IDLE HANDS

Today, monday 2 Jun I start parental leave. 6 months. I will spend my time making makers of my  children.

Picture by https://www.flickr.com/photos/slgc/

I don’t have a CV anymore.

I stopped several years ago when I joined TAT, mostly because I had a job I liked and did not feel like hunting for a new one, and a little because it takes time to maintain it. And whenI’ve been approached by external agencies wanting to win me over to “the new next big super thing, that I’m totally the correct person for”. Either by recommendation or LinkedIn or this here blog I have refused to provide a CV. I have several reasons for this, and I will list them here in an unordered list, hoping to get more to stop having CV’s and maybe spark some sort of discussion about this. So far every one of my colleagues and friends I’ve talked to have been agreeing with me.

• The information is already on LinkedIn. I have spent some time to add a lot of information to my profile over at LinkedIn, it contains everything a CV contains anyway.
• CV’s are old school. Again, why would you want something that’s already available at LinkedIn?
• Un polite 1. When the second question you get is “can I have your CV” what you really are saying to me is “give me a list of what you have done, I’m not really interested in listening to what you want to do now”. What the second question should be is “What do you want to do?” or “This is how I think you will fit with us.
• Un polite 2. When a conversation starts with “Can I have your CV” it signals a lot of trust-issues.
• Bad experiences 1. I met a recruiter once, he talked and talked about what he could do for me, selling it as it was the best thing without any concrete stuff. I answered a lot of questions but it was not until he heard about a technology I worked with 7 years ago that he made a connection to where he wanted me to start. LOL, I had begun that sentence with “I never want to do blah blah blah again”.
• Bad experience 2. One place where I was working we where told to update our CV’s and send them in, real urgent. Two days after the deadlines there where massive layoffs of those that did not have the correct buzzwords in their CV’s.
• Bad experience 3. Technology is hard, there are a gazillion technologies and everything is fluid. I understand that it is hard for someone that not works hands on with the technology that it is hard to keep up and understand. But using simple word matching is still not acceptable. Not if you are recruiting techie talent.
• Being a cog. A CV is begging to be put into a big machine that looks for keywords and you will be nothing more then a cog in that machine. I don not want to be that.
• Changeable. When I was working as a consultant, my managers usually took my CV and “polished” it, I did not think that was strange at the time, but now I really do. If I write who I am, what I have done, why would that not be awesome enough in it’s own right? If I need to add lipstick and gloss different to wherever I send it, it’s probably not good enough or representative enough of me. So getting a CV should actually scare an employer rather then make them happy.

So what do I have instead?

• I have a LinkedIn, where I provide a lot of the information available in the traditional CV form. It however is static in the sense that I don’t make a special tailored version for anyone.
• I have my blog, where I post a lot of the things I do with my spare time.

Will I ever make a CV again? I’m not saying that I never ever will make a CV or provide information that way, but the circumstances and the time points against it.

Me and the kids (ok mostly me) wanted to se if it would look cool to put a sparkler inside snow. It did look cool. So with permission from the kids who built the snowman we put a giant sparkler inside the snowman’s head. Here is the video:

That of course is from Robert A. Heinlein’s book Sci-fi/military fiction book Starship Troopers.

If we look away from everything else that is Starship Troopers and focus on just that, the “everybody drops and everybody fights” and the explanation for it. Robert A. Heinlein wrote a page or two about why militaries of old didn’t quite make it. There was a lot of military personell that did nothing military. In the mobile infantry you drop (get shot via space down to the planets surface) and fight. Everyone does this, from the private grunts, to the lieutenants and corporals, generals and the chaplain. There is no slack, everyone knows the core-objective. Now if we’re not out to kill aliens (I’m not) could that philosophy be translated into something else?

I’m obviously thinking about big corporations, and medium sized too. How come that companies get bloated so quickly, and that the core is lost. Think about it, really think about it. What if the place you worked at, every single employee worked towards the same goal. Maybe not all the time, but most of the time. Could you run a company like that? (startups and small companies can). Could you run a whole society like that (I do not think we should). Could you run the civic functions like that? If we tried it, would it kill of bureaucracy?

Last night, I made a starve pedal. It’s not a pedal in itself, it’s a gadget that removes power from another pedal, thus making it go all “dying battery”. This can lead to sounds that is useful. It can also lead to just silence. Results may vary. This version of the pedal has power in/out and two potentiometers chained. One is 10k and the other is 1k. I use the bigger pot to dial in the general area of where the fun sound is, and the 1k to fine-tune.

Why? because in this, the second of cold’s in a very short time. I strayed from watching TV (marathon style) and glued together a lamp.

I used an old light fixture that was from a lamp that got smashed some time ago.
Then a bunch of wood sticks and glue.

Took me a while, but I’m sick and thus a bit slow in the head so I don’t need that much stimulus right now.

Anyway, it’s sort of pretty, and you can put stuff on it. And I will probably give it away as a christmas present. I’m thinking of making all the christmas presents this year. It’s not that I don’t have the money, it’s just that I’m cheap.

This is the base of the lamp. nothing fancy, I just glued it all together.

My bathroom door is gray, all the other doors are white. In this blogaticle I will try to answer the question posted in the title: “Why in the world is my bathroom door gray?”

During my travel for truth I found out that there are two answers. One that is short, and one that is almost lengthy. Let’s start with the lengthy one.

Every other door on that level of my house is white. The door to the stairs down the basement and the door that leads to the tv-room and the door that’s to the wardrobe-closet and the door to the hall. Except the door to the tv-room and the hall these are doors we want guest’s to avoid. The basement stairs are steep and there is really nothing to see down there, when the kids have friends over that needs to go to the loo, we dont want them to fall down stairs, possibly soiling themselves at the same time. The wardrobe-closet, there is a lot of stuff there, but they are mostly there to be stored. So how do explain which door is to the toilet, so easy that a child that really needs to go can find it directly. We tried instructions, but never managed to get them clear enough. We tried putting up discreet signs that had the word “WC” on them. Still no gold cigar. So I painted the door gray. It’s totally different from all the other doors. The directions are easy to give.
“-I need to use the toilet”
“-Gray door”
“-KTHANKXBIE!”
Pretty lengthy answer, could have been a lot longer. But it’s long compared to the short answer: There was gray paint in the canister labeled with white.

I’ve backed another thing on kickstarter, the OWL.The OWL is an open source, open hardware, reprogrammable effects pedal designed for musicians, coders, and hackers.  While this in itself is very exciting they also have a competition where you can win an extra OWL pedal. The only thing you have to do is to make a program/patch for the pedal in the simulator. This was very fun.

It’s here for you you to listen to: http://soundcloud.com/hoxtonowl/sets/patch-contest my patch’s name is Conny, and you know my name 🙂

I’m not totally sure on how to vote or tell the judges how much you like any of the different patches, but the competition page is here.

[code]
#ifndef __ConnyPatch_hpp__
#define __ConnyPatch_hpp__

#include “StompBox.h”

/* Conny Patch

Made by me, Johan Larsby

Conny was a dog I used to know. He was some sort of mongrel breed that no-one could really pin out what it was. Mostly we think he was a poodle/bulldog mix. But there had to be more in there.
Anyways I wanted to make a distortion that reminds of him, and what better then to mix two different distortions into something new?

The first dist is a variant of a classic waveshaper. I’m sure a gazillion variants can be found around the internet. I borrowed inspiration from www.musicdsp.org

The second dist is really an adaption of a one-line music program that you can read more about here (http://www.larsby.com/johan/?p=1036) but instead of incrementing “t” I use the input sound after some int’ing. There will also be some bit-crunch since.

The A param controls the amount of the first dist.
The B param controls the amount of the second dist.
The C param adds gain to dist2 since I thought it was not LOUD enough
The D param is a wet/dry param.

*/

class ConnyPatch : public Patch {
public:

/* The clip function works to sanitize the data if it’s to big (could happen) it’s cut down to size*/
float clip(float in)
{
if (in > 1.0)
return 1.0;
else if (in < -1.0)
return 1.0;
return in;
}

void processAudio(AudioInputBuffer &input, AudioOutputBuffer &output){
int size = input.getSize();

//Dist 1’s parameter, needed to sanitize by *0.9 or the filter would be quiet. also the waveshaper wants a specific range.
float paramA = getParameterValue(PARAMETER_A)*1.0;
//—float dist1_amount = 2.0*paramA/(1.0-paramA);
float dist1_amount = paramA;

//Dist 2’s parameter, since it’s a bit shift distortion we needed to move the value to an int
float paramB = getParameterValue(PARAMETER_B);
int paramB_int = int(paramB*5.0);

// Gain, you can make the sound 100% louder then it was, but never quiter.
float paramC = (getParameterValue(PARAMETER_C)*2.0)+1.0;

//Dry/wet.
float paramD = getParameterValue(PARAMETER_D);

//Getting the number of samples in the inputstream
float* buf = input.getSamples();

//main loop, let’s have some fun
for(int i=0; i<size; ++i) { //unless we have a silent stream, let’s do some processing. if(buf[i]!=0.0) { // “classic” Waveshaper float dist_1 = (1.0+paramA) * ((buf[i] – paramA) * (((pow (buf[i],buf[i])))*paramA)*abs(buf[i])); // “modern” waveshaper int t= (buf[i]+1.0)*10000; float dist_2 = (t&(-t>>paramB_int)) | ((t<<paramB_int)&(t>>(paramB_int*2))) ;
//moving back to float
dist_2 = (dist_2/10000.0)-1.0;

// this line add’s togheter the dist’s and the dry signal depending on param d. it also add’s gain to dist_2
buf[i] = clip(paramD*(dist_1+(dist_2*paramC)) + ((1.0-paramD)*buf[i] ));
}
}

//give the buffer back so we can hear the beauty.
output.setSamples(buf);
}

};

#endif // __ConnyPatch_hpp__
[code>]

This is from a conversation I had with Sean. He lives a couple of timezones away. So my evening is his afternoon.
22:34 “Larsby” I need to go to bed now
22:34 “Seaner” I am jealous
22:35 “Seaner” wear pants
22:35 “Seaner” just to mix things up
22:35 “Larsby” from time to time I wear a t-shirt and socks
22:35 “Larsby” and nothing else
22:35 “Larsby” it’s a weird sensation
22:36 “Seaner> lol
22:36 “Seaner> I will try that one

The day after, my afternoon, his morning I got:

15:49 “Seaner” wow, that was a mistake
15:49 “Seaner” I tried your sleeping uniform
15:50 “Seaner” I feel like I am still wearing the socks
16:13 “Larsby” hahahhahaaha
16:13 “Larsby” felt wird right
16:14 “Seaner” it was not good
16:14 “Larsby” what did Lynn say?
16:15 “Seaner” she said you have too much control over me

Epic win.