Went to Schlitterbahn, friends and family, did the Wolfpack and lazy river, got a couple artsy photos. #schlitterbahn #newbraunfelstx #family #summer #texas https://www.instagram.com/p/DNa9qwNOWF-/?img_index=1
After playing around with some funky music tools, I’ve come back to the singing, which is my ultimate goal with Thunder Road. And going with the Show Your Work philosophy, here’s an early and very imperfect take of me figuring out how to sing this song.
I only sing up to “You ain’t a beauty, but hey, you’re alright,” which is such a funny line. The rest is just guitar.
I ended up kind of channeling Elvis here, which was wholly unexpected and fun. I gave Elvis a little nod to a few weeks ago as well, if you look closely.
The song is long and fast and has lots of words. It does not follow anything close to a standard rock song format. The chords are complex and unpredictable.
Being a total amateur, I specialize in covers of basic three-chord songs, so this craziness is hard for me.
But I like the challenge.
To a point.
Always an AI skeptic – but seeing glimmers of fun and utility – AI seems to have come to the rescue again. I don’t want AI to create music for me, but rather to help me create music.
it started when this music app called Moises recently won an Apple Design Award as iPad app of the year, so I decided to give it a try.
👉Btw I’m not trying to sell anyone’s apps here – this isn’t advertising. I don’t make a cent off of this blog. I just think it’s cool, so keep reading…
With Moises + GarageBand on my iPad, I was able to:
Separate out Bruce’s vocals from the instruments in the original Thunder Road track
Slow the song down from 141 bpm (wtf?) to a slightly more reasonable 134.
Transpose the song down one key from F to E (because apparently I sing lower than Bruce??)
Get the chords simplified and displayed for in real-time me as the song plays, set at a capo on the second fret (because I just like that sound). So I could just basically play along and record that.
Finally keep my guitar recording (a very dirty shoegaze sound) and mute Bruce and the E Street Band.
So I ended up up with my very rough guitar and kept Bruce’s vocals – all in one take (which is why it’s so rough). It’s just a proof of concept, but here it is: me playing grungy guitar while Bruce sings. Crazy!
Pardon it’s so messy. Sure, the sound is meant to be messy, but also this is the very first take and only a proof of concept.
My next step will be to sing the song myself, remove Bruce’s vocals, add my own drums and bass and maybe keys. And that will be my cover.
This is supposed to be the land of abundance and freedom, so let’s act like it. Let’s be bighearted and open-armed. Let’s put our energy into doing cool stuff. Let’s get our collective swagger back. 🤘 #july4 #independenceday #usa #america #merica #patriotism #swagger
The first rule of BBQ: where there’s smoke, there’s not fire. 🧙🏻🍗 #bbq #cooking #summer #austin #texas #atx #komodo #vessils @vessils_official https://www.instagram.com/p/DLa30NpSicA/
I’m personally full of contradictions. I’m a straight, middle-aged man who’s into gardening and Lana del Rey. Is that a contradiction? Only if you think it is, my friend. And that’s the place to be.
I love stepping out my front door and collecting a handful of blackberries every day. Just have to beat the squirrels out there. 🐿️ #blackberries #urbangarden #berries #austin #texas #atx #shotoniphone https://www.instagram.com/p/DKU7e6BON6V/?img_index=1
Thank you, Lana, for the title inspiration. Cool song.
A couple of years ago, I decided to play with ChatGPT and have it write a blog post for me. The results, I wrote, were believable but super generic and cliched. They reminded me of like a blowhard who is good at showing off but not actually very smart.
Now we know that, despite all the computing power required, AI really isn’t that smart; this is why it requires way more training than a person does.
In that frame, it made me reflect in ways that AI has actually become useful while writing a novel.
And no, it’s not actually writing any of the book for me. I tried that today as a fun experiment, and it was still just… amusing. Here’s a sample, but it’s basically all like this.
Lena was gone. And with her, the version of James that believed love could be mapped, managed, or mutually agreed upon.
And so began that particular summer, where the tequila was cheap, the dreams were rented, and every good story started with a woman who left before the music stopped
Has AI gotten worse? 😆
Also note that ChatGPT somehow (by coincidence?) used the same protagonist name that I’m using in my book, although I did not give that name in the prompt. Interesting… 😤
Still, AI is actually amazing at a couple of things.
AI can read my book aloud back to me
After writing a chapter of the book, I can feed the text into Speechify and instantly turn it into a really good audiobook. This is not just a basic Siri-style reading but a realistic voice with feeling. You can pick from a bunch of voices voice, including a few celebrities, although the founder “Cliff” is my favorite. It’s fun to listen to, and hearing your story interpreted in someone else’s voice is both instructive and fascinating.
AI can interpret my book for me
I also like to use the summarize tool. Even the much maligned Apple Intelligence is helpful for simply summarizing a few paragraphs I just wrote. It’s a useful check to tell me if I’m getting the intended idea across, like, “Yeah, that’s what I meant,” or “Ohh, this needs work.” Like Speechify, it’s also just kind of fun to see what “someone” else thinks of your story.
You’ve really got to enjoy the pyrotechnics at college football games. 🙌 #longhorns #texasfootball #stadium #fireworks #downtown #skyline #atx #austin #atx via Instagram https://instagr.am/p/DCvMqhfuYNX/
Explosions over the stadium, Explosions in the Sky.
My song did need a remaster from a pro. I had been focused mostly on performing the song and just wanted to get it out the door, so I kind of rushed the final master.
While I was happy to have sang my first song and enjoyed the result, I had made a few beginner’s mistakes in the recording and the final mix.
I had wanted a Johnny Cash “live at Folsom” type of sound, but ended up with an exaggerated echo.
I had recorded the vocals with a cheap guitar adapter and ended up with a lot of noise and low volume.
I had mixed everything with headphones and forgot to check the final mix on speakers, where most people would be listing to it most of the time.
Casey was looking for a challenge and jumped on it. He cleaned everything up, especially the vocals, which he somehow salvaged. He insisted that I sound just like Johnny Cash. I’m not so sure, but I’ll take the compliment.
He let the instruments breath more and gave the drums some nice crunch.
I was going to frame and hang this old sketch, but is tabletop art a thing? ✏️ #sketch #drawing #furniture #art #blackandwhite #austin #texas #atx #shotoniphone via Instagram https://instagr.am/p/C941pRUO7bX/
In case you were wondering, this is what black eyed peas look like while they’re growing. 🫛 #gardening #urbangarden #peas #blackeyedpeas #austin #texas #atx via Instagram https://instagr.am/p/C9m9pTwO8_-/
Austin has a variety of great museums of all shapes and sizes. And they all seem to have their own oddball hours. 🤷🏻♂️
It can be hard to plan a museum trip with so many irregular hours floating around, so I’m compiling a quick cheat sheet of some of Austin’s top museums and their hours, with links of course.
👉 I’ll expand and update this over time, but this is a start, focusing on art museums.
I like the LBJ library, but I always wondered how the hard-scrabbled president from the Texas Hill Country ended up with a stark, brutalist monolith for his library. 🤔
As people are graduating all around the land right now – most notably for me, my daughter – they’re looking for their next steps. Maybe they’ve picked a college. Maybe they’re trying to earn some money and support themselves. Maybe they’re doing both and more.
Sure, it’s good to plan things out, but it’s also wise to leave some room for the unknown. I like how author Julia Alvarez put it.
Don’t plan it all. Let life surprise you a little.
One graduated with “flying colors”, as she would say to be silly 👩🏻🎓, and the other is well on her way. I’m so proud of them both. 💪 #graduation #highschool #daughters #spring #dog #family #austin #texas via Instagram https://instagr.am/p/C7JqemMOdGk/
One thing I love about Ted Lasso, especially on rewatching, is how it often brings some old wisdom to life within the story.
Yep, Ted Lasso can make even an old German guy from the 1800’s sound interesting and relevant in the right context, as in this brilliant quote from Goethe in S3E1.
Doubt can only be removed by action.
Now this quote may not sound like much on it’s own, but it really hits in the show.
It reminds me of the many conversations I’ve been stuck in where people are going back and forth debating the theoretical merits of idea. Goethe reminds up that the only real judge that matters is action and its consequence. 🙌
This is a nice counterpart to Epicteus, who was also into actions over ideas.
Still, while the old German guy and the old Greek guy are great and smart and all that, wouldn’t you rather get your philosophy from this crew?
This series noted the one thing these leaders had in common: sure, they all had interesting ideas, but more importantly, they lived by their ideas. If they had just talked a lot, they would not have had the real-world impact that they had. Their actions were inspiring.
So if you want to be a pretty cool and impactful person, in whatever form that takes, then figure out what you stand for and live it.
I know, I know… that’s easier said than done.
But what else are you going to do that could be any better?
Besides, it’s fun to do stuff, and talking gets old.
Work in progress 👩🏻🎨 My friend Emily is giving my home office some much needed character. 🌊 #mural #painting #workinprogress #officespace #ocean #austin #texas #atx #shotoniphone via Instagram https://instagr.am/p/C5mlaAaO8ra/
A few months ago, I knocked off a bucket list item by recording a song with a friend who can sing.
The actual bucket list item was “Make a song that I can play in my car using Siri that I actually enjoy.” 😉 So I made sure to get it out on all the streaming sites.
But the one streaming service I missed, and probably the most helpful as a musician, was SoundCloud. This site is a little more artist-oriented. You can upload songs instantly, give and get feedback, and basically do whatever you want without going through a distributor.
I have a couple new songs in the works, but none good enough yet to post here even by show-your-work standards. When I do post something, it’ll go SoundCloud first.
Next up in iOS at a glance series, where I give you a quick visual about an iOS development concept, we’ll jump into stack views.
Sticking with old-school UIKit concepts a little conger, stack views give us a simple way (pre-SwiftUI) to lay out a screen without a bunch of constraints, which can quickly become ungainly.
Stack views just organize subviews in a row, either vertically or horizontally. Stack views can be combined with each other as well to create complex layouts, such as below.
Stack views are typically invisible and only used to contain other views, so what we actuality see is this.
So there it is: stack views boiled down to a quick visual. Of course, the topic goes much deeper, including options for distribution, alignment, and spacing.
Zizania texana (Texas wild rice) is a rare species of grass found only on the first two miles of the San Marcos River. 🤯 It appears to be SUP-friendly. #sanmarcos #sewellpark #river #rice #wildrice #texas #shotoniphone #sup via Instagram https://instagr.am/p/C5MStzMOy1d/
The documentary STEVE (martin) tells the story of a really awkward, out-of-place aspiring comedian who wants to do something genuinely new but was initially failing badly.
It is cringe-worthy at times. What is this guy doing?
But Steve keeps relentlessly trying things, observing, and changing. It goes something like this (so far)…
Is there a future for me as a magician?
-> No, that looks like a dead end. Let’s try comedy.
Should I follow the classic comedy conventions like using “indicators” to signal when the punch line happened?
-> Nope. Let the awkward tensions build naturally and see what happens.
Should I open for other acts and perform for 1000 people who are there to see someone else?
-> Nope. This is getting me nowhere. I’d rather headline for 50 people who actually want to see me.
And finally, this long-haired comedian who looked he was “trying to be the Eagles” decided to change his whole look and attitude. I just like the clarity he finds.
I wasn’t making any waves, so l made a decision.
Instead of being at the tail end of an old movement, I’ll be at the front end of a new one.
And he follows it up with action.
And so l decided, “Okay, I’m putting on a suit, I’m putting on a tie and I’m cutting my hair.”
Instead of looking like a hippie from the ’60s, I’ll look like somebody new from the ’70s.
And of course kind of a punch line.
Or like someone from the future.
Someone from the future indeed. He was about to become the biggest comedian in the world.
In the depths of Winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.
Albert Camus
Today I found myself looking right at this phenomenon in my little garden.
You see, this winter’s cold snap savagely killed almost all the plants . As a memorial, I left a sad, dead, spiky blackberry stalk sticking high out of the ground.
Now that dead stalk is getting overrun by new green growth. Blackberry sprouts are shooting up in other parts of the garden as well. The plant is even flowering, meaning fresh blackberries are on the way.
Life is resilient. 💪
Just don’t touch that dead stalk. That thing is not kidding around – ouch!
Autoresizing was Apple’s first shot in the days of yore (iOS 2, circa 2011) at letting early iPhone views rearrange themselves (this is the “auto” part) in response to screen rotations. It was limited and clumsy, as was pretty much all of iOS at the time. Mail, contacts, calendars, and the App Store were new features on the iPhone.
So autoresizing makes for a fitting intro to this series.
Autoresizing allows the developer to specify how one view relates to its super-view as far as its size and margins, and which parts are are flexible vs. fixed.
In the days since autoresizing was introduced, more capable layout tools like Auto Layout with constraints and now SwiftUI have been introduced.
But you’ll still see the autoresizing “mask” (an old-school programming term) hiding out in the Size Inspector in Xcode under the View section. If you wondered what that was, now you know.
My daughter took this pic the other night while out walking. It looks kind of like a graduation 👨🏻🎓 or a giant halo? 😇 #ellsworthkelly #ellsworthkellyaustin #nightphotography #museum #austin #texas #atx #shotoniphone
“Speeding up” is what I like to think of as relaxed focus. Just keep moving forward; the motion keeps your momentum up and keeps your thoughts and actions fresh and relevant. No more paralysis of analysis.
Get moving. Prioritise a kind of fluid, calm urgency in your life.
Now, Ted Lasso said “Be a goldfish“, but I’m going to say “Be a shark.”
Okay, a shark is a deadly predator. Don’t do that; set that aside for a minute.
The best quality about sharks is that they understand relaxed focus. A shark is always moving purposefully, but it’s never in a hurry. A shark don’t stop or wallow or get bored or frustrated. A shark is always going somewhere and always has a plan. A shark’s movement seems to feed its energy rather than expend it.
So in life, be a shark. Keep moving purposefully and own your little neck of the ocean.
In case you noticed this blog has a new name and logo, and you thought “this blog got hacked,” fret not. The new name, Mental Break Town, is on purpose.
“But that’s exactly what a hacker would say!” you protest.
Okay, okay, in that case, if I start trying to sell you fake Rolexes, phish you, or spread hate speech, then you’ll know I got hacked. 😉
But why the name change?
Well, patmcg.com was basically just my name, and the blog needed a new name that isn’t about me. It’s about stuff I’m interested in, and hopefully stuff you’re interested in.
Also, this a just a blog and not a company, so I dropped the .com in favor of .blog.
So, I thought of a new name, and luckily the domain name was available. Done. ✔️
Think lightly of yourself and deeply of the world.
Miyamoto Musashi
He must have been onto something. Yes, the world matters; everything matters. But don’t weigh yourself down personally with it. You are definitely not going to win a lot of sword fights if you do.
This description goes on to say that “After retiring from dueling, the swordsman turned to his community, mentoring students and sharing wisdom through his writing.”
Okay, I have a new hero ✔️ and a new retirement plan ✔️.
I thought my previous downtown Austin sketch would be a natural fit. But alas, it was too complicated and fuzzy. 🤷🏻♂️I needed something simpler and bolder for this purpose.
So I myself 10 minutes to come up with a few ideas. The “final” logo (bottom left) was not what I had initially imagined, but it felt right after playing around with it for a bit.
Of course, this being my personal not-for-profit, no-expectations blog, I can change it if I ever feel like it. I like this iterative process. 🙌
To get my song out there where it can be streamed anywhere – via Siri, on the HomePod, in the car – I needed to pick an “artist” name to use on all the streaming services. It’s always fun to pick a band name, but I had set a rule for myself from experience messing around fruitlessly with friends in the past: first the music, then the name. You have to earn the name.
So I decided to go with The Coastal Service. 🙌 It’s sort of a play on The Postal Service, an amazing band with one of my favorite albums ever. I am not a Postal Service tribute band; their name just inspired an idea.
“The Coastal Service” is meant to invoke a sense of mystery and fog and awe and danger. It’s about meeting the ocean: like life, it’s big and dangerous and beautiful and meant to be explored.
I also like the idea that this fictional “coastal service” is there to serve humanity and is broader and more secretive and than, say, the US Coast Guard. It’s somewhat inspired by a Wes Anderson vibe, especially Moonrise Kingdom.
While I liked the extra guitar part on the previous take, I also felt like it was a bit too much. It sort of changed the song from a “singing” song into a “guitar” song.
After a fresh listen, my buddy Joel had a helpful suggestion.
I’m wondering if you could use the clean version but bring in the guitar at some point under the whistling to add a little depth there.
I tried it out and… bingo. 🎯 This was the best of both worlds. The guitar comes in at the bridge and mixes things up at just the right time. Thanks, Joel.
My kids say the vocals are pretty “echoey”, but I’m hoping that adds to some mysterious ambience. Believe me, you are not ready to hear me singing raw just yet. 😉
I like the saying, “Imperfect is perfect”. Sometimes I switch it up to, “Perfect is boring.”
Music that is super-slick and produced starts to sound kind of the same.
As a person’s appearance approaches “perfect” (often with plastic surgery), they start to look the like everyone else who had that surgery.
That’s why I love this visual from Harsh Darji on Medium. All the circles are perfect but the same. The odd one on the end stands out. You could even say it’s outstanding. 👌
It was fun showing my brother and the unofficial in-laws around town, including a little kid who kept stealing my hat. 🤠 He loved the @texastoymuseum so much he’s dying to go back. #family#austin#texas#uno