It’s nice to live in a city that is all abuzz and cheery, living in a temporary fantasy world, and forget about all of the problems facing the country, the economy, etc. For a short while at least…

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/08/sports/ncaabasketball/08ncaa.html

I have had my MacBook Pro for close to a year now. I have had only two complaints.

The first is that after less than a year the battery will not hold a charge for even an hour.

The second has been that I can’t use my RME Multiface with it. Or at least not with some clumsy adapter(s) that have mixed reviews. So I was very happy to learn that RME is scheduled to start shipping HDSP cards the use the Express Card format in December. I will eagerly await this!

A post recently came across the Cycling’74 Dev forum with a link to this page.

This is a nice way to create externs using C++ and has a lot of things in common with the Objective-C wrappers about which I’ve been posting information. It’s nice to see some other work going on in this vein.

For the last 4 or 6 weeks, it appears that there have been a number of problems plaguing the Electrotap online order forms. Yuck!

Monday night we made some tweaks to a few system settings. Since then, the number of successful orders has increased substantially—so hopefully we’ve gotten it squared away…

If you have tried in the last month or two to order something and it never seemed to get processed, then we apologize and hope you will try again. If there are any ordering problems still lurking, then we are not aware of them, and so please let us know!

Thanks! Tim

Dan Nigrin’s Major Malfunction was released in July. The info is here: http://www.defectiverecords.com/majormalfunction/

Looks like fun!

We were awarded with the University of Missouri’s ‘Entrepreneur of the Year’ award for founding Electrotap.

• http://www.umsystem.edu/ums/news/releases/news07053101.shtml
• http://www.umsystem.edu/ums/departments/ur/spectrum/0706/story02.shtml
• http://www.umsystem.edu/ums/departments/aa/students/entrepreneur.shtml

Many thanks to all who have supported us!

There are a couple of new releases from Cycling’74. First is a new disc on the C74 label. The second is a Universal Binary release of M.

Not from Cycling ‘74, but long awaited by me personally, Sibelius has released a Universal Binary. Hooray!

We’re back from NIME 07 now. Electrotap was a sponsor and also had a table to show the various things we are doing.

NIME is my favority annual conference that I try to attend semi-regularly. This time, unfortunately, I was in a position where I was playing trade-show person instead of enjoying the conference. I actually played double-duty, working most of the time to represent Cycling ‘74, and the rest of the time to represent Electrotap. It was exhausting.

I can’t share any real highlights from the conference itself, as I wasn’t able to see most of it. A real highlight of the trip was eating Ethopian at Ghenet (284 Mulberry St. in Manhattan) with Cort Lippe, Eric Lyon, and others.

Wearing my Cycling hat, we had fun doing a preview of Max 5—the cat is now out of the bag. Oodles of goodness and many smiles by Max users were seen when they saw what was coming.

NIME isn’t really a tradeshow, but the lobby outside of the paper sessions felt like one this time. Attending a tradeshow is expensive. There is a really good blog post about calculating the cost of a tradeshow on the Rogue Amoeba Blog. NIME is not MacWorld, on many levels, but it still cost Electrotap roughly $4000 when you include printing propaganda etc. So it wasn’t cheap.

Next year NIME will be Genoa, Italy. Hopefully I can write a paper or get performance so that I can participate for real!

My wife stumbled across Matthias Wandel’s web page searching for people who have built their own pipe organ.

Matthias Wandel’s Website

I especially liked this quote from the marble machines page:

”...small kids would render it non functional in no time flat. Everybody also always makes all kinds of suggestions for how the marble machine could be improved. Catch is, how do you ‘improve’ a machine that is fundamentally designed to be utterly useless? Like all neat projects I have undertaken, I have contemplated plans for a bigger and better marble machine, but as always, there is too many other interesting things to do for me to spend the time to build a better marble machine.

Note: I wrote the above paragraph before I built Marble Machine 2”

Things to definitely check out: Night time photography Marble Machines & other insane contraptions Wasp Sucking Machine Scanning Camera Most of the Wooden Projects such as the Wooden Pager Rotating Machine, Wooden Hinges, and the Wooden machines page.

and of course the home made Pipe Organ

I think most of the people reading this blog have similar experiences in expressing creativity. I hope this inspires you as much as it has me.

Slowly, we have been working on improving our various web systems for Electrotap. About a month ago we made a bunch of changes under the hood and, unfortunately, we broke our support system without realizing it.

We lost about a week’s worth of support requests from earlier in April. We’ve had a stop-gap measure in place for the last couple of weeks, and I’ve finally got our support system bakc up and fully functional. Maybe now I can work on something a bit more interesting…