I’m scouring teh intarwubs, looking for stuff to do this week. Here’s what I’ve got:

(also, I’ve decided that I don’t really like the Plain White Ts. Bon Jovi, on the other hand, remains timeless and perfect in all ways)

Wednesday

Iron and Wine at the Orpheum

Thursday

The Hedrons at Spaceland

Friday

Not in the House playing at Hyperion Tavern

The Frequency at Spaceland

Saturday

Move into my new apartment in Silverlake

Sunday

VHS or Beta at the El Rey

Monday

The Binges at Spaceland

Tuesday
Kids Cotton Club at 1430 N Cahuenga. Suit and tie required!

The Capstan Shafts–If Stephen Merrit was less depressed and his eyes were unfocused, he’d churn out some of this energetic, wonderfully garage-ified indie pop

The Binary Dolls–Electroindie shoegazing, but with force

Menomena–synth jangle indie jam, trite lyrics repeated until they’re meaningful, and the world’s ugliest website

Years ago, bathroom luminopsychology was a virtually unknown field. Bathroom lights in office buildings were not considered an important factor in employee moral and it was common for building managers to use the cheapest fluorescent lights they had in employee bathrooms. Well, all that is about to change.

The groundbreaking work of bathroom luminopsychologist Craig Warrey is sparking a paradigm shift in the way we light our public toilets. Not only does Dr. Warrey have the intelligence and drive to explore this previously unknown field, he also has the courage to confront and break down our societal taboos while discovering fundamental truths of our psyches. “A man,” Dr Warrey writes, “undergoes many subtle yet important changes in his confidence level while using the toilet. In a set of almost unconscious actions, he checks his hair, breath, dress, the quality of his shave, and of course, his penis. A series of scientific studies conducted at Johns Hopkins University reveal that men rate the appearance of their penis an average of 28 percent lower when viewed under flickering fluorescent light than under the glow of a warm incandescent bulb. Skin blemishes and pubic irregularities are much more noticeable under harsh light, and being confronted with such genital imperfections have significant impact on mens’ confidence, and subsequently, their productivity(Warry et al, 1991). The psychological benefits of  improving the quality of the light under which men observe their genitalia are immeasurable. ”

We here at Bañoca have taken Dr. Warry’s words to heart and turned his ideas into a successful business.  We’ve transformed over 20,000 company bathrooms around the nation, replacing standard fluorescent lighting with our patented Confid-o-bulb(tm) lighting solution.  We’ve boosted productivity, morale, and touched countless lives–will yours be next?

I was going through old stuff I wrote, saved to my computer and forgot about it.  I ran across this particular piece and thought I’d throw it up on the intarwebs.  It’s funny–I’m generally pretty relaxed and flexible, but occasionally I get into some strange moods that result in writing like this:

Earlier today, in the city, I felt the presence of the swell of humanity around me.  Voices, bodies, souls screaming, pulling and dropping bits of me.  It was overwhelming and I went down to the river’s edge, trying to escape the waves of this town.  On my way, I saw a panhandler on the corner.  I felt pure terror, terror at someone intruding so blatantly, so aggressively into my fragile self, where my thoughts retreat like beaten dogs to the corner of my mind.

I guess the terror showed on my face.  As I got nearer, he said, “don’t worry, man.  I ain’t gonna ask you for nothing.”

And now I’m in the relative safety of my house, away from the cacophony, the scrabbling voices and bodies.

I hope the door’s locked tight.

I’m thinking of ideas for classes we could teach as Activation Energy. I want to do a 6-part class over six weekends on various topics in electronics. Here’s my descriptions:

Electronics For Artists, Inventors, Makers, Hobbyists and Tinkerers

a 6 part series

• Week 1: Basics

January 5, 2008. 11 am – 3 pm

This class focuses on understanding the basics of electronics. If you’ve never touched a circuit before, or just want a better understanding of electronics, this is the class for you! Rather than just lecture on chalkboards, this class is designed to introduce electronics concepts through a series of hands-on projects we’ll guide you through. Some of the projects we’ll build are an LED flasher, a solar powered alarm clock and a light-controlled organ.

Cost: $100, which includes an electronic experimenter’s kit of a breadboard, wire kit, wire strippers, multimeter and an assortment of electronic components–everything you need to get started designing your own circuits.

Students of all ages are welcome. Class size is limited to 15 to maximize the time students spend one-on-one with the teachers

• Week 2: Light

January 12, 2008. 11 am -3 pm

Moving right along, the Light unit is an introduction to the principles of electronic lighting. Students will learn how to control and mix red, green and blue light to create any color imaginable. This course will also include an introduction to digital electronics, as well as soldering technique. During this course, students will explore the concepts of electronic lighting while they build a circuit designed by Alex Hornstein. Students will walk home with a four-channel light controller that can operate as a stand-alone unit, or be controlled over USB. At the end of the course, students will understand how to dim and mix electronic lights, and the students’ creations will be incorporated into a light show that responds to the music of Pink Floyd.

Cost: $250, including a professionally manufactured printed circuit board and the components needed to assemble it.

• Week 3: Sound

January 19, 2008. 11 am -4 pm

During this course, students will explore the fundamentals of electronic sound. Students will get a good grasp of oscillators, amplifiers, filters, effects, mixers and understand how to generate and modify sounds using both digital and analog methods. All the concepts will be taught by hands-on projects where students design, build and modify sound circuits. Students will walk home with a firm understanding of how to design and build audio circuits, as well as a custom-designed circuit board that they assemble during the class, that includes a USB-controlled synthesizer, several different oscillator designs, a mixer and both digital and analog amplifiers.

cost: $250, including a professionally manufactured printed circuit board used during the course, and the components needed to assemble it.

• Week 4: Motors

January 26, 2008. 11 am – 4 pm

This course is all about motor control. Students will learn how to control the speed and direction of different types of electronic motors, explore open and closed-loop motor control, optical encoding, solenoids, and learn how to design the power electronics that drive motors. During this class, students will build several hands-on projects culminating in a wheeled robot that is controllable from a computer.

Cost: $250, including a kit for a computer-controlled robot.

• Week 5: Sensing

February 2, 2008. 11am – 4 pm

This course is a standalone class, but the material in it combined with the material from the other courses will be particularly useful in creating projects from autonomous robots to interactive art exhibits. This course covers various methods of sensing objects in the environment, including microphones, vibration, distance measurement, capacitive proximity detection, accelerometers, bend sensors, hall effect sensors, and simple bump detection. After finishing this class, students will understand how to build circuits that are aware of their environment, and can ‘sense’ events going on around them. Students will explore all these sensing methods using hands-on projects where they build a certain sensing circuit, modify it, and explore its capabilities.

Cost: $300, including a professionally manufactured circuit board that contains many different sensing circuits, as well as an assortment of sensors including a microphone, 3-axis accelerometer, bend sensor, hall effect sensor, reflective distance measurement sensor and a vibration sensor.

• Week 6: Printed Circuit Board Design

February 9, 2008. 11 am – 2 pm

This class is all about designing your own circuit boards. Creating printed circuit boards is the neatest, most reliable way of making your own circuits. With the advent of free software and inexpensive circuit board manufacturers, custom circuit board design is now easy and inexpensive, and a valuable tool for anyone interested in creating their own circuits. Using the free version of Eagle CAD, students will learn how to design schematics, layout multi-layer circuit boards, create custom footprints, use autorouting tools, and ultimately order their own circuit board.

Cost: $50. Students should bring their own computers, if possible (otherwise call Alex at 919.609.8744 to arrange another computer). Students will have the option at the end of the class to order the board that they create, which costs $42, including shipping.

Students are encouraged to come to the class with a circuit that they would like to put on a printed circuit board, but we will also have a number of interesting circuits that students can layout.