Bird Box Track


![❄️🐇](https://padilla-media.s3.amazonaws.com/blog/art/sketches-2025-03-15.jpg)

We have tons of rabbits hopping around in our new neighborhood! Love these little guys.


Winter Bun


![Louis!](https://padilla-media.s3.amazonaws.com/blog/art/sketches-2024-03-16.jpg)

Listened exclusively to early Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings of Louis Armstrong the other week. Nothing better to brighten your mood!


Satchmo


Like flossing: really important to do, hard to get in the habit of.

But I've had too many tragic losses of data growing up. And now my _entire life's work_ happens and is saved on my computer. So I've set up a system for myself!

I mostly follow [Wes Bos' Backup Strategy](https://wesbos.com/uses#backup-strategy). It keeps things easy and nearly automatic. Specifically:

- I backup my computer to a Time machine on a WD My Passport drive.
- My computer is backed up remotely to Backblaze
- On a WD Passport I have old files, videos, and photos from older computers that aren't
- Those older files are also synced with Backblaze.

[Backblaze](https://www.backblaze.com/) is great because it runs automatically in the background. It's not at all a resource hog.

It's only semi automatic because I still have a calendar reminder to actually plug in my drive every Friday morning. All of my ports are usually full with MIDI controllers and other gazmos. Ideally, I'd have some sort of monstrous port that takes in my monitor, midi instruments, guitar audio interface, AND USB to leave my external drive plugged in. Putting it on the wishlist!


Backing Up Data


My intro to databases was through MongoDB. Coming from a web development perspective, it was comfy! Documents look and work like JSON objects. They're flexible and can adapt to changing schemas. I've enjoyed it!

I'm dipping SQL this week to broaden my horizons in data land. The first conceptual overview I got was this:

- SQL databases are Relational Databases
- Other database structures are Non-Relational, or NoSQL Databases

So are relationship structures exclusive to SQL?

## SQL

The "relational" distinction comes from the fact that data is stored within tables in SQL.

My e-commerce app would divide its data into three tables:

- User
- Items
- Orders

Each table for each would have data pertaining specifically to that category of data. They'd then be linked through a relationship.

Orders, for example, would have a many-to-many relationship with items. Many items can be in many orders. Many orders can have many items.

Users could have a many-to-one relationship with Orders. A user can have many orders, but an order is tied to only one user.

So when your querying the items in the user's order, SQL has to travel through a few relationships:

1. We start with the user ID
2. We query an order based on the user
3. We query items based on what's contained in the order
4. We get massage the data to show what's relevant to our query.

And thus, SQL gets the relationship monicker.

## MongoDB

What made this confusing at first is that MongoDB falls under the non-relational database category, but I can make these same queries in MongoDB as well.

[MDN has a terrific guide to Express and Databases](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn/Server-side/Express_Nodejs). When setting up the DB schema for MongoDB, [it's done with a relational structure](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn/Server-side/Express_Nodejs/mongoose#designing_the_locallibrary_models). In their library example, there are schemas developed for books, authors, book instances, and genre. All of which are tied together through relationships. In mongo, the ID is used to connect these documents.

So the NoSQL descriptor is a more accurate lead. The query language is different, but relationships are still an offering in Mongo.

The non-relational categorizing, though, is somewhat fair: The main benefit of Mongo is that you can nest in one document what you would otherwise split between tables.

A user document can store their orders within a nested object in MongoDB. Depending on your application, you may not be accessing orders outside of the context of a query to the user. [Mongo has a clear healthcare example](https://www.mongodb.com/databases/non-relational) where patient information is stored in their document


Non-Relational Database is a Misleading Name


[Matthew Hinsley's](https://www.matthewhinsley.com/) [Form & Essence](https://www.lulu.com/shop/matthew-hinsley/form-essence/paperback/product-dwke49.html?page=1&pageSize=4) quotes William Stafford's ["A Way of Writing"](http://www2.csudh.edu/ccauthen/451S12/staffort.html) —

> A writer is not so much someone who has something to say as he is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things he would not have thought of if he had not started to say them. That is, he does not draw on a reservoir; instead, he engages in an activity that brings to him a whole succession of unforeseen stories...For the person who follows with trust and forgiveness what occurs to him, the world remains always ready and deep, an inexhaustible environment, with the combined vividness of an actuality and flexibility of a dream. Working back and forth between experience and thought, writers have more than space and time can offer. They have the whole unexplored realm of human vision.

There is no certainty when you sit down to write. That's the magic! It's simultaneously a daunting aspect of the process as much as it is the whole spiritual point of doing it in the first place!

While explaining the importance of letting go of certainty in creative process, Matt shares this:

> Have you had a good conversation recently? Did you say something interesting, profound even?...If you did, I can almost guarantee that you were accessing your creative self. And I will also suggest that there's no way you could have given that advice, in that way, had you not been having that conversation. It was in the act of conversing, or reacting to energy and idea, that you put thoughts and experiences swirling in your subconscious together into words that became concrete statements in Form as they exited your mouth.

An anecdote to the blank page then is to make the creative process something other than closing the door, turning off the lights, and staring at a blank page. But instead, a conversation.

I've been in a rut with writing music. I haven't been brining reference into my practice. I've been sitting at the keyboard and simply waiting for what comes out. While there's an intuition that's part of the process, the energy is muted when starting this way.

But nothing kick-starts writing music better than listening to something I love, and then wanting to play around with it in my own way. In the same way that visual artists aren't cheating when they draw from reference, it's quite the opposite - the music is more buoyant and fun when it's in conversation with other recordings and musicians.

This conversation-style of creating is baked into the culture of blogging! Much of blogging is finding something you read that was interesting, then adding your own two cents while connecting it to a particular audience. You're adding your own story to the mix, telling the original author's tale in a way that adds a new dimension, compounding it's message, and creating a new audience for the source material.

Creatively conversing turns wonder into art.


Chris Padilla/Blog

On This Day