Monomed.

With the help of the fine folks at Machinecollective, I've finally put together a proper, giggable enclosure for the 'nome. xndr put this together to help monome kit buyers with the trickiest bit of putting the kit together, getting a proper faceplate cut to the exact specifications you need.

This particular setup is a leftover prototype, which included a baseplate as well; they threw in some spacers, and voila, an open-sided enclosure. V. cool.

I'd originally intended to go translucent, but the white does match the laptop, and actually does let some of the ridiculously bright led light through. One project down.

Next up: let's see if I can finish building my 8-string lap-steel, for which I've bought quite a few parts from Ryan Rukavina, who in addition to building pretty wild lap-steel guitars, has begun making high-quality parts and selling them on ebay.

After that: steal enough time somewhere to just play with this stuff.

Infused with genius?

Inside that murky jar, lying in wait, scarcely visible through the condensation in this Lensbaby macro-picture, we have none other than: ginger knobs and strips of bacon, just starting their multi-week infusion process. What began life as humble Muskovskaya Vodka is will now be elevated into something far nobler; wouldst that we could all make such a transformation in our lifetimes. But such rarefaction is possible, perhaps, only after our ultimate demise.

We can rejoice, however, that in several weeks, after the ginger and bacon has imparted its essence to the spirit, after it has been strained and cooled, and the congealed bacon-fat has been carefully removed, that we can commune with these earthly projections of the quintessence of flavor.

Maybe I should add some peppercorns.

Monome progress...sorta...

This might be more sideways progress than anything else, but I made a cardboard enclosure so I can use the device for now. The whole process took...awhile...but the thing sits in a box and can be pressed, although since my hand-cut holes aren't perfect, some of the buttons are a bit obstructed.

Still, I'm fairly happy since the thing is usable now and I can start messing around with the fairly sizeable set of existing applications written for it.

I know you dig my "just-mailed" style, with holes cut right through the labels and stuff. That tape on the corners? That's the high-strength stuff with strings in it. Oh. Yeah.

Recommendation 2008: Barack Obama

As I'm sure that faithful readers are waiting for this blog's recommendation for this political cycle, and the candidacies are reaching the final stage, I believe it's now time for me to endorse a candidate, Barack Obama.

The reason is simple: his recent speech on race. In it, he showed a willingness to do something which politicians are generally unwilling to do: look on both sides of an issue, and actually consider it. Yes, it has come in response to a political crisis; yes, it did speak of religion a bit too often for secular thinkers like myself. But it serves as proof, I think, that Obama is the best choice for tackling our society's current problems.

Hillary Clinton is, to be sure, an impressive candidate herself, and I think that it's telling that Obama has been able to upstage her in the public debate. By now, she is a master politician, who would, no doubt, lead this country sure-handedly. Personally, I have been turned off by her recent tactics, which seem to be rooted in the current political dynamic; Clinton simply does not have the transformational potential of Barack Obama, despite the fact that she, too, would be a first. I expect that Hillary will win the Democratic nomination.

John McCain, who I suspect will win the general election, probably cannot be as poor a president as George W. Bush. Although, as a pacifist, I abhor his militarism, he does seem to be a man of principle, who would make decisions based on actual situations and information, as opposed to whatever twisted ideas drove the Bush administration to the needless war in Iraq. I do not, however, expect him to do anything to address the growing problem of health-care in this country, or do anything to improve the economy for working people.

Barack Obama is our best chance at not only changing the tone of debate in Washington to provide something more useful for the citizens of this country, but also towards making progress on the long-standing issues which plague us. Both Ms. Clinton and Mr. McCain have been in Washington too long to take truly brave, transformational stances; though both would almost certainly be an improvement over the craven, war-mongering administration in place now, neither have the potential of Mr. Obama.

Hope is a powerful message; and although the potential for failure is always present, audacity is necessary to change situations for the better. In this, Mr. Obama outclasses all his opponents, and for this reason, he should be elected president in November.

Dangerous profession...

You can't make this stuff up. It's a New York Times article about opera mishaps, and it's really fairly entertaining. Bottom line: think twice before taking that role as Tristan. In fact, maybe just steer clear of Wagner completely.

Also, I put some new stuff up at FoundSound. A couple of videos from a class; I really like one of them, "Road Movie / Ocular Harpsichord."

Shaving the Yak

Just a quick one folks.

Some good stuff: If you haven't seen Peter Rose's The Pressures of the Text, follow that link RIGHT NOW and spend 17 minutes watching it. It's an art video, featured in the 1985 Whitney Biennial, and it's one of the funniest things I've ever seen.

I also just want to spend a moment to point out what Trent Reznor is doing. While Radiohead's In Rainbows experiment was cool and all, the new NiN album, Ghosts I-IV, is, I think, a much more ambitious project. According to the faq, it's covered by a Creative Commons License, which is a big step for an established artist to take. He's doing a free partial download, and selling the double-album download for $5. And a monome was involved in its production! (Although I guess the very Reznor-looking guy in that video is not, actually, Trent.)

Even cooler, however, is his remix web site, where he's making current and older projects available for download in multi-track formats, and even putting out some material you can't find elsewhere. (an instrumental version of The Downward Spiral, for example) More artists should be working this hard to foster the creative community. Also, working this way on the Ghosts project seems to have allowed him to spread out a bit musically -- it's instrumental, and most of the album is mellow and atmospheric. Personally, I enjoy it a lot more than his early, aggro-industrial stuff.


By the way, isn't it amazing what you can do during finals? Especially things that aren't related to your schoolwork?

The monome works.

Instead of spending time studying for exams or working on end-of-quarter projects, I took a few hours yesterday to solder together my monome kit. And...amazingly, it works.

The kit is an easy build, for the most part -- the only tricky bit is the 64 surface-mount diodes, for which you'll want some tweezers and a fine-tip iron. But there's plenty of space and you don't need a magnifier or anything like that.

This shot is of the monome running a version of conway's game of life, written in ChucK. The actual lit-up buttons look white only because of the exposure; they're actually a brilliant green.

As you can see, however, my current kit enclosure is a half-open usps box. Weak. The soldering and stuff is really the easy part -- the trick here will be finishing the thing up nice. Hopefully in not too long, there'll be a picture of a nice, finished kit up on this blog.

Monome kit unboxing.

In the spirit of elaborate unboxing ceremonies for exciting new devices, I have decided to further fetishize my new monome kit. So, as you can see above, this might not be the most exciting box ever seen, but it's a pretty neat item. If you haven't heard of the monome, it's a 'minimalist' input device designed by some hip people in Pennsylvania. It's basically a grid of lighted buttons, which talks to your computer. It's up to you to decide the mappings of these button presses, and what the computer does for feedback.

So it's not as pretty as the box for the MacBook Air. At least not on the outside...


Mmm. Nicely textured, recycled-looking paper. Good stuff. Now, let's see what $264 buys you these days...


And there you have it. Two boards: one for logic, with the usb interface and the plumbing to talk with the keypad, and the keypad itself. The logic board comes with some chips, sockets, and passive components in addition to the usb connector. The keypad comes with the board, a roll of surface-mount diodes and a couple flat cables in addition to the board. The real star of the show here is probably the keypad itself; nicely textured rubber buttons that give off an air of quality. Note what's missing: screws, usb cable, and an enclosure. All to be designed and supplied by the end user, myself.

To get a sense of what's possible, take a look at this gallery of finished user kits. I'm hoping that mine will come out as nice as some of these do. I've got great plans...but not a lot of time right now, as the quarter comes to an end. Stay tuned for further updates.

New look, AdSense...

As noted below, I've been doing some virtual freshening up. As you can see, this site hasn't been spared -- we've got a new template, and I succumbed to the promise of vast riches that is AdSense...in the past I've been mostly OK with the sort of material Google suggests, and I'm actually quite interested in what they'll throw up here. If there's a huge public outcry, I will happily remove it.

My other blog...

I've been organizing some stuff on my website...and since I've been in school, I've actually created some amount of content...so I've started putting it in Found Sound, the blog section of the site. I'll be leaving a link on the right side of this page.

I've been doing some video stuff recently, and that's what you'll see if you go there now. It's a mixed bag right now, some interface stuff, a music video, and something that's sort of in-between. Check it out if you're interested.

I just back-graded.

If you weren't already aware of this, new cellular phones are totally lame. That expensive iPhone or Nokia N90, and the heinous bluetooth dongle on your ear say only one thing: douchebag.

No, no. Why spend $400 on a brand-new phone when you can spend nearly $200 on a Motorola Dynatac, the first cellular phone that one person could lift alone. Retrobrick.com will sell them to you for only around a hundred pounds: not bad considering that they cost around $4000 in the early '80s.

Ok, I am not that elite. I can't quite get down with an expensive phone that only runs on an obsolete technology -- but I have gone back about half a decade, to the Nokia 3390, a classic GSM dual-band phone with a glorious green-screen monochrome display. No BS .5 megapixel camera, no stupid screen savers or background that makes the text unreadable. Just telephone and text messaging. Sure, it's no DynaTac, or even MicroTac for that matter, but it's not a bad backgrade.

I am so l33t it hurts

Ok, so even I would have to admit that this is a fairly trivial side of computational aesthetics -- how your machine looks. However, I couldn't resist designing my own "skin" for the new laptop. In addition to being sick of seeing just how quickly the white plastic was scratching, there's a certain utility in being able to tell your white laptop apart from the rest: I'm living very close to Cupertino now, and this is definitely Apple country.


So, I scanned in a page from Thomas Pynchon's V. and uploaded it to Unique Skins' skin-designer utility. Props to them for providing this service at the best price -- they undercut some of the other players in the "skins" business by about ten bucks.

If you're not hip to the skins (and why would you be unless you want people to know how cool you are just by looking at your iPod or, uh, MacBook) there is a thriving business of printing images on pre-cut slices of 3m ControlTac, which is a removable, non-gooey self-adhesive vinyl. There are a bunch of people doing this: GelaSkins, which specializes in images from hip graffiti- or anime-inspired artists, MacVatar, which is obviously Mac-oriented, and Skinit, which seems to serve more plebeian tastes...as well as dozens of others. They protect the finish of your new (disposable in three-five years) laptop investment, but mostly allow you to modify the appearance without spending a lot of cash, adding a bulky shell, or voiding your warranty.

Well, that will end the commercial messages for the day.

Nerd note: this is the place where Pynchon claims that the classic WWII-era graffito, the Kilroy, was derived originally from a band-pass filter; this ties into my obsession with the
history of computing, and WWII's influence in pushing the computer to the prominence it has today. Plus I think the band-pass Kilroy looks rockin'.

The Vacuum Brew

Long time. Even faithful readers have no doubt left the inevitable withdrawal period caused by a lack of my ruminations; perhaps a few have, like mice once addicted to cocaine, continued to grab this page once in awhile. No matter: an update has arrived.

Over the winter break, an excursion that took me back to Brooklyn for the first time in several years, I had a chance to sample the nectar from a vacuum brewing device owned by the illustrious Keith Polasko of Split the Lark, who, in addition to being perhaps the best singer/songwriter left alive since the untimely self-instantiated death of Elliot Smith, is an aficionado of a beverage often considered merely quotidian: coffee.

In his apartment (littered with all sorts of amazing objects; in addition to his musical pursuits, he is an avid collector of most things arcane or obscure) there sits a modern stainless-steel Cuisinart drip brewer, unused, atop the refrigerator. It has been upstaged completely by a Yama vacuum brewer, a technology which, though perhaps older, is generally considered to deliver a superior brew. I'll admit that I sat and stared at the thing during its entire cycle: I'd never seen it before. The water slowly boils in the lower chamber, until the upper chamber is almost filled; then, you take it off the heat and the vacuum in the sealed lower chamber sucks the water back down, leaving the grounds.

It's a brew favored by connoisseurs; the new Blue Bottle Cafe in San Francisco has just installed a bar so they can serve it. Although it doesn't have the "set it and forget it" ease of a drip machine, it certainly has more panache, and the brew is certainly better than most drip machines: it's effectively unfiltered for better body, with no stripping of aromatic compounds, and maintains close to the perfect brewing temperature for better extraction. Most drip machines don't get hot enough for proper extraction, which is fine if you're using bitter, mass-produced, pre-ground stuff, but means that you're missing out on some of what your locally-roasted microlots have to offer.

Although I start my day with espresso, I have been enjoying brewed coffee myself. I brought a bag of Ethiopian Idido Misty Valley home-roast with me when I headed east, which, when brewed drip or single-cup, had a much fruitier profile than I'd gotten from the espresso machine. I had to admit that I enjoyed it quite a bit more brewed. Brewed coffee also tends to have a flavor shift as it cools; sometimes for the worse, often just...different. Like seeing more facets of a gem. Although I'm still partial to espresso (at 9 bars of pressure, you get things out of the beans that don't appear at one atmosphere) brewed coffee is certainly better for single-origin coffees that have a "delicate" profile: usually more acidic coffees with more fruit, less body, and floral aromatics, which are roasted lighter.

So I've been making some pots of press, and secretly lusting after a Yama. More gear is the last thing I need, of course, but there's something awfully charming about that siphon.

Back to the Future.

Thoughts on upgrading.

I have been slow to come to the laptop thing -- I had a 400mhz Winbook for awhile, from the era when networking was thought of as an option, and required a card with a terrible dongle on it. A few years later, I swapped a turntable for an obsolete orange iBook. Just a few days ago, I went whole hog (well, mostly) and shelled out for a brand-spanking-new MacBook, freshly updated by Apple to Intel's newest CPU architecture, and with a decent (though hardly top-of-the-line) graphics processor.

These two computers have nearly a decade of computing advancements between them. In that time, Apple has rolled out a completely new operating system, changed its processor architecture to industry-standard x86, and gone through an entire generation of products, along with several update cycles.

That's a lot of progress. The new MacBook runs a slick, modern OS, is almost two gigahertz faster in terms of clock speed (not to mention the extra core) and has built-in Airport "Extreme," Bluetooth, twice the USB ports (for a total of, um, two) Firewire, Dual-Layer DVD burner, 3d-accelerated graphics. It also has more than twice the total pixels, with a 1280x800 widescreen display. It really outclasses the old machine in every way.

Save one, and it's a doozy.

Take a quick look at that top picture again. Check out those surfaces where your palms rest, and the keyboards on each laptop. Orange iBook: nice, curved surfaces, and actually quite a decent keyboard. All the surfaces of the machine are curved, and it's comfortable in almost any position. New, white MacBook: it's square, with a sharp 90-degree edge right where your wrists are. This means it's decently comfortable if you're sitting at a desk, but it really doesn't feel good in many positions where the old one felt just fine. Also, the chiclet keyboard is really pretty bad. The key travel is small, and it's large enough, but the tops of the keys are flat, which is not as good as when they're curved, at least in terms of comfort and usability.

In a lot of ways, the design of the MacBook is a big step backwards. In the years in between these two computers, Apple went square. For desktops, where a human isn't in constant contact with the main cpu portion, this is fine. Square is pretty bad for laptops, particularly when it's taken to the extreme that Apple brings it to. Does it look cool? This is always arguable, but yes, even the bottom-of-the-line MacBook is a fairly slick-looking computer. But it's given up some serious ground in terms of ergonomics, which is a real shame.

More thoughts later -- I'm still in the process of learning Mac OS X and installing Ubuntu (which runs quite nicely on the iBook, by the way) on the machine. My feelings are really still quite up in the air, and we'll see if the MacBook really wins a place in my heart. It's got a ways to go.

Gesha.

I just made an espresso out of this coffee: Guatemalan Acatenango Buena Vista Gesha.

So what's the big deal? The "Gesha" part, which is a rare cultivar (like varietal for wine) which was apparently imported from an old Ethiopian stock into Central America a few years ago. And people love it. It's sweet, full of exotic fruit, and amazing, florally aromatic.

I made some French Press out of it a few days ago -- pretty good, sweet, tasty, nice aromatics. But the espresso (even in the Starbucks Barista here at school) was simply nuts. The floral character was intensified, and the mouth was more powerfully sweet than before...highly recommended. Run, don't walk, and order a pound or so of green, go to Target and get yourself a chefmate popper if you don't have a decent way to roast, and enjoy.

On winning.

Papelbon throws a high-90s fastball past the bat of a pinch-hitter in Denver, and suddenly it's the end; a good feeling, but not the all-encompassing euphoria we felt as we watched Johnny Damon's grand slam in game 7, 2004; even the 3-1 comeback against baseball's other best team, the Cleveland Indians, didn't have the drama of the earth-shattering '04 series, which saw the rise of David Ortiz as the best clutch hitter in baseball.

But it wasn't bad.

This year, everyone who follows baseball knew that the Sox had all the components necessary to get the championship. A few big free agents padded the already-impressive lineup; mostly, they've worked out, although Dice-K hasn't looked as dominant as he did in the World Baseball Classic, and I'd still rather have Trot Nixon out in right than J.D. Drew. (Nixon is a gamer, and we saw him rise to the occasion in the ALCS game 2, even if Drew has more natural talent.) The question was only if the Sox would return to pre-2004 form and fold.

Folding to the Yanks ended up being out of the question; they did something amazing by making the playoffs after a spectacularly bad start, and seemed to bring the ghosts of the past with them when they played the Sox in the second half of the season. In the end, it wasn't enough to get them past the Sox for the division, even with Boston's nonchalance towards winning at the end of the season.

Folding to the Angels wasn't in the cards either: the Angels couldn't bring a healthy team to Fenway, and Manny Ramirez woke up to play some baseball with a spectacular walk-off homer in Game 2, off the excellent K-Rod no less.

Folding to the Indians seems like a distant memory as well -- despite being down 3-1 to Eric Wedge's well-balanced team, the comeback seemed almost preordained. Beckett's win in game 5 over C.C. Sabathia, who before a mediocre-to-bad postseason might have won the Cy Young, was almost inevitable: Beckett is now the game's best big-game pitcher, as Curt Schilling hands over the torch, Clemens (who never really wore that crown anyway) retires, again, and the Yank's Chien-Ming Wang foundered badly this fall. Beckett's slow walk off the mound will doubtless be seen again in October.

There were surprises -- Manny showing up to hit was a big one, after his worst big-league season. Mike Lowell leading the team in RBIs was another; the arrival of Jacoby Ellsbury was huge (I think he might have won himself an opening-day start by hitting over .400 in the World Series, sorry Coco) not to mention Dustin Pedroia hitting over .300 as a rookie, despite a ludicrously long swing. The biggest, of course, has to be Clay Bucholz' unheard-of no-hitter, in his 2nd start in the bigs. The fates were smiling on Boston that day.

But still...this is all a bit new to us Red Sox people. I'm sure half of us were expecting Matt Holliday to hit a 7-run, 3-game-winning homer in the bottom of the eighth today, but the modern, professional management in Boston had put victory out of reach of even the hottest team in baseball.

So we'll see. The Sox are still 19 world series short of the Yankees (and also trail the Oakland Athletics and Cardinals in that category). I also suspect that the reports of the Yankees' demise may have been overstated a bit (unless they lose Posada and Rivera in addition to letting A-Rod go) and there are a couple of great teams in the central division that aren't going anywhere. The Tigers still have all the talent they need to win, though the Indians' pitching should keep them at the top of their division unless Fausto Carmona loses his nerve. The Angels will be tough if they can get another bat behind Vlad (although he's got to stop expanding his strike zone in the postseason.) But there's no getting around it -- the Sox are the top dogs now, just like they were a century ago. Last time, the Yanks knocked us off our post in the early 20's. If we can stay on top that long this time, I'd be very surprised.

So let's enjoy it now -- hats off to the 2007 Boston Red Sox, who, whatever else you might say about them, just proved themselves the best in the game.

Sportswriters are wicked lame.

So the Sox came back from a 3-1 deficit in this year's ALCS to be jeered by sports columnists all over the country -- look here for one example, but it's not just him. I've read several similar columns.

So you win one world series after nearly a century, and that's O.K. -- but more than that, if you continue to win, to please your adoring fans, if many of the same players from your previous win continue to play well, well, that's just too much. You should make like the Chicago White Sox, apparently, who, a mere two seasons after their last World Series, and impressive rout of the Astros, turned out an 18-games under .500 season. Or the Tigers, who despite one of the most all-around-talented teams in baseball, showed only flashes of the brilliance of which they're undoubtedly capable.

It seems to be the story of the day -- the Red Sox have become the Yankees, and now we must all hate them, as well as the Patriots (also dominant) and any other Boston team that manages to have a successful season.

They're not wrong -- that's not the problem -- although the Red Sox are still going to have to deal with the ACTUAL New York Yankees, who trailed us by only two games at the end of the season, still have the best offense in baseball (and this year, they very nearly did look like the "best offense ever," as they were hailed by Tim McCarver in post-season 2006) and, oh yeah, have a whole bunch of young pitchers coming up.

Maybe the sportswriters are right -- the Sox are the New Yankees. The Bronx is dead now that Torre's gone, and Boston is the new sports powerhouse.

I'm a longtime Sox fan and as such, I've seen some disappointments. I came into this thing just after the '86 loss -- a bitter pill to swallow for fans who really do go crazy when the Sox looked like they might do it "this time." The late '80s and early '90s didn't bring anything for the Sox that was great, but the late '90s did bring the resurgence of the New York Yankees -- which was really more of a return to form for the most dominant team in sports.

Just remember this: if the Sox are to become the dominant team in baseball, we're going to have to beat the Yankees year after year, who, in case you haven't noticed, have been pretty good.

Coffee is still rad.

Check out this excellent piece in the New York Times.

It's an article on "Direct Trade" coffee, the method of importation favored by Intelligentsia, Stumptown, and George Howell, and other top-tier coffee roasters.

This process still amazes me -- the coffee buyers from these fairly small businesses travel around the entire world, from Guatemala to Indonesia to Rwanda, doing what it takes to ensure quality product, which often involves stuff like donating bikes to rural African farm workers. It also results in top-tier farmers making far more money for their product than on the coffee commodity market, even for Fair Trade-labeled product.

It seems seldom today that capitalistic interest dovetails so squarely with development and humanitarianism: although this was not always the case, it's refreshing to see things going the right way sometimes.

Man I am such a sucker for coffee. Fuck. I'm going to go drink like eight cups right now.

JESUS VIDEO NEWS

Welcome to the JVN network. First up tonight: I am definitely going to hell.

I have been working on my submission for the soundtrack, and well, here it is.

It's my cover version of a traditional spiritual that I have an album of Lightin' Hopkins singing. Anyway it's a pretty straightforward deal with me signing, no fancy production or techno-dance beat -- I'll save that for the Trent Reznor style single.

And even better, I've actually started editing the thing after I figured out that basically every free option out there is actually worse than windows movie editor.

This is happening people. I mean, it may suck, but whatever.

Extra Rich.

Did you know about this? Clover Stornetta Dairy of Northern California (my personal favorite milk producer, apologies to some other prominent dairies) makes milk with extra fat. Notice that label though: more milkfat than state minimum requirements. This isn't straight off the cow by any means -- this milk is made up of constituent ingredients (milk, non-fat milk, and in this case, cream) like most commercial milk, then blended to the required fat content.

Now, I'm not complaining -- this is obviously the easiest way to do it from a commercial standpoint. But it does kinda destroy the image of a pure, natural ingredient.

This post has been dedicated to Richard J. Seymour.