Stayed up late last night freelancing at the bar hooking up an online shopping cart and reworking an information architecture.
When I move further west into LA, I plan to be working from the bar a lot, since I was the one to install the wifi there in the first place. How badass is it, though, to be all nrrdcore up in a bar? Most coders I know do the coffee shop thing, and that’s hackneyed to the death; but cafe’s have caffeine and wifi, which are two of many necessary things for long periods of coding.
I’m in a good mood because although I have a lot of work ahead of me, I did get a lot done last night, and had the opportunity to listen to some live jazz while I was at it. I forget how nice and conducive to thinking jazz is when it’s not traditional hard bop or that godforsaken smooth tripe – just somewhere in between. You know, the in-between of fast and slow, kinda post-Weather Report sound. (Weather Report seems to be becoming a theme lately, apparently.) Not too many flourishes, upbeat but not in your face, not lazy, just lilting left and right with hooky melodies that are not on the cheesy side.
One cool thing about last night: the sax player freelances the same way that I do! We had fun talking about job boards, the aesthetics of CSS, the craze over PHP and AJAX, the pointlessness of Flash intros, how freelancing is such a hustle, and just being general code monkeys. The man also knows how to fake a standard better than most jazz players I meet at the bar – I personally thought he had a fake book in front of him but it turns out he was just looking over the shoulder of the bassist every once in a while. Impressive memory!
And though I’ve been in a general lack of sleep lately, I’m at the point where I’m used to it. The first couple of days of sleep deprivation are pretty harsh, but after day two, you start to coast and power through it all. I’m at that point now, and I have to say I feel pretty okay, even with all the work ahead of me. I guess the night of jazz helped. Who knew?
In unrelated things, it seems I should make this blog more media rich. So I’m going to.
Here’s a picture of an onion ring in a carrying case fashioned out of a napkin, courtesy of Mahea.
click to enlarge
