjustable divider walls. Very cool to finally have all the stuff in one spot instead of scattered around the place.

I had to go to the nearby electronics store to help my mother-in-law pick out a radio. While I was there I went to the Apple section to kill time. I was typing nonsense on one of the new MacBooks and it made me realize how squishy the keyboard is on my current M1 laptop.

When I went home and typed some stuff, it was like typing on a sponge keyboard.

They all wear out in their own special way. Considering how many hours I put in on each one, it's kind of amazing they last as long as they do.

Our robot Eufy vacuum hates the sun. When it hits a sunny spot on the floor, it thinks it is a drop off and reverses course.

I've spoken with Eufy support and they know off this quirk. The solution seems to be "vacuum when it isn't sunny" which works for me. Yoof was under $100 and does more than its share of the dust removal.

We put googly eyes on it to anthropomorphize it like any self-respecting robot owner does. If it hates the sun then I am wondering if some vampire teeth are in order.

I probably should learn the name of the procedure I had before I had it done. Looks like what I was calling "giant weird red bump on my back" is actually called a cherry angioma.

So zonked from the pain medication and other fun pills but stoked I got it done in time for our show on the 28th.