I first legitimately played a guitar in high school, sometime in the mid-1990s. A friend of mine had brought an acoustic guitar to school for some kind of talent/show-and-tell kind of thing, and I remember being quite impressed. I’d never really had much interest in learning any kind of music instrument up to that point, except for maybe the drums.

However, drums had three issues: s p a c e, price, and loudness. Unfortunately, they required too much of each.

Has it really been almost three years since I last rapped at ya? I think the post title explains it best: I’ve been working at work on work, and so not much personal coding has occurred.

Neither the Portal or Mirror’s Edge theme song, but true all the same: I’m still alive, kicking, and making music. None of that music is ready to drop online just yet, but it’s in the works.

Say hello to Fenchy.

For the April 2020 RPM Challenge, I decided to make a new persona. It’s my pop rock persona, for making songs with actual lyrics and singing. And a month-long deadline to get my first release done seemed like as good a time as any to go forward with it.

You may have heard of COVID-19, a novel coronavirus that’s sweeping the globe. Welp, what it means for me so far is working from home, schools closed, and a general unrest and fear of The Outside.

Some basic info, to catch up for many years of no blogging:

• I’m about to turn 39 in a few days
• I have a daughter who recently turned 5
• I’m going to celebrate my 10 year wedding anniversary next month
• I still program (https://github.com/michaelchadwick)
• I still work by the beach (https://scripps.ucsd.edu), and have since mid-2016
• I’m still in a band (https://flylikevenus.com)
• I still make my own music, too (https://nebyoolae.com)
• I still own a dog, who is now almost 9 years old

I haven’t been putting a lot of work into making music lately, but I have been tinkering with a new site that catalogs all the works I’ve done over the last 20+ years.

It’s not done yet (still needs a copious amount of tedious data entry), but it’s worth checking out.

https://music.nebyoolae.com

Whoa! Fly Like Venus got its album reviewed. And it’s so nice! <3

http://jamsphere.com/reviews/fly-like-venus-scenes-ultimate-rock-thrill

Since my last post, I’ve worked on Raffler quite a bit (it got its own domain, for one), making it warmer, juicier, and with a nice glaze around the edges. In sum, it’s approximately 476% better.

It’s now ready to unveil publicly, after a beta test at UCCSC, a rad tech conference recently held at UC San Diego, so let’s dig into it and discuss some things that changed since last we raffled items in a random fashion.

Solo: Nebyoolae – Close to the Metal

Band: Fly Like Venus – Scenes

A few months ago one of my favorite podcasts ended. I was actually on Composer Quest a few times as a guest, and the host even stayed with me for a night during his World Tour. All in all, Charlie made a very cool thing, and I’ll miss it.

I recently completed a new web app called Raffler that lets you take a list of items (usually names) and then “raffle” them (i.e. randomly choose one). It’s an extension of an older web app I made called Just Pick One, but except for some neat animation I added on the front-end design, the back-end logic was largely the same as always: one big honkin’ funcs.js file full of global variables and methods. Bad Mike, I know, I know, but it’s just how I function when I build from scratch.

However, I know it’s “wrong” and I should adapt to modern development standards, so after a couple months of on-and-off toying with this new app, I finally modularized it in a more manageable state, but the journey was somewhat perilous as I ventured into the World of Javascript in 2017.

The sweet rock band I’m currently in, Fly Like Venus, is getting more legit everyday.

The RPM Challenge is an annual, um, challenge to make an album of music in a month. That’s 35 minutes or 10 songs, whichever comes first. I completed it once in 2010, which was when I made my first album of both music and lyrics.

I have a new album of music out. It’s a 5-track EP called Gray.

Note: these albums didn’t necessarily come out in 2016, but I listened to them A LOT in 2016 (I’m behind on a few things)

Presenting: Utterly, a macOS app that puts a GUI on top of Apple’s built-in speech synthesis technology.

Download version 1.0!

My previous attempt, Utter, has been rewritten with state-of-the-art tools and the newest of operating system version. Also, I added a picture of a cow to the app itself (instead of just the icon).

The Github Game Off is over, and my “finished” product is Axeracer (source). It’s a simple, one-track racing game that has you piloting a little insect car thing with axes for antennae, all the better to “hack” through the grassy track on your way to the finish line.

This post is not meant to go over every detail of the game, but just to hit on some of the highlights.

I’ve been listening to Composer Quest for years, spurred on by this tweet from a Mr. Whitaker Trebella, who is a friend of the podcast host, Charlie McCarron.

Spurred on by Github’s Game Off game jam, and inspired by Hook, Line, and Thinker, I’ve decided to use Pico-8 as my game engine workplace, as writing everything from scratch can be a bit of an ordeal. An all-in-one minimalist design shop, Pico-8 has the ability to do the cart, sprites, and audio all in one neat little package.