a view into the mind of dlade

blog.dlade.net

Tribal connection

Let’s face it, I’m special. I can have serious trouble showing enthusiasm for things, even when I am very excited about them somewhere deep down. I also tend to stay far away from things that I like to classify as tribal behaviour. These include things like watching sports (although that one football game between England and Portugal in the European championships 2004 will always stay with me, mostly as one of very few times that I’ve sworn in public, trying to express how exciting the game was,) following any kind of religion, computer related or otherwise, clapping along with music, or getting drunk and singing bad karaoke with friends.

This behaviour of mine was why I was caught out on Covent Garden as the only person in the audience who wasn’t clapping when the performer asked for it. It is also why you will at most see me nod my head along with the music when I am at a concert. Which turns out to be precisely the normal behaviour at a Porcupine Tree concert, but usually not at others.

There is one exception, however, which has tonight proven to be repeatable. At Gogol Bordello concerts, two years in a row, it hasn’t take more than a minute before I’ve been right there in the middle of it all, jumping along with everyone else, shouting myself hoarse and clapping along with the music, and enjoying every moment of it. Right now I’m sitting in the sofa with ringing ears, feet that feel like they are still moving and a big grin on my face when my mouth isn’t busy whistling out the tunes of their songs.

That said, I still have a few mental blocks, even at a Gogol Bordello concert. I can for some reason never get myself to lift my hands over my head. Clapping takes place at eye level at the highest. Anything higher seems totally inappropriate and is impossible for me to even consider. Also, I can never quite stop worrying about the people who are standing around me, wondering if I will step on their toes or jump into them. The fact that they keep jumping into me without showing any remorse doesn’t change this.

Anyway, the important conclusion here is that if you haven’t yet seen Gogol Bordello in concert, you need to do something about this as soon as possible.

Hackmeetup is dead, long live Forskningsavdelningen

Since last time I wrote anything here, Hackmeetup has both died and been reborn as something new. On the 25th of August, we got access to our very own little space in the house called Utkanten. Since then, we’ve been cleaning it up to make it usable for our purposes. In this process, Hackmeetup has also transformed into something slightly bigger and different. Instead of being a few geeks sitting in a meeting room and experimenting with software, it’s now going to be slightly more geeks in their own space experimenting with electronics, food and anything else we can think of that sounds like fun. It has also changed name to Forskningsavdelningen (the Research Department.)

There’s still a lot of work to be done in terms of setting the place up, but we just couldn’t wait any longer, so yesterday we started on the first project. This project is to build some kind of radio controlled sound system. The exact details of what it should become seem to be changing slightly as we progress, but that’s part of the fun.

The other part that I’ve always found to be fun (just ask my mother) is to take electronic equipment apart and seeing what it looks like on the inside. Yesterday was most satisfying, as we busted open a whole heap of speakers and then also disassembled my old DVD-player/stereo. The twist this time is that we’ll actually be putting it together again, and hopefully into something that actually works.

Other fun activities included burning up a volume control from one of the active speakers while testing if we could connect it again and playing blip blop music (of course including the Bubble Bobble theme tune) on a pre-existing home built sound system and a toy synth.

Hackmeetup, bigger and bolder

Yesterday’s hackmeetup was definitely a success. As Olle has already written, we had a new record in the number of people showing up. It was also the second time we had a theme, this time around hardware and electronics. I didn’t personally bring any project, but I had a lot of fun with Olle’s arduino kit.

The real theme for the evening for me, however, was derailment. Like how Olle’s and my project to get the arduino to play music got derailed when we obsessed around getting the correct notes for the Bubble Bobble theme tune and started googling for the correct frequency for a b (or h) below the standard c, and then tried to figure out how to convert that into a number we could use to send to the arduino. (It turned out that the conversion was really simple if you just knew how.)

Or when I was just going to quickly show off what Processing looked like and loaded a silly little project that I built out of boredom last week when I was ill. It’s a version of pong that takes the built in webcamera on my MacBook as input and bounces the ball against anything dark in the picture. Luckily the wall behind us was light enough to be a playing field and we ended up in a long deathmatch between my (currently a bit too big) hair and mickeprag’s sweater.

So for me the evening included a whole lot of silliness and not a lot of usefulness. Just the way it’s supposed to be.