The keyboard is a bit of an awkward instrument to travel with. It's quite large, to the point that you have to give up at least one seat in a typical car. What makes this especially frustrating is that I don't actually use the whole 88 keys:

The very lowest notes tend to be boomy, while the higher notes are just not very useful in playing the kind of music I play. I use a bit over five octaves (B0-D6, 31-1175 Hz).

At the same time I've been wanting to have a separate keyboard for taking to gigs. The ideal, really, would be to have an entire duplicate rig, which would halve the amount of setup and teardown involved, since I would only need to set up and pack away at gigs. This is enough extra effort and expense, however, that for now I'm just duplicating the keyboard (and stand).

I decided to get a Yamaha P-121:

It is the discontinued 73-key version of the P-125, which is the ~current version of my P-85. [1] Which made it a bit hard to find one, but there was one new-in-box shipping from Japan on eBay. I was a bit nervous, but it worked out fine.

One thing I like about renting cars when I travel is that it's an opportunity to get a sense for a car that's a lot more detailed than what you'd get with a test drive. Traveling to DC for work a few days ago, I took the opportunity to rent a 2023 Chevy Bolt. This is the second time I've rented an electric vehicle, and overall it was the inverse of my experience renting a Tesla:

• With the Bolt, everything was fine except charging.

• With the Model 3, the only good part was the charging.

The car acted like a car, which is what I want. No overly minimalist design where I can't find anything, no automatic wipers that fail to detect spray from the road, and especially no too-smart cruise control with phantom braking. Just a car.

When I'm doing exploratory work I want to run many analyses. I'm usually optimizing for getting something quick, but I want to document what I'm doing enough that if there are questions about my analysis or I later want to draw on it I can reconstruct what I did. I've taken a few approaches to this over the years, but here's how I work these days:

1. For each analysis I make a local directory, ~/work/YYYY-MM-DD--topic/. These contain large files I'm copying locally to work with, temporary files, and outputs. When these get too big I delete them; they're not backed up, and I can rebuild them from things that are backed up.

2. Code goes in a git repo, in files named like YYYY-MM-DD--topic.py. Most of my work lately has been going into an internal repo, but if there's nothing sensitive I'll use a public one. I don't bother with meaningful commit messages; the goal is just to get the deltas backed up. If I later want to run an analysis similar to an old one I duplicate the code and make a new work directory.

3. Code is run from the command line in the work directory, which means that in my permanent shell history every command I ran related to topic will be tagged with ~/work/YYYY-MM-DD--topic/.

Lily recently wrote a song, and I've been helping them record it. I got us set up to record four tracks (vocals, drums, keyboard x2) and we did a bunch of takes:

When I initially switched the computer portion of my rhythm stage setup over to a Raspberry PI I went with a 32GB SD card because that's recommended. But I don't need very much space for what I'm doing and a bigger SD card makes copies slow: the cheap cards I've been using take me over an hour to write with my Mac's card reader.

I recently made some changes to my setup, removing support for bass whistle on the PI (now that I have an arduino-based version) and adding support for more foot-bass options. This normally means round of re-imaging all of my SD cards: I have a bunch of them because SD card corruption is probably the most common reason my system breaks [1], and it's easy to have extra cards. I'm pretty sick of 82-minute waits, however, so I decided to go down to four-GB SD cards.

One of the things I like most about contra dance is how it works with a very wide range of skill levels, including having one of the best learning curves of any dance form I know. As a community we are pretty committed to the idea that people should just be able to show up and start dancing, no lessons required. Which is why I'm very excited about a new "Becket first" approach I've been seeing from several callers.

Contra dance has several common starting formations, which are traditionally taught as: