This time, with my 15 year old son. I gave him his bass for Christmas and he loves it so much that he wants to do another project with me. I’m beaming with joy! We will be recreating a Gibson LP in Blueberry Burst, like the one pictured. The kit is coming in about 3 weeks. I never thought that instead of losing my kid to young adulthood for the next 3-4 years, (you know, ‘dad doesn’t know anything’) that he’d want to spend time with me building a guitar together. I swear I must be the luckiest man in the world.

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!

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!

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

Since I unable to buy any gear for about another month I decided to create my own instrument 🤘 So I have an arduino board I got free just over a year ago and recently found it while cleaning up the storage unit and I have been working on some code using solar panel and photoresistors and some buttons and potentiometer to make a fully automated groovebox. I’ve got some code for rhythm, some drum machine code, some code for visual effects. Can’t wait to see it completed… I just need to find a few more components from the storage and I’ll be ready to build it.