Or at least the home stretch for speaker assembly. We have five speakers working now and are pushing for three more each day so we can finish this week, but, even with the promised paradise of the Nintendo Wii, morale seems low. After soldering for 2 – or is it 3? – weeks now, soldering has gotten very old very quickly, and so, in the spirit of earlier posts, here is a haiku:
Soldering is so
So, so, so, so, so, so hot
It burns. Ow! D**n it!
The same kind of loving and morally upstanding dynamic can be found here at L2Ork
…but that emptiness has now been filled.
After soldering for a couple hours today I have begun to feel a little loopy and thus have decided to take a blog post break.
Note: do not inhale tip tinner! It will leave you with a massive headache and everything may begin to feel slightly different.
Paul has said that we need a special place on the site to post all the absolutely horrid jokes that ensue when all us l2orkists get together in a smelly tinny room to solder, and I agree. Here’s a taste:
“Man, that amp board is looking pretty rough.”
“Yeah. I would never bring it home to my motherboard!”
It’s pretty awful that I posted that because I said it in the RL. I’ll try not to shamelessly display my verbal finess in the future.
I can’t wait until this all comes to fruition. The speaker housings are looking sweeeeeeeetttt thanks to Eric and Brian. Heck yessss.
For four days we have been soldering. I’ve been seeing little pink spiders since I started breathing the fumes. Surely I jest, but these past few days have been incredibly productive. With the exception of a few burnt fingers (and the spiders) this week has gone off without a hitch. Good job, everyone!
Greetings all L2Ork enthusiasts! I am pleased to report that as of May 25th, 2009, DISIS has embarked on its implementation of what is to the best of my knowledge the first Linux Laptop Orchestra in the World. Despite a shaky economy, over the past year we’ve been extremely lucky in securing funds and sponsorships for this project. Apart from our external sponsors who at this point include MSI Computer, Roland Corporation, and Sweetwater, I would like to extend special thanks to the Virginia Tech Stakeholders who have made this project a reality.
Our summer research consists of the following milestones:
Inspired by the successes of the Princeton (PLOrk) and Stanford (SLOrk) Laptop Orchestras, our main aim is to produce the infrastructure necessary to support a 15-member Linux Laptop Orchestra (L2Ork), while pursuing cost optimization and maintaining of a maximum compatibility with the two existing orchestras. While in the long-run we anticipate using Chuck and Supercollider, in the short-term we are focusing primarily on Pure-Data as our DSP platform of choice.
It is indeed my great pleasure to announce that the project has attracted an interdisciplinary team, consisting of Faculty from Art (Prof. Eric Standley), Engineering (Dr. Tom Martin), and Music/DISIS/CCTAD (yours truly), as well as Students (Art, CS, Engineering, Music).
In addition to our internal and external sponsors, L2Ork is also in part supported by the NSF’s Research Experience for the Undergraduates (REU) program. I am also pleased to announce L2Ork’s partnership with the Linuxaudio.org consortium that offers invaluable resources to the Linux audio community.
Our summer project is set to end on July 17th, 2009. Coming this fall, we plan to introduce a pilot curriculum in support of the new found ensemble. We hope to have a public debut sometime in early December of 2009. In the meantime, we will use this blog to share our progress with the World. So, if L2Ork is your cup of tea, stay tuned for updates as we continue to fill this site with content.
