Flagons Den

The head mix is a novel way to share music with a friend in a symbiotic fashion. Essentially you cross wire two audio sources and can create a two channel head mix splitting the stereo signal between you to create a live soundscape.

Person 1 has the following headphone configuration: Left source one, Right source two

Person 2 has: Left source two, Right source one.

So Mr Blue can bring the ambient sounds and Mr Red can rock some beats - see where that takes you.

This takes some explaining. To create the skinny pouch, you need first to gain a monstrous amount of weight.

We’re talking professional eating here. Giving it 110% all day every day until you can no longer physically bend your arms to reach your mouth and so can no longer consume foodstuffs.

Next step is the massive crash diet - we’re looking for serious dysentery style weight loss here. Hopefully the outcome will be folds of unwieldy skin and drooping flesh - if so, perfect.

Next a simple operation to trim off all the excess around the limbs and back ( you could go for a nice seam stitch to make you look like a moulded action figure - but that’s entirely up to you). This is important now - save all the flesh loose at the front. You now want to try and pull up the loose flesh from around your waist and create a nice pouch - this could be sewn into place during the previous procedure - or you could have some cartilage or interior support added for extra strength. This would provide you with a suitable marsupial style pouch - made entirely of living tissue. This would mean it would be warm and hopefully still supple enough to stretch a bit to accommodate such items as small children, animals, your lunchbox, shopping etc. If left pliable enough you could even pull it up around yourself as a kind of fleshy duvet.

So there you have it - the skinny pouch.

(Could also work as a cowl like hood if the loose flesh was on the shoulders)

Well - the uni days are long gone only to be replaced by the twists and turns of freelance web design. No more oldmanvegas (not strictly true) but now the friendly corporate face is omvdigital.

What that does mean though is I can now use this blog for it’s intended initial purpose - not as a repository for uni endeavours (to enable recalcitrant lecturers to mark work online in their pants) but instead as a journal of sorts for me. Fuck facebook status updates and my twitter account frittered out in 2008 - the only way for me is the wordy self aggrandising diatribe on a regular (though irregular) basis.

To recap - in a band (just), married (depending on how much time I spend with said band), a dad (to the question master Goldie) and a freelance designer with my own company (omvdigital). This year I have mostly been working hard and playing harder and forgetting that sleep is actually quite important.

Last week saw 5 back to back 2am to 4am finishes with 9 am workdays culminating with two gigs - and I was close to breaking. So I thought I’d better try and get it down before my double ended candle runs out of wax.

For example - yesterday:

Gigged till 4 am at the barbican Live lounge as the final farewell to our current singer Rosco - which turned out to be a packed shindig though too tired and battered to feel emotional and nostalgic at the end, got dropped to my door by the Hair Bear and slept in the spare bunk beds till 8 am when woken by Goldie. Went on a rainy Easter Egg hunt round Cremyll, came home fed dog and then went up the road to give my ex-DJ and Gert Biggun geezer Aaron’s old man Dave, a lesson on how to use an iMac with a wacom tablet to create art in Photoshop - Dave is an excellent traditional artist and musician but has MS and is becoming less able to use his hands so trying the tablet interface as a means to create art.  It feels like I’ve set him on his first tottering steps though. Fed the baby and read her stories - cuddle before bedtime - and before I know it it’s Monday.

It’s that most wonderful time of the year again. My blogging season starts here. A bit like duck hunting or fishing - but with words and concentrated perseverance. I heard a Michael Palin interview today and he described his diary keeping skills. I felt a tug of guilt as I remembered my disused and momentarily abandoned wordpress home for ramblings.

Since I have graduated I have eased off posting to the point where I have reached online stasis - so to work.

I am now a fully fledged freelancer having worked for 6 months under the banner of oldmanvegas - here - and have been working at twofour and now with the lovely onshore people on a new site for Pentillie Castle.  I have been working on a new interactive flash site for a Friendly Society (always nice to be nice) which should launch 2010 - here - and has taken a lot of work.

I am still gigging with Freshly Squeezed and I’m looking forward to a couple of tasty gigs this weekend at Chudleigh Knightons’ Claycutters Friday and the mighty Maker on Saturday.

Well - it’s been a while.  Since the last post I have graduated (2:1) - and been working full time as a freelancer which was unexpected, but welcome. Mon to Fri back at Twofour so it’s a welcome return to my placement stomping ground.

I have been mainly working on web design and Flash development - getting my hands dirty learning AS3 - which isn’t that bad it turns out and I have been creating some nice content with external classes and coded tweens :]

The band is going great guns (much to the chagrin of the wife) and taking up pretty much every weekend - which can be pretty tiring - esp as Goldie has now taken to waking every morning at 6:30 and jumping on me to sing “Row Row Row the boat” - but despite the tiredness it’s a pretty lovely way to start the day.

The inLaws have been living with us for about 3 months - and Fuch had baby number 4 in our front room on Monday night so there are 6 of them now (we are officially outnumbered). The little mite is lovely and currently nameless and I’m glad for Rhamis as the family managed to get immigration to let him stay for the birth - he has about two weeks till the end of his visa to get to know her.

Ahyhoo - I best get back to work.

But if anyone is reading this - the dissertation I wrote on the prospect of our digital future - heres a nice update on BCI - some peeps have made the first tweet via BCI to show the potential for the disabled to stay in communication with friends family and followers. Nice work.

How have I managed to get out of student mode and begin a regular 9 to 5:30 day job? It turns out the brain is elastic and can adapt itself - especially if a sensory input is broken/disrupted. I found it out here

I have booked a space in the local village hall to exhibit my project 3-6pm on Weds 20th May to enable me to film people interacting with the reader and inputting comments - I have put the word out so hopefully I should get a few along…

But first I just need to do a final check that the whole thing works correctly.

RFID tag on object

Tagged object launches webpage from archive

Sorted. Heres hoping there are enough people there tomorrow…

I have spent the day sticking, slicing and cutting out all my artwork so I can label all the objects in the archive and make the reader look professional (as per the brief). Here’s my visual log:

Cutting and slicing RFID stickers

Wireless interaction

Tagged objects completed

Close up object (Monkey Keychain)

Tag detail (hiding the RFID)

Reader redesign

Now for the final tests…..

It seems that for every project I create I require an afternoon in the garage with some random wood, a saw and some glue!  I have made the basis of my reader body - after ensuring the RFID tags can still be read through a barrier (mounting board) at about a 15 mm range.

Wooden base for reader

I have designed a top for the reader and for the stickers to cover the RFID tikitags so I now just need to get them printed and buy some other peripherals (Wireless keyboard, mouse and luggage tags) to complete the set up for the installation.

I just found an online tag cloud generator (here) - so I popped in the text from my dissertation and it gave me this;