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DJ Thalidomide (aka Calvin Cissel) spins at Oscillate Night.

Igloomag has been kind enough to run a short feature review of the first Oscillate Night. Chris “Zimbo” Bradbury, a local afficianado, wrote the review originally to the Oscillate Mailing List (which I maintain and which lent its name to the event).

Anyway, the good part:

“DXM played a fantastic set, one that both surprised me and confirmed my thoughts that he and Kurt (Buddy System/Pedal) are two Austin artists that are going to jump to insane levels of production/quality in the very near future (opinion of course, and a biased one, as I think highly of them both, but every time I see either of them play, it gets better and better). DXM’s set was nicely dancy/rhythmic, crossing into the techno (as a specific genre of 4-4 electronic dance music) sound that I love.”

Awesome!

I will, by the way, be playing a set at the Caucus Club on May 14th. More details soon…

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Trees and birds.

Just after midnight I finally motivated myself to go for a quick jog around the neighborhood. My job and, well, my life involve much too much sitting still in from of glowing machines and if I don’t shake myself up once every day or two I find myself unable to concentrate at work. The blood needs to rush through my brain and muscles, clear out some of the toxins, and put the right nutrients back in place. Then I’m okay.

Though I still find focussing on this well enough to write something coherent difficult. Working with computers for so many hours out of the day trains the mind to use certain patterns to get tasks done. The development I do at work involves flipping between a web browser, my development environment, various reference materials, and the specs I use to tell me what to make. My concentration doesn’t need to rest on any one stream of ideas any longer than it takes for me to quickly shove the info I need into my brain (while searching for a certain technique or reading a change request) and spit it back into the development environment. This morning I had the odd experience of totally blanking as to whether I had completed a task on Friday. My brain had been working on such a surface level that the memory of the task apparently didn’t settle into my long-term memory.

Note that I’m not saying I slack or do poor work, just that I assume a mental posture most of the day and loosening up that posture requires a fair amount of clumsy stretching and warming up the same way one would warm up leg muscles before playing a game of soccer after a long day of sitting in an office.

So when I sit down and attempt to write anything besides bland e-mails or some one-off funny comment, political whinge, or whatever, my brain doesn’t immediately want to cooperate and I get frustrated and hope I’m not losing what I consider to be a decent writing skill.

Music helps loosen the brain up. Television doesn’t. I turned down the Howard Stern show and put on “The Fawn” by the Sea and Cake and the pale colors of sound and swirling melodies inspire the small sparks of thought and memory that form the heart any true form of personal expression.

Writing that makes me want to complain about the weblog world once again. Keeping up with current web practices and just maintaining the level of one-ness with the web that is required for me to do a good job at work and with my outside clients means I do a fair amount of monitoring weblogs for new ideas and developments. And most weblogs point to the same small pile of pages and novelties that every other weblog does. Usually adding some small joke or comment or whatever and leaving it at that. To me, the whole weblog thing seems to replicate the Media Echo-Chamber effect that many webloggers would complain about the more professional news outlets perpetuating.

Anyway. Time to go to bed.

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The shop, stolen from the Mojo’s website.

Wade Beesley, founder of Mojo’s Daily Grind on Guadalupe, sent out an e-mail this week:

“Well, April 15th was a very big day for me. I closed on the sale of Mojo’s, put a down payment on a house, got tattooed, shaved my head, and a did few other non-mentionables.

“Yep that’s right, I’ve sold Mojo’s– 10 years, 1 month, and 12 days after I opened the beloved shop. I sold it to guy named John Wallace–very cool, used to own the 2 rock gyms here in town. he wants to keep it the same and just put in some money and new energy. What now? Well I’m walking away with a chunk of change, buying a house on the east side, taking a metal and wood class this summer, doing some traveling, and NOT WORKING for several months. This has all been a long time coming and I’m very exited. hope you are all doing well. Write me back and let me know what’s up.”

I first came to Mojo’s with Mason during the summer after my sophomore year of high school and have been a regular customer ever since. Hopefully the place will only get better, because Austin would be truly worse off without it.

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The cover of Edward Tufte’s book Envisioning Information has a line of sports jerseys of all sorts of seemingly random color combinations, taken from a Japanese book called Color Coordination. Here’s my simple auto-generating version of it, built with Flash MX. Click anywhere on the image to get a new set of t-shirt-jersey coordinations.

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Apropos nothing, a star.

I’ll be performing a live set this Saturday at Gallery Lombardi as DXM — along with locals The Buddy System, Numbers on the Mast, Dillitex, and DJ Thalidomide. I’m also flying in to perform Andreas Tilliander who normally makes his residence in Sweden. You should most definitely come check it out.

The details can be found here.

I’m putting this together through my little music-events wrapper Frescher-Southern.

I’ve been asked on a few occasions what that name means… It doesn’t mean anything. It just sounds nice rolling off the tongue.

That is all.

My European vacation photos will be posted soon.

Team Strausfeld wins a gold for interface design at the Industrial Designer’s Society of America IDEA Competition

Team Strausfeld wins a gold for interface design at the Industrial Designer’s Society of America IDEA Competition