In At The End

My term of service with CTEP is drawing to a close. Come 3:00 Saturday the 29th I shall be a free man, beholden to no master!

At least until September 8th, anyway. But for now there is (are?) tons and tons of paperwork to do. I've already submitted client data and even had my exit interview, but the major piece left to do is the stuff related to my civic engagement, the E-Waste Project.

Speaking of that, our PSA:



It went over very well at our civic engagement presentation last Friday; here's hoping it continues to kill 'em tomorrow...

But anyway, there's a lot of reporting that we have to do for this project. The CTEP reporting isn't that bad, but since we got a grant to support our project we have to submit all sorts of detailed reports on that end as well. Technically the latter is due the 15th of September, but we'd like to finish it before the 29th if possible.

In other work related news, I no longer have to work 15 extra hours a week anymore! Apparently there was a combination of me working overtime and the computer program forgetting that I had an extra week in there to get things done. So now my Tuesdays and Fridays (except for this week... really weird schedule) are free again! Yay! And we got mango cake at an end of the year work party the other day! Yay!



And I swear that I've done other things besides work in the time between my posts. I saw a couple of Fringe Theater Fest shows, have restarted regular weekly gaming sessions for my Changeling game, been hanging out with various people, discovered a new restaurant/bar that I have had no reason not to have discovered yet (The Bulldog- excellent burgers AND a mostly belgian/craft brew beer list? yes please!), and got to meet the family and bride that Rachel will be maid of honoring for in September (I knew the meeting was going well when the topic of conversation switched to a mix of Daleks and Warhammer minis). And also looking at grad schools and coming to a surprising decision, which I shall detail next time... hopefully...

Until next time,

"The bane of Americans is overwork--and the ruin of any work is a divided interest. Concentrate-concentrate. One thing at a time."
-Letter to Orion Clemens from Samuel Clemens, 5/12/1880

Cool Tool: Audacity

Hey all, just wanted to share a Cool Tool that I found a while ago called Audacity. I first heard about this program through CTEP at one of our corps days and was instantly intrigued. It's a free, open source piece of software that allows you to record, mix and alter sound files. It's also fairly easy to use and can create .wav and .mp3 files with ease.

At first I thought that I could only use Audacity to alter music that I had downloaded on my computer or files that I recorded with a mike. This was fine, as it allowed me to have fun adding comments to audio files or switching songs into different keys. It's also been a great tool at work for my Kids' Computer Club, modifying the tykes voices so they sound like adults or letting them change their favorite songs into slow-mo or chipmunk speed. You can also do more practical things like remove noise from recorded audio or change the tempo of a file so that it will fit better along with a presentation that you've been working on.

Today, however, I came across the following video tutorial that tells you how to use Audacity to record streaming audio without relying on a mike and external speakers, thereby preserving the original sound quality. This is huge for me, as I only have 2 microphones at work (counting my laptop's internal mike) and finding audio files on which I can have the kids experiment has been a struggle. Now I can just have them look up a song on YouTube and record it directly into Audacity!

Here's the tutorial; it will also tell you how to install Audacity and get the additional program that it requires to save its files into readable ones.

Audacity [TUTORIAL]
Uploaded by tanjentsdotcom. - Music videos, artist interviews, concerts and more.

*Edit*
And here's another useful set of tutorials that I managed to find.

*Second Edit*
At least for me there were some technical problems with getting Audacity to record streaming audio files (stupid Vista!). To fix this, go to this link and follow the directions. You'll have to switch recording apparati using the Edit-> Preferences in Audacity, but it shouldn't be too much of a bother. Also, make sure that your computer's sound is turned up when you record, as it affects how loud your Audacity recording is (though you can alter the input amplification from your recording device in Audacity/alter the amplification after the fact as well).

I hope that this was useful; I'll try and do more posts about useful free tools that I've found in the future. Until next time...

"We often feel sad in the presence of music without words; and often more than that in the presence of music without music."
- More Maxims of Mark, Johnson, 1927

Teching, among other things

The past week was fairly busy. As mentioned before, I had tech for Panda Sandwich and WTF in the Garden of Eden. The shows went very well, especially on the last night, and I think everyone had a good time.

The tech booth was pretty awesome as I had to climb a ladder to get to it and it was open air, so if something sounded to loud or soft I could hear it right away and adjust on the playlist.



The first night they had a lot of bands around to get more people to come, including one band that really blew me away. They are called Bad September and sing Victorian-influenced songs while dressed in period gear. They're also led by John Heimbach, who runs Walking Shadow Theatre Company. I think my favorite was about a duel between Tesla and Edison, though the one where the chorus is a recitation of chess moves was pretty spiffy too.



I also helped filming a PSA for the Electronic Waste project that I've been working on. It was really interesting to see all of the stuff that goes on behind the scenes, as well as the sheer amount of equipment and time that you need to film a short minute long PSA... not to mention cut it down to size! I'll post the PSA after it's all finished... but for now we have pictures a plenty.



Yay first video post!

Until next time...

"It is a fairy play. There isn't a thing in it which could ever happen in real life. That is as it should be. It is consistently beautiful, sweet, clean, fascinating, satisfying, charming, and impossible from beginning to end. It breaks all the rules of life drama, but preserves intact all the rules of fairyland, and the result is altogether contenting to the spirit. The longing of my heart is a fairy portrait of myself: I want to be pretty; I want to eliminate facts and fill up the gap with charms."
- Interview with Mark Twain on Peter Pan in Seattle Star, Nov. 30, 1905, p. 8

Too many things!

The above is a picture of SKROLBORG- the Viking Art of the Axe. See bottom of post for the show it is from. And COME!

Last week my dad and bro drove up from New York on motorcycles to hang out with me. It was definitely a ton of fun. As Rachel put it, "I have never eaten so well in my life!" Mostly because we decided that an extended gastro tour was the best way to show my fam around the Cities. Very strangely they appeared for the exact same time as we had the coldest days of July on record... heck, a lot of the pics around Lake Calhoun looked like it was winter out.

Awesome things we did included:
-visited many bars including the Muddy Pig
-went to the Science museum and saw Harry Potter (mini-review: very good. Hilarious, suspenseful and badass at all the correct points. Go see it.)
-went to the Tour de Fat, a bike and beer themed festival put on by Fat Tire
-saw a great Blues band at Famous Dave's
-not only convinced Siegi that Minneapolis exists, but that it is a great place to live (woohoo veggie restaurants and Green Way!)

Troubling things in my life include grad school hunting, GRE studying and making sure that I get all of my hours in for Americorps. Grad school hunting is proving to be scarier than when I last tried it, as now I'm trying to find schools that have both Physics Education and Physics courses, as I'm not sure which would help me out more right now. That question makes it all the scarier, as I'm actually at the point where I need to decide what I want to do for the rest of my life, a question that I have avoided for nigh on 23 years. But that could (and will) probably be a post of its own... For Americorps I need to do approximately 15 more hours per week than I normally do to get everything done in time (took one too many vacations I think...). I think I have enough work that I could do to get it all done, but it means giving up every day except maybe Sunday to work to get it all done on time. And the GRE sits there, mocking me and my lack of time.



I'm also currently involved with Panda Sandwich and WTF In the Garden of Eden. This relapse into doing tech is devouring my life, so come and see it on Wednesday through Saturday, doors open at 7 and show at 7:30. Is at Bedlam Theatre. Be there.

p.s. And yes mom, I am able to do tech and do all my other stuff as well. It just means I have no free time. *sigh*

Until next time...

"Suicide is the only sane thing the young or old ever do in this life."
- quoted in Mark Twain: God' s Fool, Hamlin Hill

Happy 4th!

So, happy 4th of July (which it apparently is). Sheesh... I've been gone for a while, mostly because I was using making a video of Siegi's grad as a way of not posting for a while. So, some interesting things have happened in the interim:

- Summer schedule at Skyline has started, which means that I am teaching more classes per day but have an assistant to help me with it. Hopefully I will be teaching kids to use GIMP and make blogs, so you might actually see the fruits of some of that labor. Also, I am teaching Math, Science, Reading, Writing and History to middle aged Somali women in hopes that they will earn their GED. Yay teaching high school!

- I went home and surprised the house with Rachel at 2 in the morning. We had a lovely wine tour, looked at Cornell, and hung out with the fam. Also, the UP is lovely this time of year.

- Played lots of Warhammer and have been (hopefully successfully, though very unfortunately intermittently) running my Changeling campaign, which is about to culminate in the last session of the first chapter.

- Started studying for the GRE again as well as researching grad schools. It's starting to get real...

- Went to the Summer MN Beer Fest and got very drunk off of many delicious beers on a perfectly cloudless day. I'll hopefully post my findings on the blog before long.

- Got the swine flu, which I am just now getting over. It's a blast of a disease, let me tell you. Not 100% sure it was the actual swine flu, but did have flu-like symptoms for a while.

And tonight we have a 4th of July BBQ, though the weather is looking tres awful. So, we'll see how that goes. Anyway, happy 4th, and hopefully I'll be posting more regularly from now on.

Until next time...

"The quality of independence was almost wholly left out of the human race. The scattering exceptions to the rule only emphasize it, light it up, make it glare."
- Mark Twain's Autobiography

Nik!!

So there's the normal boring stuff about work, but that's not the point!

Nik is here!

Wooo!

I spent Tuesday picking him up from Carleton. We met for an early breakfast at the Tavern and ran into my old prof, Cindy Blaha, and had a nice chat with her. We were shortly joined by Ben, Kristine, Laura, Lisa, and an aikido guy named Marios(sp?). After that Nik and I just wandered around, talking about many different things from work to how evolution would occur in the Matrix. We had a bit of trouble finding Carls to hang out with, but we eventually tracked them down and spent a few lazy hours chatting on the Bald Spot. It felt really good to be back and not be there for some specific event, as it always felt weird before. Just coming back to chill out was a blast and felt perfectly normal. Ah Tuesdays... how I love thee...

The next couple of nights we did awesome things:
Wednesday: Gratuitous amounts of guacamole and salsa!

Thursday: Gratuitous amounts of RPG planning and watching Enemy at the Gates!

And on Friday, we went to the Science Museum! Unfortunately the Fear and Water exhibits were taken down, but we still had a lot of fun marveling at the exhibits.



And then we had gaming, including Des via video chat. It promises to be a very interesting game, and one where you have to pay attention to the mortal world at least a bit more. Russell learned this especially after being chased and tackled by police officers for resisting arrest and squatting in an abandoned house. Never mind that it was his house, just 10 years out of date.

So yeah, awesomes! Until next time...

"The holy passion of Friendship is of so sweet and steady and loyal and enduring a nature that it will last through a whole lifetime, if not asked to lend money."
- Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar, by Mark Twain

The Week of E-Waste

This past week was an incredibly hectic one. I have been running around at work almost every day trying to put out various firestorms ranging from broken printers to kids screaming for cookies and the right to use my laptop. The most aggravating of these problems had to do with my electronic waste project.

For those of you who follow regularly, you will remember that I have been working on getting materials translated and printed for the Cinqo de Mayo festival that was held on Saturday, May 2nd. I sent my files off to the printer on Tuesday and believed my work to be done. Unfortunately I got a call as I was driving to work from the printer, saying that the text of my files was very bitmappy and wouldn't look very good as printed. It turns out that they needed a publishing program file to make sure that there weren't any unnecessary artifacts with the picture.

Herein lay the first problem: they suggested using InDesign or Quark to remake the flyers. Unfortunately this was not possible, as neither I nor CommonBond have access to those programs. I reached a workaround by promising that I would get them a .pdf file from Microsoft Publisher, which seemed to be the most agreeable solution.

I rushed to work, thanking the Lord that I don't have open lab or classes on Thursday mornings and started working on the project. I ran into problem #2 almost immediately: My office computer did not have Publisher installed on it. Not to worry, I said to myself, I'll just use one of the lab computers! The Publisher system worked on those computers and I quickly whipped up a document and went to save. Here we run into problem #3: I couldn't save in a .pdf file, only a .ps. Problem #4 consisted of none of the computers having the necessary programs to convert a .ps into a .pdf. I tried the computers upstairs, my supervisor's computer- none would work.

The solution was found through a lucky combination of my love of open source software and 40k blogs. It turns out that a week ago or so one of the blogs that I read over at FTW had an article on creating magazines and had posted a link to Scribus, an open source version of InDesign. I had downloaded it and summarily forgotten about it until I was desperately looking for help online. I quickly booted up the program, made a relatively ugly version of the document thanks to my unfamiliarity with Scribus and its inherent user hostility and sent a .pdf copy off to the publishers.

The hectic morning developed into a hectic afternoon (planning a dessert party for volunteers, open lab's many wonders) and was followed by a hectic corps day in which I drilled through concrete for 7.5 hours and got to drive through rush hour traffic on I-94 with a screaming baby in my car.

Saturday was a bit better- the day was crap (none of my students showed up, kids were demanding a lot of attention), but the evening was at Cinqo de Mayo. All of my materials were there, there was a latin beat being played across the street, and we managed to capture a lot of attention and hand out a lot of flyers thanks to our dancing cell phone costume. Oh, and we won "Greenest Booth at Cinqo De Mayo" as well!

And on Sunday I rested, and it was Good.

Pics of this weeks adventures can be found here. C'mon, you know you at least want to see the dancing cell phone...

*edit* An addendum to the talk of Friday's corps day: I just got this e-mail from one of my supervisors.

"Hi Max, Carolyn wanted to make sure you got a special thanks for “drilling into concrete all day long” on Friday. Happy Monday!"

Until next time...

"I do not like work even when someone else does it."
- "The Lost Napoleon" by Mark Twain