Dispatch #15 (May 2024)

By David Eisinger · View original post

Big news, friends: we’re expecting a second kid in June. To celebrate, Claire and I headed to Lisbon for a long weekend. Highlights included the castles in Sintra (especially Quinta da Regaliera), biking in Cascais, and attending a Benfica match. We missed our Nevie, but she had a great time with Grandma and Grandpa, and it was nice to be able to stay out past 7pm.

While we were over there, I was pretty diligent about using Shazam whenever a song caught my ear and saving everything into Apple Notes. When I got back, I compiled all the tracks into a playlist1 that’s been on repeat ever since. It’s a pretty neat way to create a memento that’s unique to me and that doesn’t cost anything or take up any space, and is something I’ll plan to repeat on future trips.

I took part in Viget’s annual Pointless Week hackathon, building a tool to surface book recommendations based on messages in our #books Slack channel. We used Laravel to build the backend, something I’d heard good things about but have never used – it was easy to pick up and fun to work with. We also used an LLM to analyze the messages and pull title / author / sentiment. Some of the results were very impressive, some were hot nonsense (it frequently matched generic messages to The Great Gatsby or Gone with the Wind).

For our quarterly company event, I made this track with a bunch of samples I pulled from our Google Meet archive:

The Simple Secret Formula.mp3

Probably funnier if you’ve ever attended one of these events, but I think it holds up pretty well musically. Credit where it’s due, I pulled that Fm11/Ebmaj9 chord progression straight from this Lofi Chord Progressions article (the shaker’s all me though).

A comment on Reddit sent me down a little bit of an iPad music rabbit hole, and now I’ve got my Circuit Tracks driving two software synths on the iPad (digging Neo-Soul Keys and Minimoog Model D) in addition to the two built-in ones. It’s a tight little setup for travel, and I can even run a MIDI controller into it for more direct control of the synths.

Claire and I are both big fans of Death Cab for Cutie and The Postal Service. They’re on a tour for the 20th anniversaries of Transatlaticism and Give Up (man what a year 2003 must have been for Ben Gibbard) and we got tickets for the Raleigh show. They played both albums straight through. It was awesome, though when they finished Give Up and we were waiting for the encore, it sure made me wish Postal Service had ever made another record – we just heard their entire catalogue.

This month:

Reading:

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  1. Here’s my Lisbon playlist:

    1. P64 By My Side - John Carroll Kirby
    2. Need Your Body - Stimulator Jones
    3. Temptations - Jitwam
    4. Sunny - Bobby Hebb
    5. Mais Que Nada - Paulo Sergio
    6. Feet Keep Moving - Natural Self
    7. Make My Day - Waldeck
    8. Te Faço um Cafuné - Mariana Aydar
    9. Primavera - Ocote Soul Sounds
    10. When You’re Gone - Jon and Roy
    11. I Will Survive (lalala) - Hermes House Band
    12. Off to the Side - L’Impératrice
    13. I Believe in You - more*
    14. Love Story (Retromigration Remix) - Malik Hendricks
    15. Tout va bien - Voyou
    16. Aquela Bossa Axé - Affonsinho

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