Cory Duncan, Jon MacDonald, Josh Weinman, and I teamed up in the Trail Blazers Street Jam for some 3-on-3 basketball.

Show and Tell PDX is an event hosted by Substance, wherein a handful of speakers have up to 10 minutes each to share a project, product, or idea with everyone in attendance. For the inaugural event, I was second in the lineup, sharing an AIR application I’d written to allow any Actionscript class to be exported as a JPEG/PNG image (or series of images).

Overall, the event was an inspiring and educational experience, and I’m looking forward to seeing how it evolves. Check out the recap for more.

About 3 weeks ago, Grant Skinner started an AS3 programming contest on Twitter. The idea is that you take 140 characters of “gimme” code, essentially a few function shortcuts with an enterFrame function to hold your code, and see what you can program in a single tweet.

Initially, most of the entries were automated line and shape visualizations, since most of the function shortcuts are for the Graphics class. I wanted to add a little more visual interest, as well as some user interaction. Here is what I ended up submitting as my first entry:

entry #1: leaky sunset

a=new BitmapData(2,400);a.perlinNoise(2,400,9,51,0,0);
g.beginBitmapFill(a);lt(1,0);lt(0,1);q=mouseX;w=mouseY;g.drawCircle(q,w,m.min(q,w)/9);

Next, I tried do something similar but using a bit less code:

entry #2: wheelix

q=mouseX;w=mouseY;ls(0,0,.1);mt(q,w);lt(0,0);
g.beginFill(r()*1e7,.1);g.drawCircle(q,w,r()*20);rotationZ+=4;

After taking a break from what had become an addicting little challenge, Shelby suggested making something that would print, so I threw one last entry together. It’s a simple drawing application that will automatically print once a bunch of circles are drawn. Just let your mouse do the talking:

entry #3: dotprint

if(i++<99){g.beginFill(r()*1e7);g.drawCircle(mouseX,mouseY,99-i)
}else if(i==99){var p=new PrintJob();p.start();p.addPage(this);p.send()};

It’s fun to see just how much you can get out of 140 characters. There are a handful of tricks to save every last character: using 9 instead of 10, 99 instead of 100, almost completely ignoring memory management, shortening color values to exponents (1e7 instead of 0xFFFFFF), boolean shorthand if(!i++), modulus, ternary conditionals, etc. The cooler something is, the less likely it is to be readable, for instance:

for(g.clear();j=i++%300;ls(0))with(o[j]=o[j]?o[j]:new Matrix)mt(b,c),
u=b-mouseX,v=c-mouseY,t=-m.pow(u*u+v*v,-.7)*r(),lt(b+=a+=u*t,c+=d+=v*t)

renders a flock of pixels that follow your mouse around… pretty rad if you ask me.

If you’re interested in learning more, here are the official tweetcoding rules, complete list of entries, and a bit more about the story behind tweetcoding.

Download audio file (falling-through.mp3)

It’s been awhile since I’ve taken the time to sit down and record anything, but after listening through a few of the tracks that Erin and I put together awhile back, I’m feeling guilty about all the time I could have spent working on new stuff.

We’d managed to work a few riffs into full tracks by passing them back and forth in a photoshop tennis style, adding a new element or changing up the arrangement each time through. The approach is pretty flexible, welcoming quick bursts of creativity, and reducing emotional attachment to any specific section of a track.

Here’s a sample of two simple riffs we wrote as a starting point:

Download audio file (track_1_samples.mp3)

And the (still unfinished) result after few passes:

Download audio file (track_1_phase_5.mp3)

I’ve discovered that it’s a lot easier for me to write a 60 – 90 second group of samples than it is to finish any single track, but it’s still a lot of fun. I’m planning to sit down and write as much as I can in the coming weeks, so I’ll put up a page with all the little starter tracks that come out of it. In the meantime, here’s a sample of the last piece I worked on before my hiatus, hopefully it’ll evolve into something cool:

Download audio file (dark_sample.mp3)

Last week, Jessie, Shelby, and I traveled to Idaho to visit the White family homestead. We watched plenty of VHS footage of Jessie as a little chub, chopped 2+ cords of firewood from the local forest, and embarked on a remote wilderness camping slash mountain-biking extravaganza. Here are some photos from the trip.

Overall, it was a lot of fun but it’s good to be back home in our comfortable bed, and cozy wilderness-free apartment. That’s not to say I don’t enjoy the outdoors, only that I’d rather not wonder if a wolf will pounce me on my way to the bathroom at 2am.

Fortunately or unfortunately, nobody was really paying attention, so it worked just fine for me. Now that’s all going to change; I am making a habit of putting something at least semi-interesting up here so there will be some reason to visit more than once every 3 years.

At the very least, it’s a jumping off point to all the rest of the places I haunt the internets, and at best a compilation of various work or play related experiences including: music, travel, photos, videos, and the like. Please feel free to dig up my contact information and heckle me if I haven’t posted in awhile.