Religious stuff: going very well overall. Bringing me a lot of joy and satisfaction, but some confusion, impatience and moments of anxiety too (hopefully resolved, but… anxiety is what it is).
Music stuff: going well too. I was going to wait until post-vacation to start recording material for album 42, but this didn’t actually happen. The two I’ve recorded so far are on the shorter side but have a consistent sound; the real question is whether my creative direction in a couple of weeks is going to match it. But it’s not a serious worry.
The expander for Auza Wave Packets is available for pre-order, allowing more CV control over things. I’m of two minds about it, which means I’m holding off. To make room I’d have to let go of something, and I have a couple of candidates for that, but… changing my setup is not really appealing to me at the moment.
Probably the biggest news in the modular synth world is that Joranalogue released a wild new module in collaboration with Hainbach, the Collide 4. Based on a retro piece of lab equipment, the lock-in amplifier, it adds a few additional features… making it effectively a filter, distortion, TZFM sine/cosine oscillator, and frequency shifter in one panel. It reminds me a bit of Synchrodyne, which also took the approach of “obscure circuit + additional goodies = something weirder than the sum of its parts. It was interesting to find out about but I don’t think it’s the kind of thing I would get along with all that well.
Vacation stuff: Reservations and time off were settled a while back. Cleaning is mainly done (inevitably there’s a last-minute round of floor mopping thanks to the little brat dog). Road drinks and snacks are bought. List of stuff to pack is made. Pet-sitter is coming over to hang out and pick up the key.
The impact of Hurricane Helene on our route was up in the air until a couple of days ago. Some roads are washed out, some areas are restricted. There were disagreements between Google Maps, NCDOT, and Great Smoky Mountains National Park. But now it looks like we can follow almost our original plan, going just a little more south from Cherokee to join the designated detour route around Asheville.
Work stuff: we are still waiting on certification for the previous release, but are moving forward into development on the next version. We each have our to-do-list and mine is actually almost finished… but I saved the biggest, stickiest problem for last. And there will always be more to do anyway.
Book stuff: Currently reading The Telescope In The Ice, about the IceCube neutrino telescope at the South Pole (and its construction, the people involved, and astroparticle physics generally). It’s a big array of strings of super-sensitive light detectors, dropped into 1km deep holes drilled in Antarctic ice by hot water jets. It detects when neutrinos passing through the Earth (like they do the time in vast quantities) just happen to collide with matter within a certain range of the array (which they do relatively extremely rarely). And being located where it is, getting people and equipment to it, and living there, is an adventure/hassle in itself.
The previous book was After On, a science fiction novel involving the collision of a shady social networking company, spies, quantum computing, augmented reality and a self-aware artificial intelligence. Very much a story for our time, a satire of tech bros, venture capitalism, the related type of toxic masculinity, and military fetishism, and and it was absolutely hilarious, and almost plausible most of the time. Post-cyberpunk, sure.