Just took a shower after working at Shakes. It was steady but not that busy.
Woke up Sunday morning with a stiff neck. Or maybe it was just really really sore? The dental hygienist from my Monday morning appointment asked if hurt to move or if it was just really stiff. I thought she was asking for liability reasons and so I was trying to find the "correct" answer but it occured to me that there was none. Or if there is, I don't know the difference. I just warned her before she yanked my head from side to side in an attempt to get a better angle on my teeth.
Either way, for a few days, my sight was as responsive as foglights on a car. Responding to my name from someone behind me was like making a U-turn on a one-way street. Finding a comfortable sleeping position was like parallel parking. I must have slept on it wrong. Really wrong. After 4-5 days though, it's almost gone.
It made computer work difficult. I usually rely on moving around a lot with my computer: sitting upright, relaxed in a recliner, standing, or laying down (to name a few). An immobile neck restricts my positions until I become increasingly restless... then my lower back starts to ache.
Coding does not seem to fit my body type. It feels like I'm in the minority though. I don't understand how virtually all of my co-workers have no problems in this area overall. It's become almost a point of fascination for me: watching other people sit still for hours.
I remember being captivated at a piano recital long ago. Not by the performer on stage but by a friend sitting next to me. She was video taping the recital with a camera on a tripod in front of her seat -- restricting her leg mobility. She sat there for 90 minutes with her knees touching and legs tucked under the chair. 90 minutes without movement.
Recitals, planes, long car rides. It's hard to for me to sit still. I think I'm going to see a chiropractor soon.
I got a lot of great family time in last weekend. I even helped judge a gingerbread house competition for my Uncle Mark and all of his family. Everyone is pretty much thriving: my 92 year old Grandpa included. The snow was wet and a foot high.
I stayed inside mostly: pouring time into working on Tag Editor (described here). I actually finished it and realized that adding tags would not give me good statistics quite yet until more work is done on magic. So I started and almost completed a companion project called Graph Editor or more specifically: React Graph DB Editor which is basically a generic React-based component that allows you to pretty much edit any graph database intuitively. All a user has to do is implement a few methods and pass down some initial data and you're good to go.
On the music front, I've spent a few hours here and there editing some songs that we, Sizable, have been working on. I probably get a little too detailed with the editing but it's truly the only part of the music recording process where I feel a lot of confidence; I know when notes are wrong, intonation is off, or rhythms are shaky. And with enough clicks and drags, you can get just about anything to sound better.
It's a big debate: whether or not to fix things. People think by fixing things you are "sucking the soul out" or making it "unnatural" but I don't believe that. It either sounds good or bad to me. And if it sounds bad, I'm going to try to make it sound good. I tend to believe work done in the studio is to ultimately support the composition. (Live recordings are more about capturing the performance.)
Anyway (anyways?), we're making good headway on this effort (52 songs recorded by the end of the year). We plan to release 4 sets -- each quarter -- 13 songs each. My bandmates are putting in a lot of effort and I'm optimistic about delivering on time.
I think I've rambled enough... until next time.