Man, Portal. This was many moons ago, and I don’t remember the specifics. One of the problems of a two month delay between shooting pictures and getting them put up here is that the little details sort of slip away. Maybe I should take notes or something, keep a daybook. Anyway, what I do remember is that it was a good afternoon, sitting in the sun for hours after a great meal with good people all around.
I may or may not have talked about this before, but there’s a whole lot of my photography that’s a love affair with the city. It is a place full of wonders, and ad the same time a place that can crush you for a simple case of bad luck. It is a big place, and getting bigger by the minute. These photos are some of my exploration of that, I suppose. All but the last one, which was good in a completely different way. You may have noticed I’ve been neglecting this blog; it’s beacuse I’ve been working on “another project”:http://unnaturaldiphthongs.com/. While that isn’t done, it is at least in a good state for now. I’m waiting on boards and parts and tools to make version two. I won’t bore you with details, except to say you’ve probably never seen a toaster oven used “this way”:http://hackaday.com/2012/03/08/toaster-oven-reflow-soldering-roundup/ before.
So, the watch project continues apace; I’ve thrown out the initial design, that was based on the “OSWatch”:http://oswatch.org/index.php ; I may still use some of his code, but for now my efforts are in getting a prototype up and running. I blabbed about the project on twitter, and a friend suggested I look at the RFduino, an arduino-compatible module that has a built-in bluetooth module. It’s a pretty sweet little chip, except for the small problem that the bootloader is closed-source. I’ve decided to let that be a problem for another day, and run with it. note: this post has been sitting, unpublished, for a month and a half. oops.
A friend of mine pointed out on twitter that an “arbitrary set,” in mathematics, is possibly infinite. I kind of like the idea that the sea of hipsters in austin that night was infinite. I certainly couldn’t see an edge. Anyway, before all that, there are some nice pictures of the folks I was with, Quin and Serena and Soph. You may have noticed a bit of a gap in the posting here. It’s been for very nerdy reasons. I saw a link on the “Adafruit”:http://adafruit.com blog about the “Open Source Watch”:http://oswatch.org/index.php and knew right away that I wanted to build one. Not just build one, but go one better, make it more extensible, and clean up the rough edges. There’s nothing more personal to me than the watch that I wear; I’ve been wearing one for the better part 25 years, after pestering my mom to buy me one sometime around age 4. It’s not just a status symbol, a beautiful toy; a watch is a hand-hold on reality. It says “This is now,” and “It’s only been 5 minutes,” and “I really did sleep 5 hours on that plane,” and “T-minus 5…” Then there’s the maker’s credo, that you don’t own something until you can hack on it. It’s beyond the skills of a lot of people to do surface mount soldering or board layout or the half dozen other skills required to build a watch for the 21st century. None of it is terribly hard by itself, but it’s all over, different bits of knowledge to cobble together from different parts of the web. Once it’s done and you can program it over bluetooth or plug it into a USB, something wonderful happens. Everyone can hack it. I don’t want a watch for the future, I want a watch for right now. Somthing that gives you a better grip on reality. It says: “You’re here, right now, and this is wh ere you can go.” The author swears this was going to be a dry feature list and blow-by-blow of the design process, but it’s late and he’s feeling inspired — Ed.
So, Austin. Hipsters. It’s a thing. Except for the first photo, I don’t know who any of these people are. First one is Sophia getting her Scissortail tattoo. The rest, you know as much about them as I do. My memory of the evening is a little fuzzy, you might say. At least there are pictures.
Copyright © 2008-Forever, Matt Mills.
