Just having some fun with the Twitter API using the twitterPHP library written by David Billingham and thought I'd set up a Twitter page for Room 213. It's now online at http://twitter.com/room_213.

Each week until the album is out (late winter, most likely), it's going to post a different quote from the album at every Saturday at 2:13 AM.

If anyone is interested in how I set it up, let me know and I can send you the code. It's about 10-12 lines, really easy to set up.

Man are these little things cool! It's small enough to sit on the desk in front of my laptop (or even ON the laptop like in this photo), and it took zero setup to get working. Oh, and did I mention they're dirt cheap too? Like fifty bucks cheap.

My other keyboard is a gigantic 61-key beast. It takes up so much room that most of the time I just keep it stored to free up the extra space. I'm usually only recording single-note leads on it anyway, so this is a very welcome change! I'm considering just getting rid of that one now...

So I'm working on a not-so-top-secret project (as in, I've been telling everyone) to connect a little electret microphone through an arduino microcontroller to a set or RGB LED lights in the hope of programming them to react to my voice.

Super nerdy, but sometimes us nerds make the coolest stuff! Case in point, this quick video showing proof it's partially working (no microphone yet, that's next!):

And here's a photo of my awful breadboarding skills to go with it:

I just saw this awesome video from the World Science Festival 2009 where Bobby McFerrin jumps around on stage, and giving the audience only the root note to sing, they automatically know the rest of the notes with no further instruction. It's really funny when they just get it as soon as he hops "up a step".

What's really interesting is at the end when he says "What's interesting to me about that is, regardless of where I am, anywhere, every audience gets that."

In more ways than we understand, music really is a universal language. A language that connects more immediately to our emotions than our logic. I think the best music achieves a connection to both, in the right proportion, and through understanding as well we can reach even greater depths of emotional experience.

Check it out here.