Something has been bothering me for a few months now. It's the first thing that comes to mind when I wake up, and it's also the thing that keeps me up at night. Alright, I'm exaggerating a bit, but the permalink structures on this blog have actually been on my mind for a while now. Today, I finally decided to do something about it, so I thought it would be fun to write about and share.

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I've been combing through old photos to add to my portfolio over the past week. I took this photo of Shinjuku Station during a shoot with my friend Drew. I really miss Tokyo, and I hope we'll be able to return in August.

MainStage is one of the most powerful applications available for live musicians. It allows you to turn ideas into sounds, which you can then organize into patches and sets. With so many features and tools at your disposal, it's easy to go overboard with resource usage in MainStage. In this post, you'll learn about six ways to reduce your CPU usage in MainStage, so you can spend more time performing and less time worrying.

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I'm exhausted, but I just wanted to write a quick weekend recap before bed. Like I said yesterday, I tried to drop everything and take a break this weekend. While I did write a blog post for Tezos Commons this morning, I'm going to call it a success because I didn't work on anything else.

Today was another beautiful day, so we decided to go to Lake Quannapowitt to have a little picnic. I brought my Leica Q2 with me, and was able to get a few nice shots. I seriously can't wait to go back to Tokyo to put the camera to good use.

We drove by Bagel World in Reading, MA on our way to Burger King for lunch last week. Yeah, I know fast food is terrible and isn't really "food", but Ayaka and I were both craving Burger King so what were we supposed to do? Anyway, she also wanted to try Bagel World, so we did that today. It was pretty good.

The playground by the lake recently opened back up, so we let J play on the swing for a little while. He really enjoyed it, but we didn't stay for long because most of the parents there weren't wearing masks. I just don't understand why it's so difficult for adults in America to follow rules and wear masks, especially at the playground where there are parents and kids running around.

I'm glad I was able to relax this weekend. Last Thursday, we found out that JAL canceled our flight back to Japan for the third time. We were supposed to go back to Japan in May, then June, then July. Now, we have no idea when we'll be able to go back. If JAL cancels the BOS-NRT for August, we'll probably try to drive to New York and take the JFK-HND flight. Just thinking about that makes me stressed out, so I should stop now.

Good night!

I'm addicted to working. During the week, I work on content-related things for Kinsta. In the evenings, I work on improving this website. Weekends are more relaxed, but I still try to find some time to learn about new things and write content. Right now, I'm going through a JavaScript boot camp, so hopefully I'll be able to add some dynamic functionality to this site later this year.

Occasionally, it's important to just drop everything and take a break. I decided to do just that this weekend because of the beautiful weather forecast. Restaurants started opening back up again in Massachusetts, so we decided to go get Mexican food at El Pelon in Boston. During my time at Northeastern University, I probably ate at El Pelon over fifty times. Initially, we were going to get takeout. When we arrived, no one was sitting outside on the terrace, so we decided to eat there before going home. I never knew eating a burrito could feel so nostalgic.

I have to say that eating at a restaurant felt extremely weird. It's crazy to think it's been almost half a year since I last ate at a restaurant. Like I said in a post a few weeks ago, the COVID-19 pandemic has really put things into perspective – a reminder to appreciate the simple things in life.

I added "X min read" (a la Medium), functionality to my Hugo-generated blog today. If you're not sure what that means, just take a look under the title of this post – it says "1 min read" next to the post date.

Adding this feature was pretty easy. The Golang snippet below can be used to display the read time in minutes. It reads the number of words in .Content, which is the post body, divides it by 250, and rounds it to the nearest integer.

(math.Round (div (countwords .Content) 250.0)

With the snippet above, I integrated it into my Hugo template. I ended up with two conditionals. The first one checks for the post type because I only want "X min read" to show on posts, links, and notes. The second conditional forces the minimum read time to one minute.

{{ if or (eq .Section "post") (eq .Section "link") (eq .Section "note") }}
 &middot; <span class="read-time">{{ if lt (math.Round (div (countwords .Content) 250.0)) 1 }}1{{ else }}{{ (math.Round (div (countwords .Content) 250.0)) }}{{ end }} min read</span>{{ end }}

I know what you're thinking. No, I am not trying to make a Medium clone.

Earlier tonight, I woke up my MacBook Pro from sleep mode. I was then greeted with a completely washed out display followed by a drop in blood pressure. Okay, I'm exaggerating a little, but I was quite concerned because I just bought my 16" MacBook Pro two months ago. After some experimenting, I was able to resolve the issue without restarting. In this post, I'll share how I was able to fix washed out display colors in macOS.

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Last weekend, I hosted a webinar on how to host an online concert with Zoom. During the Q&A portion, I received a lot of good questions about MainStage and music technology in general. One question that came up had to do with the best sample rate for MainStage. In this article, we'll discuss which sample rate is best for performing live with MainStage.

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I can't believe it's only 39 days into my 100 Day Blogging Challenge. Between work, taking care of J, and trying to absorb the gravity of world events, keeping my head up and charging ahead with one post per day has been exceedingly difficult. I guess what I'm trying to say is that something as trivial as a blogging challenge seems pointless during these protest-fueled times. Dave Mark from The Loop summed up my feelings in a tweet.

I am really struggling to find meaning in writing about tech the past few days. Such small beans with all that’s going on around me.

I just want to scream and rant about this dumpster fire we’re all living in.

Doing my best to compartmentalize. Bear with.

That’s the tweet.🤬😢

If you've been keeping up with my blog posts over the last month and a half, you've probably a noticed a trend. I started off strong and event wrote a few pretty detailed posts like this one. Things have definitely slowed down over the past few weeks, and I've resorted to shorter posts and providing commentary on linked content. I think the most important lesson I've learned so far from this challenge is that my writing style and ambitions do not vibe well with the "one post per day" mentality. My natural blogging style is "longform and detailed", which makes this blogging challenge particularly frustrating.

With that said, I'm not going to back down from this challenge now. Don't get me wrong... I can't wait for this challenge to be over, but giving up is out of the question. I guess I'll try to make the best out it in the meantime. My plan is to continue with shorter commentary-style posts, and publish a longer tutorial or analysis piece every two to three weeks.

Before my brother and I moved away from home, my family used to have barbecues pretty regularly during the summer months. With the COVID-19 pandemic, that routine has been shaken up a bit until today. Since things pandemic-wise are getting a bit calmer where we live, we decided to have a barbecue today to celebrate my cousins' birthdays. I have to say it was actually really nice to reconnect with aunts, uncles, and cousins. I used to always take gatherings like these for granted. It's amazing (in a good way) how much the pandemic has put things into perspective for me.

Even though I worked for most of the weekend, it was nice to unwind for a few hours to eat, drink, talk, and laugh with my family. I'm looking forward to starting another week of WordPress domination with Kinsta tomorrow!