complete radio station (PHP, 2006-present)
I wanted to listen to more music from the Twin Cities artists and bands, but I found that I
really didn't have much of it. So what if there was an internet channel that only had local music?
Of course. I'll download a simple program and make my own stream from mp3s I put on a server.
Voila! Right? And it will be free, right? No, I guess not. I found a few programs for streaming
from a server, but they were either just for personal use, not flexible, or not secure enough.
Or charged a rather exorbitant subscription fee. I wanted something that would stream to any
music player and display the song title, artist, and other pertinent information. Well, so I figured
out how an MP3 works and I wrote my own 'radio station' script. I'm still working on it... slowly
getting a nice interface to upload music and edit tags, plus program playlists. I may never finish
For now, you can listen to my friends play noise music for 12 hours on shuffle, or write me at
twincities.fm@gmail.com to tell me to upload more Mazarati. Seriously.
image stream tagger NSFW (PHP, 2006)
Random image generators from publicly available streams of images can be pretty amusing. But
what if you reload the stream, and you try to go back, and you can't find that picture of a
kitten sleeping on a baby deer anymore? You might not be sad enough to try to get around this
situation by learning PHP and MySql then writing a program to tag and search said images, thereby
saving them with word that you randomly associate with it in your head. Like inventing a pen that
writes in zero gravity instead of using a pencil (or just ignoring pictures of cats on the internet.)
animation of gravitational effects on multiple rotating bodies (Flash, 2005)
My great uncle John, who worked for a governmental agency as an aeronautical engineer for many years,
took me aside at a family gathering. He said, "You're a physicist, tell my why all those scientists
are trying to invent a new substance called dark matter. Look," he pointed to a diagram, "if your system
is rotating from an initial explosion, instead of just floating around, it explains the discrepancy
between the theoretical and actual velocities without introducing new mass into the universe. Think
about it and email me when you discover something." I'm going to blame the low precision of the x-y
coordinate system in Flash for foiling my efforts to discover anything. I haven't emailed yet.
sample based experimental music (2005-2007)
Panda Bee and Cool Ranch are my two musical projects. I have had a fascination with recorded sounds
ever since my cousin got a boom box for Christmas when we were four or five. She stood on the porch
bouncing a basketball, and then rewound a tape and we heard the thing bouncing again. I was transfixed.
I would have kept bouncing that ball all day, and playing back the tape, but my cousin wanted to play with
other stuff, and I was a shy child, so I gave in. If you're thinking, you stole that story from Joey Ramone,
you're not alone, but you're not right either. I realized that maybe, I too, might get one of these magical
things one day. I knew Santa Claus might have a spare one. we got a tape recorder the next year for Christmas,
and I made many many incomprehensible recordings. I only have a few cherished tidbits still on
magnetic tape, because I wasn't really into not taping over stuff back then. Now, I record sounds with
home made stereo microphones, and run them through effects. Panda Bee is me acting alone, with help from Audio
Mulch and various analog and digital pedals and jamboxes (Nord Micro Modular, Boss Analog Reverb are most
prevalent). Cool Ranch is a project with electronic musician and theater soundtrack musician Adam Patterson.
Cool Ranch is on hiatus as a live act because our fans got too rowdy and we couldn't hear ourselves play
anymore. Perhaps a studio recording is in order for the upcoming months.
Other things I like to do:
Bike touring - Summer 2008, Adam Patterson and I packed some suitcases,
flew to Seville, Spain, bought some bikes and made it all the way to Nice, France. I hope to write
up my journals on this someday.
Organic Farming - Summer 2009, I will be interning at Turnip Rock Farm
a small community supported agriculture operation. Better living, better health, social, economic and environmental
justice, they all start with food. I could go on and on about this topic. Updates forthcoming, I suppose.