FUTURE BLINDNESS

It has been difficult to find a moment to write about the last two weeks. I will try, briefly, to relate the events so far.

Last week I took Wednesday and Thursday off from Ambient to go to the all-hands production retreat for “Death and the Powers,” the opera I’m working on as part of my research at the Hyperinstrument Group. I admit it—I only got a chance to read the libretto all the way through on the night before the production meeting began.

When I had finished reading the libretto, I laughed out loud for almost a full minute. They did not know how it ended! Despite this, the meeting went well and was quite productive. I was very impressed with the creative team, and Pinsky coined a part of the (erotic) choreography “The Chandelier Position;” we got along quite well after that. I had the sense, though, that he was having his own fun with us (the technical staff) by writing into the libretto a series of known-impossible tricks (for example, the stage direction “NICHOLAS calmly removes his head from his body, and smiles at the Delegation”).

After the first day of brainstorming, we had made good steps towards a complete vision for the show’s aesthetic and production values. It was clear that after a long and exciting day of new ideas, us engineers had gone home and thought for a moment more about phrases like “those batteries will cost nine hundred thousand dollars” and “Nicholas’ arm should detach from his shoulder and crawl around” with understandable trepidation. On the second day the scales fell from our eyes, and we went through the libretto again with a pragmatic run-down of the requirements for each minute of the show. I learned quite a bit about engineers and their working process, which is different from other styles I’ve encountered but not without its merits.

Unsurprisingly, the meeting ran a little long on the second day and a couple participants almost missed their flights. (No, I don’t believe we quite finished deciding how the opera will end I was thrilled that I left the meeting much more excited about the opera than I had been coming into it. The story is wonderfully written, with a couple completely beautiful moments, the set is going to look rad, and the story itself is more compelling than the synopsis I had read months ago.

Come Friday morning I sure wasn’t looking forward to going back to Ambient to answer the phone. I hit the ground running on Monday as we began to set up the Hyperinstruments space for all the UROPs we’ll be working with all summer. This took most of the first week, during which I am also supposed to be learning Eagle, Mathcad, Solidworks, Visio, OMAX, and a few more things I have written down somewhere. I am drinking a lot of Diet Coke, and I haven’t exercised or cooked myself a meal in over a week. Today is my last day at Ambient (hooray!), so my fond hope is that this weekend I will be able to organize myself, take stock of my time the coming summer, and be able to start on Monday with a new, more productive and flexible routine. If you have any suggestions, let me know—I got the email address I was hoping for, so you can guess how to reach me!

Well, I really fucked up the Constraints I laid out for March. My good friend Sasha knows me well enough to profit from these bouts of optimism, so he bet me a reasonable sum that I wouldn’t make four out of the six Constraints. Even if you accept a couple of my excuses (and you know you shouldn’t), I made two. If you follow the letter and not the spirit of the law, I succeeded at zero of these tasks.
Let’s go through them:

I will eat out only three times this month, and not spend over $100 total on this. When at home, I will eat inexpensively and I will try to consume all my leftovers.

NOPE.

I will drink one beer per day, perhaps two on the weekend. This does not count a beer that someone might purchase for me.

SORT OF.

I will visit the gym every other day, with the option to skip a weekend visit if I exercise at home. (This will ensure I get value from my gym membership).

NOPE.

I will sell my two ham radios at a reasonable price.

NOPE.

I will make and sell at least two t-shirts…getting them in a store on consignment is okay for this.

NOPE.

I will find freelance work and execute it at a rate more than $20/hr.

SORT OF.

Sasha, thank you for your support—let me know where to send my finest Liar’s Poker bills.

Well, they let me into the Media Lab—hooray! I am very excited to join the talented and interesting people there, and you can expect me to be a lot more smug than usual for awhile.

Because of some recent financial blunders and a lack of roommates in my residence, I find myself with far less cash than I usually have available. Coupled with the recent computer troubles necessitating a new laptop, this prompts me to take drastic steps to increase my liquidity.

I will therefore live the month of March with some elective constraints, listed below:

I am interested in the degree to which you think I will be successful here. I have listed more constraints than I intend to follow, and I’d love to hear in the comments which ones you think I will be able to meet.

If I had a lot of time on my hands, in fact, I’d love to take odds on these and make this an ongoing market—I think it would be interesting and motivational if a community helped itself improve by posting resolutions and paying out when they’re broken (and vice versa - if you bet me I won’t make it to the gym and I do, you lose the bet). This encourages people to push their limits and propose something that gets better odds, and discourages them from lowballing and going the comfortable route. Sasha would probably have a better system to implement this, so if you read this, Sasha, chime in!

In other news, I have snuck some fun into my workday by assigning myself the task of designing better visualizations for the tech support staff’s telephone data. Right now, I’m adapting Ben Fry’s excellent zipdecode applet to accept timestamped call data.

After three txt-msg blogposts, I need to break the streak and provide a proper update. Please do not think I will be txt-blogging less, though, as it makes an excellent threat when Company is around.

My second run of T-shirts went very well - I will be posting photos soon to flickr. The design was an AKA logo called Twin Eurofighters, and most of the shirts from the first run of 9 have been given away. Let me know if you’d like one, and I’m sure we can work something out. Screenprinting is great fun but a bit costly—so far I’m about $300 in the hole from supplies, the sink I had to buy and install, and shirts to print on. Clearly, this is a pursuit that must eventually be monetized.

I’m preparing a very small (but possibly noteworthy) presentation for the Dorkbot “Presidents Day” showing; it is called PissPoll and I’ll have more details soon. You may or may not like this idea. I am concerned that you might not like it.

I was in Harlem from this past Thursday to Monday working on Thenji’s film, which is coming along well. We were supposed to have finished by Monday but the deadline was extended and we’re finishing up next weekend. I hope. My most pressing concern is that I will finish the score and not have a chance to mix it on proper monitors, which neither of us own. Also, the diagetic mix is not yet final, which may affect some scoring stuff. It certainly will be exciting to see it screened, though! (no idea when that may occur).

Harlo was down in New York over the weekend as well; she was filming an interview with DJ/rupture for the premiere episode of share.tv, which airs on Feb 17th on CCTV. I haven’t seen the footage yet, but I’m sure it will come out very well. We went to Raggs of Harlem, a fine old bar, and had a nice evening talking with drunken locals who won money on the Superbowl.

Well, it was a nice little system but I’m going to disable the automated linkdump that posts every day. It’s sort of overkill. Instead, I’ll try to put a del.icio.us tag cloud on the right, or an RSS feed that’s not always breaking.

first results from Dragon Skin test run

Originally uploaded by AKA MEDIA SYSTEM

This weekend I had some encouraging results with Dragon Skin, a silicone molding compound from the pricey folks at Smooth On. Luckily, the silicone we had left over from PS04 was still usable, and it was much easier than I remembered. Some photos of the prototypes are available here.

What I’ll now need to figure out is exactly how to shape the nitinol I’ll be embedding, and how to ensure an electrical connection will always be made regardless of the bend-state of the wire. A journeyman friend is in town tonight but I’ll try to have a more detailed summary by tomorrow.

In the meantime, please have a look at the photos and tell me: how am I going to get the petals to shrivel/contract/close on command and what will have enough force to return the wire to its normal state?