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The Supernote is one of those pentab things. A digitized e-ink screen pen-based input tablet. (What a mouthful.) It's a kindle you can write on.

I got mine because a coworker turned me onto it, but I've been horribly neglectful of actually using the thing. It's a beautiful machine, but not terribly convenient. I made the mistake of buying a third-party case for it, which is far too large and unwieldy. I don't have internet at my apartment yet (which is a whole other story, mostly one of me being too traumatized by recurring poverty to sign up for services before I absolutely understand the extent of my monthly bills) so without a WiFi router I can't even use syncthing to sync it to my computer at home. It would be great if I could just offline sync the thing, but the company that makes it has disabled that function. (More on that in a second.)

I'm getting to be very jaded about hardware purchases. I spent a fair amount of money on what's essentially a very nice e-ink touchscreen running the OSS version of Android. I did whatever adb nonsense I needed to do to sideload F-Droid onto it. I'm savvy. I knew going into this that it'd be a little touch-and-go and tweak-as-needed.

But DAVx5 doesn't work. And, looking at the error logs, I can't help but wonder if the device itself has blocked the app's ability to send digest authentication headers to my server or done something else particularly nonsensical to prevent it from contacting self-hosted DAV servers. After all, the manufacturer has its own sync service it wants you to use.

Look, they also let you use Google Drive and Dropbox. So it's not like they completely lock you in, but… I'm so sick of being suspicious. I shouldn't attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence, but I work with tech for a living. I should be able to set up my devices to sync to my own servers.

Anyway, sorry. This isn't even a fun rant. This isn't even a thoughtful rumination on the nature of mankind. This isn't even a fun journal where I did something neat.

I'm just annoyed. (angry lol)

Anyway, I went playing around with my server installations and got VJOURNAL working on my CalDAV server, which is what started me down this rabbithole in the first place. It's not terribly convenient to journal properly from my phone, but the "notes" function looks like it's leaps-and-bounds above the functionality of Google Keep, which I still use for far too many things. (The Android desktop widget makes it convenient to open.)

One day I'll make a clean break from Google! (Narrator's voice: Even as they typed it, they knew it was a lie.)

Ah, well. As one of my friends likes to say, "Settle la vie!"

(Oh, before I go, I'm working on some Gundam QuuuuuuX fanfiction. If you're me in the future, and you're reading this, why haven't you finished any of that yet, huh?? Go write something, already!! The stuff you were writing was making you too introspective, so let's write something crazy, instead!!)

Feeling: manic
At: Cubicle
Grooves: Several Coworkers' Overlapping Music

I'm obsessed with a relatively new song.

I say "relatively new" because somehow I left my teen years behind but never moved on in terms of my personal taste. I'm trying to rectify that. I'm trying to repent of being stuck in time and get hip with what the kids (my fellow 30-somethings) listen to. I'm attempting to keep an open mind and accept that the worst of 2010s mixing habits have become ingrained in the recording industry and— Oh, god, if I keep talking, it'll be bad, so let's just start praising the good things and not whine about the bad.

Kenshi Yonezu. He's not a new kid on the block or anything; he's immensely popular; he just did the GQX opening and was attached to all sorts of other shows popular with young people before that. I sing "Lemon" at karaoke all the time, and try to indulge others when they ask me to sing "KICK BACK." (I cannot perform "KICK BACK" with any level of skill. The singing style is too different to what I'm used to for me to have a prayer of sounding even halfway decent.)

But man, no matter how many of his songs make me stare into the middle distance and wonder what his voice even sounds like if you don't filter it through twelve different plugins, I do think he's a talented artist. His vocal quality on less-processed songs is great! His songwriting is amazing! The lyrics are always thoughtful enough that I get lost for days in them.

That said, I do have to wonder who's handling the official translations. I can tell they're trying to change the Japanese language poetry into something more immediately recognizable to an English-speaker, but… I don't like that.

That's entirely personal preference! There's no wrong way to translate something! Translation is, itself, a transformative act. But while I think what they did with "KICK BACK" is pretty good, I just can't get myself to like the translation for "Uma to Shika," which is my current obsession.

So I did my own translation. Of course I did. I'm in love! If I'm not in love, I don't know what else to call this feeling! A "love" by any other name would feel as intense!

So let's call it out by name; the flower in my heart.

( uma to shika translation )

The official translation minimizes the flower metaphor, which I think is a terrible shame, because it's almost certainly a play on "a rose by any other name would smell as sweet."

"Even if I shouldn't call this feeling 'love,' if it feels like love to me, does that matter?"

I also see the entire thing as a conversation between two parties instead of a one-sided declaration. That's a bad habit I have when listening to Japanese songs. I almost never go with the easiest explanation, which is that, by default, the subject of a sentence is first-person "I." I'm always looking for reasons to sing a song while thinking, "you, you."

In this case, though, at the very least, the line about tired eyes is clearly "you." It's not "these tired eyes," but "those tired eyes," so it's most certainly "you" who is speaking with tired eyes, not "me." And if it's "you" who has tired eyes, then "I" want to ease your burden even as "you" try to hide your scars.

There's untranslatable wordplay in here, too, further solidifying the flower imagery. "Nose to nose" is "hanasaki ga fureru," which is one syllable off from a homonym, "hana saki ga furueru," or "the blossoming flowers tremble," perhaps as they burst through the frozen soil of early Spring.

The title itself is also a play on words, although I'd completely forgotten about it until Wiki-san told me. I'm used to writing "baka" in katakana. I'd forgotten you can write it "horse deer," "uma shika." The particle "to" being "and."

"What metaphor should I use to compare the two of us?" The words "two of us" being "kimi to boku": "you and I." Both of us, idiots.

Anyway, I wonder if the way wardrobe, hair, and makeup styled him for this music video influenced anything at all. Who can say.

Feeling: enthralled
At: Boba Tea
Grooves: Uma to Shika - Kenshi Yonezu

I literally can't talk about where I'm at (in exact terms) or what I'm doing (in exact terms) right now; I'm under NDA. However, it feels so good to have people acknowledge that I'm good at something. And, don't get me wrong; there's lots I'm not good at. I don't do well with the "layer one" part of the job (that's an OSI model joke), and I have to get better at it. But the fact that I have a niche at all makes me so happy.

I was handed a piece of software yesterday that runs on one of our virtual machines and told that I needed to do a Teams call with the guy who had been setting up visualizations using it so that I could take over for this gig. That's intimidating, right? But I was able to parse the information easily, talk through the problems I was having, get things working, and even discover enough about how the backend worked to look up the stuff I didn't know.

Ah, this is a GUI with a different service that's polling our hardware in the background? Cool. It's got a query language to interface with that background service. Ok. It's a SQL-like thing that isn't quite SQL? I'm not a database engineer, but I did take a week-long one-on-one intensive with my bestie who's a senior SQL analyst. Let's do it.

I'm getting some duplicate data after doing an inner join between two wonky-looking queries inside a WYSIWYG interface, but you know what? For the most part, I'm keeping up with my teammate who's had access to the software for a heck of a lot longer than 48 hours, so I'm counting it as a "win."

( if i had kept walking past the ticket gate without stopping back then )

This job necessitates travel, and I'm here for it. Please send me away from my normal, everyday life and have me work two straight weeks of 10-12 hour days. I need the money, first of all, and I am severely enamored of the experience of having hotel services clean my room every other day while I wrangle networking switches from sunrise to sundown. I don't need the sun. I can get my vitamin D from a pill.

Oh god, is this what touring is like if you're a rock star? I keep thinking about my middle-aged faves and the times they must have had as wild, carefree 20-somethings throwing CRT TVs out of hotel windows and getting banned from life from every single Hilton-owned hotel. Not me, ossan-tachi yo! I've got a Hilton Rewards membership now! Take that!

My coworkers are very sweet, teaching me how to navigate the various methods of acquiring frequent flier miles and urging me to set up TSA Pre and telling me it'll be no time at all until I have access to airport lounges. Actually, I'm a total gremlin who's been traveling cheaply, eating cheaply, and economizing every aspect of my life from a young age, so I don't know what I'd do with all that luxury, but they're excited on my behalf for me to find out. It's a contagious kind of excitement. If this continues, I might actually find out what it's like to be middle-class.

It's too early for me to get carried away, though. For now, let's enjoy the hotel. I heard two conflicting reports as to whether there's working air conditioning back at the apartment, so who knows what's awaiting me after this sojourn ends. I might be Urashima Taro, and when I unzip my suitcase after getting home, I just get heatstroke and age 100 years.

Feeling: hopeful
At: Hilton
Grooves: plazma - Kenshi Yonezu

For no particularly good reason, I'm doing a deep dive into David Bowie and his various stage personas, concept albums, and lyrical elements. I'm a product of American radio, just as much as the next person, so it isn't as if I have had no exposure to the man. In fact, I remember precisely where I was when I first heard his very last single.

At the time, I thought only, "just like the rest of his work, my religious schoolteachers would all have a field day whispering in corners about the decline of society," and secretly enshrined in my heart a small shard of solidarity. I think that's the core of rock music. It isn't anti-establishment sentiment, so much as it is the small knowledge that you've made them sweat a bit.

I've got to say, though, the entire experience of watching Bowie's final performance as Ziggy Stardust has been an interesting time for me, in my present circumstances. I'm sitting here — watching him, then later typing this — at a computer with more power than any I've set my hands to before, researching how to packetize audio and video and send it over network switches that would have made my child self blush at their sheer speed — and there he is, across time and space, performing at a level I can't even imagine reaching, every analogue sine wave traveling down a dedicated cable, getting a dedicated fader, being manipulated by human hands alone, traveling to a recording medium unmitigated by ones and zeroes at all… It's the world that built the world that I live in. My hair is bright red because of glam rock. My job was built on the back of those camera operators and lighting engineers, sweaty in a control room, with monitor mixers sitting near wedge speakers, losing their hearing bit by bit, while spotlight operators track movements onstage.

My first ever gig that I got any credit for, in any meaningful way, was doing spotlights at a rodeo. I got so motion sick I had to leave straight after. There's a physicality to that job. And now I'm bruising my knees on the concrete warehouse floor zip-tieing in fiber cables between switches so that, at point of show, a single Ethernet cable could carry more digitized sine waves than surrounded Ziggy during his Rock 'n' Roll Suicide by some exponential number; fader groups abstracted away, preprogrammed in their paths by osc signals, recorded here and sent there as a series of packets arranged by committees of electrical engineers… Ziggy Stardust is dead! They took pieces of him and became real, traveling down the wire!!

And I will sit, knees bruised, sweaty in a control room, and if I get motion sickness it will be from staring into a monitoring application too hard, surely.

I ended up becoming more of a computer monkey than a rock star, despite the color of my hair. Still, I hold onto that shard of solidarity. Maybe I'm a blackstar.

Feeling: contemplative
At: Cubicle
Grooves: Starman - David Bowie

Hoo, boy.

I've been an audio engineer with some IT responsibilities for about a decade now on and off, but suddenly I'm transitioning to a position that's more like being an IT engineer with some video engineering responsibilities… and let me tell you, I do not know video.

I briefly tried to run my own streaming server once. I can use ffmpeg with a guide open in front of me. I am aware of many ways to configure VLC. I gave myself many a virus back in the Windows XP days thanks to infected uploads of ACE's Mega Codecs Pack. This is the extent of my video knowledge. Or it was until a week and a half ago.

Now I'm studying SMPTE ST 2110 as if my life depended on it. I'm considering whether or not to get a SMPTE membership so I can read their magazine and take their training courses. I'm furiously typing "chrominance and luminance in digital broadcast video" into the Youtube search bar.

I know more about how color works than I ever needed to. (The red cones in my eyes are mildly deformed; I gave up on understanding color so long ago, and yet.)

(But you know, the compression scheme for JPEG images is pretty neat! I finally understood a little bit about why we studied all those discrete mathematics structures in undergrad!)

(As to why video broadcasting led me to research JPEGs, it's because fundamentally all video compression is either MPEG or JPEG. The two static image formats of the early web. Poor GIFs, sad, alone, lonely, and unpronounceable — you were the first moving standard, but you never had much luck.)

And I know I'm complaining, but it's actually pretty fun. It'd be pretty fun, anyway, if I were getting proper sleep, and therefore were able to properly encode new memories. (The air conditioner at my apartment has been out for two weeks. No word from the roommates on whether today's the day I go home to air that has been conditioned, so I'm betting I'm in for another sweaty night of barely sleeping, followed by another long day of trying to figure out how light becomes pixels becomes light again.)

But hey… I have a work trip coming up very shortly, and the hotel I'll be staying at will surely be air conditioned…! (I'm abandoning you, my roommates! Farewell! I'll never forget you…!)

Don't worry. I'll probably succumb to some kind of video engineering madness as my comeuppance for leaving you to bake in the hot apartment while I run off to shadow someone with actual experience…

Feeling: exhausted
At: Cubicle
Grooves: Air Conditioning(!), Flourescent Lighting

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makz survives the apocalypse

one millennial; no plan

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Navigation

Supernote, CalDAV, Self-host Nerdery in a Corporate World

Uma to Shika (Idi and Ot)

Hotelsville and a Break from the Apocalypse

Ziggy Stardust and the Fall and Rise of the Sine Wave

Video Killed the Audio Engineer

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November 2025

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