Mike McCracken

April was a very rewarding month. I spent nearly the whole month pushed to just below my breaking point for stress tolerance - and I really enjoyed it. Forced to balance all-out sprinting on projects with planning and self management, the month brought that variety of satisfaction unique to peak productivity.

The projects:

• A very challenging (for me, at least) xylophone and glockenspiel part in the Ginastera Harp concerto with Lake Union Civic Orchestra.
• My first ever interactive visuals performance (for the Hildegard recital).
• Wiring and electronics for an exhibitions company
• And of course, putting up Woolgatherer. Most of my work was pre-performance, building the set, the inverted stilts, developing the narrative, and managing the production (which of course has plenty of performance-time work, as well). Check it out: Seattle Times.

Here’s a little story about a special birthday treat that happened. The day of my birthday was spent in large part driving on a road trip. I was just fine with that seeing as how the trip was to Berlin. Part of the way into Germany the driver got tired of driving and I offered to do some. I was excited to drive on the autobahn and didn’t know when I’d have another opportunity. It was going fine, and it was fun. The car wasn’t thrilled with the speed we were going, but plenty of cars were zipping past me.

I then, in a moment of cheeziness (which I felt allowed to have, as it was my birthday) I requested that my friend who was DJing put on Kraftwerk. Autobahn, naturally. For maybe a minute and a half I was basking in the perfectness of careening along the listing to a song I love driving on its namesake. It was about that long before we hit traffic and came to a dead stop. For the next two hours we were in painfully slow stop and go traffic, utterly obligerating my romantic ideals of the autobahn, to an ironic soundtrack.

The experience, however, was a very good one. When we first hit the traffic I popped the door open and touched the famed highway with my hand. The irony of the situation was glorious, and I completely appreciated it. It was an excellent birthday treat.

I recently put together a fun little project using an arduino, headphones and an accellerometer.

When you put on the headphones, you hear a sound that is cycling through a sequence indicating its approach. The sound is somewhere on the left-right axis in the headphones. If the sound is to your left, you have to tilt your head to the left until the sound is centered. If you tilt your head (the paddle) to the right position in time, you hit the ball an continue, the ball’s approach speeding up each time. If you fail to hit the ball a buzzer and light go off to punish you and the game is over.

I am interested in using senses differently and getting people to focus on their senses in novel, interesting and engaging ways.

My first implementation is very rudimentary. My sound generation capabilities are limited to square waves at full volume so there isn’t true panning - just left, right and centered. In addition to real panning, I would like volume control to indicate the ball’s approach rather than the tone sequence I have now. I need to figure out what kind of RC circuit would smooth the PWM output to act like volume control, or use a digital potentiometer.

I also hope to build a transceiver into the game so that it can be multiplayer. Potentially there could be a number of players and it would be like audio hackey sack.

Another thought for extension is to use the other axis on the accelerometer so that one could use forward and backward motion in competitive play. A violent motion forward ’spikes’ the ball at the other player - just like in real ping pong.

I used the Protoshield, which is a handy way to consolidate a small arduino project.

This project was inspired by an exhibit at Disneyland The Exploratorium.

I’m in the middle of this crazy deference of decision making. I really want to go to burningman, but I told myself that I would only go if I could bring my project (currently referred to as ‘Avatar’, but looking for a better name). So, I am scrambling to see if I can get it in shape for burningman over the course of the coming week.

There’s about an 18% chance that it will happen, because there are a lot of logistics to work out: how will I power it, how will I get down there, what will I use to get four channels of audio out of supercollider (and will my old laptop support it) and what will I use to get button signals into MAX (hey, a really cheap solution might just be a disassembled mouse!), how will I keep the whole thing 30 feet off the ground?

Whether or not I go, it is good to be focusing like this on it, as I still plan on bringing it to robodock.

I am constantly cultivating my capacity for productivity, so I have decided to put my ideas down for future reference. Since I am doing that, I might as well share them. Please feel free to put any important points you think I have missed in the comments.

Clean Environment

While working, being in a clean environment can be incredible important for maintaining the focus you need for maximum productivity. If your environment is too messy, leave and go to a coffee shop where you’ll be surrounded by people having loud, often inane conversations. If for some reason you can’t do that (say, you are having a war against your stupid laptop) try really hard to ignore your mess.

Think About What You’re Doing

Even if you’re working really hard, it doesn’t count as productivity if you’re doing something wrong, or something that will ultimately be usless. Yeah, what can I say, this list isn’t intended to be any fun. Speaking of that…

No Blogs

Blogs are a huge time sink and seldom render any actual benefit beyond a mere chuckle. They are only to be approached when you have 4 or more hours in which you are ok with a complete lack of productivity, and if that’s the case, you should really go to a bar. Hey. What are you doing reading this?

No Email Lists

See above. Email lists are essentially blogs that people are less discriminate about posting to.

Get Wasted Early

If you’re going to get hammered, start immediately after work and get into it quickly. The goal is to pass out by 9:00 so that you’ll get plenty of sleep and be bright and perky the next day.

Pants

I know, I know, no one likes pants, but I’ve found (much to my chagrin) that wearing pants improves productivity. Dresses are ok if you are a woman, but they are certainly NOT ok if you are a man. It is very easy to get distracted if you are a man wearing a dress trying to work.

New-fangled: Get thing. Take thing out of box. Turn thing on. Use thing until broken. Throw thing out. Repeat.

Old-fangled: Get thing. Learn about thing. Assemble / adjust thing. Become proficient in thing maintenance. Use thing. Twiddle thing to optimize it. Repair thing / replace parts as necessary.

I care about the environment and find the disposable mindset more than a bit distasteful. Right after reduce, reuse is the priority. Then recycle. But that’s not the way consumption is done by default and those priorities can be difficult to abide by. I figure that this change has occurred from changes in economy and technology that has shifted the relative value of stuff and labor (local labor, at least). I personally hope we shift our use of material and fabrication optimizations from “more crap” to “better designed crap” and account for reuse (and reduce) in design.

Now I have a ridiculous story. I have this nice burr grinder that I got for Christmas a few years ago, but it stopped working. You know, the thing that was supposed to make it start going wasn’t making it go - but the non-electric timer mechanism was working, so I thought maybe it was just a loose wire and I might fix it. Later. A kind of half-assed nod to an old-fangled paradigm. So I stashed it away and was actually grinding my coffee with a mortar and pestle. It felt wholesome to do it that way (but I did go out for morning coffee more and eventually ground a bunch up at the parent’s place).

Wife-girl picked up on this and was very proud to get me a nice Christmas gift that she knew I needed but hadn’t asked for: a big fancy computer controlled gravity optimized mega-grinder. She put a bunch of effort into finding the most fancy-danciest one (under a kajillion bucks) and placed an order. However, not long after that I, inspired by the aforementioned wholesomeness (but un-enthused about the inconvenience), put a nice old-timey looking hand grinder on my wishlist. This was my peculiar approach to being more old-fangled without actually looking at the old grinder to fix it. Anyway, the fancy one came and after much deliberation I decided I still wanted the hand grinder (fortunately the fancy one made an excellent gift for someone else - ah, Christmas). Wife-girl managed to find it for me and I was quite happy.

So now I’m feeling good about this rustic approach to coffee grinding, which somehow makes me feel a little better on the old-fangled machine relationship front (the hand grinder is a very simple device that surely I can maintain and all that). I feel good, that is, until I try to use it for the first time. I stick some beans in it, crank away for a few seconds and just get a dusting of beans. Ok, it takes a bit longer than that, fine. I grind for a couple minutes and check to see two small piles, reflecting the curve of the burr. Wha??! I grind for ten minutes or so and make very little headway - not nearly enough to brew even a single cup.

This will not work. I’m not going to labor for nearly an hour every morning before coffee. What was I thinking with this rustic, wholesome, little house on the prairie stuff? This is miserable, how could people live like this? Before giving up all hope, I went online and found a third party manual for the machine (there wasn’t one included) and it said I should be able to grind coffee for six people in one or two minutes. That should be fine, so I read through more and it describes how I should turn this little knob to get the right grind. I follow the directions precisely. One full rotation counter clockwise, then clockwise to taste (I do about a quarter turn back). Try again, same results. Ok, it didn’t work out of the box and the internet failed me.

It is in these times of crisis that sometimes a miracle will occur - and one did this time. I actually finally engaged my brain. By looking at and listening to the burr, I adjusted the knob to a point where the grind would come out decently course for stovetop espresso. I put more beans in and plenty ground up in about a minute. Ugh, this whole time it was set so fine beans could barely make it through because it was tightened all the way up for shipping. I didn’t even check because I expected “factory settings” to be optimal. Ugh. Well, after all that stupidity (and hopefully a lesson learned) I have a nice hand grinder, and am pleased with my urban house on the prairie.

After the hand grinder idiocy, it’s time to put away the old grinder. There are no screws on it so I don’t go any further on an attempt to fix it. It’s been in use for several years and never cleaned, so I set to do that by figuring out how to take it apart. I do so and after re-assembling it I figure, heck, let’s just plug it in and try it again, eh? Why not? It works fine. The grind setting had twisted beyond it’s settings toward the position from which you take it apart, which disables it. All that fuss over wanting to be old fangled and I failed to simply twist the only adjustment on the device. Miserable. But at least I made a tiny movement forward from my way-way-way behind position in wholesome old-fangledness having gotten it working (even though it was never broken and now I have two grinders). Now I’m using the hand grinder unless I need a lot or really finely ground coffee.