BomBBone’s been one of my favorite bands in Chicago for years now so it was great when they approached me with a stack of tapes from their shows at the Cave in Chicago wanting to put together a video of one of the songs that they had a good recording of. After looking through the footage and talking, it was clear that we had the same idea going on. Something fast, chaotic, and rough, even glitchy. I’m not sure if I’ve ever made a straight forward “music video” before but this was a blast. Since they’re a band I like a lot and being a web-developer also I decided to put together a page for the video adorned with every social media tie in I could think of to promote them. I’m finally getting a good chance to test out some of these social media ideas I’ve been wanting to push. At this point, the SMS mailing list seems to be generating a lot more interest than anything. Anyway, go check it out. http://pankavantgar.de

So, I got this beautiful old German microscope. I’m pretty fascinated at the idea of looking at anything through some sort of scope. This thing is beautiful but still with some problems, the power supply seems to be dead so I’m having to improvise with the light at this point, and getting my camcorder to play nice with it is taking some time. Nevertheless, there’s great things to be done with it. Here is my first look through it. I’d post it here on the page but the size of the video blows this page design into uselessness. You’ll also have to use your back button to get back. Anyway it’s about 12 min. of footage looking first at some ground coffee (Cafe Bustello), some arbitrary shots of the microscope itself and, finally, a mostly cat hair dust mass that I had to douse with water to keep it still.
I’m looking for what to look at next once I get some of the technical issues dealt with. I’d be happy to post the higher quality footage if anyone can think of some use for it. Let me know.

It’s the same problem I’ve always had, Linux doesn’t do everything I need, Apples are expensive, proprietary, shicky-micky, etc, etc, etc…. Windoze is about as pleasant and useful as a zombie with a contagious rash. So anyway, because Linux doesn’t do everything, and because swodniW is the path I’ve gone in the past, I decided to go with this Intel Mac after reading the documentation Installing Ubuntu on a MacBook Pro. It works pretty great, actually. A couple of things that bug me still. The computer has a touchpad that is really too big, in both OSes I have trouble with it. There is supposedly a fix for this in Ubuntu but I haven’t tried it yet. Also, in Ubuntu I can’t seem to get the mouse to move as fast as I would like. The biggest problem is that the delete key, which is usually a backspace delete key, when using nano, it becomes a forward delete key and there is no backspace delete. Oh and the whole Macports thing. Don’t get me started. All I need now is a GNU stencil-sticker to put over the apple beacon on the back of this thing.

from strangemaps

USB Hammers, what could be better!
The messy unsorted photos from the exhibit.
Go look, really.