{"id":327,"date":"2019-08-07T11:17:29","date_gmt":"2019-08-07T15:17:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/patrickmauro.net\/blog\/?p=327"},"modified":"2021-03-17T12:41:04","modified_gmt":"2021-03-17T16:41:04","slug":"state-of-the-prang-summer-2019","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/patrickmauro.net\/blog\/?p=327","title":{"rendered":"State of the Prang &#8211; Summer 2019"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>It&#8217;s been a minute since my last post, so I wanted to bring you all up to speed on what&#8217;s been going on in my life since then. This will be a long post &#8211; here we go!<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Work Stuff<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>I&#8217;ve recently been promoted to <strong>Senior Consultant<\/strong> at my company, a fintech consulting firm that provides clients with development &amp; support for business analytics applications &#8211; after being with them for a little over 3 years. Having worked previously in both IT support and application development roles, this place has been a pretty solid fit for me, as it sort of combines my favorite aspects of both workflows. I have worked with a variety of clients during my time here, and have recently been able to add Port Authority to this list.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I&#8217;ve also recently been tapped to write some documentation &amp; other content for the company&#8217;s blog. <a href=\"https:\/\/www.acgi.com\/blog\/adding-single-sign-on-to-ibm-planning-analytics-local\">Here&#8217;s a recent example, on integrating SSO capabilities into IBM Planning Analytics Local.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Music Stuff<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>After having taken a bit of a break from music, I&#8217;ve been getting back in the swing of things a bit, and have a couple projects I&#8217;ve been working on recently.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>First: the release of the <strong>Light &amp; Sweet EP<\/strong>, which I mentioned in my last post, has stalled a bit, as I&#8217;ve brought another producer on board, and we are doing a complete re-mix of the entire project to give it a bit more of a professional sheen. In the meantime, here&#8217;s another sample from the project (the original mix anyway): <br> <iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"100%\" height=\"300\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https:\/\/w.soundcloud.com\/player\/?url=https%3A\/\/api.soundcloud.com\/tracks\/410859687&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true&amp;visual=true\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But I have some other side stuff I&#8217;ve been working on as well &#8211; recently, I&#8217;ve been trying to incorporate more <strong>analog synth<\/strong> into my work, inspired by some of the collaborations I&#8217;ve done with my good friends in <a href=\"http:\/\/weatherontheinternet.com\/\">the band Weather<\/a>, with whom I now share a music studio (!!). So last autumn, to get myself more comfortable with the required workflows, I decided I&#8217;d try adapting something for analog synth, as an exercise. I&#8217;d been listening to <strong>Steve Reich<\/strong> a lot at the time, and the third movement from his composition <strong>&#8220;Electric Counterpoint&#8221;<\/strong> seemed like an excellent candidate, so I gave this a shot. Every sound here was created with a <strong>Korg Volca Keys<\/strong> synthesizer &#8211; with the exception of a drum machine I applied later in Logic. This addition might be a bit controversial to some, but I felt it was missing a certain je ne sais quoi as-is. In my opinion, you can&#8217;t be afraid to add some personal flair when adapting or covering something! Otherwise, why bother?<br> <iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"100%\" height=\"300\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https:\/\/w.soundcloud.com\/player\/?url=https%3A\/\/api.soundcloud.com\/tracks\/527910888&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true&amp;visual=true\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And finally, on the much sillier side &#8211; I recently discovered the wonderful world of <em>j a z z m e m e s<\/em>&#8230; inspired by the incredible work of <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/user\/havic5\">Adam Neely<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/channel\/UCIglhQNl15_hi0M0FD2BFCQ\">Simon Fransman<\/a> and others, a couple weeks ago I decided I wanted to try my hand at one myself. This is a goof, but it actually took a lot of work!<br> <iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"100%\" height=\"300\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https:\/\/w.soundcloud.com\/player\/?url=https%3A\/\/api.soundcloud.com\/tracks\/646262472&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true&amp;visual=true\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>As an aside: Recently I&#8217;ve been thinking about some of my older tunes, and what I should do with them &#8211; they aren&#8217;t doing any good just sitting on my hard drive collecting e-dust. Should I put them out as-is in a quick-n-dirty compilation release? Should I clean them up? I don&#8217;t know yet&#8230; but either way, in the spirit of that, I&#8217;ve restored a bunch of old stuff to the site that had been missing before &#8211; I&#8217;ll explain in a little more detail in the next section&#8230;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Website Stuff<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>First up: As I alluded to above, <strong>I&#8217;ve restored a bunch of older content to the site that was missing before.<\/strong> Back in the iWeb iteration of this site from when I was in high school (oh yeah), &#8220;blog&#8221; posts and &#8220;music&#8221; posts were essentially two separate feeds, and when I made the transition to Blogger (and then later to WordPress), I only ever imported the actual &#8220;blog&#8221; feed. Having recently stumbled on an old backup, I&#8217;ve gone back and manually restored all of these old &#8220;music&#8221; posts as normal blog posts, taking extra care to make sure the timestamps on each are accurate. So, if you go back through the 2007-2010 period of my blog, you will notice some new posts that weren&#8217;t there before!<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But &#8211; most of the actual music referenced in those posts would have been missing as-is, since I switched to SoundCloud to manage my &#8220;public&#8221; music library in 2012, and most of the older content didn&#8217;t make the cut. So, to supplement these new posts, I also screened <em>every<\/em> post in the blog and <strong>re-added any missing music<\/strong> that I previously removed. <em>At the time,<\/em> it made sense to offload <em>all<\/em> of my music to a service like SoundCloud &#8211; but I&#8217;ve had my own private hosting solution since about 2013, so there&#8217;s actually no real reason I can&#8217;t just upload <em>everything<\/em>, even if it&#8217;s stuff I&#8217;m not super proud of. I don&#8217;t know why it never occurred to me to do this before, but I decided to finally take advantage of this and restore the missing content. So now, every post that makes a reference to a track has a link to the relevant track, regardless of whether or not there&#8217;s a newer equivalent on SoundCloud.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>This also gave me the opportunity to <em>add<\/em> some extra goodies I hadn&#8217;t shared before&#8230; for example, here is the original recording of Oedipus Rex from way back in <strong><em>2005<\/em><\/strong>, in all its glorious MIDI terribleness!<br> <audio controls=\"\"><source src=\"\/files\/Oedipus Rex.mp3\" type=\"audio\/mpeg\"><\/audio><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I also collected all these and grouped them into a new &#8220;Old Music Archive&#8221; sub-page. I also did manage to dig around and find an old raw html version of the last iteration of the &#8220;music&#8221; page that existed on the Blogger version of my site right before I went to SoundCloud &#8211; after cleaning it up a little I also put a version of that up as well; as I figured there&#8217;s something to be said for having a version of it preserved pretty much the way it was.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>On the technical side,<\/strong> I&#8217;ve been doing some additional tinkering since my last update. The site itself is now a bit more responsive thanks to some PHP &amp; html5 enhancements I added in &#8211; this makes the site feel a bit more modern and behave a bit better on mobile devices. Using PHP, I&#8217;ve also minimized WordPress&#8217;s role in the site so it basically just injects text (and manages the blog&#8217;s database), giving me as much manual control over the site as a whole as possible. The source code I&#8217;d put on GitHub back in 2015 is now super, super out of date, but to be honest I don&#8217;t really care, and I don&#8217;t think I&#8217;m gonna bother updating it. But I&#8217;ve said this before and I&#8217;ll say again &#8211; my site isn&#8217;t the best, most professional thing in the world, but it&#8217;s mine, dammit; I created it from scratch, and I&#8217;m proud of it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>That&#8217;s it for now! Stay tuned for more updates soon!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s been a minute since my last post, so I wanted to bring you all up to speed on what&#8217;s been going on in my life since then. This will be a long post &#8211; here we go! Work Stuff &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/patrickmauro.net\/blog\/?p=327\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-327","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/patrickmauro.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/327","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/patrickmauro.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/patrickmauro.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/patrickmauro.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/patrickmauro.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=327"}],"version-history":[{"count":46,"href":"https:\/\/patrickmauro.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/327\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":383,"href":"https:\/\/patrickmauro.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/327\/revisions\/383"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/patrickmauro.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=327"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/patrickmauro.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=327"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/patrickmauro.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=327"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}