Oct
2
Connections
October 2, 2008 | Leave a Comment
this week the assignment is related to ‘connections’ ‘connectors’ it took me a while to find out what i’d do. first i thought i’d make some soundtrack to ‘connect’ the previous assignment, the one on ‘modularity’ that i titled ‘moveOn’, soon to be here as well. But writing music is not easy. i tried several times, but i think i like music so very much that i don’t dare to write it. So I came up with an idea, the idea: i’d recreate the connectors we used when kids to talk secretly from bed to bed: 2 cups connected by a simple thread.
always with a little procastination on the side:
Sep
18
gummy bears
September 18, 2008 | Leave a Comment
first challenge: to produce a gift to be given to a guy i have a crush on. FUN. Gummy bears! i got the idea right away. i also thought of a gift if the recipient is a gal. in other words, i also thought of another gift for me. yeah. gummy bears. what stroke me was that this came out after declaring what my ‘weakness’ is. one of them. gummy bears. yes, gummy and bears. a classic munch, world wide. actually the best ones come from germany. haribo makes them.
it would be a ring for him and a hair pin for the lady. for me. actually, i guess if im gonna give this to some guy i [supposedly] have a crush on, i’d wear the hair pin myself to mean: ‘wanna play?’
also, i’d use saliva to glue the bears. i know that after a certain time it becomes a very solid glue and the gummy becomes hard as a stone.
Sep
14
Last.Fm 1 - 0 Pandora
September 14, 2008 | Leave a Comment
An inspirational example in the digital music world that focuses on PC- based social music discovery: Last.Fm is as they claim the music revolution. Based on the users taste and thanks to
its audioscrobbler app, Last.Fm creates music streams customized. I’ve been comparing it with the well spread Pandora and I find it much more appealing. Since 2004 I don’t need to spend a penny on music and not only got rid of commercial hosts but I listen to what I like to listen to and it’s been a incomparable source of new music. Not even have the need to ‘make friends’ or interact with unknown people because Last.Fm does it for me based on similar music tastes. I can be listening a 28 yo girl in Japan that happens to like what I like. And before I choose to listen to somebody’s stream I have the chance to overview his/her taste avoiding bad surprises in my own stream: if I see U2 or Bjorg in someone’s stream I know I won’t ever play this stream. Period. And it is free. You don’t need to even download the application if you just want to listen. It is only needed if you want to build your own stream. Free of charge. Thanks to the hyperlinks I also have access to fresh made information about the group playing and its coming tour dates, if any. British people have a respect about music and you can tell from this web site.
Most people, when I tell them about Last.Fm say ‘oh yeah, like Pandora’ and that gets on my nerves, cuz this is what I think of Pandora once I gave it a chance:
‘No, thanks’:
how can they give me Joao Gilberto when i ask for the great BB?
French pop of the 60’s have not much to do with brazilian songwriter.
No Way.
Before that i had ask for Jetplane Landing, brit band that i can stream on last.fm. a band that happens to have huge sales in the uk is not in Pandora.
Nino Ferrer, another French pop gem from the jolies 60’s and got no results.
Good:
I found info about the track. very little but some.
Still I can’t find the connection bet French jolies 60s and bossa nova .
the following artists keep being Brazilians, why?
One thing I like that i can’t get in my beautiful last.fm paradise is the possibility to pause a song. Great.
Very poor pool of music.
The information given sounds very loussy / against to the ones at Last.fm that use to be written by users and therefore sound more accurate, less commercialized, fresher and therefore, closer.
Oh, and when I ban a song, I do it forever, not for a month!
So long Pandora.
BTW, in one of the recommended readings for this week, HOW THE MUSIC BIZ SPENT THE SUMMER KILLING ITSELF, I found in the end the blogger offering music upon request to his readers, and i wonder, is that legal?
Not that I’m against, but what is exactly what music public streamers fear?
Sep
10
Live Web 1 - 0 Celina
September 10, 2008 | Leave a Comment
Chats !
So far it is something i do not get into just for fun:
I can only use them when i need them, and actually what i then use is the forums rather than getting into a conversation among strangers.
I see it weird. Maybe if i was bored and …
But there’s no way i can just get into a running conversation and tell them about a certain experience i came across during the Summer.
I may spend time reading them, seeing what others think, but always keeping to myself and my offline acquaintances my own thoughts, if any.
I guess I’ll have to open up something and start stirring things up out there.
So yes, i’m trying and this seems harder than i thought: so far I haven’t yet got heard, i mean i didn’t expect to have to actually read instructions and/or download apps.: What is IRCLE for? What does IRCLE do for me?
Sep
9
CNet1
September 9, 2008 | Leave a Comment
first exercise.
a secret trip
Jun
28
video formats
June 28, 2008 | Leave a Comment
i recently tried to upload a video in anamorphic pal
and found out that it is not accepted anywhere:
youtube, google videos and the fancy vimeo !
went crazy encoding it, used all the storage in my little computer on the way.
no way.
had to re-capture the anamorphic and set the new sequence
as standard pal, do the endless rendering [btw, can anyone tell me the
advantages of fcp6.0 over fcp5 in rendering time?]
after modifying the aspect ratio to get it as a ‘fake’ 16/9
and get it running out there.
right now i’ve just discovered that MySpace does accept the
anamorphic format !!!
they have an awesome uploading pal !
so, for now on, MySpace rocks
oh, btw, here’s where i got my one hundred bug bites.
as we say in spain, ’sarna con gusto no pica’
[any translators]
May
16
BYOB
May 16, 2008 | Comments Off
BYOB stands for Bring Your Own Books and it is the name of the project I presented for finals at school.
Why BYOB? Because I don’t like to keep books on selves that I will never read again.
When I like a book I like to give it to someone else to read. I will never have the time to read it again, so what to keep them for?
I specially hate them when moving from one place to another. So heavy. And I move so often.
It all started here
where this russian MIT’er [my friend Alberto García Saenz] made a presentation for his last ‘invention’ that was never taken into consideration. Seriously. Throwing books against a wall and getting the letters out to splat first on the wall and then fall seemed to me the perfect way to get rid of some heavy weight in my next moving.
Plus the act of throwing an object against the wall is a long time fantasy.
So, I geared myself to re-vitalize the project from ITP.
As I had been playing with Shiffman’s Particle System in my midterm project for DanO’s Computational Cameras, I knew I could use the Particle’s code to make the letters stuff and then I would use MaxMSP Jitter to track the book and trigger the processing code when the book hit the wall.
On the processing side:
I first made the particles to be an array list of letters. Then give them a time [to stay on the wall splatted] and make them fall. At the bottom of the screen, I’d make them roll to disappear, otherwise the applet would get too heavy. Then I had to make the letters start at a certain location that I chose to be the mouse location. this would later be changed to location x,y determined by the location sent by Max to Processing: exactly where the book hit the wall.
On the MaxMSP Jitter side:
I had to track the book, find its centroid, listen to the hit on the wall, scale from the image captured in the camera to the output screen, and send all this to processing, modifying the processing code to understand Max.
The Processing code can be seen here.
And the first final sight of the project looked like this
I know it is just the beginning of this project outcome. The based is set, now it needs to be properly wrapped.
Apr
16
voilá!
Feb
3
site’s first assignment
February 3, 2008 | Comments Off
the right shape of monuments maybe round and the scale, spectacularly big
postcards can take you on a really long trip
a landmark of a country, of a city and of a universal emotion
Jan
29
back to school
January 29, 2008 | Comments Off
back is hard. school is harder. classes are good.
good season at the movie theaters as well. First recommendation: no country for old men.
the coen bros make a very intelligent movie about a heartless killer played by spaniard Javier Bardem.
the aesthetic of the whole movie and the tempo are amazing, almost european style. smooth. the killer is just passionless.