spent the night in nick's yurt. lyrics, sounds, melodies, and harmonics to be heard. warmth from a fire to be felt. company and salty tea to be had. a night to remember for a day to forget.

nick and i finished up the bridle, made wooden kitebars, found a diversion, made some pretty swarf, and flew our new 11m kite. good night to fly.

said bye to my warmshowers guests,
cooked black-beans and quinoa for breakfast,


flew my kite,


met trimpin!
(if you don't know who he is, watch some videos of his sculptures)

oh, and the mango tree is doing well.

one of ten semifinalists in the IPSO-Alliance challenge!




I also made bowtie alfredo for lunch












and dyed my rod lavers blue!

nick and I finished the 11m^2 nasa parawing we were building!

no pictures (nick took them), but i'll post some when I get 'm!

I like this.

the statement he makes is exactly in line with my concept of a job.

I met all three presidents

also, fuck fixies.

I spent saturday at work, sunday at tep, and monday in lab with sulu.

Sunday I planted the mango tree!

I got a lot of work done on the jfet buffers and a wideband large input range amplifier for olopede on monday. I tried adding a diamond buffer to the output of the existing signal generator and mis-wired the collector of a transistor, which promptly exploded as soon as I turned on the power.

Tuesday I went into work and convinced my boss to plant some chia seeds on a paper towel. We hid a TH-12 wireless internet temperature humidity sensor underneath the paper towel to measure the humidity. When the humidity drops down to the room's humidity, you know you need to water it again! You can see it updating once every three minutes here. We even set up an ip camera so we can watch the seeds grow online, but we couldn't figure out how to access it outside redwire's firewall.

Today I went to a spring sound lecture where incredible vocalist Pamela Z and prepared pianist Hauschka spoke. I enjoyed Pamela's music and mindset, especially bone music and you, which you should listen to, then discover its meaning here. She also did some 3D sculpture + sound + performance work for an installation called Baggage Allowance. I really liked the Bag X-ray, weeping steamer trunk, and suitcase pieces. Most of the installation is pretty cool, though.

Hauschka told us a little about his life growing up, where life took him and why he diverted from those paths. How he started to focus on music coming from physical instruments rather than electronically synthesized music, and why he incorporates both into his pieces. He likes that acoustic instruments have soul because there is no possibility for technology to mask the meaning of the piece (ie. one trick technological ponies). He likes knowing that there are people who can replicate the sounds most people can only make with technology (violinist playing several loops in score). He wanted to expand the function of his piano, play percussion and other genre's of music.
He's a nice, quiet, guy who tried out modern composition/music making techniques and decided he liked the old way of doing things better, but couldn't live with a limited tone palate.

He even taught us how to play around with preparing piano.

Then I practiced with 'Hobo Joe and the Crack Smackers' for our first concert this saturday. We have a pretty excellent set list of covers. Maybe one day we'll record stuff and I can post it. Until then, you'll just have to come to deli haus on saturday.

Tyler and I met up tonight for some beer and conversation. We need EE buddies, so we're going to be each other's EE buddies. I'm excited!

jeff buckley all day.