VexVox

rm -r

In UNIX command prompt-speak, it simply means "remove recursively". More verbosely, it means "nuke everything on this directory and every directory under it."

The rm command only removes files, not directories. To remove directories, you can use the rmdir command. But I was raised on graphical user interfaces (Windows Explorer, anyone?), and I'm conditioned to expect widespread damage from a click of a delete button. It gets tiresome typing rm and rmdir separately, especially with lots of files and directories.

rm -r is the lazy way out — it removes files and directories. It's fast, convenient, and like any other delete function, deadly if you're not careful.

My near-death experience happened this afternoon when I typed rm -r [path redacted] to remove files I mistakenly checked out of source control. The instant I pressed Enter, I realized I was at the wrong directory level, and I was in fact deleting a folder containing source for five of my sites — and the Smarty templates for all of my sites — from my production server. That is, from my publicly accessible sites!

I could have just checked it all out of source control again, but some portions of the sites weren't put under source control for very specific reasons. Thankfully, I mirror everything in a test environment so that I can iron out bugs before moving changes to the production environment. So I just copied the test files over to production and was up and running again.

Aside from a few oddities, which were cured by clearing out the Smarty cache, I was maybe borked for about 20 minutes.

Nonetheless, rm -r is one of tho most dangerous keystrokes someone in my field can type. As vigilant as I try to be, sometimes quick fingers prevail.

In other news, I have managed to move the Eponymous 4 official site — and it's "audition" sister site — over to CodeIgniter. They don't look or act any different, which is the point. The sites should act and feel like nothing has changed, even though a lot have. That's how I measure a successful launch.

Tonight, I broke a policy of mine I pretty much instated in the last three or so years — never to work on web development at home.

There was a time in my life when I would go to work and code, then go home and code. It was the early part of the decade, when I had just been trained on the intricacies of web development, and I wanted to automate everything. I reinvented wheels all over the place, justifying the effort as "learning experiences" and "coding to exact needs".

And I built some pretty big sites in the day.

It's kind of weird to think my first scripts were written in 1999 — nearly 10 years ago. Have I been at this for that long?

The policy not to work on web development at home arose after I started paying more attention to home recording. Sure, I could have used my free time to learn Ruby or Python or to keep up with frameworks and whatever else gets tongues wagging on dzone. But web development has always been that job that I could do that doesn't annoy me. I can do it, and I can do it well. I can even do it for years to come. But I will never love it.

And if all the blog articles about what makes good developers are any indication, then I'm on my way to becoming a bad developer. It's not like I hide my predisposition. I don't try out every new language. I don't subscribe to any development blog feeds (but you should see the number of music sites I follow.) I code at work — sometimes — and I always leave it there. It never comes home with me.

I made a choice to learn more about audio engineering than software engineering, and I unleashed a torrent of creativity that built up because I let code get in the way. It's a choice that may not serve me well in the long run as a programmer. It wasn't a few days ago that I started working with jQuery, even though I had seen it mentioned time and again, day in and day out on dzone. And while I learned about MVC years ago, I didn't really start seriously working with it till now.

The oddest part of tonight's infraction was the fact I didn't even use my local files — I logged into the office through VPN!

I must admit working with CodeIgniter has gotten me engaged again, and perhaps that excitement tickled the part of my brain that really does like code. At the same time, I don't want it to get in the way of music again. I let a lot of things get in the way in the last decade or so.

Tonight, I moved all the vocal tracks I've recorded for Imprint, the album on which I'm working, to release candidate 1. For me, that means I've recorded versions of the songs that don't totally make me wretch. There is one track that might slip back into beta, but I'll need a few days of listening to the entire album to see if that's the case.

Just now, I marked the "mixing" column of the Imprint tracks on my spreadsheet to alpha. There seems to be a subtle difference between mixing and arranging, but everything I've read makes me think they're partially the same process. During the mixing phase, raw recorded tracks get woven together to create the final song. My method of writing, however, combines the composing and arranging at the same time, and when I record tracks, the arranging and mixing happen simultaneously as well.

In this case, mixing is pretty much pre-mastering — applying effects processing, achieving tonal balance, balancing levels. I usually do some preliminary mixing and mastering every time I create a new vocal take, just so I can hear something close to final product as possible.

I have to say, though, it's nice to be close to an actual mixing phase, where I can fine tune everything. I'm encouraged by what I'm hearing — it's a far cry from the first few recordings I did in 2005, when I didn't know one whit about decibels, frequencies, equalization, compression, limiting. And while I still don't think I'm much of a singer, I'm at least a half-step within tune, instead of singing in an entirely different key.

(Let me also say the new headphones I bought back in September really make a difference. That, and reading the manual of my mixer to figure out how to work the auxiliary buses.)

But the real clincher in this whole endeavor is that when I finish, the resulting work is still just a demo recording. In reality, I picture this album performed by live musicians with a singer who isn't me. That's when I would consider this album actually created. For now, I'm pouring in a lot of time and effort to make a very detailed blueprint.

And it's actually coming together.

A long time ago, I learned the difference between a good smoker and a bad smoker. The good smoker can smoke through packs of cigarettes a day. The bad smoker can make that pack last over time. I am a very, very bad smoker.

A few months ago, I went to a doctor's appointment and had to fill out a health history form. I answered the question about smoking in the affirmative, but I left the number of packs I smoke blank. Instead, I drew an arrow to the question about drinking, to which I had answered, "Socially".

Back in 2006, I had surgery to have my gall bladder removed. For that same questionnaire, I crossed out the word "day" from the line asking "packs a day" and replaced it with the word "month". My answer? "1".

I pretty much smoke only at work and only once in the day. That means I can literally make a pack last a month, at the end of which it's pretty awfully stale. The only time I may ramp up my consumption is during the SXSW music festival, which happens only once a year. Times of tremendous stress might make increase to two a day, and I may sneak in extras when I'm hanging around people willing to supply. And I befriend a lot of smokers.

But when it comes to being a bad smoker, I'm not sure you can find anyone who is worse. A former co-worker absolutely marveled at my restraint.

The tobacco industry didn't get its hooks into me till I was 20, and those hooks never went very deep. I also never say I'm going to quit. I will always say I'm a smoker, even during times when I stop. This past March, I came down with a cold and fever, and throughout most of the spring and summer, I didn't light up once. I picked up again around July or so.

I also try not to buy my own pack of cigarettes. I will bum off my friends who are more than willing to supply, but they also have enough conscience not to encourage me to ramp up. In fact, one of them gets disappointed when I do break down and buy a pack. (Although I bet she feels a bit of relief knowing I won't be raiding her stash.)

I mention all of this because yesterday, all my suppliers were out of cigarettes. I had been bumming pretty much everyday for the past four or five months, and it was time I pay back and ensure a steady supply for the future.

So I bought a carton of my friend's brand of choice.

And holy crap is that shit expensive!

Since I've never let my habit get to the point where I would be buying cartons, I had no idea how much they would cost, and holy fuck! I have even more incentive not to escalate. (Yeah, that should be "incentive to quit", but I'm being realistic here.)

My friend was impressed and aghast that I would sink that much money into paying back my supply, and we sort of concluded that it would be my ghetto Christmas gift of the year. You know what I could have bought for the price of that carton? About two Japanese import CDs. Maybe 2 1/2 weeks worth of gas at current prices. (1 week and 3 days at prices during the summer.) One of the Season 2 DVD sets of Battlestar Galactica.

Even as I was buying the carton, the pinch I felt in my wallet was acute. But I dropped the cash anyway because really, I have been a leech. Five months is pretty much five packs that I've taken from my friend, and half of that can be made in the carton.

I'll probably smoke the other half of that carton in the next five months.

Back in late September — about a year after I started working out regularly — I hit a plateau. The lowest I've reached is about 167 pounds, and I've bounced back to an average of 170 ever since. Two pieces of equipment in the workout room of my apartment complex had broken down, and the manufacturer was taking its sweet old time repairing them. (Only in the last few weeks was the equipment working again.)

These confluence of events spurred me to do something different with my diet and exercise regimen. The Abs Diet was recommended in a few threads on Ask Metafilter, where I learned about The Hacker's Diet. I used the method of measurement in The Hacker's Diet to gauge my progress, and I figured if the Hive Mind were right about that, it would be right about this.

After reading through the book — and cringing at the writing — I went ahead and tried it out. I bought some dumbbells to substitute for the broken gym equipment, and I rearranged my diet to accommodate the "power foods" recommended by the author. I stopped watching calories, as instructed.

But I had some suspicions. Because I was at a plateau, I didn't think ignoring calorie counts would really help. That would be the point where calorie counting because more important.

A lot of the testimonies in the book came from people who lost 10-15 pounds in the six weeks promised by the book's subtitle. Thing is, I got those same results without using The Abs Diet. Those first few pounds are water, and five of them went missing in my first week of exerce. I lost 10 pounds from the very end of August to the very end of September. By October, I was down 17 pounds. During a plateau, I would not register such a change. If I did lose weight, I predicted it would be very, very nominal.

The Abs Diet recommended snacking between meals, which I did at the start of my diet because the smaller portions at lunch and breakfast left me wanting more. But once my body started adjusting to the new portions, snacks actually got in the way. Now I don't snack, but I still eat those same small portions. If I try to eat the way I did before, I'd feel sick fairly quickly. I didn't want the snacking to get me into the habit of expecting bigger portions.

But I decided to follow The Abs Diet as closely as I was comfortable, regardless of my instincts. Over the course of six weeks, I gained five pounds.

It wasn't until the fourth week — when it was clearly obvious The Abs Diet was not doing what it promised — that I got a second scale with a body fat monitor. In the last two weeks of The Abs Diet, I consoled myself with the steady daily reading of my body fat — an average of 22 percent, which is considered an acceptable body fat percentage. The ideal for me is closer to 17 percent.

I even read on the BBS of the book's official site that The Abs Diet would make some people gain weight at first, but they would then lose it. Right.

Once the six weeks were finished, I ditched a few of the diet's guidelines. I stopped eating nuts when I saw the calories from fat consisted more than 30 percent of the recommended daily allowance. I stopped snacking because it felt better not to snack. I went back to watching my portions.

A few things I kept — I've started eating eggs on the weekends, if only to stop me from driving across town to get a bagel. I eat quite a bit of spinach and broccoli. And I still do the exercises demonstrated in the book.

I think The Abs Diet made me gain some muscle, but it wasn't enough to burn the remaining fat lurking around my gut. My weight seems to be trending more toward 169 than 172 now that I've adapted a few of the diet's ideas.

I still have 15 more pounds to go, but I'm not quite in a rush to get there. I haven't been 170 pounds in about eight or nine years, and I'm relishing it. It's also the holidays, so there's little point trying to be good in a season that encourages gluttony. When the new year comes, maybe then I'll start thinking drastically.

My mom's birthday is Dec. 10 (yesterday, relative to the timestamp of this entry), and I intended to call her to wish her happy birthday. I live in the Central time zone, and she lives in the Hawai`i time zone, which means the earliest I can call without waking anyone up is around noon. But she beat me to the punch and called me up at work.

I thought that was odd. She's not the type to ring someone up and ask them why they forgot her birthday. In fact, when I greeted her happy birthday, she had forgotten. She cares for my dad day-in and day-out, and it would be an understatement to say he's not in great health. That she would forget her own birthday didn't really surprise me.

But the purpose of her call was even weirder — she wanted to know how I was doing. I had talked to her over the weekend, so I immediately suspected she must have had a dream alarming enough to spur her to call. Sure enough, that was the reason. She dreamed I had gone out somewhere, and when I didn't come back after a long while, she went looking for me. My grandmother, who died in 1992, went with her.

I'm not sure what she found more disturbing — the fact I went missing, or that my grandmother was in her dream. So I stated the obvious.

"Well, the anniversary was this past Sunday," I said, referring to the day she died. Dec. 7 was the day Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. It's also the day the New York Philharmonic first debuted. And it was the day my grandmother died.

"Oh," my mom replied, realizing she had forgotten that date as well.

It seems nobody in the family remembered. Or if they did, they forgot to call my mom up. Usually, she and my uncles and aunts would get together for a vigil on the anniversary, and they would call each other up to make sure it happens.

It didn't this year.

Perhaps everyone is so busy that the day slipped them by? Or maybe 16 years is just enough time to make that date seem distant? Or perhaps my dad takes far too much of my mom's time and energy?

Maybe it's all of that.

I'm just kind of surprised by how the subconscious works. My mom has a dream about me, but it's ultimately a dream about my grandmother. Actually, I think there's a deeper analysis there, but I'm not a psychologist, not even on TV. So I'll save my head shrinking the next time I talk to her.

I just dig the fact I was able to make the connection her subconscious was trying to point out — to some degree.

If you want to put some real hurting on my computer, just write a blog entry with dozens of YouTube videos embedded therein. A friend of mine has a blog, and he does it all the time.

I must be really lazy if I'm going to take content from my one of my other blogs and post it here. But I have an unstated policy banning the use of embedded YouTube on that site. This site does not have such prohibition, and the interface, in fact, makes it easy.

So here then is the Musicwhore.org Favorite Edition 2008, complete with a whole clusterfuck of YouTube videos. Writing about music is like dancing about architecture, so the saying goes. Rather than read the list, it would probably be more helpful to listen to it instead. (LiveJournal readers may want to click through to Vox to experience the video overload.)

Musicwhore.org Favorite Edition 2008

1. MASS OF THE FERMENTING DREGS, MASS OF THE FERMENTING DREGS
2. The Magnetic Fields, Distortion
3. Emmylou Harris, All I Intended to Be
4. ASIAN KUNG-FU GENERATION, World World World
5. Girl Talk, Feed the Animals
6. Samamidon, All Is Well
7. Chris Walla, Field Manual
8. LEO今井, FIX NEON
9. Nico Muhly, Mothertongue (Sorry … this music doesn't really lend itself to video.)
10. Spangle call Lilli line, ISOLATION

For anyone thinking about shopping for me for Christmas, I have this one piece of advice: don't do it.

The kinds of things I would ask of Herr Sinter Klauss are either too pricey for casual gift-giving or too specialized. It's not like you can pick up Hajime Chitose's Shima Kyora Umui from Best Buy. And do I matter that much to you to spend $300 on a pair of studio monitor speakers? Didn't think so.

I know there's some debate or other about giving cash as a Christmas gift, but for me, cash is so much simpler. I know where to get what I want, and I'm not afraid to risk my credit card number to get it. My gift-givers in the past, not so much. And most of them can't read Japanese anyway.

The first time I made a list of various sundy items for which I was desirous, I ended up getting a lot of them. The last time I made a similar list, I later decided I wasn't really in a position to make much use of them. (A camcorder? QuarkXpress upgrade? Really?)

This time, I'm making a list of things I actually foresee myself getting in the near future. That all depends on the tax return and the second half of the company bonus. It also helps that I'm in the last few months of my car payment.

So I want but not necessarily for Christmas …

• A pair of studio monitor speakers. I'm tired of using my computer speakers, of having to anticipate how the bass presence on these speakers may translate when I listen in my car or at work. I would like to have some monitors that have no color — like the headphones I bought in September — so mixing isn't such a guessing game.
• Bass traps. I've already treated the room with some acoustic foam to handle the high frequencies. I'm not sure if I really have much of a problem with standing waves, but I could feel a subtle difference when I installed the foam. Perhaps bass traps will enhance that difference even more.
• Singing lessons. My breath control sucks, my timbre is off and my mic technique is non-existent.
• Mastering Audio by Bob Katz, or The Mastering Engineer's Handbook by Bob Owsinski.
• In the Aeroplane Over the Sea by Neutral Milk Hotel. I'm probably going to get this when I start doing my Christmas shopping.

Now if you're not going to heed my advice and you insist on shopping for me, let me make it easy for you: Guitar Center Gift Card. I actually tell people this every year, and it never happens. One of these days, it's going to stick.

It occurs to me that I didn't really make a proper Holidailies introduction post, in the autobiographical sense. I often run under the assumption that I never acquire new readers — I just have the same ones from 10 or 12 years ago. So I don't bother catching people up with what's going on.

I never really know how far back I'm supposed to go with these kinds of entries anyway. I think perhaps 12 months is a good span. Laziness — more a mother of invention than necessity — spurs me to employ a bullet list.

• I work in Austin, Texas as a web developer in a job I've held for five years, depending on which start date you use.
• I grew up in Honolulu, where I visited earlier this year to attend my dad's birthday party.
• I have an unhealthy addiction to Japanese indie rock. Browse my Vox audio library to get a better picture.
• I released an EP back in June as an experiment to see how involved the process is. The production part is easy. The promotion part totally eludes. (Wanna listen? Better yet, wanna buy?)
• Since 2005, I've been writing and recording a lot of songs. I have about five albums in various states of unfinished.
• I've lost 45 pounds since September 2007. I'm still working on that last 15, but the plateau, it is a hard mistress.

I'm probably going to talk about these topics over the next month. Particularly the music stuff. I'm back in the home studio again, and I am trying — really, really, trying — to get something absitively, posolutely finished. Could be this month is nothing but a recording diary.

I should be so productive.