red echo

Maybe it's a good thing I didn't get the mask lights finished yesterday. I just plugged the LEDs I was going to use into a little test circuit and wow are they ever bright. These two white LEDs put out as much light as the entire ring of eight blue LEDs I used on each of my leggings. I think if I wore these people would hardly be able to look at my face. Then again, I suppose that was sort of the idea, with the whole “frightening heavenly messenger” thing, so maybe it would have worked out after all.

I spent all day putting together my Halloween costume. A few different ideas clicked together a couple of weeks ago and I decided that I would dress as an angel. It gives me a great excuse to wear light-up clothing, and as a concept it somehow manages to be both completely uncharacteristic and totally fitting.

I already had a pair of white furry leggings and garter belt from my Burning Man “space cowboy” outfit, so I continued on in that theme with a blue-trimmed white furry vest and a pair of arm-warmers. I bought a couple of surplus cold-cathode fluorescent panels from Herbach & Rademan a while back, and decided to wear one of them on my chest. This was today's main project: I sewed sort of a minimalist vest out of thin webbing and some plain white cotton knit. The light panel fits into a thin pocket on the front, behind a layer of organza, which functions as a window, while a pocket over my shoulderblades holds the battery pack and inverter. It took a good five or six hours to put this together, which was a fair bit longer than I had expected, but I'm happy with the results. Once all the sewing was done I ran out and bought a pair of feathered wings and a white carnival mask, and that was that.

I had originally planned to outfit the arm-warmers with blue LEDs to match the leggings, and to put a pair of bright white LEDs in the mask, but ran completely out of time. I didn't unplug my soldering iron until 9 PM as it was. Then: off to Heden for the pre-func, and then over to West Seattle for the Hive Mind party!

Reasons I am stressed out:

I tripped on a cord at band practice and destroyed the line-out jack on my Nord. My beautiful red keyboard now makes nothing but a loud grinding buzz.

La Bête's Check Engine light lit up on the way home from band practice.

I scraped my bumper against the side of my neighbor's car while trying to squeeze into my terribly cramped parking space and left a long black streak. Then I had to circle around the neighborhood for twenty minutes looking for somewhere to leave my car overnight, because there simply wasn't enough room to fit into my own space.

There's a particular deadline at work bearing down on me, about which very little can be said in public.

We had a good band practice session tonight. I could hear a little more polish in our sound; we're getting better at control of dynamics, and at working variety into our arrangements. We have a couple of new songs, too, which Collin brought, that sound like they're going to work well.

I'd really like to set up a permanent practice space. I don't mind shuttling my keyboard and amp around, but I'm tired of wrangling all the PA gear out of storage, setting it up, tearing it down, and packing it all back into storage every single time we play. It's a big waste of time and encourages longer, less frequent practice sessions, which are less effective than shorter, more frequent practices.

Still no name for the band yet.

Some folks I know are talking about putting together a Burning Man-style event out in Eastern Washington next summer. Tonight was the first planning meeting, and I was seriously tempted to go; I've wanted for years to see something like this happen. Truth is, though, I really don't have the time to take on any new projects...

Instead, it was a quiet evening in, with craft projects. I wired up one of the new black leggings: eight red LEDs on a strip of webbing. The LEDs are threaded directly into the webbing fabric's weave, so they won't slip around, the wires are neatly braided together, and all the electronic parts are hidden under a layer of velcro. It's all tidy, and I'm very pleased with it. I think this new design should be sturdier than the last, and it was certainly easier to assemble.

It seems I forgot to renew my old redplanetsw.com domain. I suppose I could go toss another few bucks at it, but I'm tempted to just let it go this time. It's more of a nostalgia thing at this point anyway: the company called “Red Planet Software” shut down something like eight years ago, and I stopped using my spam-ridden old mail account when I started up Red Echo. Ah, well...

I did some more tinkering with my MIDI setup today and got it working the way I want. Part of the problem, it turned out, was that the cable I'd used to connect the Electribe to my SR-16 was bad. No wonder the SR-16 wasn't responding! Once I figured that out, and configured the SR-16 not to pass the note messages from the Electribe on to the Nord, everything worked swimmingly. The Electribe sets the tempo, and the rest of the system plays along. The SR-16 listens to the Electribe's sequencer, so I can program both drum machines using the new, shiny, blinky-light-enabled UI. I'm still not very good at sequencing drum loops, but the new system makes it much easier to experiment, so it should be easier to learn now.

I am increasingly confident that this live electronica project is going to work. The combination of the SR-16's nicely sampled rock drums with the Electribe's squelchy, bleepy, synthetic sound works really well, the Repeater is rock solid steady, and it doesn't take that long to spin a couple of synth lines up into a loop I feel inspired to riff over. Now I just need to spend a lot of time practicing.

La Bête is back from the shop with a new oil pressure sender and a fresh set of ball joints. After a few weeks of internal back-and-forth, I've decided to keep on with the car I have. It'll cost a fair bit of money to get it back into a condition that will make me feel happy to drive it, but it's still only about half what I'd have to spend on a newer car. I like my big red snob-mobile, anyway: it suits me and does what I need a car to do.

I spent a few hours at Stitches this afternoon working on a light top to wear while dancing. It's done now, and it looks the way I imagined that it would, but I'm not sure that I actually like it. It's a pretty radical design and would only really work at a burner party; I'll have to try it on some evening when I'm getting ready to go out and see if it feels like it suits my mood.

Oh, well: in any case it gave me some good sewing practice. I can almost thread a machine now, and have made my way out of a few common mishaps. Finishing this also gave me even more ideas for further projects...

Michael, John, and I went over to Heden with Adam and Janet after pool last night and spent a couple of hours playing Guitar Hero. So much fun! And yet another in my string of late nights. Tonight I'm having some people over; the plan is to kick them out around eleven so I can catch up on sleep (and so I don't bother the neighbors); we'll see how well I manage that. Oh, well, I'm having a great time, and I can always catch up on sleep later.

The Electribe I ordered last week just arrived! What fun this is going to be. I've got it wired up to the rest of my MIDI system, though I haven't figured out how to get the SR-16 to play along. It will probably be a couple of days before I get enough time to read the manual and really figure it out, but I can already tell that its interface is going to be fun to use. Every setting has its own dedicated knob or button - no digging around in menus necessary.

I spent about three hours at Stitches this afternoon, working on the new pair of fur leggings. It turns out that the tables and sewing machines in the back of the store are available for anyone to use, free of charge, for as long as you like, whenever they're not using the space as a classroom! Using a sewing machine made a huge difference, and wasn't as hard as I thought it might be. The bodies of the leggings are done now, with velcro strips where I'll attach the lights once I've finished wiring them up.

I'm trying to eliminate the need for a garter belt, and this pair of leggings holds itself up with a lace which you tie above your knee. It does seem to work better than the elastic band the last pair used, but the improvement isn't as great as I'd hoped. You have to cinch it down to an almost uncomfortable degree before it will stay in place. Oh, well, I'll get there eventually - and now that I have easy access to sewing machines, making a prototype is far less of a commitment than it used to be.

Last winter I did a fair amount of skiing, and thought of a novel application for a portable laser system. Late in the afternoon, or under overcast skies, shadows disappear and it can be very hard to see the contours of the snow. Unable to anticipate the terrain, you ski hesitantly, eyes strained open, which isn't much fun. My idea was to build a wearable laser device which would scan the oncoming terrain in a regular grid. You might not be able to see the dips and rises in the snow itself, but you'd see the laser lines curve when they ran across the uneven surface; it'd be like turning the ground in front of you into a topographical map.

This morning, for some reason, I woke up with the realization that this device would be mechanically identical to a standard omnidirectional supermarket barcode scanner, which raster-scans a surface in two dimensions using a prism and a rotating polygon mirror. Instead of reinventing all of the optics, I can just tear apart a used scanner and build my gadget around it, using a more appropriate laser module. Suddenly this project sounds almost easy - come the ski season, I think I'm going to have to try it out.

Alexis and Rose threw a joint birthday party for each other tonight over at Heden. It was a surprisingly mellow, conversation-focused event; it was clear that they had thought carefully about the sort of party they wanted to have, and had avoided the fun but impersonal chaos that often overtakes the bigger parties held at Heden. I was happy for the opportunity to sit and talk for a while with some people I've been wanting to get to know better.

I found the perfect car for sale today, in great shape and at a reasonable price: test drove it, loved it, and... decided not to buy it. It's an '87 Alfa Romeo Spider, silver, with a gorgeous grey and red interior - an even lovelier version of the car I almost bought for my 28th birthday (and have been missing ever since). I took it for a cruise: the engine purrs, the steering is tight, the handling is sharp, it has no strange bumps or rattles. Oh, it's a wonderful car. It's too wonderful, really; it's so clean, and in such good shape, that I would feel bad driving it up snowy mountain highways, parking it on the street in Capitol Hill, cramming it full of camping gear...

But the real killer is the fact that its trunk isn't wide enough to fit my keyboard. A car that can't take me to band practice is simply not going to work. Alas. I will own my hot little convertible someday, but I may need to wait until it can be a second car.

I took a quick trip down to California to see my family. My sister is back in the U.S. for a week, which was a good excuse to take a day off and come visit. We took our dad out to dinner, talked about our upcoming trip to Morocco, admired Joanna's art projects, roughhoused with Abigail, and generally did a lot of relaxing and talking.

Timothy, my youngest brother, enlisted my help in assembling his Halloween costume; along with Abigail, we spent the morning browsing at the hardware store and assembling bits of this and that into a charming little robot suit which will serve as his Halloween costume.

Tonight's dorkbot was all about microcontrollers. There were presentations about Atmels, Basic Stamps, PICs, Rabbits, and something called a PSoC which sounds like a combination FPGA and microcontroller. The folks who give the talks at Dorkbot are often better at building things than explaining them, so it was a mildly frustrating evening, but I did learn some things. I may take a closer look at the Atmel chips - they don't sound much harder than PICs, and you can program them in C instead of just assembler.

Dorkiness finished, I headed over to the Bronze for Rose's surprise birthday party. The place was packed when I got there, with a game of Guitar Hero in full swing. Rose looked a little dazed, but seemed to be enjoying herself. A few drinks, a few conversations a few games of Dance Dance Revolution, and a few rounds of Guitar Hero later, it was after midnight, and time to leave. What a fun party!