My poorly automated Kubuntu setup
The target audience for this post is myself. I recently set up a new (old) laptop and tried to bring it to parity with my main Kubuntu workstation in as few steps as possible, which turned out to be … a lot of steps, most of them manual. I wanted to document the full process and see if I can find worthwhile opportunities for automation.
Still playing guitar like piano
I still play the guitar like a piano. It’s most obvious when I try to play along with the lead guitar part in a recording of a two-guitar band. Often, the lead guitar just has a simple single-note riff or triads in the upper register, but I cannot resist the impulse to insert bass notes in the “left hand” (often grabbing them with my thumb). It doesn’t feel like a complete part without them.
Of course, there is already a bass in the recording, so playing in this way does not add any value, and comes at the cost of less fluidity in the actual guitar melody. I am trying to discpline myself to double lead guitar parts exactly, but it’s hard to break the habit of embellishment.
Another way my piano training interferes with playing guitar is an instinctual aversion to the capo. On the piano, if you want to play a song in a different key, you play it in a different key. (Actually, a lot of keyboards have a transposition feature, but using it is frowned upon.) But a guitar capo is sometimes musically necessary access open chord voicings in flat keys.
My pianist problem is that when I play the guitar with a capo, I can never decide whether to think in the transposed or concert key. The open chord voicings certainly are easiest to remember in the transposed key, but as soon as I need to play a melody higher on the neck, it’s like the capo isn’t there, and I have to think in concert key to make any sense of it. Most often, I just get really confused and put away the capo.
First impressions after moving to Tennessee
- Honey, baby, etc.
- Even young people have the accent. This surprised me because I thought that regional accents were slowly melting away thanks to mass media. In Korea, kids may have picked up a few regionalisms from family, but for the most part they spoke like the video game streamers they watched on YouTube. In Tennessee, you can hear an accent even in young toddlers.
- Frequency of conversations with strangers is somewhat higher than on the coasts, but more noticeable is the length and depth of the conversations. I spoke for five minutes with a guy in the elevator and we kept having to stick our arms in the door to reopen it. We finally stopped talking when the elevator starting beeping at us and forced the door closed. Didn’t even find out his name.
- Haven’t heard any cool aphorisms like “it’s all grist for the mill” yet, but my ears are open.
How I organize browser tabs
I didn’t realize I had a system for this until I did.
My system: I only ever open one browser window (OK, two on my work computer where I use MS Edge profiles for different Microsoft accounts).
When I open a new tab, I scan the tabs already open and move it left or right so that the tabs remain ordered by decreasing priority. “Priority” means something like, how annoyed would I be if I closed this by accident?
- High priority: Things that I keep open all day (email, GitHub issues).
- Medium priority: Documentation or reference material for the current task.
- Low priority: Random ephemera, landing pages from clicking a confirmation email, article I already read but just need to copy a quote from, etc.
Whenever I start to have more than 15 or 20 tabs, I get an instinctual, cramped feeling and start axing tabs from right to left until I arrive at one that I still want open. Usually, this leaves two or three tabs.
Sometimes I accidentally close things that I still needed, but I tell myself that the time wasted reopening them is offset by the time saved searching through dozens of tabs to find the right one.
Is this system any good?
Music videos
A side effect of my refusal to subscribe to Spotify (I just buy albums on Bandcamp or used CDs) is that when someone sends me a song to listen to, I usually look it up on YouTube and end up watching the music video. Because of this, there are some songs or artists that I like more than I might have without the video because the video adds an additional layer of interpretation.
I think I had mentally blocked myself from verbalizing this thought before because of my background as a musician. I would like to think of myself as someone who values the music itself and whose opinion of a song isn’t swayed by the addition of a video track. After all, a music video is kind of like an advertisement for the song or artist, a reference rather than the thing itself.
But then, I should have realized my susceptibility to music videos sooner, because a big part of jazz school was learning how to watch jazz performances: Musicians on stage employ a wide vocabulary of visual and bodily cues to steer the ship while improvising.
And I went to a school whose music buildings were right next to the film school—I think they actually had a small scoring stage somewhere. Lots of my classmates did collaborations with film or animation students, but I went the other way, preferring to incorporate “analog” art like poetry and fiction into my music by setting texts to melodies. A missed opportunity.