Yellowman, Album Art & Camping

Weekly Update 2016-36: As shall be the theme of this week's weekly update of the week, I did something outside of my comfort zone. I went camping. Not only have I never camped before, but I did it with a bunch of people I don't know very well (who are part of my drumming troupe), and with fewer details than I think I've ever had for something lasting three days of my life.

And it was great. Read on for more.

Music: Yellowman
Not a single Dave Matthews song was played on this trip. Throughout our time at the campsite and the beach, I heard all sorts of music like soca, reggae, dancehall, dub, and some other genres that I don't even know how to identify.

As this song below played, everyone started singing these sort of nonsense words along to the song. They sound so good and it's rare that I get a chance to speak a little nonsense, so I really like this song now.

Accomplishment:
I put up a tent all by myself on Friday! Honestly that was the thing that I was most nervous about. Luckily, it was pretty simple! I was even able to help someone else put their tent up as well. Amazing.

After my brief stint learning about Google Analytics at RED Academy, I decided to sign up for Google Analytics lightning talk at work (5 min). I don't know that much about what I learned, but there are some cool tidbits so maybe I can learn a bit by asking questions as I give the talk. Kind of a weird quasi-talk.

I found an excellent conference to go to this year that looks so exciting. All of the talks look like they'll be so interesting and future-forward, I can't stand it. I really hope my boss approves this one so I can go to Munich at the end of Oktober! Auf wiederseihn!

I also took half an hour and upgraded my work computer to the newest operating system. That means that all of my Apple devices (except the beautiful lil' Nano 3G) are now running some sexy San Francisco as their system font. Yummers.

Goal:
I guess I have to write a script for a lightning talk on Google Analytics now.

I also want to move my dang files onto my reformatted computer from the external drive. Gotta do that soon.

Random Thought:
I was just looking at my SoundCloud likes by grid view, and thinking that a lot of covers for these songs are still very relevant and even strongly encouraged by the site's user interface, despite the decline of any physical real-world use for them (i.e. these songs are not generally wide-spread enough to be on a physical CD sold in a store, which is going out of style anyway).

All this information is there for the taking, in about 500 likes since I started heavily using SoundCloud about eighteen months ago. I wonder if there is also some sort of pattern that can be found in the procession of the grid view of squares of art, as correlated with my wavering interest in different sub-genres. For example, the following:

One of these songs is extremely different from the others in terms of genre. Do you see a pattern of (almost) all of them? Can you tell which one is the odd one out? (Hint: it's bright red.)

So maybe I can scrape some sort of API to get the information I need in spreadsheet format, and create a static processing sketch that lays them all out? Maybe I could even export it to a PDF format so I could print it.

Inspiration: Singing Bowls
One of the fellow members of our drumming band has Tibetan singing bowls, which produce what is probably my favourite sound in the entire world. He brought all three of them camping with him, and played them on both nights at the fire. It was one of the most relaxing and wonderful things that have ever happened to me.

The crazy thing is that you can find recordings of this stuff on YouTube - nine hours long. Lots of heavy meditation happening there. Here's a particularly long one, don't hesitate to watch the whole thing.