About Me

Hi! I'm a software developer, Dad, Husband, Son, Neighbor, Musician, Joker from Ottawa. I'm passionate about coding and technology but music is probably my greatest passion.

• Learning technologies. Especially in software but I am conversant in other areas like EE or whatever.
• Writing music
• Building and fixing things!
• Why buy when you can build?! I keep our washers and furnaces all in good repair.
• I've built entire bikes, speakers, a few electric guitars, shelves, odds and ends.
• My list of interests is varied and long. Life is just too short!
• local_cafelocal_cafelocal_cafe

Tech & Coding

On coding and technology

It's all pretty Microsoft-ey. .NET 4.7 desktop/server stuff. Got into .net 5(core), 6, etc a few years ago. Microsoft was trying to unify their .net so that it is usable by all. Made a Blazor WASM server dashboard recently which I really loved. Blazor is all basically C# and HTML/CSS. Performing loops and stuff is excellent and easy. I aim to spend more time on learning Blazor and WASM in general. It's a funny thing.. we always need to provide a GUI. But is native better than a web gui? Some may say so. I think there are too many platforms and we need to be able to make powerful applications that are completely portable. It's almost like a virtual machine or container or whatever but in the browser. The user only cares about things working in a sane fashion.

Been working on an Angular/TS app as well(c# dotnet core back end). Postgress DB. Various hosting.

I don't love vscode. Regular VS is better. Fight me.

My first computer was a Tandy CoCo3(Like a Commodore 64). I super miss it.

My private commits from the past couple of years. I think I was using Azure Repos last year

My Music

Here are some of my recent musical sketches that I created.

All my recorded music is only in a sketch state right now. What that means is that they are improvisations that I needed to record because I would like to complete these ideas into full songs at a latter date.

Rhythm is off, drums are bad, the ideas are cool though!

music_notemusic_noteMy Soundcloudlink

Listening Setup

I built a pair of Paul Carmody's 'Hitmakers'

These are a set of nearfield studio monitors. 'Nearfield' means that they are intended to be very close to the listener(Ideally pointed towards their ears in a equilateral triangle formation). 'Monitors' usually means that the speakers respond equally across all frequencies. We call them 'flat'. I'll paint them someday.

linkPC's page on these.

Mine LOOK terrible! But they sound like I expected. Had some issues with the table saw I inherited from my dad. Could not cut a square with that thing no matter what I did.

I do a little bit extra to make these sound 'good'. Everything is routed into my computer and into my favorite DAW Reaper.

I mounted them to computer monitor telescopic arms. This lets me position them with greater ease. Also possibly isolates them from any vibrations that could leak into the desk and cause frequency resonances that could cause issues in tuning.

Below are some screenshots that show how I EQ them so that they have a 'good' sound. It turns out that quality of sound is a subjective thing and is hotly debated. I have considered using tube amp simulators to add an extra bit of harmonic distortion so that I can emulate a classic hifi amp.

So there is another image down there of a full frequency 12/6/1 fEARful Greenboy instrument speaker that I also made. However at 48Hz-70Hz, there is a steep rolloff as a crossover so I can use it as a sub.

I haven't measured the room or my responses but this is a pretty nice set up.

Aiyama A07 class D amp with a 48V PSU. Seems just fine!

Music Gear

Guitars, Reaper DAW, VSTs, and not having guitar pedals and stuff anymore!

So I gave up using pedals and amps. Digital is great fun.

I don't only use bias fx. There are so many awesome plugins out there. Instrument ones too. Did you know that you can use the output of the ReaTune plugin to control midi instruments?! Nothing but fun there.

Here is a picture of my family

jk. these are guitars I built(assembled)

On the Strat, those EMGs soapbars ACTUALLY have a three coils. One humbucker and a single coil. I like how many sounds I can get from these. I also added a latching switch because they are active pickups and the battery dies if you don't unplug. I need to use a make before break type switch because it will prevent the ugly POP.

My student model Ramirez. Been through a lot that friend and I.

This is a Flamenco guitar. I don't actually play that style of music but this is an awesome instrument to play.

Bikes

Here is my take on a 1x gravel bike.

So it is a 29er carbon fiber MTB frame/Forks

• 1x Sensah SRX Pro w/ 11sp dropbar shifter
• Cassette is an 11-52. That means the biggest sprocket on the rear has a lot of teeth. IOW: potential large gear ratio.
• Chainring is a 52T(currently). So yeah, I could have a 1:1 ratio but you would be surprised at how steep it has to get for that to be useful!
• Favero Assioma DUO-Shi(not because I am an athlete, it's because I am a nerd lol!)
• Challenge, Strada Bianca TLR, Tire, 700x40C. In tan as one does.
• Holy heck these were hard to mount.
• Crappy whatever rims/brakes
• A nice saddle from aliexpress
• BT speaker is almost as essential as water!!!
• Some of the cabling is internally routed. It was annoying to do on this bike as some of the entry points were pinching the cable housing and affecting shifting. mood_bad