Wanderers 2007.5.23

The Toshiba is projecting Glenn's Cymatic Soundscapes (a DVD version) through Terry's projector. Cymatic Soundscapes, by Dr. Hans Jenny,©1992 MACROmedia, is a study of wave phenomena. No computer-generated images are used.

Bill, the electronics engineer behind the not-a-theramin, has been struggling with ncurses in Python, and brought me some broken code on a memory stick, along with the assembly language version that's already working.

He's trying to mock up a calculator directly on the "glass CRT" or terminal window, bypassing the OS-provided widgets libraries ("the canvas" and so on), which add so much overhead in the field, in terms of needed memory.

Bill calls himself a "bunny clubber" to signify his Neanderthal predelictions, which are valuable biases and skills to keep handy, given all the sophisticated graphical stuff that relies on bunny clubbing at a low level.

And even below that, are the Bruce Adams type skills, which allow metallurgic annealing of delicate tiny circuits, using but the shortest possible bursts of radiation.

Bill also showed off his RPN HP style terminal window calculator, written in C. The unit converter, however, was not quite compatible with WinXP's emulated DOS. Such is life in the big city.

I also projected this comic "battle of the sexes" video by Harry Enfield & friends, a spoof of past gender typing, plus we enjoyed this "ode to aging" (more fun stereotyping) by Tom Rush.