UOW: day 6

I was pretty relaxed when i went to bed on monday night, if not with a head full of code and programming and interactivity mush (like i said, i'm totally novice and still have to bend my head in new ways about this stuff a lot). 

But do you think i slept well?? no. some squeaky noise kept going all night - woke me up enough to bother me and i got up this morning with a headache. Not a good start to the day in anyone's books.

Today's account will be in point form, in keeping with its tone:

- Schlepped to Jaycar to get aligator clips (found bonus set of wireless digital headphones to hack into - the most expensive chip i've bought so far. 

- Almost back at uni, I realised that i left my phone and sunglasses at the hotel. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

All that smugness from yesterday's sense of accomplishment: down the gurgler.

- Found missing arduino and raced into class. thankfully I presented at the end of the lesson, so had time to deal with my lacking caffeine levels.

Surprisingly, after that the day impoved.

Chatting to second years was fun - some of them are feeling so overwhelmed with electronics. 

Which i can relate to. 

I passed on some valuable information I received as a student from one Philip Wilson, who was a third-year to my second. Phil said: use second year to experiment. At no other time will you have access to the kind of material and studio that you do now. Plus you have leeway. In first year, you don't get time to do anything, third year, you have to focus on your project, but second year - go nuts. (And i did.). Actually, the second year spirit underlies a lot of my practice nowdays, so it was nice to revisit that important moment in my learning.

I had some beautiful conversations with a couple of students who were keen to chat either about coding environments, or about how to 'get out there'. it was so lovely to pass on 'how to be keen'.

During lunch i pulled apart my super-expensive transmitter, excitement plus!  i realised i must have been learning something about how circuits and electronics work 'cos i ascertain what was important and what what wasn't. I don't quite know, yet, how to make it interact with an arduino board, or control it yet, but hopefully i will. 

After talking to the second class of second years, who weren't quite as interested in what i had to say, i raced over to Bldg 25 to join the faculty of creative arts for an afternoon tea. whilst not quite as rad as CIA's morning teas, it was pretty special anyway. great cake, nice to be introduced and chatted briefly with some music teachers. yay.

Back to Innovation Campus to spend 3.5 hours not getting anywhere with my arduino. I managed to hamfist a soldering job and bust my lilypad development board. huzzah. i just wanted to set up a script so that i could test the flex sensor, and set up and if/else statement to write to digital, so that when the flex sensor flexes up to a point, the light goes on. and anything over or under that, it goes off. no luck. nada. zip. 

i gave up, ran for the train (again) and spent the rest of the trip writing up these blogs.

meh, yah, meh.