Welcome to the Sea of Echoes

1:49 am and it’s time I started writing again before getting sucked into a long twisty tunnel of code.  I’m on leave from Google for a week or so after the birth of my second son and now is as good a time as any to take stock and reflect on what’s going on.

The photograph above is taken near the summit of Windy Hill, a hike I used to do fairly often.  This is the first time I actually made it to the top on my bike, and it was a lot harder than it should have been, but then I’m getting up there in years, finally.

The view near the top is just spectacular.  The coastal fog blows over the mountain top and breaks up into these incredible wispy clouds, and they just seem to move so fast.  It’s as if you have the sense of flying even when your feet are on the ground.

I actually had my doubts about making it to the top this time.  Even though the ride isn’t technically, there are some steep sandy sections and my balance is a little off.  Last time I attempted it with a friend I had to bow out half way up because I was feeling dizzy and disoriented.  Looking down from the top of the hill I could make out a couple buildings near my home though they seemed impossibly far away.  There were several points on the ride where I asked myself if I should turn around, but I just decided to take it slow knowing I would get there eventually.

Which brings me back to the pile of code that I’m tunneling through right now.  I’ve spent bits and pieces of the last year working on a project that has had a lot of stops and starts.  I’ve had to take it on faith that it’s important even though no one has really bothered to explain the benefits of it to me. Now we are in the final stretch, just reviewing a couple things that should be details really, only to find that some of the basic assumptions underlying the project might be incorrect, possibly momentarily, but also possibly permanently.

This realization has been creeping up on me for the last couple of weeks, and while a few weeks of misdirection is not a big deal in the scheme of things, it does make me question why I haven’t been asking the big questions about these projects to begin with.  I think I need to be a lot harder nosed about these things soon, but in order to do that I also need some support.  And in order to get that support I need to deliver results.  But before I can really get going on things that I think will make a difference I need to finish tunneling through this pile of code and declare victory.  It’s a lot of work and it takes years to learn how to read the tea leaves.

It seems to me that this one little situation is a metaphor for many of the larger challenges we’re facing now as a generation.  The economic uncertainties, environmental decay, the misalignment of moral priorities, the far-to-large number of lost and lonely people in this world.

All of these problems seem huge and sometimes insurmountable.  But all the basic pieces are in place - ingredients scattered around some global kitchen waiting to be sifted and arranged into some kind of cake.

So when I think about tunneling through code, even though I’m annoyed at slowdowns and misunderstandings, I’m very optimistic about the overall future.  We just need to get the bike pointed in the right direction and keep pushing until we get the damn thing to the top of the hill.

Our understanding of things is so tantalizingly limited now - I can only wonder what the view will be like in five years.

Just finished watching this piece on Bradley Manning and Wikileaks:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/wikileaks/

They draw many connections I wasn’t aware of, including the fact that Bradley was perhaps partly a misfit in the military because of being gay, and the possibility that the Arab Spring uprisings were in part enabled by the leak of the US diplomatic cables.

Ex-wikileaker Daniel Domscheit-Berg sums up the trend that protagonists in this story hope for:

“… it has set in motion a cultural change.  In some way it has created this whole debate we are having today: What is secrecy? And is there a need for secrecy? And what is the need for breaking these secrets? …

The goal is not to get rid of all secrets in this world, the goal is to foster transparency, and that I think is a really important cause.”

In this week when S&P downgraded the US and the economy seems like it’s headed into the crapper, it’s nice to know that the larger arc of history is showing progress.  In ten years perhaps we will look back and see that our society is more and more open than before.  How interesting that the revolutionaries in this story, flawed and vulnerable as individuals, push both political and interpersonal boundaries.

Take the political arena first.  Our governmental institutions today are still working on methods that rely on speech and writing laws on pieces of paper. How backward!  The Jasmine revolutions show that the social tools we used to for governments for the last few centuries are about to be overrun by Twitter-like media.

• Why not use Google docs or open-source software to create laws so you can see who wrote what?
• Instead of having elections why not have people indicate who they support through twitter or facebook - when popular support shifts from the incumbent to a new candidate the government reorganizes.
• Why not make all battlefield footage public so people can see what war is really about?

All interesting ideas, but a true revolution in openness revolution can’t happen if closed societies (China comes to mind, though obviously the US has plenty of misdeeds to hide) can reap tactical or strategic competitive advantage over other nations by being secretive.  I’m not sure that this is a slam dunk in favor of openness.

This organizational transformation also can’t happen from the top-down.  Rather, smaller (initially very small) groups must adopt new methods of governance and decision making, and then overtake existing institutions because their newer methods make them more effective.   That does mean that if openness is to work at the scale of nations, then it also has to work at the level of companies, teams and even families.

Which brings us back to the interpersonal. The revolution that is happening there is even bigger perhaps than the political revolution that could be coming.  More on that later…

Got home from a great dinner at Anne’s folks house and decided to finish up some housekeeping that I’ve been putting off.  I can tell I totally need a vacation as so many thing have been piling up unattended to.

One of the things I’ve been meaning to take care of is to replace the compact florescent lights in our kitchen.  They have a very harsh white tint and are very bright, overpowering the softer lights in the living room and casting hard grey shadows all over the place.  I got some “soft white” CFs at Home Depot which was a big improvement, but I still felt that the contrast was too harsh so I started experimenting with making little “nun’s hat” shades with two pieces of paper taped in the recess.  It actually worked really well - providing a little warmth and diffusion under the spot and vitually eliminating the high contrast further away!

I got so inspired that I started making paper “scupltures” to hang as ornaments under the lights.  Originally I wanted to do this to further diffuse the light.  What you see here are a couple of the more interesting examples.

It wasnt a total success, but I’m happy with the results for now.  Maybe this Christmas we’ll experiment with some different decorations.  :)

So I just finished another three hour session putting Tycho to bed.  I’d say that these are rare and that a more typical time is 45minutes to an hour, but sometimes when I try to shorten it things spiral out of control.

The doctor says that he should be able to fall asleep on his own without us lying down with him, but we’ve simply never trained him to do that, so he gets quite anxious trying to sleep alone.  He can be really really tired, but when I try to leave, he just starts getting upset that I’m not doing my job and taking care of him.

Here’s where the crucial decision in parenting style comes in.  I think the popular child-rearing strategy these days is to be a little tough, and use the crib or other techniques to just draw an absolute line, and then let the baby adapt.  I have no doubt that after a few days or weeks of something pretty strict that Tycho would adapt.

But here’s the rub.  Up until now, I think Tycho has been a remarkable open and well adjusted little boy, mostly because I think he knows he has so much love and people are always watching out for him.  My fear is that part of Tycho’s adaptation to a solitary bed-time would be to pull away a little, and maybe to view the world as a slightly more cold and lonely place.

So tonight I experimented with a strategy to gradually make him more comfortable being on his own, which almost worked, though it does take a lot of patience.

Keep in mind that there are many outcomes I’m looking for in this process:

• I want him to feel safe and cared for going to bed.
• I want him to know that he can depend on us when he needs us.
• I want him to be able to relax and get to sleep in 10-15 minutes, assuming we put him to bed at a reasonable time.

I’ve been doing some mixing on headphones and getting awkward results.  To try to get to the bottom of it I thought I should see how bad the phones are coloring the sound I’m getting.

First I tried recording a white noise sample played through mac speakers and headphones thinking that there would be some pretty big differences.  There are, but mostly what you see is the loss of low-frequencies (<600Hz) and anything about 12kHz.

It turns out that a chirp is easier to measure and repeat.  Here are two spectrograms, first the mac laptop speakers:

Followed by the response of the headphones:

Both are flatter than I would have expected, with deviations under 10dB.  The phones actually have a pretty big notch near 2kHz, while the mac speakers are more erattic.

Here’s the prius:

The verical scaling is a little weird.  Iztope reads out the delta band as +/-2db or so, but I can make 10 or 20db changes in the input faders and not move these meters much.  Hmm…

Bottom line:

• Headphones drastically underestimate the amount of 2kHz and have some other weird frequency holes.  Mixing in the car might be a good solution.
• Checking peak hold plots might be a good way to tell what is happening.

So we went through our final pass of mastering last Monday and have been letting the album sit for a while.

Here’s quick preview of ‘The Scar’ after mastering.

Does this song work for you?

Should we include it in the album?

What about the details of the sound?  Anything we should re-track or re-mix?

“The Scar“ (mp3 4:30)

Please leave comments down below, text
or email me directly.  :)

Just got back from Tycho’s first “festival” show - Lilith Faire at Shoreline.  The crowd there was decent sized though not sold out and the music was pretty good.  We heard a couple of new acts and some older ones as well.  Here are some thoughts on the show, what worked and what didn’t.

Ann Atomic - an older songwriter turned singer.  We only caught a few minutes of her in the ABC lounge after her main set.  She was ok - nothing special.  I thought her guitar player and band seemed to be putting on a good show of being in it, but the vibe wasn’t really happening for me.  Clean sound, but no soul.

Kitten - flips side of Ann Atomic - she’s like 15 or something and jumps around on stage like she’s high on pop-rocks or something.  Twice she stood on amps and had to be pulled down by roadies, and then while she was doing spinning jumps she fell and twisted her ankle, which I am sad to say, was a little funny.  A few minutes later she was up again like nothing happened so maybe it was just a World Cup moment.  All that crazy energy worked with the crowd and the band was pretty tight.  She had a pretty good voice, and a sound that could be compared to Paramore.  I’m sure all that energy and attitude will get her somewhere, but again, the soul seemed lacking.

Colbie - I was actually not looking forward to her set much, but was pleasantly surprised.  She’s got a fair number of hits that I forgot about and her sound is so mellow and poppy it’s the perfect compliment to a sunny afternoon on the grass.  Also, her voice and comments seemed to convey that she was totally into the gig and her and the band blended really well.  Hats off.  :)

The Bangles - their first number (one of their rockier songs which I dont remember) sounded great, but the set was uneven.  When they were relying on their hit songs with nice vocal harmonies and support from keys things sounded good, but the stripped down punkier songs just sounded harsh.  Part of that was that the kit sounded bad - a snare that was too bright and no warmth from the kick, toms or cymbals.  They were in good form over all considering how long they’ve been around, and the vocals were solid all around.  But again, for some of the songs, the soul was missing.

Heart - We only caught a few tunes, but I was impressed by the band and the girls can still sing just like 20 years ago.  Wow.

All in all a great afternoon on the grass with mama Anne and baby Tycho.  Happy days.