The Citizen's Town Hall
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 01/08/2013 - 21:36Wednesday, January 9th, the 2013 regular session of the Connecticut General Assembly convenes. People who have been reading my blog regularly will recall that I ran for State Representative last year, and if I had been elected, I would be getting sworn in on Wednesday.
Yet when I tell people about my campaign, I often tell them, that while I didn't get elected, I did win. I won by getting a chance to discuss important issues that our state faces. I won by giving voters a choice, even if they didn't end up choosing me. I won by having an opportunity to encourage people to become more involved in their government.
In one of my final campaign pieces, I encouraged people to stay involved. To start attending school board meetings, events at their places of worship or social clubs in their community, perhaps even attending town halls talking about what is going on up in Hartford.
Since election day, a lot of things have gone on and there are many things that the people in our community should be talking about, so I've set up an event that will take place at a local restaurant.
The first Citizen's Town Hall in the Woodbridge, Orange, Derby (and perhaps Hamden, Bethany, etc), will be Thursday 1/10 at 6:30 at Wheelers. Join us. Let's talk about the legislative agenda and what you'd like to see happen.
What's Your Social Media Impact?
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 01/07/2013 - 21:22People often warn high school kids about social media. Those pictures you post may end up affecting which schools you get into or which jobs you get offered. It is a valid point. There is still stuff I posted online over thirty years ago that, if you know what you're looking for, you can find. This is different than some of the posts from my written journal thirty years ago that I started posting online.
About twelve years ago, I went to a group relations conference in Holland. There was one moment I particularly remember. The group consultants changed roles and became members of the group. One of them made a comment about being able to just blurt things out, without thinking about the effect their comments would have on the group.
It seems like many adults on Facebook don't post material that they will be embarrassed about when they are looking for their next job, but they still blurt things out, without thinking about the effect their posts will have. I've been thinking about this a lot since Sandy Hook.
I've tried to post more positive material; highlighting compassion, cooperation and creativity, and trying to avoid the more polarized posts. One blog post that I wrote about video games started a bit of a discussion on Facebook, and one hyper-partisan individual resorted to 'argumentum ad ridiculum'. Unfortunately, it made him look ridiculous and did nothing to move forward the discussion at hand.
Perhaps this becomes even more important if you are a public figure, as Rep. Hovey discovered this weekend.
Yet does sharing positive stories make a difference? Yesterday, I shared a post about the Orange Lions Club Annual Wine and Beer Tasting. It is a fundraiser helping the Lions combat blindness. One of the organizers thanked me for sharing it and I appreciated her kind words. Hopefully, it will get a few more people to attend the event.
Now this is not to say that all posts need to be promoting the public good. It is important to be real, to be authentic online. I've set up a Facebook List of CT State Legislators were I get a sense at what those legislators who have friended me on Facebook or have public figure pages are writing about. Sometimes, they root for football teams. Sometimes they play Farmville. Sometimes they post pictures of having dinner with friends and sometimes, they share posts that can have a positive impact on their friends and constituents..
I hope everyone tries to have at least some of their posts make a positive impact on the people around them.
Spoken Word Blogging
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 01/06/2013 - 09:17After college, I moved into an old cinnamon factory with a bunch of aspiring artists in New York City to be a writer. I was most interested in writing poems and short stories. I also had dreams of writing a great novel, but end up writing mostly computer programs.
Fast forward three decades, and I'm sitting in a nice house in suburbia writing blog posts on a laptop computer; a writing implement and genre that didn't exist back in the spice factory days. My online writing style continues to evolve. There have been times that I've written daily, sometimes, not very eloquently, in an effort to hone my craft. Other times, I've just been too busy to write regularly.
I'm starting off 2013 with a good string of blog post, but I've got a busy week ahead. I have to get non-blog writing done for other projects as well.
I'm also spending time trying to find things to inspire me and stimulate my creativity. Yesterday, I ended up on Sarah Kay's Ted talk, If I should have a daughter …
It got me thinking. Should I start hitting some of the poetry open mics? Should I start writing some more poetic blog posts to be read allowed, and then make a video of me reading them which I could share on YouTube? NPR has been doing an interesting series of having poets visit their news room and write poems about the experience and the day's news. Could I do a spoken word poetic news recap, perhaps drawing from other experiments in creative news, from the Daily Show to Autotune the news?
For politics, could I, a former, and perhaps future, political candidate, deliver spoken word poetic stump speeches?
I hope to give some of this a shot, perhaps even today, Epiphany, if I get the time.
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SuperCollider, Middletown Remix and Raspberry Pi
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 01/05/2013 - 10:49At work, I've been speaking with people involved with Middletown Remix. As part of the project, I met with Ron Kuivila, who teaches electronic music at Wesleyan. His biography on Wikipedia mentioned SuperCollider, "an environment and programming language for real time audio synthesis and algorithmic composition". So, last night, I downloaded Supercollider and started playing with it.
I downloaded the Mac OSX universal image version 3.6.2 and started it up. It comes with documentation built in and it was fairly easy to get started. On my Mac, I had to use Shift-Return to kick off snippets of code. The server didn't appear as described in the documentation, but using s.boot; did the trick. The instructions saying to use Cmd-. to stop the sound weren't exactly clear. That's the command key and the period key.
Once I got that far, things started to come together really nicely, and I had my computer making some interesting sounds. Another bit of documentation that I found very interesting was How to Program in SuperCollider. It explained PBind which gave me the ability to play some tunes.
It took a little bit of remembering music theory, to get a scale that sounds half way decent.
(
Pbind(
\freq, Pseq([ 1/1, 9/8, 5/4, 4/3, 3/2, 5/3, 15/8, 2 ] * 440, 5),
\dur, Prand([0.2, 0.4, 0.3], inf)
).play
)
The next subject it looks like I need to explore is SynthDefs.
With all of this coming together, the next obvious question was, what other devices could I run SuperCollider on? There is a great blog post on SuperCollider on the Raspberry Pi. I plugged in my Raspberry Pi, loaded the SuperCollider program on it and tried to get it to run. It seemed to run okay, but the instructions talked about using Overtone to control the SuperCollider server, and I haven't gotten that far. Nor have I done anything with Synths yet, which is what I read about in the
It does seem like an exciting project would be to use a large number of Raspberry Pi's running SuperCollider, and perhaps some sensors to make them react to what is going on around them. This could be used to create a sound installation, perhaps similar to what Ron spoke about with his rainforest installation.
I also started playing with SuperCollider for Android. I got it to start and make a sound, but not do anything subsequent. Their page, How to control SC Android remotely didn't seem to work with my Android. and server remained listed as inactive. However, using the same commands to my Raspberry Pi, I did manage to get indication that the Raspberry Pi SuperCollider server is running properly.
That pretty much captures where I am with SuperCollider, Middletown Remix and Raspberry Pi this morning. It's time to get about my chores. If've you're playing with SuperCollider and/or Raspberry Pi, let me know what your up to.
Dammit Doll on a Bar
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 01/04/2013 - 19:49It was a few weeks before Christmas when I received a Facebook message from a social media friend. She wrote a blog and sometimes did publicity. She wanted to know if I'd consider writing a blog post about Dammit Dolls. I don't do a lot of product reviews these days, so I checked out the website and thought about it and then told her, sure, I'll do a review.
One of my co-workers has little kids, and does the whole Elf on a Shelf thing. I thought an interesting angle would be Dammit Doll on a Bar. You get the idea, "Are you tired of trying to keep up with all the Christmas trends, of trying to create as magical a Christmas as your co-workers do? Forget Elf on a Shelf, you need a Dammit Doll on a Bar."
So, one Thursday evening in the middle of December, my Dammit Doll arrived in the mail. It was cute, and seems to be about as indestructible as it was described. Our big fluffy dog Wesley stole it from my bag, thinking it was a chew toy for him, but he didn't manage to do any damage.
The next day, I took the doll to work to show to some of my coworkers and get their reactions as I thought about what I would write about the Dammit Doll. We have a lot of stress in our office, and everyone thought the Dammit Doll was cute, and was a good idea. Various coworkers would come over to my desk to borrow the doll.
I settled into my regular work schedule. I track what's being said online that would be of interest to the health center I work at. It was two Friday's before Christmas; likely to be a slow social media day. There was a story about a shooting in a town about half an hour to the west of where I work; not much for details. Yet as the day progressed, the details became more and more gruesome. Our health center provides services in some of the neighboring towns and in many schools around the state. Behavioral health is an important part of our services. As the story unfolded, it became clear what I would be working on for the foreseeable future.
I grabbed the Dammit Doll and gave it a few extra swings. The following week, I got an email from my friend. She lives fairly close to Sandy Hook. She wanted to know if I had gotten the doll, but also understood why I couldn't write about it at that point.
A few more weeks have passed. Students have returned to the relocated Sandy Hook Elementary School. The crisis interventions have wound down. Things are slowly getting back to the new normal.
Finally, I can take a moment to write about the Dammit Doll. I didn't get it done in time for Christmas, which I imagine was the original goal, but during these winter months, there remains more than enough stress to go around, and more than enough reason to get a Dammit Doll.
