blit

"I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his..."

Sun, 08 Apr 2012 20:12:51 -0400

“I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings. In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.”

- Walden - Henry David Thoreau http://www.gutenberg.org/files/205/205-h/205-h.htm

"Children learn from anything and everything they see. They learn wherever they are, not just in..."

Sat, 17 Mar 2012 20:40:17 -0400

“Children learn from anything and everything they see. They learn wherever they are, not just in special learning places. They learn much more from things, natural or made, that are real and significant in the world in their own right and not just made in order to help children learn…We can best help children learn, not by deciding what we think they should learn and thinking of ingenious ways to teach it to them, but by making the world, as far as we can, accessible to them, paying serious attention to what they do, answering their questions—if they have any—and helping them explore the things they are most interested in.”

- John Holt, Learning All the Time

List of Problems

Fri, 09 Dec 2011 21:21:37 -0500

Thinking of what needs to be done before you need to do it
Too many things to be interested in
Too many things to keep track of
Doing what you’ll say you’ll do
Impending panda extinction
Doing what you want to do
Too many unique things
Too many similar things
Voices are too loud
Misunderstanding
Isolated incidents
Generalizations
Mean people
Oversharing
Ugly things
Rust

"If you believed, as Starkman clearly does, that this view is not just incorrect but odious, that the..."

Tue, 06 Dec 2011 13:11:18 -0500

“

If you believed, as Starkman clearly does, that this view is not just incorrect but odious, that the current form of the newspaper remains a good general fit for public interest journalism, merely going through a rough patch, then you’d be eager to dial down the ‘try anything’ ethic in favor of the hard, grinding work of rebuilding and shoring up the institutions that have served us so well these last several decades.

But if you believe, as I do, that many of those institutions are so mismatched to the task at hand that most of them face a choice, at best, between radical restructure and outright collapse, well, in that case, you’d probably find the smartest 25 year olds you know, and try to convince them that now would be a pretty good time to start working on Plan B.

”

- Institutions, Confidence, and the News Crisis « Clay Shirky

a response to RMS' shenanigans

Sat, 08 Oct 2011 11:07:00 -0400

Specifically this blog post by Avdi Grimm: http://journal.avdi.org/i-neckbeard.

Regarding RMS, Steve Jobs, and open versus closed systems, I’ve come a long way since my Linux zealot days and this recent round of spouting off from all corners of the internet is enough to make me end my charitable giving to the FSF. “Disappointed” best describes my feelings. I’m sad that there are camps in this issue and the FSF side can’t see past the tall fence they’ve built around theirs.

We’ve built our careers on the fact that there are not strict dichotomies in software between open and closed. I have seen a lot of give, and remarkably little take, even from the corporate fringes surrounding professional Ruby development. I’ve enjoyed immensely working in and with open source software and the community that surrounds it, and I don’t believe any form of “I don’t care, Steve Jobs was an evil man” represents that community.

RMS dragged an interesting topic for private discussion over a cup of coffee or beer onto a pulpit, not cool.

what I think about design

Thu, 29 Sep 2011 01:35:00 -0400

In response to one of the biggest Twitter conversations I’ve ever been involved in (67 chars of just usernames), I thought I’d jot down exactly what I’m trying to say with regards to Figure 53’s current, tentative search for a designer.

Before I start, I confess to ignorance of the professional practice of design. I ask that if you are a designer you afford me a measure of grace and not assume I am denigrating you or your profession intentionally.

Also, I do not speak for Figure 53 in any official capacity. I am an employee and do not sign the checks, although as much as we tend to run on a consensus basis, my voice counts in the decisions of the company.

What I do

I am a programmer. I write code all day and mostly my screen looks like this:

General talents, skills, and learnability

In the world I inhabit some skills are very difficult to pick up on-the-job. For example: logical thinking, the ability to visualize data structures in one’s head, the ability to make connections quickly between disparate ideas, the ability to learn quickly when things change (things always change), and the ability to speak a highly structured foreign language or many such languages fluently.

You don’t have to be “smart” to be a good programmer, but most folks who are good programmers seem “smart”. These are all “smartness” things, they could be called general talents or skills, and seem like they would be very difficult to learn. I don’t believe they are native or born into a person, but it seems likely that there is a strong natural predisposition towards their development in some people more than others.

Some things I do during the day are much easier to learn while working. Those are things like, how a particular editor works, how to use source code management (SCM) tools, or the particulars of the programming languages in use on the current project.

This distinction is subjective and is based on my personal journey into programming professionally. On my last gig I came in as a programmer but I knew very little about the language, editor, or SCM tools but I picked them up as I went along. In the meantime, I wrote working code and contributed in a real way.

You might say I came to the job with the necessary talents and the general skills, but I learned the specifics required by the job after I got there.

The relevant discussion

Just the highlights. I’m using EmbedTweet for embedding, try reloading the page if the messages don’t appear.

It started with:

https://twitter.com/#!/chris_ashworth/status/119118402005635073

Then Brian said:

https://twitter.com/bsierakowski/status/119168835537469440

Then Chris replied:

https://twitter.com/chris_ashworth/status/119172286250094592

Then Brian split a longer thought across two messages:

https://twitter.com/bsierakowski/status/119180858442788864

https://twitter.com/bsierakowski/status/119180989686743040

And Elizabeth added her voice:

https://twitter.com/elizabetheadie/status/119182744721965056

And Brian, again with the double:

https://twitter.com/bsierakowski/status/119182947952762881

https://twitter.com/bsierakowski/status/119183068945850368

Jonathan Julian joins jovially:

https://twitter.com/jonathanjulian/status/119185311241740288

Brian clarifies:

https://twitter.com/bsierakowski/status/119185487297650688

I join, attempting to cram too much into two messages:

https://twitter.com/abachman/status/119215380555239425

https://twitter.com/abachman/status/119216376157188096

Let me explain.

By “tools of the trade” in the first message I’m describing the actual specific technologies we use to get our jobs done. Things like particular image formats, particular resource management tools (http://mac.github.com/ is killer), and the specific graphic language we’re looking to use can all be learned on the job.

Regarding skills, our goal is to make beautiful software tools that work well. The “work well” comes largely from our skill in building the tools in such ways that they don’t break and when they do, they’re easy to fix. The technical skills that allow us to build such software we already possess (he says, arrogantly). The design skills that allow our company to make them beautiful and truly work well, we do not possess. Where we have produced things that people consider beautiful we have had to struggle, hire out, try repeatedly, or spend more time than is comfortable experimenting. It’s my belief (and I think the others share it) that by adding dedicated design talent to our company, we’ll be able to go much farther, much faster.

I would expand on the second message by saying that I want Figure 53 to hire someone who would work full-time on the visual design elements of: our corporate materials, our applications, and anything else we produce that has a visual aspect. Chris has said the same. It is necessary that they work digitally (on a computer) and are fluent in the medium in which our products are based (also computer).

It is not necessary that they be able to build web pages, slice PSDs, or design a complete desktop application UI from scratch. Also not necessary for them to design exclusively for digital mediums, but it would be difficult to do the work we want to do with a person who designs exclusively for physical media.

The “too much beauty wasted on marketing” jab doesn’t really add but is me criticizing our culture’s celebration of advertising and its resulting drain on the incredible talents of some of history’s great designers. Why create ephemeral work to sell snack food or TV shows when you could build tools people use every day, love dearly, and remember for most of their lives? I don’t want to go any further down that path, I’ll finish by saying “It’s great work, but…” and nodding towards Jonathan Ive and raising my eyebrows meaningfully.

Back to the thread.

Kate responds to my comments:

https://twitter.com/kbladow/status/119217224908148736

Andy adds:

https://twitter.com/andymangold/status/119218998545092608

After that, I think we crossed wires, it’s hard to follow who was replying to who and as part of what conversation.

But at the end:

https://twitter.com/elizabetheadie/status/119232676426289152

Design is more than photoshop.

This sentiment I agree with very strongly. I’d also add that design is more than web pages and design is more than icons. The “more than” would be very difficult for us to teach, the “Photoshop” we can help with if we have to.

In closing, Figure 53 wants to work with a great designer. A person who sees clearly what is difficult for us to see and can create with us beautiful tools that work great and people will love to use, because that’s what makes us happy. Everything else is details.

In response to "Is making software a craft and/or art form?"

Wed, 21 Sep 2011 12:32:11 -0400

In response to “Is making software a craft and/or art form?” on Mike Subelsky’s blog.

Do you mean art like a product or artifact, or art like a creative practice? Defining art is not simple, using the word precisely is difficult. What do you mean when you say “art”?

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/art-definition/

The motivation behind the creators (programmers) prevents software development from being classifiable as art. There’s an aesthetic component for a lot of people and there is clearly creativity involved, but craft is much closer to what the process and product of software development is.

In the world of computer art, software development can often be involved, but the creator in that case pursues art as the product, the end goal. In my work as a software developer, I’m producing software as the end goal. A finished product that fulfills a particular set of requirements.

None of this prevents us from observing our practice and considering whether we are doing what we want to be doing in the way we want to be doing it. People’s response to “is software design X” reflects their motivations, not a truth that can be applied to another’s experience.

“Is making software a craft and/or art form?” is a subjective question and can only be answered subjectively. I think it’s craft-like in its repetitive practice and in the quality of the product strongly reflecting the skill of the creator. I think it’s not art-like, even though software making can be pursued for artistic purposes.

"I guess what I’m asking for is a digital rendition of the commonplace book, and a serious rethinking..."

Thu, 05 May 2011 15:19:14 -0400

“I guess what I’m asking for is a digital rendition of the commonplace book, and a serious rethinking of what advantages digital could provide in that context.”

- An interview with Frank Chimero

"I mingled with the students and chatted with some of them. I got to know a young man named Ben who..."

Thu, 21 Apr 2011 12:35:31 -0400

“

I mingled with the students and chatted with some of them. I got to know a young man named Ben who was seventeen. After talking with him for a while, I made a prediction:

In a few minutes, you and your friends will be asked to stand behind the podium and listen to the speakers. At some point, one of them will say something like: “This is a great day for Milwaukee because our children are our future.” When that happens, go over and grab the microphone away from whoever is speaking and tell him: “I’m here right now.”

The press conference began. The students were herded behind the podium. The president of the technical college welcomed everyone and introduced a representative from the National Council of La Raza who described the initiative. Then, he invited the superintendent of the Milwaukee Public Schools up to the microphones. The superintendent said: “This is a great day for Milwaukee because our children are our future.”

Standing behind the cameras, I made eye contact with Ben and gestured to him to do what I had suggested. He smiled shyly, looked down at his shoes, and shook his head. The press conference droned on to its conclusion. When it was over and the media people were packing up their equipment, Ben found me in the crowd.

“How did you know someone would say that?” he asked.

“Because,” I answered, “most of the people in the adult world don’t believe you’re here. They think you are somewhere else they call The Future.”

”

- patfarenga.com

Why not every school in a garden?

Mon, 27 Sep 2010 13:02:06 -0400

Eventually there are gardens in every school, because in every garden there is a school—where deep and dynamic teaching can happen in nearly every subject—science, nutrition, social studies, math, art, and more.

A Garden in Every School - Jill Wrigley, Audacious Ideas.

This is a beautiful idea and definitely one that I would’ve appreciated while I was going through school. Any opportunity to bring children into direct contact with the living world will bring lasting benefits.

My question is why bring the world into the schools-which will at best provide the children with a very realistic simulation-when we could alternatively bring the children into the world? Here’s your Audacious Idea: make every student of the public school system a farmer for one full year.

Baltimore has at least 92 community gardens (JHU Center for a Livable Future) and seven “city farms”. Bring students out of the sheltered environment of a garden for learning and into the actual work of a garden for eating.

"Ultimately we need to lower the cost, and raise the utility, of user-centric creation and..."

Mon, 23 Aug 2010 13:56:26 -0400

“

Ultimately we need to lower the cost, and raise the utility, of user-centric creation and presentation of content, rather than the network-centric creation and presentation of content we have today.³ In an ideal world, you’d be able to use whatever tools you want, to produce whatever content you want, to publish in any place you want, to whatever audience you want.

In truth, we still have a long way to go before the federated model catches up. Though, thanks to Atom, AtomPub, Salmon, Webfinger, PubSubHubbub, etc. we’re getting closer bit by bit every day. And as long as the status.net’s and the cliqset.com’s of the world are out there and fighting the good fight, I haven’t personally given up hope, and I will continue to work on solving these problems myself with the resources I have available to me.

”

- Flipping bits, domain names, and the permanent you. - DeWitt Clinton

A strong argument for Diaspora.

"The web evolves. It is barely old enough to vote. It is unlike anything we have had before. If you..."

Tue, 10 Aug 2010 13:43:45 -0400

“The web evolves. It is barely old enough to vote. It is unlike anything we have had before. If you don’t like negotiating a blizzard of loosely-connected impermanent pieces you need to work on something else.”

- Hacker News - “So You Want To Be A Ruby Dev” - from a comment by mechanicalfish.

more context

in response to this article

"the ability to be completely transfixed by mundane objects seems to be something shared in common by..."

Tue, 10 Aug 2010 13:23:31 -0400

“the ability to be completely transfixed by mundane objects seems to be something shared in common by designers, babies, and dogs.”

- Authenticity: If You Have to Ax, You Can’t Afford It - Bike Snob NYC

Looking for the technically inclined

Tue, 11 May 2010 00:13:05 -0400

A minimal response to The City of Founders Without Hackers.

New York City has a shortage of entrepreneurially minded technical talent. It’s not that there’s not enough engineers. Hardly. Columbia, NYU and the rest of the eastern seaboard spits out engineers in spades each year. But somehow those aren’t funneled into, aware of or interested in the NYC startups, at least at the early stage. Local engineers, it seems, want to be employees, not co-founders. [emphasis added]

Why aren’t the non-technical founders able to easily find technical co-founders? Because both sides are looking for the wrong thing in the wrong way. At least I know I am. As a startup-curious technically adept potential co-founder, it is not sufficient to wait to be found, I must be seeking, doing.

If non-technical founders cannot find technical founders, blame cannot rest squarely on the “engineers”. In the passage below, Saras Sarasvathy suggests that it is the responsibility of the entrepreneurs to also be cultivating the partners they would like to have. Where technical co-founders exist in short supply may not be because potential technical co-founders are lazy, it’s because both the techs and non-techs are lazy.

I learn this lesson again and again: The world will not come to you, asking you to do great things. You must simply do them.

Experienced professionals in the entrepreneurial arena, whether they are bankers, lawyers, VCs or other investors have always agreed with successful entrepreneurs that finding and leading the right people is the key to creating an enduring venture. These entrepreneurs know that such “right” people are not on the job market waiting for the jobs and incentives the entrepreneurs can offer them. Instead the “right” people need emotional ownership in whether they are bankers, lawyers, VCs or other investors have by the belief that the effects they create will embody their deepest passions and aspirations while enabling them to achieve their best potential.

But great entrepreneurs realize something more about the central role of people in shaping the urn. Using effectual logic, they understand that they too cannot wait around to find the “right” people all the time. Besides continually striving to attract the “right” people, they learn also to nurture and grow them in their own backyards. As Josiah Wedgewood wrote, “We have to make artists of mere men.”

Saras D. Sarasvathy, “What makes entrepreneurs entrepreneurial?” [pdf]

The Four Myths of School - An excerpt from Deschooling Society

Tue, 27 Apr 2010 00:16:00 -0400

These are excerpts from the third chapter of Ivan Illich’s Deschooling Society. A longer selection can be found at http://adambachman.org/illich_03.html. The whole chapter can be found at http://www.preservenet.com/theory/Illich/Deschooling/chap3.html. I’ve emphasized my favorite passages.

This text goes a long way towards describing why I will not put my children in school, and why I try to push Baltimore Node in the direction I do. Schools take much more than they give, and the cost is much greater than can be measured in dollars. I’ll leave my own thoughts for later.

Ritualization of Progress

We cannot begin a reform of education unless we first understand that neither individual learning nor social equality can be enhanced by the ritual of schooling. We cannot go beyond the consumer society unless we first understand that obligatory public schools inevitably reproduce such a society, no matter what is taught in them.

The Myth of Institutionalized Values

Once the self-taught man or woman has been discredited, all nonprofessional activity is rendered suspect. In school we are taught that valuable learning is the result of attendance; that the value of learning increases with the amount of input; and, finally, that this value can be measured and documented by grades and certificates.

In fact, learning is the human activity which least needs manipulation by others. Most learning is not the result of instruction. It is rather the result of unhampered participation in a meaningful setting. Most people learn best by being “with it,” yet school makes them identify their personal, cognitive growth with elaborate planning and manipulation.

The Myth of Measurement of Values

The institutionalized values school instills are quantified ones. School initiates young people into a world where everything can be measured, including their imaginations, and, indeed, man himself.

But personal growth is not a measurable entity. It is growth in disciplined dissidence, which cannot be measured against any rod, or any curriculum, nor compared to someone else’s achievement. In such learning one can emulate others only in imaginative endeavor, and follow in their footsteps rather than mimic their gait. The learning I prize is immeasurable re-creation.

People who have been schooled down to size let unmeasured experience slip out of their hands. To them, what cannot be measured becomes secondary, threatening. They do not have to be robbed of their creativity. Under instruction, they have unlearned to “do” their thing or “be” themselves, and value only what has been made or could be made.

Once people have the idea schooled into them that values can be produced and measured, they tend to accept all kinds of rankings. There is a scale for the development of nations, another for the intelligence of babies, and even progress toward peace can be calculated according to body count. In a schooled world the road to happiness is paved with a consumer’s index.

The Myth of Packaging Values

School sells curriculum—a bundle of goods made according to the same process and having the same structure as other merchandise.

The result of the curriculum production process looks like any other modern staple. It is a bundle of planned meanings, a package of values, a commodity whose “balanced appeal” makes it marketable to a sufficiently large number to justify the cost of production. Consumer-pupils are taught to make their desires conform to marketable values. Thus they are made to feel guilty if they do not behave according to the predictions of consumer research by getting the grades and certificates that will place them in the job category they have been led to expect.

The Myth of Self-Perpetuating Progress

Even when accompanied by declining returns in learning, paradoxically, rising per capita instructional costs increase the value of the pupil in his or her own eyes and on the market… If it teaches nothing else, school teaches the value of escalation: the value of the American way of doing things.

School programs hunger for progressive intake of instruction, but even if the hunger leads to steady absorption, it never yields the joy of knowing something to one’s satisfaction. Each subject comes packaged with the instruction to go on consuming one “offering” after another, and last year’s wrapping is always obsolete for this year’s consumer.

But growth conceived as open-ended consumption-eternal progress-can never lead to maturity. Commitment to unlimited quantitative increase invalidates the possibility of organic development.

"Even in the best schools a close examination of curriculum and its sequences turns up a lack of..."

Wed, 21 Apr 2010 12:27:00 -0400

“

Even in the best schools a close examination of curriculum and its sequences turns up a lack of coherence, full of internal contradictions. Fortunately the children have no words to define the panic and anger they feel at constant violations of natural order and sequence fobbed off on them as quality in education. The logic of the school-mind is that it is better to leave school with a tool kit of superficial jargon derived from economics, sociology, natural science and so on than to leave with one genuine enthusiasm. But quality in education entails learning about something in depth. Confusion is thrust upon kids by too many strange adults, each working alone with only the thinnest relationship with each other, pretending for the most part, to an expertise they do not possess.

Meaning, not disconnected facts, is what sane human beings seek, and education is a set of codes for processing raw facts into meaning. Behind the patchwork quilt of school sequences, and the school obsession with facts and theories the age-old human search lies well concealed. This is harder to see in elementary school where the hierarchy of school experience seems to make better sense because the good-natured simple relationship of “let’s do this” and “let’s do that now” is just assumed to mean something and the clientele has not yet consciously discerned how little substance is behind the play and pretense.

”

- John Taylor Gatto - “The Seven Lesson Schoolteacher”

Inventory, April 2010

Thu, 08 Apr 2010 12:17:30 -0400

The full spread. This includes three awesome kits from Nightfire Electronics, a new soldering iron from MPJA, some hardware from Sparkfun (hook up wire, solder sponge, DIP AVR ICs), and a whole mess of hardware from Futurlec.

The Futurlec order took the longest (about three weeks), but came from Thailand via Hong Kong and their prices were VERY difficult to beat. Component prices vary wildly, and on some stuff (ICs, potentiometers, crystals) they were competitive, but on others (heat shrink tubing, male and female headers, crocodile clips) their prices were 1/10 of competitors.

From April 2010

Details

Three chips, Atmel AVR ATtiny85’s. Handy for building custom USB devices or tiny synths (with light modification to the source code). On the back side of this bit of foam is an AVR ATMega328 (Arduino Diecimila upgrade).

From April 2010

Five ATX power supply conversion kits. Banana plugs, banana plug sockets, and totally classy SPST on/off switches, all panel mount.

From April 2010

Potentiometers galore. A bunch of linear rotary pots, 70mm linear sliders, 30mm linear sliders, and a handful knob covers for making circuit bent toys looks more “professional”.

From April 2010

Workspace. This is where I do stuff right now. Handy because it’s a rolltop and can close, not handy because there’s no space to the sides for the kids to get involved. A work in progress.

From April 2010

What’s Next?

So I’ve got it, now what am I going to do with it?

Build, make, re-make, invent, explore, search, find, ponder, repeat. I don’t know, that’s why I’m building a personal lab. If I knew what I wanted to build I’d buy the kit, assemble it, and be content with hard boundaries on what I can and can’t do with the hardware. I’ve decided that I don’t want to be an electrical engineer, but the road to embedded systems design is paved with electricity, so this is a learning time. We’ll see where it leads.

"most of us pay attention to the wrong things. Most people vastly overestimate the extent to which..."

Wed, 31 Mar 2010 11:58:00 -0400

“

most of us pay attention to the wrong things. Most people vastly overestimate the extent to which more money would improve our lives. Most schools and colleges spend too much time preparing students for careers and not enough preparing them to make social decisions. Most governments release a ton of data on economic trends but not enough on trust and other social conditions. In short, modern societies have developed vast institutions oriented around the things that are easy to count, not around the things that matter most. They have an affinity for material concerns and a primordial fear of moral and social ones.

Governments keep initiating policies they think will produce prosperity, only to get sacked, time and again, from their spiritual blind side.

”

- Op-Ed Columnist - The Sandra Bullock Trade - NYTimes.com

Walmart in Remington

Mon, 29 Mar 2010 00:26:00 -0400

This letter came out of a brief discussion with Claire Caplan, the producer of Midday with Dan Rodricks on Baltimore’s NPR station. There’s a Walmart proposed for development in Remington, and she asked if I’d be willing to share a few words regarding my opposition to the project for a show scheduled to air Monday, March 29. While I certainly do not claim to possess all the answers, this was a good opportunity to organize my thoughts.

Claire,

The short answer to, “why don’t you support Walmart in Remington” is that I do not believe Walmart’s long term goals are the same as Baltimore’s citizens’ long term goals. It’s easy to take potshots at specific problems Walmart has, but they’re so huge (no other retail services corporation can compare) that anything that can have gone wrong at some point, will have. But the problem I see is deeper than just, “I heard one of the managers was a jerk”.

What people in Baltimore want to see is more prosperity, what the city wants to see is more tax revenue (a city’s version of prosperity), and both groups want to see these things with as little effort as possible. A big-box shopping center—on the surface—promises these things on a very short time scale with limited up front cost to the city, but does so with a huge long term expense. There are a few problems with the proposed Walmart that outweigh the benefits.

First, more prosperity for citizens in the surrounding neighborhoods cannot be created out of thin air. Walmart’s business model is to undercut the prices existing businesses and to siphon off those business’ customers. This means we’ll see a wave of closures in North and Central Baltimore (Remington, Hampden, Charles Village, and Waverly for sure) starting a few months after the store opens and continuing until a new, more one-sided, balance is reached.

Second, once Walmart (or any out-of-state chain) has the money, it’s removed from the local economy. That’s very bad in the long term. The big boxes (Walmart and Lowe’s) are not going to build up Remington, they’re going to drain it.

Finally, the kind of traffic (both vehicular and human) that comes through a big box retailer is not interesting and doesn’t contribute to the character of Baltimore. Walmart is designed for closed-loop consumption. You drive up, walk in, buy your products, and drive out. I applaud the consideration and effort that has gone into not making the site another brutalist wasteland, but it will still be a primarily auto-friendly strip mall, which is not something worth celebrating.

The culture Walmart promotes is not one I want to be a part of. To Walmart, I am not a person, a citizen, or a neighbor; I am a consumer, good only for spending money. This is an institutional position brought on by the sheer vastness of the enterprise. That they hire P.R. firms to polish their image is not a statement of changing goals or improving business models, it’s the standard corporate acknowledgement that they suck at being good so they have to control the discussion.

I can’t say a Walmart in Remington would be entirely bad. It’s going to replace a dying business having few customers with a new business with a lot of customers. If the development project, in general, were pursued in a staged manner with more involvement from groups like the Chesapeake Sustainable Business Alliance, then I would be more likely to support it wholeheartedly.

What I want to see for Baltimore is more opportunity for people to do interesting and productive work, more encouragement from the city for small businesses and entrepreneurial activity, and more meaningful interaction between humans who care about where they are and who they are living next to. Walmart does not support those goals.

Barebones Arduino Synth

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 01:06:00 -0500

Two potentiometers, one speaker, and an hour of spare time combined to form my first (real) Arduino circuit and the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

// based on "Arduino Sound Hello World"
// originally by David Fowler of uCHobby.com
// modifications and adaptations by 
// Adam Bachman of adambachman.org

// Open the Arduino serial monitor at 9600 baud to see debug output

/* 
circuit:

digital pin 9 -> pot 1 outer -> speaker A
speaker B -> ground
analog pin 0 -> pot 2 inner
5V in -> pot 2 outer 1
pot 2 outer 2 -> ground
*/

int soundPin = 9;      // the I/O pin for our sound output
int sensorPin = 0;     // input pin for the potentiometer
int sensorValue = 0; // control frequency

void setup(void){
  //Set the sound out pin to output mode
  Serial.begin(9800);
  Serial.println("I'm alive!");
  pinMode(soundPin,OUTPUT);
}

void loop(void){
  sensorValue = analogRead(sensorPin);

  //Set the pin high and delay for sensorValue uS
  digitalWrite(soundPin,HIGH);
  delayMicroseconds(sensorValue);

  //Set the pin low and delay for sensorValue uS
  digitalWrite(soundPin,LOW);
  delayMicroseconds(sensorValue);

  // spit out the sensor value (sanity check)
  Serial.println(sensorValue);
}

The scene of the crime. I had to sit close enough to the computer to program the ‘duino and read the references. All soldering (wires to speaker) was done elsewhere.

The circuit (as described in the code) is one potentiometer between the speaker and the arduino to control volume, and one sending data directly to the analog input to control frequency. When I took the second potentiometer out, frequency was all over the place. Depending on where I touched the wires, I could pretty reliably get some interesting electronic pops and squeals. Almost more fun than twisting dials.

Nowhere to go but up.