First, I recorded myself whistling the same two notes for about a minute, three times, in three different places (a cafeteria, a park bench, and a busy street). I then asked friends to submit recordings of themselves whistling these same two notes. Thus far, there have been 26 submissions from 15 people.
The site is arranged so that you can listen to more than one of these files at a time, and this is what I find most interesting. Here’s an example of what that sounds like:
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If you’re interested in participating, please send a recording of yourself whistling those two notes. There is information on how to do that here.
The project is turning out to be about a few things. Ambient sounds, intention and non-intention, collaboration and unity, etc. There are different people in different places all doing the same thing. I think playing around with and listening to this has tuned up my ears to my own aural environment. Very interesting to me is that after playing with the files for a while, I start to hear those two tones everywhere: in the wind, in traffic sounds, in electronic and mechanical hums.
This site is for quick, gestural drawings I’ve made using Microsoft Excel. The results can be startling for those of us who have spent a lot of time mucking with numbers or lists of things using Excel.
I’m very interested in what happens when you take an emotionally cold thing like a spreadsheet software package and try to “warm it up” so to speak. I have mostly done these on busses and planes. I have no interest in using this as a pointalistic representational drawing tool.
I use something like this for the beginning of a work day. I set it to launch (for example) iTunes, Mail, iChat, and iCal, and then hide everything except Mail.
I think it’s handy. I trigger it to run and then go get coffee and when I get back everything is where I want it to be. If your computer’s slow, probably increase the value in that line that says “delay 5″.
Very easily adaptable as you’ll see if you open it in Script Editor.
I got tired of copying a column of stuff from Excel, opening BBEdit, doing a find and replace to convert a bunch of lines into one block of comma-delimited text, selecting it all, copying again, and then finally pasting. I felt like I was that chump using an old fashioned blanket on the snuggie commercial.
Copy a column of stuff (from Excel, Numbers, anything really)
Go to where you want to paste it as comma-delimited
Invoke the script!
On my system, I run it with a keystroke trigger defined in Quicksilver. But you could use LaunchBar…or activate it from the scripts menu. By the way, if you want a system-wide scripts menu, here is a page that describes a nice way of activating a bunch of menu extras in OS X.
There are probably more elegant ways of doing this, but it has been working for me. If you find anything funky with it, let me know.
While you’re browsing around and thinking about books, click it. Here’s what’ll happen when you do:
If you are looking at a book on Amazon, it’ll take you straight to the WorldCat entry for that book. Magic!
If you’re not looking at anything on Amazon, it’ll check to see if you have highlighted any text on the current page in your web browser (i.e., you’re reading book reviews in the New York Times and you highlight the name of a book, an author, etc.) and then search WorldCat for that text.
If you’re not looking at anything on Amazon, and there is no text highlighted, you’ll be prompted to enter what you want to search for in WorldCat.
Slick, eh? If you haven’t used WorldCat before you’ll need to tell it your location so it can give you relevant results.
I think it’s handy. It isn’t perfect, though. For example, if you’re looking at an electric toothbrush on Amazon and click this, it’ll take you to WorldCat and WorldCat will say it has no idea what you’re looking for. There are probably some other conditions/edge cases/etc. I haven’t thought of. Let me know if you come up with anything I oughtta account for and I’ll give it a shot.
The trip is over. I rode a total of 4,765 miles this summer in a great zig-zagging arc across the United States.
There’s more to say about Philadelphia and arriving at the shore (both of which were inspiring moments), but I’ll say it all later. I’m in New York for a couple of days and I’ve shipped the bicycle back to California already. From here I’m headed to Boston by bus for two nights, and then to Champaign, IL by plane and will be there for about a week. Friends, I’ll be back in California the weekend of the 20th; let’s celebrate.
