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Back in the Matrix

What a week!  Sorry for the dearth of posts, especially in the middle of such an important campaign, but some things cant be avoided or postponed.  such is the case with dealing with immigration and visa issues.  I spent the week preparing paperwork for the Auslanderbehorde (Auslander=foriegner, behorde=office or authority) so that i can stick around Berlin for a bit longer.  its not hard, but it is rather involved.  They do love paperwork here.  luckily, although i don't have everything perfect, its good enough that they want me to visit them again in a few months. yaaaaay! because theres nothing better than filing a dozen forms and sitting all day in a lobby waiting for your number to be called so you can be told to come back again in another 3 months.  but its worth it.  I love it here, so if i have to do the paper dance every few months for a while, so be it.

With all the stuff i've been uploading and downloading, associated with the TRON beatjazz controller campaign, i have caned my bandwidth limit for my wireless internet on my iphone so i've been throttled down to prehistoric speeds.  i imagine that this is the same sort of internet speed that our ancestors had to deal with, poor them.  but, until my wifi is operational again, i have found an unintended benefit from the situation.  As you may know, I use a mind mapping application called "Mindmanager" to basically run my life and keep all these plates spinning and it has a built in browser that i rarely used, until yesterday.  its basically a builtin version of internet explorer 6 or something.  it, also is ancient; no tabs, limited support for javascript, etc, so its basic but pretty fast and no history, so i go straight to a page, get what i need and close the browser, and conveniently my mind map is right there ready to be referenced or altered, in the same window.  i may continue to work like this.  very efficient especially right now.

Now we move towards a playable prototype.  and by playable i don't mean "gig-able".  i mean literally just able to produce note sounds.  this is a first attempt at mounting the keys so i can test whether the the patch i created is making and sending the right note data.  it will be a weekend of refinement because this version isnt safe.  i almost blew up my laptop last night,literally.  i never saw a message before stating that the system is receiving a power surge from the USB port...yikes!!  so i will work on a version that doesn't involve nuking my lappy.

In those moments when i'm not frying my cpu with oddly wired pseudo-controllers, i am adding content to my book "the 21st century musicians guide to busking".  i just started on the chapter, "don't be a dick, but don't be a wuss either" concerning the political landscape of playing music on the street and how to deal with all manner of character development and plot twist that occur  in the ongoing drama that is street music.  if you have contributed to the campaign, and are on facebook, you will find that you have been added to a group for the book, where i upload chapters as soon as i write them and you can check them out and give feedback.  my way of saying thank you for helping me create the most amazing live music  performance system ever!  if you are not on facebook, let me know if you are interested in checking the book out and i will create some way of making it happen.

The other big news for the coming week is my debut performance in France!  I will be in Lille next Saturday feb 12th, for the Blueday Stereo Live party at Boreal.  The line up will be me, DJ Sumic, Timothee Milton and Dagui Rodann.  it looks like i get to dust off some of the soulful stuff and get a little tribal with it as well.  I am REALLY looking forward to this show and getting groovy.. These cats seem to be on the same tip as me so i should be able to "let go".

Now that the legal stuff is out of the way, i will be able to get back to the job of documenting the progress of building the TRON beatjazz controller system.  if you would like to see this project realized, throw a little money at it.  I have a varied array of perks that you may find very cool, including my old jail broken iphone 3g, loaded with notes, videos, pure data patches, and a copy of my book!  there are many others as well.  you can check  them all out here www.indiegogo.com/tronbeatjazz