summerland

a cozy little beach town 6 miles south of santa barbara. I was suprised at how unpopulated the beach was. parking is free and there's a barbeque/picnic area separated from the beach with a hill. oh, and it's cleaaaan!

going back this weekend to bask in the last days of summer before fall arrives. i'll be the one doing cartwheels if any of you also happen to be there. winkemoticon.

waiting...

a lot of people spend their whole lives waiting.

there's that saying about how living life to the fullest meant taking risks with the possibilities of regret than the inevitability of regret by not having ever taken risks at all... I'd like to live my life to the fullest but ever since I was a kid, I always said to myself, out of sheer motivation and defiance of fear, that if I hadn't broken a bone, it meant I haven't truly lived life yet.

confession: I have not broken a bone.

communication breakdown

Acquaintance: emails.
Loose alliance: texts.
Friendship: cell phone.
Intimacy: land line.

-Elizabeth Trundle

in most cases, if we're not face to face or hearing the tone of each others' voices, words are very easily misconstrued. text messages and emails can be tone deaf, especially if they're being exchanged with strangers. so we judge each other with these shallow first impressions by constructing preconceived notions about how a person is and attach these notions to who we think they are without really getting to know them. everyone has good in them, but everyone also has their shortcomings, faults, flaws, insecurities...

most of us are trying our best to BE the best we can be, but that doesn't mean we don't stumble and err once in a while. 

noisy jelly

"Note : This project is a fully working prototype made with Arduino and Max/Msp, there are absolut no sound editing in the video...

Noisy jelly is a game where the player has to cook and shape his own musical material, based on coloured jelly. With this noisy chemistry lab, the gamer will create his own jelly with water and a few grams of agar agar powder. After added different color, the mix is then pour in the molds. 10 min later, the jelly shape can then be placed on the game board,and by touching the shape, the gamer will activate different sounds.

Technically, the game board is a capacitive sensor, and the variations of the shape and their salt concentration, the distance and the strength of the finger contact are detected and transform into an audio signal. This object aims to demonstrate that electronic can have a new aesthetic, and be envisaged as a malleable material, which has to be manipulated and experimented."