Jonathan Field - Maker of Random Stuff

I’ve been writing a lot since I arrived in South Africa a couple weeks ago. I’m going to start posting today, and I’ll try to post a little something every day. However I am going to do it a little different this time: I’m going to keep the posts “friends only”, so that I don’t have to worry so much about privacy in an increasingly connected society over here. If you want to read the posts, just sign up with LiveJournal (if you haven’t already) and “friend” me.

I hope that my thoughts, however slightly filtered, are at least comprehensible. And maybe even enjoyable.

Feedback is most welcome!

I leave in just four days! I don’t have much time to work this out but it has been requested by Alan and Donna that I try to secure a used laptop computer to bring to South Africa with me. One of their most promising students is Simangaliso, a fellow I wrote about on my last visit on a few occasions.

Apparently the laptop he’s been using for his studies has died. He’s in his last year of college and they were hoping to help him out. Nothing fancy, just a small Windows laptop that could run Office 07. Because the organization is so small, they do not have official non-profit status, so it’s not tax-deductable, but I assure you there’s no profit, and it will be put directly to good use.

If you’ve got something that would fit the bill laying around that you’re not using, and that you’d like to donate, drop me a line at…

Update All set!

In just over a week, I’ll be leaving for a second visit to South Africa. It’s been three years. I’m looking forward to it, as my life here, while fun, hasn’t been inspiring me the way it used to. I figure I should get out and just do something positive, and hopefully that will give me the energy and ideas to take on further challenges. Anything to save me from more days just wasting away online!

That doesn’t mean I won’t be online: I’m still considering whether I should undertake writing a detailed daily blog about my experiences there. I think that writing things down day-by-day last time set the experience much more firmly in my mind than if I hadn’t done so. So perhaps I should do that again, to make the most of it. On the other hand my spending several hours each night writing on my computer may have kept me from other adventures… though I can’t imagine what they might have been, as overloaded with new experiences as I was!

I think I’m leaning towards blogging it again, but we’ll see how I feel when I get there. Another option presented to me by a friend’s gift is to do it oldschool in a paper-and-graphite journal. That might be a fun way to go about it, though I worry whether I’ll even be able to decipher my own handwriting, as out of practice as I am!

I’m going to be there for two months. I’ll be doing the same basic stuff I did last time, to start, though my uncle has suggested that if I see any new and interesting projects come up I should branch off and do them. That sounds fun and scary… two things I tend to like.

I’m looking forward to seeing some of the people I connected with last time to see how their lives have progressed, and make more good memories.

Strangely, I think I’m in a more subdued state than I was last time. I was a bit crazy with shaking off enormous work responsibilities when I did my last trip. I was exhausted yet somehow energetic. This time I feel a little less energized. How that will effect my trip I don’t know. Perhaps the energy there will get me in gear. That’s what I’m hoping, anyway.

Until then, I’m just hanging out and taking a quick visit to Kentucky to see the state of the Zappos warehouse and the people within. I haven’t been there in 3 years either. Should be a fun weekend… and then off I go.

Flying in to Boston I watched the in-flight movie 500 Days of Summer. Really enjoyed it. It’s a story that touches on notions of coincidence and fate in love. Highly recommended it if you like quirky, bittersweet romance.

After the movie I was reading my book club book — Guns, Germs, and Steel. It’s about the development of societies around the globe over the past 10,000 years or so, the resulting clashes, and possible reasons for the course that human history ultimately took. It’s dense stuff, but I am enjoying it so far. I am the one who suggested this book for the book club. My fellow book club members Lisa and Christa are, as of yet, skeptical that they’ll find anything in it to enjoy.

Anyway, at some point I got up to stretch my legs and noticed that a girl in the row in front of me had the same book on her tray table. I was a bit surprised — even though it’s a pulitzer prize winning book, I’d say it falls far short of being terribly common.

In the movie 500 Days of Summer we’d all just watched, there’s a part where a chance question by a passer-by about a book one of the characters is reading leads to them falling in love and getting married. And with that setup, here we were. I tried to nonchalantly get a look at the reader.

She was a slender medium-blonde haired girl, probably just a few years younger than me. She had her hair pulled back simply, revealing a cute, attractive face, adorned with thin black rimmed librarian glasses. She wore no makeup and didn’t need to. She was the quintessential secretly hot bookworm girl. She was talking quietly with a girlfriend.

I considered this for a moment as I sat back down and continued my read. The flight was almost done and I figured there might be a chance to say “hi” as we disembarked.

On the ground as we all got up her friend spotted my book, which I made sure to keep visible as I got my stuff together. She whispered to her pretty librarian friend, “Look! That guy is reading the same book!” And then with a quiet laugh, “It’s fate!”. I could only just barely hear their conversation, which was not intended for me, so I didn’t look over. The pretty librarian girl simply replied “Yeah, right.”

A moment later the friend asked me to get her jacket down, which I did in as friendly and manly a way as I could muster, hoping that she’d mention something about the book I was still prominently holding. At this point the pretty librarian girl had long since put her own book away. Then there was a bit of a hold up as an older lady had some trouble getting her bag down, and I offered to help her. After things started moving again the pretty librarian girl said “thank you” to me, presumably for helping the older lady. Then she headed down the aisle and out herself. I walked out behind her.

I thought that maybe I’d say something to her as she waited by baggage claim, but after walking behind her for a couple minutes on the way there, I decided not to. She never glanced back. I lost track of her a few moments later.

Oh well — she was probably just reading it reluctantly at the suggestion of some annoying book club guy anyway.

The morning after my first full-scale vodka tasting party was not nearly as painful as I feared it might be. Here is the full report!

The Tasters:

Alex, Austin, Crystal, Dylan, Me, Pawel, Sotheavy

The Vodkas:

Belvedere	$26.99
Grey Goose	$25.99
Effen	$25.99
Absolut	$18.99
Skyy	$14.99
Vitali	$6.99

The Method:

Double-blind(ish) tasting, each participant ranks all vodkas, from best (1) to worst (6).

Our vodka experts were invited over for a Saturday afternoon cookout. After the meal we gathered inside for the tasting. I prepared official ballots for the participants. You will note that the ballot lists Ketel One, but this was swapped out for Effen, which Pawel had brought.

(I am amused by the fact that the invite said “if you want anything besides meat and vodka, bring it!”, and Pawel brought more vodka. It is for such reasons that we are friends.)

I set out 42 glasses, and Sotheavy helped me label each set “A” through “F” with little stickers before filling. Then, while people played Beatles Rock Band, I filled each with about a half-shot and wrote down which was which. This would normally make it a single-blind test, but I honestly forgot which vodkas corresponded to which letters by the time I was done. I think this officially qualifies as double-blind-ish.

Here is a picture of the spread.

We all did our tasting at the same time, but not in a structured fashion. Chips and lemon wedges were available for palette cleansing. The goal was simply to rank them according to personal taste, not by price or match to the “correct” vodka.

Nobody did them as shots. We all spent a good amount of time going through the process, tasting and re-tasting, adjusting our rankings. I would estimate the group spent about 15-20 minutes working on it.

After everyone had their ranking finalized, it was time to view the results!

And the results are… (drum roll please)

Continue reading →

Whoops — I kind of dropped the ball there on blogging about my album. But it was for a reason: I decided that I need to update my personal site which hasn’t been updated since roughly 2000. I want to have a sort of central place for the stuff I make and then I’ll return to blogging about my album again, possibly in a slightly revised format. I hope to have that worked out within a month.

However in the interest of keeping up my main hobby, which is procrastinating, I haven’t been working on redesigning my site for the past few weeks anyway. Here’s what I have been up to:

• Celebrity Guess Who
  Teaming up with The Reverend Brendan Powell Smith who had created a series of fun celebrity-guessing party games over the past year or two, we put together a web version that tests your facial recognition skills and your pop culture knowledge at the same time. My first bit of serious programming in over a year, and my first AJAX project ever, I had a lot of fun making it. I managed to get drawn in enough to pull an all-nighter or two!

• All-Day Buffet
  I just returned from about 34 hours at the Excalibur hotel in Las Vegas, where I rented a room for two nights (just $36/night!) and joined my friends Lisa, Dave, and Cheryl for an all-day buffet pass (just $25!). We had breakfast, lunch, and dinner right there. As gross as that may sound to some, it was actually wonderful. There’s no gourmet food at the Excalibur buffet, but what is there is well-made and very tasty. Between meals we talked up a storm, played games at the midway, had free champagne, hit the pool, Dave played in a poker tournament, and they all did some general gambling as well. Sophie stopped by for a bit, but could not bring herself to do three buffet meals in one day. I can’t say I’d do anything like that again any time soon, but I enjoyed it immensely and seem to have gained only 6 lbs.

• Tickets to South Africa
  I committed and bought tickets to South Africa for next spring! Eight weeks from March to May. I got a real connection to that place on my last visit, and I’ve wanted to return ever since. A and D continue to go every year and work in the schools there, and it looks like this year I’ll have both the time and money to go help again. I continue to be amazed at how little we understand about what makes a healthy society function, and yet how much we take it for granted. I don’t have any insight into it myself, but I want to observe close-up the struggles of a society on the cusp to see what I can learn.

Oh, and the latest TV show that will receive the J Field Death Touch ™: FlashForward. It just premiered, I like it and I am curious to see where it goes. That means, without question, that it will be cancelled before resolving. You heard it here first.

Over the next few weeks I am going to post about each song on my album in turn. The posts will include the story behind each song, some notes about the recording process, a streaming copy so you can listen while you read, and for the truly curious I’ll be putting up the GarageBand files as well.

I think the Garageband files might be interesting for anyone who is recording with GarageBand themselves; to see how the sounds were created and the songs constructed. If you know anyone who might find it interesting, spread the word.

Without further ado, here’s the first song on the album, and the first song I recorded for the album…

This past March I went on a two week road trip up the west coast and back with my friend Lisa. We had a great time cruising in her RV, yet I was depressed for most of the trip. I had been going through some dramatic changes over the previous several months, including a divorce, and I had yet to see the light. I’m not sure how apparent this was to her or to the people we visited along the way; I kept it to myself as much as possible. There’s sometimes a strange contrast between the interior and exterior.

We got back to Las Vegas in late March, and I remember the first night home I was very glad to be back. Though the trip was absolutely great, there was a part of me that was uncomfortable ignoring my depression for all that time. I didn’t know what to do about it, but being back in the house alone I felt awful, yet relieved to be able to let myself feel awful.

One thing was sure that first night home: I couldn’t sleep. It was in this insomnious state that I went into my studio for the first time in several months and picked up my guiltar. In the unlit room I plucked out a few unplanned notes: the spare opening guitar line of Nocturne. The resigned simplicity of it and the pacing resonated with me, and so I decided to record.

I knew I wanted the guitar to sound very distant, and slowly approach the listener. Even though the style of the song was very different from what I normally do, it came pretty naturally. I had the intro, first verse, and bridge section recorded in a couple hours.

I felt right away that I wanted the song to be the opening to an album — not that I actually believed I’d record a whole album at the time; I’d had more than a few false starts on such things over the years. But I liked the idea of setting a tone of sleepy melancholy and then exploring that through several songs. Maybe an album about one lonely night from sundown to sunrise.

I had so much unfinished music I’d accumulated over the years, but I thought to myself that I’d let go of the past, and write all new songs. They’d be more atmospheric, darker, with a deliberate pacing. An album that you could listen to while falling asleep. And then as the morning light came, I went to sleep myself, having completed the first half of the tune.

I let the half song sit on my iPod for a week or two before recording the second half. I listened to it often while driving around in my car. I seem to use the car as a secondary listening room; a way to see how the songs sound when played out in the real world. My car just has a stock stereo, and it’s good to hear what happens to the mix on a non-ideal system. But just as importantly, driving around puts me in a different frame of mind from being in the studio, so I get different insights into the music. Eventually I went back to the song and added the second verse and the ending.

The only part that gave me any trouble was getting the last vocal section right; the part that begins at around 2:18. But even that came together relatively easily.

I’ve been pleasantly surprised with the reaction to this song, which has been very positive. It is a little shorter and simpler than most of the other songs, and in some ways I thought of it as an intro rather than stand-alone. But several people have named it as their favorite tune on the album, so I guess it works well in any case.

Technical Notes:

Like everything on the album, Nocturne was recorded with a relatively simple setup: a MacBook Pro running GarageBand 09 via a Tascam US-122 audio/midi box. Vocals were recorded through a Sure Beta 87.

For instruments: I used a relatively new Schecter electric guitar, the only electric I currently own. My bass is an old Peavey Dyna Bass (in passive mode) bought used around 1993. The keyboard sounds were from GarageBand using my old Ensoniq as a MIDI controller.

The drums on this song are a loop from one of the excellent “Jam Packs” that I got for GarageBand. For years I avoided loops, considering it cheating. But in the past couple years I’ve got over myself and decided to serve the song over my ego. I found this rhythm loop fit perfectly, and I added only a few fills of my own and the percussion during the second bridge/finale section.

Here is the Nocturne GarageBand file. You’ll need GarageBand 09 to open it or, I am told, recent versions of Logic Audio can open GarageBand files too.

I’ll be posting about the title track, “Drift” in a few days!

As of yesterday, my album is now available in iTunes! Yay!

I think it’s amusing that I ended up with a “Parental Advisory” label, but I’ve only got myself to blame. Without too much thought I flagged “So Hard” as having explicit content when I was adding it to CD Baby. So there you go.

Over the next couple weeks I’m going to blog about each song on the album, and I’m going to release the raw GarageBand files. Crazy? Perhaps — but I hope it’ll be interesting for some people to poke around and see how the songs were put together. I’ll try to give a little insight into how and why they came to be, as well.

The songs are available for free download in my July 4th blog entry, and you are welcome to grab them. If you find yourself replaying and enjoying the songs as much as other songs you’ve paid for, please buy a copy from iTunes, or if you want a hard copy CD, buy one from CD Baby. Otherwise, please feel no obligation!

Honest reviews on either site are also appreciated!