http://www.mike-mccracken.com Musings: amusing, bemusing and pointless Wed, 03 Sep 2008 02:28:19 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en 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 ... http://www.mike-mccracken.com/2008/08/11/a-special-birthday-treat/ Several friends have jumped on the 8:36pm bandwagon. Every night (or most nights, or whichever nights they feel like it) at 8:36 in the evening they tweet what they are doing at that very moment. According to bugeats who started the trend, one should do it every day, in order ... http://www.mike-mccracken.com/2008/06/23/836pm-twitter-time/ This release from CultureMob.com is exactly what I've been waiting for. In addition to expanding from Seattle into Denver and Portland with it's event-finding magics (with, of course, the world to follow), this release includes the fruits of my labors: editability! We've released this with an experimental ability for anyone ... http://www.mike-mccracken.com/2008/04/25/ooo-blingy/ 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 ... http://www.mike-mccracken.com/2008/04/22/audio-ping-pong/ This post is a bit belated, as will the next one be, but I wanted to put up a little about the piece that I put up in the People Doing Strange Things with Electricity show. It's called Audible Avatar, for lack of a better name. The installation consists of ... http://www.mike-mccracken.com/2008/01/03/audible-avatar/ With the assignment being to create autonomous art, I wanted to set up a system that would exhibit emergence. I wanted to make a whole bunch of light fearing robots that would become increasingly light adverse the more exposed they were. This would set up a cluster of robots that ... http://www.mike-mccracken.com/2007/11/20/autonomous-art/ In my very excellent mechatronics class, our first assignment was to make a piece of site specific art. That was the whole assignment. However, it being a mechatronics class in the dXArts program, it is naturally expected to be systems art incorporating electronic sensing and control apparatuses. My piece was, ... http://www.mike-mccracken.com/2007/10/23/site-specific-art/ 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 ... http://www.mike-mccracken.com/2007/08/19/big-push/ Just bought the ticket to go to Robodock in Amsterdam. Hooray! I hope to bring my yet-unnamed soundscape installation doohickey that needs a ton of work. http://www.mike-mccracken.com/2007/08/02/robodock-here-i-come/ From this freakonomics blog post, I discovered a story where, in a speech of Al Gore’s that was closed to the press (but a member of the press came in as a civilian, and reported on it), he describes the behavior corporations exhibit, in which they pursue short term profits ... http://www.mike-mccracken.com/2007/05/25/wow-al-gore-just-got-way-cooler/