Friday, February 26, 2021

eventful weeks.

I meant to take a photo of all the empty space on our lot: the garage looked nicer as a debris pile than it had as a garage, and yet it's even better now that it's all gone, and better still since our neighbors (who we're friends with) took down the shared fence. Even once we give them back the 8"-12" the old fence stole from their property, there's so much space to work with: not just the 19'x19' building, but the 6' wide Shed of Doom on the far side, and the metal-roofed, low-ceilinged, termite-ridden shade structure over the patio. There's so much space for things that are...not ugly! Someone on Nextdoor even wants the old well pump from 1955 or whenever.

In an improbable coincidence, the garage was demolished and then suddenly our permit to demolish+rebuild–which permit has been stalled for, no joke, 2 years–was approved. Not that any of us have the bandwidth for that, whether it's the project management, or the construction noise that we can't get away from because...there's nowhere to go. Instead, we'll put up a nicer shade structure, and a couple of sheds for secure bike and tool storage, and big gates across the driveway to screen everything from the street. It's gonna be awesome.

One thing startups don't like to tell young engineers is that any given startup, no matter how carefully they think they've chosen, is almost certainly not going to be the kind of success that will let them retire in luxury at 27. Silicon Valley relies on that heady brew of intelligence, optimism, ignorance, and heedless energy. Many of us keep working at startups even when we no longer have all of those things, because the money's good enough (depending on your lifestyle) and we don't like working at big companies. And there's a place for us, too. Or we hope so, as we get older.

This is not to say that companies don't find a way to "exit," as we say. The venture capitalists funding your startups are VCs because they're good at making money, for themselves and others. They know all the other VCs, who are also good at making money, and so it's not remarkably difficult for VCs to make money for each other–at the very least, to get their investment back–by buying each other's companies. If you own millions of shares, this can be a hefty down payment on your new Learjet; if you're an engineer who was employee #40, it will likely come out somewhere between "a weekend at the Four Seasons" and "buy a new Volvo." I've worked at a lot of startups–I think a dozen?–and all but the single most idiotic managed to fumble their way into a half-assed demise of being bought by Microsoft or Facebook or something. As a rule, VCs are good at getting paid.

I did manage to extract some real, non-hypothetical money from this last one, which means reserving money for taxes, paying off a lot of debt, and buying more musical instruments I've been eyeing for months or years. And probably adding to the list, since that is the way of things.

I've been mostly enjoying this round of job searching, which is new. I was a people-manager for 4 years at a name-brand company that everyone in tech recognizes, so I just have to talk fluently and convincingly about people and teams and organizations and relationships, which I can do easily, unlike programming interviews, which I can't. I'd already been unemployed for 3 months when the comically awful January struck, I'm pretty ready to stop looking and start working. I've been talking to so many companies, this week especially, that it's been hard to keep them straight, as I give similar answers to the same questions from different small companies on the same day. I'm happy to find places that value emotional intelligence (or would like to), and I'm expecting two or three offers to land next week, though, and then I can get busy hiring my Army of Dread Software Minions.

For my birthday I bought my first truly nice violin bow. It's carbon fiber, so far the only material to really compete with the incredibly problematic high-quality pernambuco wood that is still the musical standard. (Pernambuco is as messed up as any other tropical hardwood, and also it's even more wasteful than ebony, which is saying something.) This one has a funky kind of design and balance, which they suggest is for "high-octane" performances, perhaps well-suited to unusual instruments like my 5-string violin.

I love it. But I don't really understand why. I've measured and weighed and checked the balance points among the 3 very different bows I have: the carbon fiber, a yellow sandalwood, and a "hybrid" which is wood over a carbon fiber core. The differences don't look so big on paper, but our human power of honing our perceptions make these things matter. There's a story of an Olympic-level fencing match, where one fencer stops and accuses his opponent of cheating via a longer weapon. Sure enough, Mr. Cheaterpants's weapon was...1/16" too long. I don't think this is exaggerated: in aikido, I adjust my timing by fractions of a blink, maybe 50-150 milliseconds objectively. Get the timing wrong and your technique won't work.

So the new bow bounces "right," and seems to draw the right sound out of the instrument, including the low C string. I dunno. I just like it.

Friday, February 19, 2021

an architectural icon dissolves abruptly

One project that has been entirely too long-term has been to get rid of our garage, somehow, it being an unsafe structure and full of rats and termites.


Terrible Garage™
1938 - 2021
R.I.P.

The demolition took a day, and the cleanup will be longer: apparently, once you've created your pile of large smithereens, they lock together like felted fibers, and you have to further demolish the debris pile. As it is, they worked for 3-4 hours and filled a dumpster the size of our bedroom, and they'll fill at least one more.

Then some gates and fencing, some stuff for storage and some stuff for workshop space. It was really a huge chunk of the lot gone to waste, not only the 19' x 19'ish building, but 6 feet on one side, and maybe 3 feet on the other. (There's a tree back there!) We'd wanted to build a studio apartment for the kid, but it's been two years since we applied for the permit, and it's about time to give up and move on with other plans.

Thanks as always to Anna, who makes these things happen. ❤️

Saturday, February 13, 2021

March 350th, 2020.

 One of the many,

many,

many

irritating things about the violin is that your ear is a few inches away from the soundhole, unlike the more civilized 1-4 feet given by...every other instrument. Playing generates a lot of little sounds and obnoxious harmonics that just aren't perceptible unless you have your head practically inside the instrument. Imagine the worst violin noise you've ever heard, and have some empathy for the poor player, who has it much worse.

(Low frequencies travel farther, and the gnarliest bits of violin sound are high frequency and low amplitude.)

Singers have the same problem, for the same reasons. If you try to sing so it sounds unambiguously good to you, you're almost certainly just bottling your voice up inside your throat and head, which are all full of resonating cavities and highly conductive bones bringing the sound to your ears.

(There are actually bone-conduction headphones, the wired version of which I tried out many years ago, and they didn't solve my problems, but they're cool and the sound is decent.)

You have to let your voice come out with some balance of nose and mouth. You can make some recordings to learn how you sound, take some lessons from a good voice teacher, and eventually you redefine what "good" means, so you can make it sound good for the audience, and you just spend less time sounding pretty for yourself.

All this to say that as I've been exploring my 5-string violin's viola capabilities, I've been wondering how it actually sounds. Putting a low C string on a violin––or a high E on a viola, for that matter––involves some funky and obscure design tradeoffs, between playability and the physics of tone. Some excellent makers have jumped right into the problem, with pricing around $6,000 at the low end, and $15,000-ish at the top (Jonathan Cooper, for example). That's a good deal for a pro-quality instrument, even if it illustrates the old adage that violin prices are like guitar prices, with an extra zero at the end. Mine was mostly made in (probably) China, and shipped to Gary in Minneapolis in some form. He took it apart if it wasn't already, added the electronics he invented, put it back together, and did the final setup of all the hardware bits: tailpiece, bridge, nut, strings.

(Having spoken with him at length, I would not be at all surprised if he checked all the front and back plate thicknesses, and did some re-graduating on them, as long as he had the thing in pieces already.)

Violas have a certain kind of growly tone, and I talked to Gary about what I was looking for: the punch of the lower register, with a pure but not strident upper register, since violin high notes kinda bug me. It doesn't have to look like an ordinary violin: I don't need to impress anybody, I'm not joining competitions or orchestras. I'm pretty sure my violin owes its rounded lower corners to a viola design I haven't had any luck finding, even though it's clearly a thing:

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/1o8BXM3Wnbw" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>

Although I guess I don't have any proof that Eric Benning didn't invent them.

Luckily, over the past year I've been accumulating the bits and pieces of a home recording setup: a couple of inexpensive microphones, a Scarlett 2i2 (a USB interface that connects microphones to a computer), and a pre-amp for the violin.

(I asked Gary the Violin Guy if I couldn't just plug the violin directly into the Scarlett like a microphone, and he said "Well, you can try it, but it's probably expecting an impedance like a microphone's, around 3,000 ohms, and the piezoelectric pickup's impedance is a few million ohms." So, right. Pre-amp it is.)

Maybe on a little bit of a lark, I bought another bow, nicer than my current ones. Bows and bow-making are far more arcane even than making instruments. For centuries the prized wood has been pernambuco, and I don't entirely understand why. Pernambuco is not doing better than every other tropical hardwood, and incredibly, it's even more wasteful than ebony, which is saying something. The primary replacement material is carbon fiber, which can certainly be achingly expensive, but for us mere mortals, you generally get a higher quality bow for the same money. I've been trying to not buy tropical hardwood stuff if I can avoid it, anyway. I got my other two bows re-haired so I could compare to the new one, and it's lovely, and I think quite suits my playing.