Blog (page 2)

Adventures in Circuit Design and Synth Building

The 2020 pandemic has certainly been a weird, and depressing year full of a roller coaster of emotion and inner struggle and there have been many "phases" since it began back in March. After I passed through the "stay drunk all the time and watch TV phase" and my movie was put on hold, I started trying to expand my horizons and started doing various projects that I had always wanted to do. I'll be adding those projects on here periodically (updating this website is on my list of projects) but one area I am particularly excited about is learning circuit design and building my first analaog synthesizer. The first jump into this was building an analog sequencer which introduced me to designing custom panels on which to mount components and to create a nice, clean product in the end. I had the enclosure from an old transistor radio I found at a pawn shop years ago and decided this would be the best project for it! Here are some photos of that sequencer, of which I am very happy with the result:

I won a thing

So many of you might know I work full time building bank websites for my primary source of income, and recently I won an award for one of the websites my team did and which I was the lead developer on. Check out out below!

This was a pretty fun project, and while banking websites are typically on the conservative side, I am lucky to work with a group of designers who push the boundaries of most banking websites and do some really cool things that keep building these sites over and over again fresh and new. It was only a matter of time that we won an award, to be honest.

This New American Life

It is a pretty common trend of mine whenever I created any kind of "blog" with the intentions of updating it frequently I end up posting one article and then never touching it again. Well, given the situation in the world right now, I figured I might as well have a place for my random thoughts, ideas, and general memoirs.

As you might know, March 2020 (well, before then, but mostly now) we are under a worldwide pandemic unlike anything of us have ever experienced. We are to remain at home unless for essential activities, and all businesses, restaurants, bars, etc that are considered "non-essential" are closed and either gone completely or adapting with home delivery or curbside pickup. It's rather bizarre, but also kind of an interesting paradigm shift that I have become quite fond of.

This pandemic has also brought out the best in a lot of people—as we are all confined at home we have to resort to our own imaginations to keep ourselves entertained. Given, a lot of people just binge watch Netflix and re-post memes, but there is a Rennaisance happening in the artistic community and people are really connecting with each other in ways we never have—even when we had much more opportunities to do so. We are congregating online in groups to chat, play games, play music together, laugh together. It's a very unprecedented time and it is the one time where the Internet—having become this behemoth of awful—has really stepped into the light with its full wardrobe and shown us all what it can really mean and provide for us and each other.

I've been getting a lot of work done. My day-to-day job luckily has not changed all that much—but Ashley is out of work for the time being, so we are both adapting to this close-quarters confinement. We have been taking bike rides, hikes at a local park, climbing the trees in our back yard and tonight we are camping outside in the yard in our big tent—complete with movies on the projector and a big air mattress! Again, another example of how a pandemic has made us break out of our daily routines.

I have to admit I am scared. I am scared for my friends, my family, and myself because this thing is proving itself to be a force to be reckoned with—and I am afraid if I come down with it, it might just kill me. But we are being safe, and hyper-aware of anything foreign that we come in contact with. Our lives are a lot more simple now, but certain aspects have become increasingly complicated.

I miss my friends and my family—but we are all gonna make it through this. And it is up to us as individuals to make it through this because our leadership in this country has become a laughingstock and a complete farce—a truth that should have been evident before this all happened. But I'm not getting into politics here—I have enough of that in my daily life.

Anyway, I'll be updating this more frequently now—it's on my list of daily quarantine tasks. Meanwhile, here is a video I made on the second night of quarantine:

New Shitty Website

Well this has been an interesting month. My wife is away for an entire month for a wilderness training course, and I cannot talk to her until August 17th, so I have been occupying my time with LOTS of projects to keep my mind off that. I'm currently editing my first feature film that we have almost wrapped: CHEST, coming 2020! I have also been doing chores out the ass around the house, and I decided to just go ahead and build that terminal based website i've always wanted to do! I have also put together a pretty efficient build system using Gulp/NodeJS/NPM/etc in the process that I plan to use to build more freelance websites so it isnt just for the fun of it. But I wanted to get this amazing user-unfriendly gem out there for people to look at. I don't want to be flashy--I'll leave that to my freelance clients' websites. So, I hope you enjoy this, and maybe you'll check back as I add in more features. Maybe a version of Zork? Or the snake game to play while you are here? Who knows what easter eggs i'll be hiding all over this fuckin' thing.