All posts by johncohn

Monday night – advice

March 12, 2012 johncohn 1 Comment

I gave a long… much too long talk today to a bunch of smiling new hires at work.. the room was full of them.. all sitting there at the start of their careers. Time is such a funny thing. . I could put myself exactly in that space.. in fact.. I can clearly recall sitting in that same damn room listening to some geezerly and esteemed senior guy tell me about the ‘old days’.. and there I was.. 30 year later.. playing the geezer.

I spoke far too long today.. but had some fun stories and props.. .As I spoke , i actually tried to listen to the advice I was trying to give.. most of it was not that bad.. … ..make a plan, combine incremental improvement with disruptive change, take a few chances, don’t be afraid to fail, make a name for yourself.. reach out and build a network. What’s not to like in all of that. The thing is.. I ind myself sitting back in my office, not taking my own advice I’m now taking on a new challenge at work.. and as per usual, I’m asking for.. and receiving a ton of advice..How come I’m not able to put it into practice ? Maybe I need to hire someone to give me advice..
Any good advice out there for me ?

nite all, nite sam

-me

Sunday night – spring in the air

March 12, 2012 johncohn 1 Comment

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.

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

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

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

March 11, 2012 johncohn 1 Comment

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

March 9, 2012 johncohn 1 Comment

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 ?