Current location:	home
Current music:	some video of a guy making IDM with a Machinedrum
Entry tags:	awesome, blockparty, circuit-bent, demoscene, notacon

Notacon... wow...
Bullet points, since I'm not sure I can write in a proper manner at this time:

• My presentation went pretty well. Did have a problem when my Arduino-powered MIDI sequencer failed to work right, but otherwise everything worked. It even got covered on Hack A Day. I'll get slides online soon. And of course, this nice little Arduino hack gets published today. Though that could come in handy later...
  
• I have been properly chastised into getting proper soldering gear. Now to make that happen.
• At least a few people used the Twitter hashtag aggregator I set up at atea.us. I think I'll switch it for Penguicon use next week.
  
• Jam Session: Much more cohesive than last year. 0% Green Day, though some Collective Soul popped in for a minute (guitarists...). Neat things included a pickup-fitted violin, this cool use of an XBox 360 Guitar Hero controller (brought by the developer), and the return of krue's avrsyn. And bleakenigma didn't come to rock the vocoder, even though he specifically requested it.  He was probably busy, y'know, running the Con or something. Once I make some edits it'll probably get aired.
  
• Sessions (I unfortunately ended up missing a TON of sessions)
  
• Jeri Ellsworth: I missed half of it due to teardown from my presentation and finally checking into my room, but what I saw was really cool. It was also a lot of material I got in the Computer Design Lab class I took way back when (we did VHDL->FPGA stuff).
  
• Virt: Lots of good info on FM. Makes me miss my DX27 a bit. I should SonicBirth up a little 2-operator FM synth to play with.
• Pete Edwards and Fred Owsley: Lots of good information. I ended up working with them on their hands-on workshop (in part since I had tools and they didn't). Fred's breadboard-expanded TR-707 is made of awesome. I think I'm going to have to take another crack at the Buddhist Digital Jukebox.
• The semi-impromptu 4k sound presentation by BarZoule  was pretty cool as well.
• Blockparty
• Ok, my photo entry was kind of lame. I had this idea of doing something with HDR, but haven't had the time to even try doing it. Instead, I trawled my iPhoto library at 3:30am and found something that at least looked "nice".
• Streaming Audio: EPIC FAIL (but not on my part - it basically got lost in the shuffle of getting submissions sorted since partymeister had issues getting up and running) - If nothing else, the debacle has given me a foolhardy idea for Wildcard next year.
  
• Hirez: I did it for the lulz. And they were indeed epic. "Snow" was added in Gimp at 3:30am. Actually, all my entries were finished up at 3:30am.
  
• Oldschool Audio: complete standings aren't out yet that I can find, so I don't know where I'm at in it. Just not 1st-3rd.
  
• Needed more rickrolls. Had a special secret one ready to go, but partymeister's failure to run made a surreptitious upload more complicated. infowidget (who had the idea to begin with) and I decided to skip it. Keep a close watch on NEOelectro. Maybe you'll find it ;-)
  
• And I still believe a demo should be in the demo category regardless of platform(ok, Windows, OS X, and Linux), but that's just my opinion.
• Whoever un-bent the bent "That was easy" button in the NOC by tearing off the potentiometer kind of sucks.
  
• Yum Cherry Guarana Bawls. Yuck Cocaine Energy Drink. Like carbonated Pixy Stix, but worse.

Mad greetz to everybody who came out. Everybody else - you'll just have to come next year.

Luckily tomorrow's a vacation day.