Ducks and databases
Thing I learned today:
Duck typing is a cute name for the very powerful (and lazy) object typing method of not caring what you're handed and running your code on it anyway.
Accomplishment:
First pull request on someone else's project on github.
Books in progress:
CouchDB: The Complete Guide
Plans:
Out to spin fire with the family!
A Late Summer
In my last post I said I would post up the past WildFire audio recordings. Unbeknownst to all of you I DID! Why didn't anyone know? Because I totally forgot to post about it. In fact I neglected to post for so long that its nearly time for FALL WildFire.
Never fear though, prepare yourself for a MEGAPOST of _ALL_ the WildFire audio I have available! Thanks as always to the DJs for their amazing talents on and off the field.
Summer 2012 (links fixed Sep 14th)
- Friday - nope, we had recording problems. Sorry.
- Saturday - The Amazing Baz (Baz Simon)
- Sunday - DJ Recluse (Matt Weston)
- Perfomance Class (coming soon... I hope)
Spring 2012 (Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Never Gonna Bop) - Originally posted in "WildFire Spring 2012"
Fall 2011 (Friday, Saturday, Performance [wav]) - I'm not sure why I don't have sunday. I'll look around again.
Summer 2011 (Friday, Saturday, Sunday)
Spring 2011 (Friday, Saturday) - Sunday didn't happen because I forgot a power adapter and was WAY too busy playing with my flowlights. Read more in "Burning Beats and a Shining Light of Craziness"
Fall 2010 (Friday, Saturday, Sunday) - This was my first recording attempt. The quality is pretty mixed (meaning a bit awful). Original post "A Taste of Home"
WildFire Spring 2012
Another amazing weekend. More will go here later, but first the IMPORTANT stuff.
- Friday
- Saturday
- Sunday
- Never Gonna Bop (extra long cut) Sunday night sampler fun! (also on soundcloud)
- Never Gonna Bop
The music is hosted on my personal server this time, so it'll be there for the forseeable future. I will be reposting older recordings as well.
Funny Guy
Sometimes I make stupid analogies that make me laugh. Here's a recent example:
dracoling: let me put it this way
dracoling: it's like building a car out of blenders
dracoling: sure, I guess if you add enough duct tape and chop the blenders into the right shape you might be able to get it to pretend to be a car... sorta
dracoling: but it's never going to be a good car
Real Life Radio
This past weekend I took and passed the HAM Technician test, which has been a vague life goal for years now. I say vague because it kept fading out of site under other things I was doing. While I wait for my ID to get processed by the FCC I decided to dig up information on the radio tower at work.
It's actually pretty interesting from a radio nerd and history perspective.
First some pictures with a little info: http://deakworld.weebly.com/ham-radio-odds--sods.html
Then a thread with some more info on QRZ: http://forums.qrz.com/showthread.php?217251-Antenna-Discoveries-in-NY&p=1694077#post1694077
I am going to try to get permission this week to go exploring and take my own pictures... for science.
LadioCast automation (AppleScript)
Playing music is fun, LadioCast is an awesome tool that lets you broadcast ANY audio from your soundcard to an icecast server. It also lets you mix from multiple sources. Being a simple tool it doesn't grab it's own metadata info or anything fancy like that. There are several common ways to update this info and they're covered other places online. Below I've included my own ladiocast_update script that adds a bit extra to the metadata mix.
Sometimes you want to play a stream for a bit and then drop offline cleanly, but you don't want to hang around to wait for it to finish (sleep is awesome once or twice a month).
Through the magic of AppleScript you can do this. [We can have platform debates later, my whole broadcast kit is in osx right now, get over it.]
This script queries iTunes for the current state (playing, paused, stopped). If the stream is seen playing or paused it updates the metadata in ladiocast with the info from the currently playing track. If it finds that it has stopped it plays the "radio off" playlist (used to give a sign-off message), waits a little bit (for the message to finish) and then kills the stream.
An uncertain artist
I entered a piece in a 24 hour art show this weekend. Later this post may contain more information about it, but for now I'll just leave you with a picture.
Burning Beats and a Shining Light of Craziness
Last weekend was the Spring 2011 WildFire Retreat. I had the pleasure of traveling and camping with some of my dear friends from Consolidated Awesome, and it was amazing.
Lets get on with the good stuff? Okay, here it is!
- friday.mp3 - 374.1mb 3h10m - Even though I forgot my power adapter for my MacBook Pro at home, I was able to record all the way up to the final "goodnight"! I was so happy to find out that I had gotten it all.
- saturday.mp3 - 388.6mb 3h34m - I was fortunate enough to borrow a power adapter for Saturday night. Thanks again whoever you were (sorry, I'm awful with names).
- sunday... - Sorry, there's no recording of Sunday because I was only able to borrow the power adapter for Saturday. In addition I was having far too much fun playing with my INSANE FLOWTOYS OF INSANITY (more below).
On Sunday night, after the performance class I assembled and lit the series of tubes that was variably named "a big mistake", "a bad idea" and "awesomely stupid" (all labels applied by me). It consisted of 20 FlowLights in various sized tubes assembled into mega-sized toys.
Round 1: MEGA POI - 10 lights, 2 connectors, 3 tubes in each of 2 gigantic (approximately 6ft) poi. They were spun on benches, and on stilts and I even spun them (with little hops and jumps) while standing (long arm) on the ground. After everyone who wanted to had tried this craziness out, we moved on to...
Round 2: MONSTER STAFF - Remove flowpoi caps, insert contact staff handle. Result? 15 foot contact staff with about a foot of sag from center to ends. This thing was insane. In a show of complete badassery, Terry Fields was able to pull off both a cartwheel with the staff on his back and (what looked like) a full matrix. He and I then proceeded to harass the people standing around the fire pits into lighting up and getting the spinning started for real, by imitating a gigantic glowing bird screaming and chasing me across the field.
It was wonderful. It was hilarious. I didn't get any pictures of it! 
If any of you have or know people who may have pictures or video of the epic flow madness from Sunday at 2011 Spring WildFire, please contact me to share.
Thanks for another great event, keep burning brightly, and spread the awesome!
~ Mike
A Taste of Home
Last year at WildFire Retreat I had the good fortune to be able to record the DJs on the burn field all three nights. I had originally hoped to release these immediately following the event but for many reasons (ooh! shiney!) I didn't.
Finally, only weeks before we head back into the wonderful world of WildFire, I have them to share. These files are posted on dropbox at the moment. If anyone knows of a better (preferably free) way to share them, please let me know.
- friday.mp3 (4h 15m - 439.2MB)
- saturday.mp3 (5h 36m - 562.7MB)
- sunday.mp3 (5h 17m - 514.8MB)
Please keep in mind that these are unedited live mixes. Enjoy them as the moments of history that they are 
Hope to see you soon.
- dracoling
EDIT: I just noticed that sadly the friday track had some recording issues. From about 5m into the recording until about the 30m mark there's some problems. It clears up after that. The other two days went well.
EDIT 2: Fixed the link for sunday. oops!
Poi beginnings
A coworker asked me about poi spinning today, what it is and why I do it and where I learned. After a brief discussion he asked if I could send him some videos of it. Here's what I shared with him.
----
Here's a video of a friend of mine spinning fire at that Connecticut retreat (WildFire Retreat, mentioned last month):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wLE658Da6rQ
Nathaniel Everist from Australia is one of the folks I learned the most from when I was starting out:
http://www.youtube.com/user/NathanielEverist#p/c/A0C299DC8A312068
Another great group I learn from is Nick Woolsey (from Canada) and playpoi.com
http://www.playpoi.com/poi-basics