Monthly Archives: March 2012

Sunday night – spring in the air

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Spring was definitely in the air today. We woke to snow… But by midday it was in the 50’s and the roads were turning to mud. The real spring surprise was that their of the huge springs that help open our garage door snapped. I had the fun and surprisingly easy job of replacing them.

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I spent The rest of the day trying to catch up for the coming week. I have a ton of stuff to take in for work and it’s all adding up. I have a 6 inch stack of stuff to read. For some reason, I’ve never learned to read technical stuff on a screen.. Not on a laptop, not on a reader, tablet or phone . I still need paper to hold on my hand. Funny thing is … I don’t have that trouble when reading fiction. Go figure

Around 11:30 I got tired of pretending to work and I did a few minutes of recreational programming with the kinect I’m borrowing. I’ve got it hooked into my laptop using a piece of code called synapse . That translates the kinects model of the human skeleton into OSC messages. OSC stands for open sound control. It’s used to get audio and visual devices communicating. I created a very simple video theremin by grabbing the messages relating to the movement of my left hand. I mapped the left right position to musical keyboard. Then mapped the up down position to. Musical instrument . It only took a few minutes to get it working. Here’s the kinect

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And heres the screen of my laptop. You can see my max/map program and the synapse window with its idea of the positions of my body parts

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And here is a completely unedited video of me making music(???!?) with the device. Still not musical., but everything’s working… Fun stuff !

Ok… It’s late. More tomorrow

Nite All, nite Sam
-me

Saturday night – neighbors

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Home late… Even later if you consider daylight savings time. I spent the entire day wrestling with projects. One of my very favorite kind if days. I finished 3 projects that had been nagging me to get done. Each required some deep thinking and some trial and error. Each took several hours to work through. In the end , each was actually satisfying aNd successful . The last one was about hooking an Xbox kinect into a synthesizer . It’s worth showing, but it’s late so I’ll Go into that tomorrow …
The only other thing I did was to go to our friend Martha’s birthday party. Martha and her husband bud have been friends of ours for years. We don’t get together much but when we do it’s great .Martha was having a big birthday… So her sister in law Amanda cooked up a surprise party. The entire neighborhood was there.

By the end of the evening we were doing taste test comparisons on types of tequila . Good think we were walking distance home !
It was great seeing everyone tonight. Great people, great town
Ok gotta sleep.

Night all, night Sam
-me

Friday evening – liminal

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Liminal.. I’ve always loved that word.. but never used it.. I  first remember coming across it many years ago in  a in a novel by A. S. Byatt It means”barely perceptible”  or “relating to the point (or threshold) beyond which a sensation becomes too faint to be experienced”..   W experience the word in “subliminal’ as in ‘below perception”.. but who gives much thought to that point at which something transitions above subliminal to… to what ? To Liminal.. hard to put your finger on it, but that’s the whole point of ‘liminal”…

That whole riff  was going through my mind  today as I was taking a left turn out of work across moving traffic. I was looking right and thought I saw a small tear in the fabric of reality.. it was like a curtain fluttering at the edge of my vision.. like the whole idea of Essex Junction Vermont had been spray painted on a screen.. and I was seeing behind it..   I made my turn.. met my friends for lunch.. but.. I’m still here wondering what it is I saw or didn’t see..

I always wonder what it’s like in other people’s heads.. is it like this ?

nite all, nite sam

-me

 

 

Thursday night – kinda blue

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I was feeling kinda blue today.. not in a bad way at all. I was blue because Mount Mansfield Varsity Basketball was in the State Championship tonight.. wait.. I mean.. Mount Mansfield Varsity Basketball WON the State Championship tonight. Normally I don’t care much about sports. Diane had to explain to me that Basketball was the sport with the orange ball, note the brown or white ball (not really.. but close).. But tonight;s game against Rice Memorial was stupendous. The two teams were very well matched.. with nearly perfect seasons each..   Gabe had gotten us all tickets to the game which filled Patrick Gymnasium at UVM..  I was very glad to be there.. since I was sitting on the MMU side, I decided to blend in 🙂

 

 

The boys all choose a more understated war paint..

The girls sported blue bhindis

Tha fans were almost more fun to watch than the game.. they had tons of cheers and routines.. I would have said it took me back ot my high school days.. but I never ever attended a sporting event until my kids started playing.

Here’s the magic free throw spell.. seemed to work about half the time 🙂

The crowd was surprisingly subdued through most of the game.. NOT !

I was impressed how masterfully both coaches managed substitutions..at one point near the middle of the game it seemed that they’d all been swapped out for girls !

and then… instantly it was over.. I think MMU had a 10 point lead.. The crowd exploded !.. I was jumping up and down too just to blend in..

Graydon seemed happy that we were now THE MOST POWERFUL TEAM IN VERMONT  (bwah-hah-hah)

The players seemed to enjoy it too !

No event is complete without leaving a samstone.. so Patti and I left one high in the bleachers while we were waiting for the crowd to disperse.

Diane, Gabe and I went with Victor and Patti to On The Rise to hear open mike and celebrate a bit.. Victor ran home and got his guitar and played a set with our friend Todd.. What a nice way to end the evening .. and drain off some of the adrenaline we’d stored up.

 

Gabe came in looking very funny.   But I didn’t point it out to him.

ok.. gotta sleep.. More tomorrow. night all, nite sam !

-me

ps. go cougars !