Aaron Parecki

I got a late start again today because of the morning W3C call. The call goes from 8-9am, tho sometimes runs late, and there's usually a bunch to follow up on with individual people after the call. I didn't end up getting started until noon!

This morning I worked on finishing the first two websub.rocks tests for hubs! I managed to finish them pretty much on schedule for the morning. Now you can test whether your hubs send WebSub notifications that are properly formatted! Superfeedr and Switchboard both pass the tests, and I filed an issue for Mastodon's built-in hub which should bring it up to spec.

I started later than I wanted to this morning, because I got distracted with something else first thing. I'm going to have to get better about jumping straight into these projects in the morning.

I managed to get a start at an acceptable time this morning! I focused on finishing the websub.rocks tests for subscribers. I pushed a little longer than I had originally wanted to, but I was really close to wrapping up all the tests and figured it'd be better to just finish. I'm happy to say that the tests for subscribers are complete now, including the template implementation report!

This morning I had a W3C phone conference for the new Social Web Incubator Community Group, so I didn't get started on Maniac Morning until the late afternoon. I ended up at a coffee shop with a nice back patio and made some good progress on websub.rocks!

Day 2 of filming CSVConf, basically didn't use my computer the whole day except to publish the timelapse of everyone arriving in the chapel: https://aaronparecki.com/2017/05/03/14/csvconf

This is not what I intended to do for Maniac Mornings, but I had already been booked to record the talks at CSVConf before I started this project, so I'm posting this anyway. I spent the whole day Tuesday and Wednesday at the conference filming up in the balcony.

This morning I worked on the websub.rocks test suite, and wrote a helper library for creating a WebSub client.

Day 100. As you can probably imagine, I was spending a lot of energy trying to figure out what to do for my 100th day. I had considered a few options, like "33 seconds of silence", or a bizarre mashup of the previous 99 songs. In the end, I decided to make the final song be just one note, a massive orchestra hit. It turns out it takes a surprising number of instruments to make this sound like anything still. Several layers of strings, various percussion instruments, a large piano chord, and I even snuck in a subtle hint of the electronic cello that's been featured in a few of my songs. And with that, I am done! I've published all the songs and videos on a web page if you want to browse through the archives! https://100.aaronparecki.com

Day 99. Almost done. I had fun with the pizzicato strings in this one. The pizzicato cello and the snare drum hold down the rhythm, and I have a few different violins and violas playing the melody.

Day 98. Another multiple-layer piano track. Each piano has a different effect applied. Echo, reverbs, EQ to emphasize specific frequencies.

Day 97. Further proving the theory that when I don't have a plan for the day, I end up finishing way sooner than I thought, today's song took less than an hour. As usual, I started this with the piano intro, and built it up from there. I considered using a drum set, but then opted for a light bongo track instead. The piano part is actually two overlaid tracks in the same range, which for some reason ends up working nicely together. I think the middle section could use a little more buildup, but the flute does an okay job at denoting the middle section.

Day 96. I always seem to spend a lot more time on these when there's a specific sound I'm going for. This one turned out to take way more layers than I expected. I'm still a little confused why I couldn't quite get the string section to sound correctly "on" the beat. I tried snapping it exactly to the beat, and that sounded too lagging in some cases, so I tried moving up a few of the notes in some cases. It's not quite right, but it's about as close as I can get it.

Day 95. I wanted to try something in a medieval style, so this is a quick sketch mostly experimenting with the instrumentation of it.

Day 94. I didn't have a great plan for this today. There's a lot of sounds going on here, but I tried to make a few of the highlights stand out. I think also after a few days in a row of doing piano-centric songs, I tend to try something in a totally different direction just to make sure I'm not getting stuck.

Day 93. I didn't end up finishing today's song before going to the studio for my last class, so I had to finish it here. I ended up doing something pretty simple just cause I didn't have much time. The video is some test footage we shot on the green screen earlier today.

Day 92. This is maybe a little more wander-y than I wanted, I wasn't expecting to bring in the orchestra in the middle until after I had started. I originally thought it would be just piano again. There's a couple little nods to some other songs in here if you listen closely.

Day 91. I don't know why I'm on such a piano kick lately. This one was kind of fun because it's more notes than can be played with two hands, but doesn't totally sound like it.