WOW

OK, intense month all around. First, I've just got to say that this has easily been one of the most insane months of my life. I've moved to Chestnut Hill while the entire Universe had a conniption, apparently, and somehow I finally have my head above water.

So, the illustrious Billy has been working on installing copper wire into plastic marble tubes. Using metal balls, these complete connections that are attached to the AMAZING iPac!! So, if all goes well, as the balls go down the tube they'll trigger several keystrokes from the iPac.

http://www.ultimarc.com/ipac1.html

I personally am really fascinated by this little thing and really look forward to using it as a basic control-surface component for my own designs. Most (apparently not all, as you'll read below) music production software lets you customize the key commands, so this is VERY useful to someone like me who loves live performance with electronics.

As a side note, there was a severe delay when Amazon.com (the badly-run company, or BRC, hereafter) didn't ship out marble-stuff out. Like we had asked. And paid for. To get EARLY. But it didn't come early, no....

So, BRCs are awful roadblocks to progress. As a comparison, Cycling '74 is an awesome-alternative company (or AAC), so they should not feel our hate, only our ambivalence. They make Max, a handy, powerful application that saves me repeatedly. My end has involved trying to get the iPac's keystrokes to communicate with Reason, the sound software we are using for effects. I thought all music software had customizeable key commands, but not Reason. So, I have a little patch in Max that takes key commands and transforms them into MIDI controls (which Reason reads just fine).

I'm meeting with Billy today to put both parts together. Once that's done, I'll do a summary of the project so you actually know what all this is for! But now I have to run.

Firt Post!

So, I guess this is the journal I'll be using for the COMP150 TUI class. Basically, it will be to record new problems, ideas to fix problems, and how such problems are going. And, we've already encountered some!

The first has been trying to get the Mistubishi Diamond Touch pad to work properly. First, we had to download some installation software, but even then the computer fails to get any of the signals. The "mouse-pointer" software opens and runs, but you can pound all you want on the pad and nothing happens. We'll see how this goes....

The other one is how we're going to get the RFID software to do what we need, but that's more open-ended and we've got good people (i.e., Anila and Sabina) working on both. In the meantime, I'm getting some powerpoint stuff ready for Monday. Hopefully, I'll have some good news to post next week before the break!