Took my TAB music sharing app out for a test drive last night, hung out at a local Starbucks and had three instruments with me. Brought my Fender electric uke, a 1924 La Pacific banjolele, and a mandolin I was recently gifted. At first, I was simply building collections and set lists for various event types - build a Reggae collection, an Easy Listening set, a Church shows set - to see if it was quickly searchable and accessible. Building the sets, testing the songs (I’ve loaded in about 3,000 chordpro files from the Olga Archives to get started), and having the excuse to jam in public… But while I was sitting there noodling about, a guy came in with a Backpacker guitar. We got talking, he pulled out his tablet and shot the session-share code on my screen, and real-time got the session set that I was trying out. Got all the songs in the set, set his preferred instrument, and opened the song I was playing and got chords custom to his instrument (guitar for him, uke for me). But the song was in A minor, and I really like (and he preferred) D minor. Easily fixed - there’s a transpose option right in the song viewer. And when I transpose on my device, as the session host? Every connected device sees the transposition live.. The chord names change in the song, and the chord diagrams update dynamically. If I add a verse to a song (and only the host can edit/transpose, otherwise it’d be chaos), that change ripples out real-time through the session. Even if we’re offline. There are a few bugs still to work out, but by golly, it’s shaping up nicely!

What songs do you or would you play around a campfire? I'm partial to the old classics, Camptown Races, She'll Be Coming 'Round the Mountain, Home on the Range, I've Been Working on the Railroad, Oh! Susanna, This Land is Your Land, and Clementine. What other suggestions do you have for me? I want to play songs people will probably know the words to, so they can sing along. So maybe, Row Row Row Your Boat, Michael Row the Boat Ashore, On Top of Spaghetti?

i wrote this during the Ice Storm of 2021... seemed appropriate ebow, delays, synth pedals, reverbs. getting unexpected sounds out of the acoustic guitar

It came from out of the blue and happened quickly. A week before Christmas, I got a message through LinkedIn from someone I worked with at ADT (he was let go about a year before me). He told me that his supervisor asked him if he knew any software testers for a new opportunity at the company. He gave them my name and contact information. The next day, I got a call from the company's recruiter to set an appointment for a screening interview. It was scheduled for the next day. On the screening interview call, the recruiter told me that the hiring manager already wanted to interview me, but we still needed to go through the screening interview, which went well. The next day, which was Friday, I got a call from the recruiter to set an appointment to interview with the hiring manager and a few others. That interview was scheduled for Monday. The interview went well. On Tuesday, I received a call from the recruiter with a verbal offer, during which she said that the written offer was forthcoming, but that I probably would not receive it until Monday because of the Christmas holidays. I gave a verbal acceptance contingent on the written offer. To my surprise, on Wednesday, Christmas Eve, I received the written offer, which I immediately accepted. It's with a federal government contractor, so I had to go through an extensive background check. I was told the background check would take 4-6 weeks, so I expected a start date no earlier than the middle of February. Once I filled out the forms, made some corrections, and got fingerprinted by the DHS, I sailed through the background check in a week! I start the job on Monday, 02 February 2026. My work desk is ready, just waiting on the laptop(s) and overcoming my lack of motivation to put up some curtains in my office to keep the sun from peeking through the narrow openings in the blinds. What a relief! More than 150 resumes/applications submitted in over nine months resulted in one screening interview. Then in the span of a week from a recommendation by a colleague, I have a new job. Crazy!

Hey all - a while back, I wrote about being a music/nerd crossover, about this chord-component and chord-list thing that I'd built in order to wrap a javascript package (`svguitar`) into a useful, easy-to-consume tool that lets me just `<chord-component instrument="Standard Guitar" chord="Dm7"></chord-component>` and it renders out the SVG chord diagram. It's neat, it was fun, I'm working on a series of articles about it from the programming side. But I've been working with that, and with a comprehensive TAB editor/renderer doohickey that I'm calling Gigwidget - it lets me create or edit songs and collections, it lets me fetch TAB sheets (currently scraped from ozbcoz.com as it's one of the more comprehensive TAB collections I know of), it lets me choose the instrument I want to use and it renders those chord charts dynamically. It'll handle transposition seamlessly, and it's pretty much working. It currently is in *very* early development, but it does allow for users to sync their data remotely (via Supabase) and use their account on multiple devices. There are two things I'm working on adding to it: 1) The UI is rough. It works, but I'm seeing it more as an interface like GMail or the like, with a sidebar listing collections, a top panel with a list from the chosen collection, and the main content pane showing the currently-selected song. 2) Session-sharing. I want to be able to have a user create a session (say, at a jam or something), and then get a QR code that others at that jam can scan *and get the full setlist for that jam*. While it appears to be stubbed in currently, the "join the session" bit hasn't yet integrated with the "share the full setlist" bit. If anyone wants to hammer on it, I'm totally down to share it for review and opinions - I just don't want to violate community policy by blindly sharing links.