sleepless in HK

Three necessary survival items for 1AM in Hong
Kong: a guidebook, ibuprofen, and cheap snacks.

i crashed hard tonight way too early. when i woke around 1030PM, i decided to go for a walk around the Wan Chai district.

the Hong Kong lifestyle starts late in the day in comparison to my American routine. it is really common for a business not to open until after 10AM, but the place is alive until late, late.  after 11PM while wandering the alleys and streets it is not uncommon to discover a popup market splayed unto the roadway that would normally be unforgivingly ruled Hong Kong's red taxi cabs during the daylight hours. i see all manner of produce, fish, and other wares exotic.

during the late mornings and afternoons the street bustle is extreme and you either get in line of get out of the way, but after 10PM the attitude eases. the night is still overly warm and sticky, but a tad more pleasant now that the sun has been abolished; and with it, the human
flow slows to a stroll, there is time for you to indulge, taste, read. main streets have many little late night food stalls with all the many variations of chimeric asian cuisines. the night becomes bejeweled with neon and led lighting and a hot dirty day is erased.  one more stop for me into the local ubiquitous 'circular initial' convenience store for a cheap sticky cold treat to snack on, while i sit in the apartment shared space to handle emails and communications from my Western world.

new inspiration HUGO GERNSBACK

it has been a couple of grueling days of reading and trying to wrap my head around technical methods with the Neurosky data. during that time of reading looking up references and so forth, i have discovered a new inspiration! Hugo Gernsback was an inventor, writer, and editor. in 1925 he presented the Gernsback Isolator, a device to assist you in concentrating and shutting out the annoying distractions of the world.  i found these images at: http://www.strangerdimensions.com/2014/12/09/strange-inventions-isolator-1925/

a side adventure to the thrift shop

i decided to go see what i could find at the local thrift shop. the pickings in Owego were modest but i did score two night lights to leave here at the residency site as well as three power supplies all for under 10$. i walked down to the store this place reminds me so much of Eureka CA with the Victorian and Greek Revival wood framed houses. i stopped into Mario's for lunch, the Manicotti was very good and the garlic knots were amazing. here's a few images from the walk:

really?? Owego?

Owego NY is the homeland of one of my great grandfather 4 generations ago. when i took up the residency offer, i had no idea. it wasn't until my uncle told me that it became very apparent. i actually have the facsimile of this ancestor Ephraim Lainhart. the Lainharts were Germans who immigrated/settled the Tioga County area and Upstate New York in the 1700's. Lainhart Road still exists today and is the home of a grass fed beef farm Twin Brook Farms.

early today before reporting to the residency, i rented a car and drove out to the site just to marvel at the ancestral lands. the country is a set of rolling hills and creeks, sparsely populated with wood frame multi-story farm houses, barns and a few lumber mills. i took these pictures today. that is the Lainhart family farmstead or at least the lands.

after i got to town, i went to the Visitors Bureau and they said that they think the Twin Brook Farms owner would probably be open to a visit. i am going to try to make sure i buy and cook a roast from them before i leave. how could i resist the urge

the Neutrino Food Labs is raging today

the Neutrino Food Labs is raging today, i started an experiment to culture my own cider yeast. over the past few weeks, i have been pining away for a good glass of home brew. we are very lucky locally because about 1 year ago the Pensacola Bay (micro)Brewery opened; they make a fine Brown ale which i have used as a component for my own fine chili. i am also spurred on by the price of a decent beer at the supermarket; last week when i wanted to grab a six pack for a small gathering i was holding the average price for a sixer of my favorites in domestics and microbrews was over $10. oooch! i went with a Leinenkugle specialty brew for about $8.

oi, i was feeling mighty sad this morning when the urge to brew came on strong. i keep missing the brew shop hours, they are closed Sundays and Mondays, because i generally have meetings all the rest of the week. then i saw an instructable by member, creasemaker, where he had sucessfully cultivated his own cider yeast from organically certified apples. not too many months ago i cultivated a strain of yeast for my sourdough breads, following some lore published by Peter Reinhardt. to do this, i soaked some organic raisins in warm water and slowly fed the critters in the tea flour and purified water. similarly, creasemaker took apples and soaked them in a good quality apple juice. my fingers are crossed and i can't wait to report back.

secondly, I was inspired by all the chatter on 'cold brewed' coffee so i started a pot today. i was impatient and i have dug into it after only 6 hours and it is amazing. very similar to a really lovely espresso, i think it is very high octane. i feel like i have taken some speed. lovely, delicious, Pete's French Roast speed, that is.

pbs gets hip

i am seriously impressed by the campaign that pbs seems to be on top of for the arts/culture programming. in the past 12 months, they have been producing witty, inspired, short format. you might have already been introduced to PBS PBS off book and the relatively new PBS IDEA Channel that have been burning up the YouTubez, both of which seem to be very interwebs/technology/theory oriented... go figure!

here are two episodes if you haven't been introduced:

it is not confined to the interwebs,the other night i caught a 3minute short on the local PBS OTA broadcast featuring a comedian riffing on  contemporary life. unfortunately, i didn't log his name and i need to get back to my real work so mebbe i can do a follow up.

what i like about this type of programming is the fresh way that some seriously interesting theory is being introduced, what they lack in depth they make up for perhaps waking up my 20-somethings that some seriously deep shit may be behind the fascination with things such as immersive worlds, consumerism, open source, and pop culture. as i start to develop my theory course for the Spring semester, i think i will need to consider these closely as media for the students.

ok ok. i will get back to work.

the garden & chemical warfare

so my garden is moving along very nicely; the combination of the warm winter, being able to over-winter a few plants in a makeshift greenhouse, and some starts from the warehouse store gave us an aggressive start on this springs season. we have already dined on the first green tomatoes (fried greens baby!) and there must be 2+ dozen more fruit on the three already mature tomatoes. i have already made one harvest of Kung Pao peppers and the Datil peppers have fruit on the plants. about two weeks ago i notice some wilt on the large tomato vine. a few branches would turn pale yellow start to wilt, now i got seriously depressed because this will be our 3rd summer and it looked like our tomato crop would fail again. for two years we would watch the vine vigorously grow and almost get to fruiting stage and then the extra hot weather here or a swarm of insects would literally devastate them in 48hours. i can get good fruit from the local farming community but it is so satisfying to eat the produce you grow.

this past week i was tending the garden and i saw a cluster of orange-red six legged critters on the tomatoes, i wondered ifthese guys could be causing the wilting. after a couple of hours of digging, i discovered that they are the nymphs of to the leaf-footed plant bug. the adult Leptoglossus phyllopus have a flattened spot on their back legs that looks leaf like and are related to the common stink bug and ugly as sin. i immediately recognized the adults as the bastards that stripped 3 vines and desiccated the stems in the space of 36 hours two years ago. it was horrific how fast they could devastate a plant. sure enough upon my return to the plants later that day i found an adult and another cluster of nymphs.

i grabbed the adult and did a quick flattening of my own and quickly ran around looking for the other adults, but i could only find nymphs(small, pun intended) blessings. i picked and hosed off the buggers, but i was feeling conflicted because i really don't want to use a synthetic chemical/pesticide on the food plants. i followed up my reading about the species looking for alternatives. most sites immediately said that you can try a home-brew of natural soap and water, but it is a difficult pest to control. the soap (don't use a detergent!) breaks surface tension and essentially drowns the insect (i can live with it).

to concoct the brew, you combine about a tablespoon of natural soap (castille or animal) and optionally you can add a couple tablespoons of chili sauce as an irritant to dissuade the critters. i used sirracha because it also has garlic which is known for pest control too. the only castille soap i could get had peppermint in it, again peppermints are known to repel some critters. it has a odd aroma, but it is not a chemical pesticide in the Malathion sense of the word (though some people think it makes an awesome cocktail).

so far i am off work, summer class has been canceled) so i can do about a half dozen checks a day and spray the living hell out of the nymphs. i don't know with everything i need to do this summer if i can continue and i might need to do one or two sprays of the more intense stuff.

exciting summer... ¿break?

it was a small blessing and curse in the same breath when my boss said "Sorry we have to close your summer course due to low enrollment."

i have gotten it into my head to purchase a studio; in this depressed economy there is so much cheap real estate available down here on the frontier. one of my colleagues even told me that a professor emeritus from our department had both a dumpy old house in a poor part of town to use as a studio years back. and it looks really possible. there are literally 900sq. ft. houses here on a small lot under $15k.I really only need it to have a solid roof,and not fall through the floor. even with 15 year mortgage an 10% down the payments will be around $250 with all the trimmings or much less than renting a place from someone else. so i will miss the income from the summer job.

the blessings are that i accepted a position on the V2V project for the 2nd Ural Industrial Biennial (Ekaterinburg, Russia) and Zero1 2012 (San Jose, CA). I am leading the international teams on building the installations. we will be exporting data from the modeling of Silicon and the Titanium Valleys as we 'seek' for them. these models will be used as part of our exhibition design at each venue. pretty exciting stuff and i am getting to apply the research and explorations in 3D modeling i have been doing this past year.we are exploring lots of outputs, FDM, CNC, laser etching,maybe combinations to build the exhibitions. here are a couple of exports from this evening.

of course, a summer away from class planning is also opening other doors for me. i have started practicing with the Processing language again, studying the Unity 3D modeling engine, practicing more with the CNC, building up my local makers club, developing a theory course in the history of New/Computational Media, participating on an arts organization Board of Directors, and joining a Board for a new science and engineering museum for the Pensacola area.

i don't think i am going to get very bored...

money in the 21st century fundraiser

more lessons from kickstarter

so i saw a predicition sometime last week that within 10 years that wallets will be obsolete. now i can see this as possible because i use applications that securely fill in my data on webforms, but PayPal is not what this post is solely about. we will get back to them in a few moments.

an interesting flaw appeared in our Kickstarter campaign this past 6 weeks. Kickstarter contracts through Amazon Payments to do the accounting on the pledges. i haven't looked into who runs Kickstarter and their attachment to Amazon, but it is an issue. Amazon Payments only takes 'credit cards', now i know the saturation of the Visa and MC brands are extensive and it is rare to find someone without at least a debit card without that sanctification. i found out, though, that i have a close friend who doesn't participate in that, and it got me to think that Amazon needs to figure out some more ways to collect money.

Amazon Payments require linkage to a U.S. bank, creating another barrier also. additionally, you must make an account on Kickstarter to pledge. these points actually put up a barrier for a few more friends and family members who didn't or didn't want to grok the web interface. we considered taking donations from people who couldn't participate for whatever reason and then apply them to the campaign from our account, but this is an issue too. it is a violation of the TOS to donate to your own cause. so you have to go find someone to do it for you, complicating the process even further.

this all is a huge deficit in the system. i actually think that we lost a few hundred dollars because of these inherent prejudices and hurdles. last week i found a open source laser cutter, Lasersaur, that is collecting donations like Kickstarter campaign, but through PayPal on their own webpage. the downside is that you lose the high profile visibility of Kickstarter with it's very involved community and all the easy buttons to plug into the other social media.

i have come to the conclusion that a fundraiser needs to be a two prong attack where you do both. you really should be trying to funnel as many people as you can through Kickstarter to take advantage of the trendy high profile nature of the platform (and the all or nothing nature of the pledge model). additionally, you need a side channel. ideally, a close friend who can collect through PayPal for you and that can make a deposit in Kickstarter for you in the case you get pressed to the wall for for your goal, which is probably a TOS violation, but what can you do other than handle it discretely.

and you definitely need a PayPal donation page immediately after the campaign closes because less than 12hours from when we closed our campaign we started having 'knocks on the door' to still participate. ah i love the procrastinators.

a lesson learned from kickstarter

i learned a boat load from our kickstarter experience. i am going to make posts over the next few days to get them down.

the model is good, but it is definitely geared toward product/business development. community development projects are a lot more ephemeral. i know that i am splitting hairs here; there are plenty of artists using kickstarter, but i see a big difference in those who are developing something like an album which is meant to be reproduced again and again by a manufacturing process and/or delivered by a retail method. i received a lot of messages that were serious and importantly asked "so what?". i do think this is a valid criticism to ask: "past the parlour tricks aspect of the device, what is it for?" business focused folks had a really hard time figuring out why we would ask for investment. i would like to share an email i got Monday. i have obscured the name for privacy:

Hello Thomas!

One of my friends shared your project with me. I watched your video about the glove and turning anything into a speaker. My question to you is "So what?". In other words: "What is the benefit of turning anything into a speaker?" "Why could this project be significant?" "How could it be used in the marketplace?"

I am not asking to be insulting but I am asking to help you help us non-techie people see the benefit and why it would be prudent to invest in your idea. If you could shed some light on that, I will be glad to share this information with all of my contacts.

Have a great day!
r.e.

in my reply i tried to decscribe why open source it vital for our world and told the person about another email i had recieved a few days earlier:

Hi R***,

These are all good questions and let me see if I can unfold it a bit and describe our motivations.

First a bit of background, James and I are developing this as an open source project, which is a concept that revolves around community development, strengthening an individual through 'know-how', and freely sharing information. It is a very academic pursuit which fits right in to my career as you can see. You may want to read more here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source or you might want to see it in action look here www.instructables.com/

Now to our madness, 'contact transducers' (the tech bits we are using), are indeed used in commercial applications all the time. They get used in fixtures like lamps or other objects at a shopping malls to turn those objects into a speaker to play background music or advertisements. Our projects seeks to use the tech for other audiences. One scenario could be for a group of actors who could show up and do a live impromtu performance at some public space activating sound effects, music, etc. This could allow performers to really open up their interaction with the performance space.

One other application comes from a local person who contacted me. She is a care taker here in Pensacola that uses the same technology to treat children with Autism. It sounds as if they have planted transducers into furniture that the children use to calm themselves. She has the intuition that the touch combined with auditory stimuli could expand her treatment options with the technique.

And that is the great thing about open source. It encourages innovation. It is quite likely that there are dozens of applications using the gloves that James and I haven't thought about. We are academics and artists, so we have a different take on the project. It is not our intention to be the inventors of ProductX. The Kickstarter campaign is really to help support us in building community/share the thought with the world. So that is the basis for raising money with Kickstarter.

BTW I will be leading workshops on building this, and talking about open source as a movement in November at UWF. I want to build community here also!

Don't hesitate to write back if you have other questions.

cheers!
t-

when it rains it pours!

YAY (mini)Maker Faire is coming to Atlanta! ...while i am in Istanbul. Wow. That was one of the fastest let downs in history.

¡you! yes, you. you need to go. unless you are accompanying me to Turkey this is a special thing, i was at Maker Faire 1 and 2. do not miss this opportunity.

http://www.makerfaireatl.com/Atlanta_Mini_Maker_Faire/Home.html

CS5 reflections

it has been slightly over 3 weeks since i downloaded the CS5 suite for my laptop and I am not too impressed with the performance on my relatively new Mac (less than 6 months old). i am running:

Model Name: MacBook Pro
Model Identifier: MacBookPro6,2
Processor Name: Intel Core i5
Processor Speed: 2.53 GHz
Number Of Processors: 1
Total Number Of Cores: 2
L2 Cache (per core): 256 KB
L3 Cache: 3 MB
Memory: 4 GB
Processor Interconnect Speed: 4.8 GT/s
Boot ROM Version: MBP61.0057.B05

the new suite really bogs my computer down even when doing simple things like making animated gifs. i also have had problems with the availability of tools common filters and tools (lighting effects for heaven's sake!) in the Ps 64bit version so i have had to down grade the performance to access them. and in my opinion Dw CS5 makes basic site setup less user friendly. it confused my mid-level students who had become quite comfortable with the Basic Tab; not a great idea Adopey!

i am going to suggest to my students that yes the content aware clean up tools are really sexy, but for day to day use I find that CS4 is a fine tool. it pretty obvious that we will need a few more hardware revisions to make this work smoothly, so my recommendation for the student is to go get a deal on CS4 for the mean time. or buy a really tricked out desktop.

power

i was wrong about the transformer last night. a branch weighted by the rain & wind touched the power lines. no wonder that i smelled oak bbq.

recommendations

it is a strange day. not a bad day but just one of those days that feels that it has a different rhythm to it. today, i followed up on writing a recommendation for a colleague. out of the blue one of my former students from SJSU made contact and wrote a lovely recommendation of my work teaching Art74 Introduction to New Media. it was awesome to hear now that more than a year has passed. and now back to prepping for my classes.

a reunion?

every CAA is an awesome event; i get the chance to reunite with my former colleagues and discuss our progress, opportunities, and challenges. it seems that every year there is a discussion that we should organize some kind of reunion. tonight i was on a web chat with one of the principals at Alpha One Labs, a Brooklyn Hackerspace; i have been looking to visit A1 Labs and plan to try to schedule time to visit the space during my trip to CAA in NYC this February.

as we chatted and bounced ideas, i mentioned what i do and that i would be in town with some colleagues. he then hit me with an offer: "if we want to have an event at A1, we just need to ask." bingo! wouldn't A1 be a cool place for a CADRE/SJSU reunion/party? imagine a bot building-beer bash with Brooklyn geeks and hackers. just the thought makes me smile.

new Dali museum

on Sunday we attempted to go to a Thai temple for brunch, but life got in the way and we missed our 'window of time'. instead we ate at a seafood dive in St. Pete and drove around looking a lovely houses. in the Salt Creek neighborhood there is an artist collective that i need to try to visit the next time i am down.

there was a nice surprise was as we drove around the waterfront: a peculiar and striking piece of architecture stood out. i got to drive by the new Salvador Dali Museum construction site; last week images from the site and the new building were posted on the flickr pages and current events blog of the HOK architectural firm.

spectacular!

agents, sheesh!

my lovely Bride attended the performance i mentioned a few posts back by herself since i have made a last minute run to the land o' lakes. Rebecca volunteered to help close down the gallery, but before they had finished three or four young military guys wanted to take a look around the show and they were given about 10 minutes to see.

Rebecca said that they were really excited by the space, which is cool; i don't normally think of early career military people being into the arts. i like when my expectations are blown up as much as i like to explode other peoples' preconceptions. it seems before they had left she had signed up three volunteers for gallery sitting and she had pimped me out—at least one of them got vocal when she told them about the electronics workshop i have proposed to run at the gallery—and business cards were distributed.

pimp, agent, advocate, whatever... i am going to give her half of my cards when i get back to town.

a funny thing happened on the way to the inter-library loan

a colleague shared a title that he uses for his classes the other day, whoich i wanted to look at it before i commit to the $75 book. a quick jump to worldcat(oh! i love thee!) revealed that the State University System aka Union, had half a dozen hits at other campuses including two major schools only a few hours from the p'cola. i also noted that USF which is close to my mom's house had a copy. since i am on the road for a few more days i assumed, "cool i can look at the USF copy while they ship one of the closer copies to my campus". can you hear the fail horn coming?

yep they shipped the USF copy, or i assume so because it is due now in early November, obviously a faculty checkout. only 2.5 weeks until fall semester! eeeek!

prophecy

i am visiting family before the grind of the semester begins anew. one of the benefits to being in this household is the insane numbers of subscription networks on the old boob tube. my grandfather has access to this googolplex of narrowcast networks because it is tied to the programming bundle that contains the western/cowboy sub-genre of American tv and film which he favors. i avoid subscription tv in my day-to-day life so this is fun to look at the niches all of these groups are trying to carve out.

one such narrowcast network is the Science Channel and i spent the last hour watching 'Prophets of Science Fiction' a documentary on the predictions and work of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells. sure this program was pulpy, contained cheesy historical reproductions of the science labs, and was large on hype, but the thesis was compelling. the show recounted of the predictions that Well and Verne had made in the pursuit of the art of writing. and doubly compelling as it pointed out political/moral differences of the 19th c. techno-deterministic utopianism of Verne versus the 20th c. Modernist disaffection and social concern of Wells. both writers engaged set the bar for speculative fiction as well as assuredly inspired the engineering and science by blueprinting the ideas of the submersible research vessel, time travel, and nuclear weapons. once again a fine example of the vital contribution and necessity of the arts to drive culture, not just record it.

advice for the undergrad on the C grade

one day last week, i had a rather interesting chat whilst on a popular medieval fantasy MMORPG (bet you can figure out which one). as i got pwnd just outside the Westpark Workshop the conversation turned to how to decide whether or not to go to grad school. in itself an excellent question and posed in quite an interesting social venue.

that being said, the one thing that has stayed with me is a curious intricacy of my friend's timetable. my friend has to take a dreaded freshman course during senior year. it is one those 'prep' courses where i believe you only get 1 credit and you have to listen to different speakers every week and do a fair amount of composition. the issue is that m friend put it off, but the class is a requirement. no exceptions.

"When you can take the pebble from my hand, it will be time for you to leave."

or recieve a BFA as it is.

i am curious as to what the reaction from my teaching colleagues will be to the advice i freely offered. i told my friend to be blunt and honest with the professor.

i am a senior, i am here to fulfill the requirement, and i want XX for the grade.

i find it liberating to have a student say "I want to get a C, that is my objective." i know right from that moment the amount of time to expect that this person will put forward and i know the amount of time i should spend on counseling the student. the goals are clear.

one thing that i learned from the past year is that while teaching undergrads at the state level, i will be extraordinarily lucky if 15% of my students want to pursue 'my type' of career in the fine arts. i will still require myself to teach at a high level, the work will still be geared to the para-professional who truly wants this as their career. the damned fact is: that it is hard to be in this profession. so if a student sets the goal with me and they want to try to hit 85% of the material with some aptitude, well hell yeah let's hit it. a C shows aptitude, not mastery and it is a fine grade. however, if you want a professional mark then step to it.

hmmm, what do you other college teacher types think?