It’s Nacho Time

Yesterday I chilled out at the National Museum of Natural History and made friends with a Madagascar Hissing Cockroach. Neat-o!

This is my final project for Multimedia class last year.

I had wanted to animate one of my favorite songs, Time is Tight by Booker T and the MGs. The graphics were all hand water-colored and animated frame-by frame in Final Cut Pro. I spent a lot of time in the multimedia lab matching it all up, but I’m very happy with the result.

The blue represents Bass. The yellow streaks were meant to suggest a strumming guitar. The green and orange splotches are percussion. As the Hammond B3 is the most dynamic instrument in the piece, I had a hard time figuring out how to represent it, but I decided on the banded accents and background color changes that you saw.

I used photoshop to isolate the shapes and set transparent backgrounds, and then as mentioned above, I placed each frame in Final Cut Pro.

Overall, I’m very pleased with how it turned out. Of course I would still make some changes, but now that I’m not taking the class, I don’t have access to Final Cut Pro.

I hope I did Booker T and the MGs justice.

Let me know what you think!

I’ve been making paper wallets for a few years now. Here’s my latest. I used some Japanese paper treated with map sealant for extra strength. Click through for more photos. I’ll probably post pictures of my retired wallets soon.

BUZZ-SAW-FOR-A-HAND FLOATING KILLBOT?!!! RUN!!!!

Today I felt like making something with the containers I’ve been saving from all the box-lunches I eat. The material is the perfect thickness for crafts (see nap light). I’ve wanted to make some robots pretty badly; here’s the first. Click the picture for more photos, or go here.

Here’s my first set of photos from Europe. I got these in and around Grindelwald, Switzerland. I’ll add some more descriptions and photos later. Enjoy!

A few weeks ago a friend and I biked to the Great Falls in Maryland. THEY WERE SO COOL!
Who knew that you can bike for a couple hours and there you are looking at some serious waterfalls? This is the sort of thing you can’t get in NYC.
The book I used, Road Biking Washington DC, is of course a road biking book, so the route there was all along roads. Once we got there, however, we realized we could just take the C&O Canal all the way back to DC. That was some of the most beautiful trail I’ve seen.

Here’s a picture next to an old pumping station or something along the canal.

I’ve been talking about starting this project since last semester. Well, it’s finally here: the Nap Light.

I put together a simple circuit so that when people interrupt my naps, at least I know it was intentional.
(Click the image for the entire set)
Now that I have a soldering iron, nothing can stop me!
- Tim

I made this awhile ago out of scraps from my Squid Costume, but it wasn’t until I was relaxing outside this beautiful weekend that I got around to taking any photos. Here it is:

As the sun rose on the National Mall, I could already tell that it was packed. Since much earlier that morning people were standing shoulder to shoulder around us. I felt a little guilty that we had enough room to stretch out. The sleeping bag kept me from most of the cold, but that morning as it got lighter, it seemed to get even colder. I’m not sure what time it was when they started replaying the Inaugural concert on the Jumbotrons, but whet “Shout” came on, I decided it was time to stand up before I got trampled. THEN I started to really feel the cold that everyone had been experiencing for the past several hours (since Inauguration, I have gone through a box of Kleenex and at least three travel packs). It was so cold that my water bottle was freezing up:

My Inauguration Day Wardrobe:

• 2 pairs of Smartwool Socks (Andrenaline Lt and Streethikers)
• flannel pijama pants
• jeans
• Smartwool “Next to Skin” wool top
• American Apparel thermal long sleeved shirt
• REI Staff Vest
• EMS Down Jacket
• EMS Skullcap
• wool hat with earflaps
• Merrell Chameleon Hex light hiking shoes
• Fox River Gripper Gloves

Everyone was bundled up.

Finally, it was time for the main event:

I really did almost cry during the speech. The only thing wrong is that I didn’t have my own little flag to wave around like a maniac!

Then, it was all over. This is where it really started to get crazy. The police decided it would be a great idea to open up only a couple of exits for a couple million people on the Mall. We decided to try our luck at L’Enfant Plaza metro station. This was a mistake. We found ourselves in the middle of TONS of people all heading back to their tour buses. Along the way we lost the shortest member of our group. At this point, I got on a friend’s shoulders and we waded through the crowd shouting her name. Besides the fact that we lost someone, it was tons of fun, and the crowd seemed very amused as well. The good news is that she made it back home, but we lost about an hour in that crowd without getting anywhere.

We circled around the west side of the Mall towards Foggy Bottom/GWU metro station, but it was pretty clear that we would never get on a train over there. While G didn’t get on a train, I at least took a pretty cool picture while we were in the neighborhood.

We eventually made our way to Dupont Circle which was much more manageable. After a few hours of trying, our group made it home, and I went right to sleep.

All in all, it was worth it. My sleep schedule’s back on track, my cold is almost gone, and I can say that I was there.

- Tim

(for more pictures, be sure to check out my Flickr set)