Right, so, I’ve been busy. Ava and I had to get a new car after the little red 325 met an unfortunate end on a rain-slicked stretch of I-5. Neither Ava nor the occupants of the other car were injured, but my car came out of the wreck several inches shorter than factory spec, so I decided it was time to scrap it and find something new. Ava and I spent a day shopping and picked out another BMW 325: this one a 1994-model 325i convertible, dark green, with a manual transmission. Sexy.

We promptly took the new car on a 1600-mile road trip, visiting my family in California for Christmas. Getting all of my siblings in one place at one time is an increasingly difficult challenge, as we all grow up and more of us acquire mates and thus extend our families in multiple directions, but it’s a delight when we can pull it off. We stayed in Sacramento long enough to attend Carolyn’s 21st-birthday party, then drove home in one long rainy day.

New Year’s: Ava was tired and opted to stay in, so I went out a-rambling on my own. I met up with Adam over at Ryan’s place, joined Ryan and Maya’s dinner guests for a champagne toast, then picked up Michael, Candace, Michael, and Likhita and went out for a walk. We had the astonishing good luck to be passing by T.T. Minor park, on top of Capitol Hill, when some crazy people started up a renegade fireworks show. They had a whole line of mortars set up, and they just kept feeding in the shells. They launched dozens of them, one after another bam bam bam, and it was glorious – then as quickly as they’d started they bagged up their gear and disappeared. What a way to start the new year!

Later I went by AND for their late-night chill-out party and had a good time chatting and relaxing while Michael H. played the funky mash-up beats. Good times.

I’m still trying to get the new shop space set up. We’ve established an LLC but haven’t signed a lease yet – we’re getting close, but still have some landlord concerns about noise to work out. I feel good about this project; the location is good and there are lots of people interested in being part of it.

With all this going on, I haven’t done much in the way of creative work lately. I haven’t touched the juggling balls project or the walkie-texties in a couple of months, and I have not yet started a new sewing project after finishing my ski jacket.

I’m still pecking away at the rhythm robot, however. I had been planning to create three separate devices – a loop sequencer called “rhythm robot”, a master clock called “steadyrocker”, and a percussion synthesizer named “hammerbox” – but I’m now combining all three functions into a single box. It’s a marketing thing: separately, the devices are unlike anything else on the market, but when you put them together they become an unusual but perfectly recognizable drum machine. Drum machines are a well established product category, so I can describe my system by comparing it to other products, instead of having to explain it from scratch. It is also a product category with a price range high enough that I should be able to break even without having to risk lots of cash on a large production run; this was going to be a challenge if I tried to produce individual devices.

The down side is that the bigger box makes for harder design work. There are more constraints to juggle, more complicated arrays of resources to manage, and fewer checkpoints where I can verify that I’m still on track. I also have a demanding customer who knows exactly what he wants in music gear and has imposed all kinds of challenging design constraints on the project! Oh, well. I’ve designed the algorithms, settled on the parameters and their ranges, assembled a parts list, and worked out a schematic. I’ve gone through three revisions of the UI layout now, and it’s coming together; one or two more and perhaps I can start laying out the circuit board.