The personal blog of Eric Skiff

I just uploaded my 4th gameboy music track, “All of Us.” It took a LOT of revisions to get me happy with this one, but I was able to bend it to my will and I’m really digging the second half. I’m going more in that “soundtrack-style” direction for my next song. I’m determined to finish my album, but I can’t decide how many tracks that should be. 12 seems right, but I might stop before then if I feel finished.

In the meantime, Noel Hidalgo go in touch the other day to ask if my music was free to use under a Creative Commons license, which it most certainly is – the super-permissive “Attribution” license that simply asks for credit with no other restrictions.

Since that means anyone can use my tunes in anything they want, he grabbed a copy of “Underclocked” to use in his latest episode of Taxinyc.tv – his new videoblog about becoming a taxi driver (also known as a “hack”). Here’s the episode, where he finally cuts off the hair and beard he grew during his last project:

I’m part of a collective called NYC Resistor – as it says on the top of our site “We learn, share, and make things”. We’ve been meeting over the past few months to get up and running, and things are really starting to take shape now!

We’ve gotten an awesome space in Brooklyn, and as of April 5th, we’re going to be starting classes. If you’ve ever wanted to get started with electronics, this is the time. We’ll be beginning with 101 and 102 classes in soldering and electronics, and I’ll be honest that I’ll actually be taking a spot in some of these classes myself to get my basic skills ready for more advanced stuff in the months to come. Bre’s also going to be running a class on “video basics for people who make things“, and Justin’s going to be teaching a class in freaking gameboy programming. How cool is that?

We’ve created NYC Resistor to help build the NYC hardware hacking community, so we’re running these classes extremely cheaply – $25 per class hour. Because we’re keeping them cheap, we really need to fill the classes to keep NYC Resistor running. Please, spread this around, tell you friends, and sign up to help us grow the NYC tech community.

We’ve got BarCampNYC3 T-shirts thanks to the extremely awesome Mr Joshua Keay of Insanely Great Tees!.

The BarCamp logo is traditionally just the flame next to name of your camp, and I LOVE how different, quirky, and inspired this new design is. Aside from the fact that it’s delightfully python-esque, Josh’s logo communicates giving and uses the BarCamp flame in a novel way, showing it igniting a brain. BarCamp is all about sharing ideas and getting inspired, so this logo cuts right to the essence of what BarCamp is for me, and does it with a wonderfully weird sensibility. I’m going to be wearing this shirt a lot!

If you haven’t heard of BarCamp yet, it’s an ad-hoc conference happening March 15th and 16th at Brooklyn Poly. In short, it’s like Fight Club for geeks. If you come to the event, you have to present (or at least help, but that doesn’t rhyme so well). Because we’re all sharing expertise, you get some incredibly deep and geeky topics from an amazing diverse array of disciplines.

We capped the event at 200 people this year, and ran out of the main batch of tickets, but we’ve got 10 more opening up next Monday and Thursday at 9 AM. If you want a ticket, head to the registration page then and jump on them as they open up!

I’ve just uploaded my first real song made on a vintage Gameboy from 1989 using Nanoloop. Take a listen and let me know what you think!

All songs are released under a Creative Commons Attribution License, please feel free to use them in your projects, podcasts, videos, or whatever you like, just be sure to let me know so I can link back to you!

Twitter had some scheduled downtime tonight which led to the inevitable confused and plaintive tweets as it limped back up, and some twitter soul-searching.

When this thing – this endless, up to the minute newsfeed, this lifeline to like-minded geeks – goes away, you definitely notice it’s absence. Your behavior changes. In some ways it’s like the power going out. When you can’t turn on the TV and you have to light some candles and read a book, it can be an incredibly different and rewarding experience, and observations about twitter abounded tonight amid the downtime.

Pete Cashmore summed up his thoughts simply, saying “when twitter goes down, productivity goes up” and I was inclined to agree. It makes sense that since we’re putting time into reading each other’s tweets and writing our own, that when we can’t spend time there, we get more done.

As I thought about my twitter-less evening I realized that although it seems logical that less twitter equals more work, the opposite was proving true for me.

Here’s why: I tend to dive deep into whatever I’m looking at, but if there’s time I have to wait, I have an extremely hard time sitting idle. Whether that’s a software compile, audio export, or video render, there are many mini-waits during my day. Normally, I turn to twitter to fill those little gaps while staying mentally active. Tonight, without twitter to fall back on, I found myself lost in the web itself, reading about dense topics like predicting elections using futures markets, and completely losing track of what I was waiting for.

During a normal day if there’s something holding me up I can leave whatever I’m waiting on right front-and-center on my screen, and flip through the last few hours of tweets while I’m waiting. It’s a nice brain-break and I can plow through the new tweets quickly. Since I’m still alert and haven’t mentally gone down another path, I can check back in with the app I’m waiting for and easily slip back into my flow.

My idle-time is definitely spent reading and writing tweets, and there’s no question that I spend a good amount of time there, but (in large part thanks to twitterrific) the time I save by staying in close vicinity mentally and visually to the task at hand more than makes up for the time spent.