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Last week I taught a week long session of both “Youth Extreme Gizmos” and “Youth Radical Robots” at the Crucible. They’re for 8-11 year olds and 12-17 year olds. Next week I’m doing another session.:-)

Yesterday I played lasertag with Marc Hertlein at Ziggy’s SF Lasertag. It was great fun!

After, I went over to Mark Alexander’s where we  throughly enjoyed dinner, sake, music and the best of times. I now need to enrich my sake and Cornelius collection!

Went to the Switchboard Music Festival last weekend. Super fun!
My favorites include:

Strike Gently, Kate Campbell and Regina Schaffer playing solo piano pieces

Teslim – not entirely my style of music but they can really play!

Sabbaticus Rex – with their animus connections to their musical instruments.

Zoe Keating – She’s becoming one of my musical heros. :-)

Billygoat – They played this awesome psychedelic set with accompanying visuals :-)

It was just 2 blocks away at Dance Mission Theater which was super-nice. And I got to chat with (a pregnant!) Zoe Keating for a few minutes about music and licensing for a few minutes which was terrific.

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Here’s snippets from the Switchboard press kit

Teslim means both ‘commit’ and ‘surrender’ in Turkish and features two well known Bay Area
musicians: violinist Kaila Flexer and Gari Hegedus on oud, Turkish saz, Greek lauoto and other
(mostly plucked) stringed instruments. This potent duo performs Greek, Turkish and Sephardic
music. In addition, both Flexer and Hegedus are composers whose original music is based on
these fertile traditions. This unusual duo is at home in classical, early music, and folk music
venues and holds workshops on a variety of topics.

Sabbaticus Rex is an ensemble rooted in the supremacy of sound over music, the triumph of
tone over time and thought. This process uses haunting and beautiful acoustic instruments and
methods: overtone gongs, shakuhachi (bamboo Zen flutes), Taimu (bass) shakuhachi, and throatsinging.
This is sound, but not music. It is primordial easy-listening for dinosaurs: slowly shifting
elemental dialogues between fat flutes and big gongs.

David Klein and Nick Woolley formed the musical/visual duo of Billygoat, producing stopanimated
films and performing their live, original scores. These films have been described as
“stop-motion shorts of staggering complexity,” created one tiny movement at a time via tens of
thousands of individual photographs of an ever-morphing art piece.

• At music fest. Trapped in room with jazz. Send help. #

With a sensor and some processing power, it shouldn’t be hard to make a toaster that can actually make perfect toast every time. I’m astounded that such a product doesn’t exist. It wouldn’t be expensive in large quantities.

Possible sensors include

• visual camera
• infrared camera
• gas sensor – Sparkfun has $5 alcohol and carbon monoxide sensors. I wonder what burnt toast “smells” like.
• standard “darkness” knob
• ambient thermometer

Possible controls include

• shutting off at the right time
• a bell to alert the consumer of soon-to-be-done toast and done-it’s-getting-cold toast
• delivering different power levels to different parts of the bread (eh, sounds expensive and not useful)
• changing the wattage, allowing “keep warm”, “warm throughout” (no more lava pop tarts!), and “crisp” settings

Hurdles

• Easy to use interface
• Technical challenge: it’s never been done!
• Really, it’s never been done?

I should make this.

PS. Ha, this fancy $130 toaster sucks. I can do better.

local version:

I’ll be at the Switchboard Music Festival in San Francisco this weekend. Join me!

Worked a day last week at the Crucible for a corporate training event building part of a large crazy control panel. We didn’t finish it at the event so I’m being paid to finish building it. Cool.

I hooked up with an  acquaintance on Monday night to modify a mechanism to work for an online video ad for a big client. The acquaintance was happy with my work. Cool.

I just took on a third tutoring student. 3rd grade reading. Pretty cool.

I was just asked to teach 2 sessions of  a week-long intensive classes at the Crucible starting next week, “Youth Radical Robots”. Cool.

The SWARM robots are  still in India after a month of wrangling with locals. For the last 2 weeks I have made it a ritual to call every night and ask “Ok, who is now blaming who for sitting on who’s hands today? And how can we get things moving?” Uncool.

SWARM was just asked by Velocity Circus to do a gig in San Diego on April 21st. That’s good because it’s a gig. That’s bad because I have to  guarantee the orbs will be back. It took 9 days to get the orbs from San Francisco to Kanpur. So far it’s taken 32 days and they are still sitting in the same spot we left them. Serious potential for Cool AND Uncool.

In more pleasant news, I’ve been wrangling with the computer system of a local machine shop for the last 10 days, getting paid to remove viruses, diagnose DSL problems, install software and the like. Just yesterday, I believe we had a major victory, defeating the slow DSL service. An AT&T tech was here for 3 hours and he found that our line from the telephone box to the office was poorly balanced so he switched to a different line. Only time will tell if this  sporadic problem was really fixed. It’s totally cool hanging out with the machine shop guys and hearing about the totally exciting projects they’re working on… like a motorcycle that doesn’t… darn it, I’m not sure if I can talk about it!

In tutoring news, yesterday I taught a 9 year old how to pay for pizza. You wouldn’t think this would be rough but oh my this was a horror. I’m tutoring this 4th grader and for the second session in a row he was really bad. He grumbled, mumbled, fought, threw papers, swore, drummed on the desk, ran around the room, bitched AND moaned.  So Delphino, the completely awesome staffer at the YMCA helped me convince him to do a little math. In 1.5 hours we successfully did 1 math problem. “You and 3 friends agree to split a pizza. The pizza man is at the door and he wants his $12 dollars. How much should each person chip in?” We had to work in earnest on the answer for 10 minutes, but he got it! Cool.

• @erikswedberg :-) in reply to erikswedberg #

Erik’s tweet was: in texas, you get three enchiladas

It’s the future now. I was promised a jetpack. Where is my jetpack?

Oh, here it is! (via)

The future is looking up, isn’t it?