Making it Happen in Ann Arbor: Local Makers Discuss Their Projects And Businesses

Sat, 10/21/2006 - 2:59pm

When: July 5, 2010 at the Downtown Library: Multi-Purpose Room

This year's Summer Reading program theme is Make It Happen - encouraging everyone to DIY (Do It Yourself) and celebrate arts, crafts, science projects and the DIY mindset. Makers are people who make things, for fun, for science, or for a living, and Ann Arbor is a great town for makers. Hear several 5-minute talks from local makers about their projects, from the geeky to the freaky, and find out about what cool stuff is being made in the garages, basements, and workshops of our community.

Transcript

• [00:00:24.26] ELI NEIBURGER: I'm Eli Neiburger, I'm the associate director of IT and production here the Ann Arbor District Library. And I just want to thank you all for coming out tonight. When I put this on the calendar, I didn't really think about how almost everybody is going to be out of town or at a picnic or that kind of thing today, but here we are and we're going to have a good time tonight. One thing is that we are recording tonight's program, so if you have questions for any of our presenters this evening, I'll come around with a microphone just so we can be sure to get your question on the tape.
• [00:00:54.12] OK, so I've just got a couple slides to kind of introduce this topic and talk about why we think this is important and why we've, here at the library, dedicated resources to Making it Happen. One thing that's interesting to think about is that America has a long, rich tradition of making and building and tinkering and doing things, and it used to be there were all kinds of publications that were focused on this market and were designed to do this. And you see here is a couple of early '50s Popular Mechanics and Popular Science You can see on Popular Mechanics, robot, TV sites, forest fires, for the craftsman, build your own portable barbecue. Popular Science, how to build a beginners diving outfit. And you can see there's this friend pumping it up on the surface. Not the sort of thing that most DIYers get into these days.
• [00:01:44.62] But what is interesting is you start to see the direction that these went in. The '54 Ford and What We Think of It. They started to discover there was a new type of customer, someone who wanted to read about upcoming commercial products. And that turned out to be a very significant audience for them. The other issue is that as they went through the late '50s, they started getting dominated by a certain type of cover. Race to the Moon: Are the Russians Ahead? And How Deadly are the Russian Jets? This is what sold magazines, this is what was able to move them.
• [00:02:13.49] What's most interesting about this is that then for the next 50 years, it didn't really change. These are two copies of the same magazines from 2000. We have Rogue Nukes: We're Betting Everything on a National Defense System, and Inside Russia's Secret Rocket Complex. You look at other covers from that and it's like, here at the 20 new cars from this age. They don't even talk about how to build anything yourself anymore, they don't even give any instructions. It's all just about what products are coming out, where you can buy them, and which are the best ones. This was a very big change.
• [00:02:43.40] So enter these two guys. This is Dale Dougherty and Tim O'Reilly. Now Tim O'Reilly, the two of them together founded O'Reilly Publishing back in, I think the late '80s, and they write basically computer books. And you may have seen them, they're the ones that have these beautiful woodcuts or lithographs of various animals on the cover. And those animals have become synonymous with some of those technologies. For example, if you're going to learn Perl-- I believe I have this correct-- if you're going to learn Perl, you can't do so without the Camel Book. That's what it's been called, the Camel Book. So these guys were enormously influential.
• [00:03:20.00] Dale Dougherty actually coined the term Web 2.0. That was the first person to use that term. And also he was the first person to have a website that was supported by advertising. So these guys are real web pioneers. And somewhere along the way, they started realizing that this whole sort of culture of making things and building things and tinkering things had kind of disappeared from mainstream media in the United States. So they created Make Magazine. And Make Magazine is really a throwback to what some of these magazines were like back in the '10s and '20s when you had to make these things yourself because you couldn't afford the real products. You can see they've got Adam Savage on the cover building a hydrogen oxygen rocket or 10 Sneaky Spy Gadgets. And none of the stuff in here is about upcoming products unless they're products that you then use to build something out of. Like Arduino is probably the most popular example, which is a little solid state circuit that you can program to do all kinds of different things.
• [00:04:21.12] So when those sorts of things come out, Make Magazine gets really excited about it. You can see one of the things, Build a Pole Camera there, is a way to mount a little digital camera on top of a pole and be able to take very unique pictures at big public events. There was actually one of those at the Mini Maker Faire. So not long after they started publishing Make, they had this wonderful event called Maker Faire. And you may have heard of EepyBird. EepyBird are these two guys who do the Diet Coke and Mentos fountains. Have you seen these guys? We're going to jump to this video here, and take just a quick look at what Maker Faire kind of looks like, and we'll come back to this.
• [00:05:08.16] So I don't know if you saw that that giant hand. The giant hand is controlled by a person wearing a glove. This guy built this huge hand out of it. So this has been going on the Bay Area for, I think four years, four or five years. And it's just basically people building weird things, and of course a lot of stuff also goes to Burning Man, as you can imagine. And just kind of building weird things and doing strange things. And they invited the EepyBird guys to come and do their show.
• [00:06:10.23] So part of the exciting thing that happened when, about a year ago, just a little over a year ago, Dale Dougherty came to Ann Arbor to give a speech for the Merit annual conference. And he also visited GO-Tech, which is a local group of people who are interested in this kind of stuff and like to build things together. And then he also came here he gave a talk about the maker culture and the history making in America, and we did record that. That's available on aadl.tv if you want to watch Dale's talk from last year. And one of the things that came up when he was here is there was kind of this interest in getting Maker Faire to get away from the coasts and kind of come into the middle of America. They had done one in Austin but they hadn't done anything in kind of the upper Midwest.
• [00:06:55.74] And one thing that Dale had realized when he was out here is that there's a lot of skill in the Detroit metro area. But a lot of that skill is seen as being attached to an employer and that you have these skills and abilities and you're just waiting for an employer to come and pay you for them. But in reality, that's not the way that the majority of American entrepreneurship has worked, and that a lot of it, over the years, has been people who come up with an idea and make it into their own business. Not necessarily just working on a line. But we've worked that way in Michigan for so long, it's become easy to forget sort of the maker route.
• [00:07:30.00] So between O'Reilly and Make Magazine and the Henry Ford, they decided to do a Maker Faire here in Detroit, calling it the Motor City Faire. And that's coming up at the end of July, and the Diet Coke and Mentos guys are going to be there. They're coming and bringing their show. Another thing that they've got is a full-size Mouse Trap board. You know the Mouse Trap board game with-- you set it up. They've built a full-size one that is human-scaled. All kinds of other interesting things and exhibits, lots of Detroit-area makers exhibiting their own stuff.
• [00:08:03.53] So along side this is a couple of other little institutions and organizations you should be aware of here in Ann Arbor area. One is the A2 MechShop. This is a place where people who like to make things can basically rent space and be a part of a shared making space and a shared making environment. They have tools there in they all kind of will use the tools together. There's a couple different businesses that operate out of there. And it's a new type of model. It's very similar to the Workantile Exchange which you may be familiar with over on Main Street. It's a place where you can buy a membership and have a place to just go sit and work that isn't a cafe. It's also a cafe, but it's not only a cafe. So the Workantile Exchange is a very cool place and very much a model of the way that sort of post-mega industrial employment is likely to happen. And MechShop is just like that, only for people who make things out of metal and Styrofoam and wood as opposed to zeros and ones.
• [00:08:59.62] The other institution here in town is All Hands Active, which is the downtown Hacker space. This is in the same space as Digital Ops which is the gaming-- I guess you call it a gaming salon-- over on Liberty right next to Michigan Theater. All Hands Active has a lot of youthful vigor and energy. They have a lot of cool ideas, and they just want to make a space where people can make a cool things. So this is for the Ann Arbor Mini Maker Faire, that the second one happened just a couple of weeks ago. This is the Cybernetic Juggler, and what she has is, she's got these balls of tin foil, and she has sensors in her hands. And depending on which ball she's holding, different little electronic parts on her back wiggle round when she has the different balls in her hands. Very unusual and very cool exhibit. And they also built just a big cardboard fort for all the kids.
• [00:09:48.09] So the idea is being, again, there's not enough of this hands-on education. There's not enough of this idea that you can make things yourself. They're trying to bring that back. There's also a number of businesses based in the Ann Arbor area that have sort of taken this to the next level. One of the biggest successes right now is the Current Motor Company, which is still, I believe, housed at the MechShop. And they make all electric scooters. And it's a very serious, real product made right here in Ann Arbor. And this is a very cool thing. If you walk on Main Street, Barclay's has one of these sitting in their window, right next to Espresso Royale.
• [00:10:20.93] Also there's a guy in town named Pete Jensen and he has a business called TubeClock.com, and he makes clocks out of nixie tubes. And nixie tubes were these older vacuum tubes that could display the numbers zero through nine with a little set of shaped, incandescent elements. So Peter Jensen makes these clocks out of these old nixie tubes, and they are really very cool devices. One of our programmers here at AADL has one on his desk. And they are super awesome. But just another example. He's taking some old tech, some new tech, integrated circuits on the inside that drive them, and putting them together to make something new and decorative and functional.
• [00:10:56.57] So before I move on to our presenters for the evening, I just want to let you know about a couple things that are happening here at the library. In conjunction and support with Maker Faire, we've made our summer reading theme Make it Happen, because we want the kids to realize that summer isn't just about sitting on your butt reading books, it's also about making things and doing things and having fun experiences. So we've got a couple of different things. One is in conjunction with All Hands Active, we're doing this thing called Wreck Lab and Make Lab. And it's the first time that-- we had the first one this past Thursday, and a bunch of young kids came and took apart a bunch of old LCDs that the library doesn't use anymore. And then tomorrow night, they're going to come and make something new out of it.
• [00:11:32.40] We also have our second Make Lab and Wreck Lab is about clothing. We'll get a lot of Salvation Army clothing and take it apart and then stitch new things together. And last one is about making art out of unused computer components, hard drives and other boards and all that kind of stuff. So those are very fun events. They are open to all ages. You can find out more about that on our website. Also this Saturday, right here in this room, is Gundam Fest. Gundam is a huge, world-spanning, Japanese giant robot show. And they are all about building models and watching shows. So we're going to have 50 Gundam kits for kids to try out. So the first 50 kids who come will all get their own Gundam kit to put together. And one thing that's amazing is if you've ever put together like a Revell, Snap Tite, or any of the American model kits, boy, those Japanese model kits are just amazing, in terms of the quality of the engineering, how easy they are to put together, without even having to read any of the non-English instructions. You can follow the pictures and put it all together, so that's great.
• [00:12:27.38] Then this Sunday, we have an event called Build the Bitdragon. This is the library's exhibit for Maker Faire. We're making this big, long dragon out of five-gallon buckets. And that'll be used in parades. So the kids can actually decorate-- or adults as well-- can decorate the bucket segments. And we've been putting CDs on it to make the dragon scales and all that kind of stuff. Then Wednesday, 7/14, we have the History of Mechanical Television. That's featuring Suzanne Fischer who is a curator of business technology at the Henry Ford. And she's going to be talking about all of the pre-cathode ray experiments of transmitting moving images. There were these several different mechanical display technologies that were dominant in a very small market before it really caught on big.
• [00:13:08.20] And then finally, Maker Faire at the Henry Ford is at the end of July. So I hope you'll check out all that stuff. There's Maker Faire fliers in the back. So I've got four presenters lined up for you this evening. First I'm going to introduce Dan Romanchik, and he's going to talk a little bit about ham radio in Ann Arbor and what's going on at the Hands-On Museum. So please join me in welcoming Dan Romanchik.
• [00:13:33.14] DAN ROMANCHIK: Well thank you very much. I'm Dan Romanchik, and my amateur radio call sign is KB6NU. When you get an amateur radio license, you get a unique identifier. And oftentimes we are known by our identifiers more than our names even. So ham radio operators, we like to call ourselves the original geeks. Ham radio's been around a long time, almost 100 years if not 100 years already. And so we like to claim being the original geeks. I guess you can say the steam engine guys probably are a little bit earlier, but we're pretty close.
• [00:14:12.99] Ham radio operators do a lot of things, but because we're talking making stuff, I'm going to focus on actually making stuff, rather than the other kind of activities we do. But I will mention just a few of them. One of them is emergency and public service communications. We do a lot of that. But that's not the point of the talk, so I'll just blow over that a little bit quickly. We say hams homebrew. By that I mean just like you home brew beer, you make beer at your home, we make radios in our home. And that's been a long tradition of that. As Eli pointed, out in the early days, you had to do it yourself. There were no commercial products, so you had to do it yourself. Even today, some hams make it a point to build all their own equipment. And I contact those kind of guys frequently. I'm not one of them, but you do contact them.
• [00:15:10.42] One who's really probably the most known these days is a ham whose call sign is AA1TJ. And he's got a number of different creations if you go to his website. But this one he calls the Das DereLicht. And you can see the prototype there, it's built on a prototype board. What you do with that is you stick the components into the little holes and the little holes connect all the components. All those components came out of a burned out compact fluorescent light bulb. And that's actually a little transmitter. And I actually contacted him when he was using that transmitter, and he estimates it puts out 100 milliwatts of power. 100 milliwatts, I mean that's like nothing, and yet he's in Vermont and he was able to talk to me here in Michigan. So that was pretty cool. When I talked to him about that, I thought that was pretty neat.
• [00:16:05.29] If you're not quite up to doing it all yourself, you can build kits. There's lots of kits. I build lots of kits. Here's an example of a kit I built. This is a whole self-contained amateur radio transceiver. It's got a transmitter and a receiver built into it. Couple other kits-- I want to apologize for not having pictures, but I've been without internet connection for about a day and a half, so I wasn't able to get pictures. This is a little kit I built. This is a little device that helps you align and test receivers. And this is a little kit that a friend of mine and I actually designed. This is a device you'd used to test feed lines for your antenna and stuff like that. But you see how simple these really are. You can build these in an evening, and at the end of the evening, you've got a useful little piece of test equipment. So that's kind of cool.
• [00:17:01.15] Kits are available in a wide variety from, like I say, the real simple to the more sophisticated. And there's even some that are even a lot more sophisticated than this yet. And there's actually a Michigan connection. I don't know how many of you are old enough to know about Heathkit. But Heathkit used to be a company in Benton Harbor, Michigan. And when I was a kid, that's the way a lot of us got into amateur radio by building Heathkits. Heathkit produced a lot of different kits, a lot of test equipment, you could build your own television set, a lot of radios, stuff like that. Then they got into computers and when computers were first around, they had a bunch of computer kits and actually that sort of led to the demise of the company. They got bought out by bigger companies and they basically trashed the Heathkit part of it, unfortunately.
• [00:17:56.04] One of the knocks on ham radio is that it's old technology. I mean we have been around 100 years. But part of it, written right into the law that establishes amateur radio is this statement: hams are supposed to advance the state of the radio art. That's the exact way it's worded. And we take that seriously. In recent years, we've come up with lots of new things. Things we call the digital modes. That's where we connect computers to radios and use the computer to modulate the signal and demodulate the signal. And using digital signal processing, sometimes we can actually communicate even when you can't hear it with your ear. You may not be able to hear that signal, but that computer is going to pull that signal right out of the mud. It's really pretty sophisticated.
• [00:18:46.13] There's also a thing called software-defined radio. And in a software-defined radio what you do is you turn that radio signal into-- you digitize it, you turn it into a set of numbers, and then you use software to implement functions that normally circuits would in a radio. And that's probably the latest frontier in radio. Satellite communication. Amateurs setting up satellites. They piggyback on commercial and scientific rocket launches, and there's a number of satellites up in the air right now and we can communicate by bouncing signals off them.
• [00:19:24.93] SPEAKER 1: [INAUDIBLE PHRASE]?
• [00:19:26.80] DAN ROMANCHIK: Amateurs themselves. There's a group called AMSAT, and it's short for Amateur Satellites, and we all chip in and they send them up. We're also part of the internet revolution. We use of Voice over IP in some cases. The two most popular systems, if you will, are called EchoLink and IRLP. And what these do is there are local stations called repeater stations. And if you had a handheld radio, normally you'd talk through this repeater station to other people in the local area. The repeater station gives you a bigger range, because usually it's up on a tall building and gives you greater range. But some hams have actually taken those signals, routed it into the internet, goes throughout the whole world, out another repeater on the other side of the world. And so then with a little handheld radio, you can be talking to someone in Dublin, Ireland, Tokyo, Japan if you knew Japanese, wherever. One of my friends has a brother who lives in Austin, Texas or Corpus Christi, Texas. And he used to live in Thailand, and he regularly gets on IRLP and talks to his friends in Thailand via the internet. So that's kind of cool.
• [00:20:54.80] How do you become a ham? Well there are three different classes of licenses. Tech, General, and Extra. And as you go from the lowest to the highest, you get what we call more privileges. You get to use more frequencies and more types of-- transmit different ways. And you take actually a fairly simple multiple choice test. The Technician and the General are 35 questions. The Extra's a little harder and takes 50 questions. One of the big stumbling blocks in the past has been the Morse code test requirement. But as of about 10 years ago, the code test was eliminated for the Technician class, and now as of two or three years ago, there's no Morse code test required at all now. So if you're thinking, oh no, I gotta take Morse code. Don't worry about that. Personally I love Morse code, I use it all the time, but that's me.
• [00:21:54.52] Here in Ann Arbor, we have volunteer examiners who give the test every month. So it's very easy to find a person to give you the test. And at the Hands-On Museum, we have an amateur radio station and we actually teach classes there too. We teach classes three or four times a year there. And we teach what's called the one-day Tech class. And we actually do. We get you your license in one day. We go from 9:00 until 3:00, basically cram the material into you, and right at 3:00 we get the volunteer examiners there to give you the test so you don't forget anything. And we have a very good success rate. The last two sessions, we had 29 people in all, we had 100% pass rate. Overall, the last two or three years, we've had probably close to 90% pass rate. So we do a pretty good job with that.
• [00:22:45.30] And plus, at the Hands-On Museum, like I said, we have the station there and it's very cool. We just go there and play with radios and build stuff and just have a lot of fun. I'm usually there most every Saturday and just stop by. Stop by and we will give you a real demonstration to ham radio. And you don't even have to worry about paying a fee. Just tell them you're with the ham radio club and they'll let you right in. For more information, you can go to these two websites. The first is the American Radio Relay League. They're the National Association for Amateur Radio Operators.
• [00:23:20.46] And then this is me. My claim to fame is I have the number one rated ham radio blog on Google. So if you type in ham radio blog into Google, I'm number one. But that's my website. And I have a study guide there if you want to actually take the test. And here's my email address. If you have any questions at all about ham radio, just feel free to email me or look me up in the phone book and call me.
• [00:23:45.35] SPEAKER 2: [INAUDIBLE PHRASE]?
• [00:23:48.88] DAN ROMANCHIK: Well, there's two theories on that. One is it's just sort of a shortened form of am, amateur. And so that's one theory. What I tend to like is that back in the early days, it was all Morse code, because they hadn't really invented voice modulation yet. And so that you had professional telegraphers, right? Even before radio, you had a landline telegraphy. So you had guys that were really good at sending. Well now you've got these amateurs in there and maybe they're not quite so good. And like ham actors, these guys, they'd call them ham operators. So that's the theory I kind of tend to go with.
• [00:24:35.08] ELI NEIBURGER: Dan, what's the most exciting or memorable conversation that you've had with someone over ham radio?
• [00:24:41.01] DAN ROMANCHIK: Good question. I'll tell you an experience that was memorable to me. Not so much a contact. Every year, we have a thing called field day. And field day is sort of the quintessential amateur radio event. It's a combination of emergency preparedness exercise, an amateur radio contest where you try and make as many contacts as you can with as many people. And it's a PR event. We invite politicians and public service agencies that come and see what ham radio can do. So it's all these things sort of rolled into one.
• [00:25:15.35] And last year, we had a kid come up and this is the first time he'd seen ham radio. And he was so excited that he was shaking. And it was amazing. And then his mother tells me, well he already knows Morse code. So I took him over to one of the Morse code stations and sure enough, this kid knew Morse code. And he did it all by listening to this radio he had. He had a little handheld radio and he learned the Morse code himself by just listening to the radio. And not only did he know Morse code, he knew it had like 30 words a minute which is pretty fast, which is pretty fast. So over the last year, we were able to get him his license, get on the air. And that's been a cool experience for me.
• [00:26:01.49] ELI NEIBURGER: Any other questions?
• [00:26:03.93] DAN ROMANCHIK: Well thanks.
• [00:26:04.96] ELI NEIBURGER: All right, thanks a lot, Dan. [APPLAUSE] OK, our next presenter tonight is Curtis Glatter, and he is an amateur musician and professional musician here in the Ann Arbor area. I'm going to put his Myspace page here. OK, so please join me in welcoming Curtis Glatter.
• [00:26:34.93] CURTIS GLATTER: I just wanted to thank Eli for having me out today. I really do appreciate the opportunity to speak to y'all. I've been performing and composing for about 25 years. I started playing when I was about eight years old. Started playing percussion. I'll just keep it real brief. I'm originally from Michigan, originally from Dearborn Heights. I've traveled all over the world, haven't hit the Asian countries yet, but I've traveled quite a bit. Seen a lot of different performances, a lot of different ways to make music.
• [00:27:07.90] What I do is something called electroacoustic chamber music, and what that is, is it's the ability for musicians to interact with technology. It's been going on for the last 100 years. But it's a style of creating three forms of music which is one pre-recorded. It's also scored music, which is written down. And it's also the ability to perform improvisations over that music. So there's three layers of creating music when that happens. It sounds very complicated, but if you have an idea for music, for example, and you want to construct it, there's one gentleman that had a huge influence on my music which was Frank Zappa, he said, the way to make music is just to start something and stop something. Then that is your music, be it if you want to recreate a bird call, or if you want to recreate a train, or if you want to create a guitar solo, anything like that.
• [00:28:03.67] So some of the influences that I've had is Laurie Anderson, Frank Zappa, Gregory Ligeti, Steve Reich, John Zorn. Some local musicians that have also been able to influence me are jazz musicians. Not so much electronics, I got mostly into that from John Cage and the guys from 1950s that were doing electronic music. Basically sampling objects like cactuses, sampling objects like wind storms, sampling objects like trees crashing to the ground. All of that can be created and in fact manipulated to create music.
• [00:28:43.39] So I wanted to talk to you about tonight is something called [? Innotronic ?] 2010 which is a booth that I'm going to be presenting at the Detroit City Maker Faire. They said that they were turning Detroit city into Maker City on this particular date of July 31 and August 1, and it's at the Henry Ford. And what my booth consists of is actually three elements: car parts, a laptop computer, and also an amplifier. That's all I'm going to use to create music.
• [00:29:22.89] Basically the reason I am presenting it is to show everybody that comes to this particular event that anybody and everybody can make music, no matter what they have in their backyard. They can make it out of buckets, you can make music out of buckets, you can make music out of hardware that you find. What I'm going to be doing is actually creating live music, so it's not going to be anything that's pre-recorded. It will be sampled, manipulated, and also you'll be able to interact with the laptop. So that means I'll be controlling the laptop. All you have to do is play whatever you see in front of you. I will sample it, I will manipulate it higher or lower, I will reverse it and play it back to you, and I will be able to improvise it. And I will let you guys improvise it if you come to see the booth.
• [00:30:05.60] So it'll be very interactive, very fun, and I'll be giving away CDs, things as far as creating. Also a chance for you to create your own household items to perform on and take home with you. The other events actually that I have been working with are other musicians that are involved with jazz improvisation. The way that I construct music in any circumstance when it comes to electronics or tech equipment is basically to find out what the jazz musicians want to hear, and to be able to manipulate the sounds that they have already created, and trying to create something that's new and original with a laptop. And it's no particular music program that you have to use. You can use a basic laptop. You just put up a microphone in front of your laptop, you just push the record button, push the stop button, you play it back. It's just like using a tape recorder, but it actually does interact with other musicians by recording them. So they're actually amazed that as an improvising musician you can use just a regular laptop.
• [00:31:16.19] The reason that I've decided to do a five minute presentation today is not only for the Maker Faire, but also I'll be giving a full-on presentation on the ninth here at the Ann Arbor Library. And also on the 23rd, I'll be playing the Ann Arbor Art Fair at 2 o'clock. So if you guys have any questions about what I do or would like to maybe hear any of the music, it's possible to hear some of it on the website. You've probably, maybe, perhaps been wondering how electronic music has evolved, and it's actually evolved through a lot of a recording of old radio programs and also through ham radio as Adam was saying, by basically performing with signals from around your local area or signals from around the country. You can actually create, sample, and project all of these sounds onto a concert stage with other musicians that are classically trained, jazz trained, African trained or trained in any other culture.
• [00:32:20.93] And they're not so segregated from the idea of using technology. You'll find out that when you start using electronics with other musicians in jazz and rock and classical and different backgrounds they are actually interested because you're using a piece of tactical equipment that you usually check your email or create a web program or do word processing on to create music. And people are usually very delighted by that. If you want, I could take questions about anything that I've been doing, or if you'd like to maybe ask about me personally, why I keep doing it even though people really are not quite sure what it is that I do. I'd be happy to answer any questions.
• [00:33:07.09] ELI NEIBURGER: I've got a question. Music has been shaped by so many inventions. What invention of the 20th century do you think has had the biggest impact on the direction that music has taken?
• [00:33:18.63] CURTIS GLATTER: Well the good and bad news is that the invention of the iPod and the invention of sampling music has had the biggest impact on music. The reason being is that in order for a musician to make money these days, they do have to create records and they do have to sell records. And of course there's big corporations that produce big bands, so on and so forth. But in order to be an original musician or original composer or original at anything, you have to talk to people personally about what you do. You have to play for people personally.
• [00:33:53.75] So the amount of money that I ask for as a person to person like, I'm going to be performing here, I'm going to be performing here, has gone up because of the invention of pirating music. Because anybody can sit down and put on a CD and anybody can dial up you on their internet or iPod. But to physically show up as a human being and being able to play for somebody and actually get that reaction from somebody saying, I didn't know you could do that, I had no idea that you could create music out of nothing, or create music out of just a bucket. I had no idea that you could just show up with nothing in your hands and interact with other jazz musicians.
• [00:34:31.46] And that's, to me, what the development of technology has become, like a constant pirating and masking of other people's material. But there's not a lot of new material coming out. So by combining all that material that's happened in the last 1,000 years from African percussion all the way up to 20th century just bleeps and bloops that you hear from R2D2 on Star Wars, all that can be combined to make music that can actually be your own personal stamp on music history. And anybody can do it.
• [00:35:00.48] SPEAKER 3: What's your favorite non-traditional instrument?
• [00:35:06.72] CURTIS GLATTER: That's a great question. Favorite non-traditional instrument. I do play coffee cans quite a bit actually. The coffee cans are used just like a regular drum set would be used. You know, a lot of kids, when they grow up, they bang on pots and pans. But I've actually performed on a couple records where they said no, I don't want you to use your drums or keyboards or sandpaper, I want to use this set of coffee cans and I want you to create a rhythm track of these coffee. And so they just give me 10 coffee cans and I just go to town and they're excited to hear what comes out. So that's what's exciting to me, to see if that challenge can come. I'm really excited to be able to perform on that.
• [00:35:49.56] SPEAKER 4: I'm interested as the economics of being a musician have obviously gotten tougher. But do you feel that more people feel empowered to make music than when you started [UNINTELLIGIBLE], because I think we're more democratized?
• [00:36:09.46] SPEAKER 3: I haven't seen more people eager to create more original music. I've seen more people willing to give themselves over to music that's been going on for the last 300, 400 years, whatever style it is. Latino, or American rock, or classical. They're more willing to say, well if they can do it, I can do it. If they're professionally trained, if they go to this university then they obviously are trained at what they do. But I get that question all the time when I go to play at a university. They say, are you officially trained. And I say, yes, I'm officially trained in university. Then why do you play on these coffee cans, or why do you play on these boxes, are or why do you make music on a laptop? It doesn't make sense. And I say, well, is anybody else doing it? Is there anybody else that's willing to put those kind of ideas out there?
• [00:37:00.71] And they say, yeah, but how much money is in it? And that's always the next question. How much money is it in doing this? Well if you do it enough, there's two rules to being a composer or any kind of great inventor. There's don't stop and keep going. That's the two rules you have to keep, and eventually people will catch up. And just like Henry Ford, that's one example, where he had an idea. Just eventually, he kept creating these things, and lo and behold, it revolutionized an entire industry of automobiles. Any other questions?
• [00:37:39.01] Sure. Sure, this Suite Tempestaire Opening Titles is actually all done on laptop. If you would like to maybe play it. I haven't used this in a while. Let's see.
• [00:37:57.50] [MUSIC PLAYING-- "SUITE TEMPESTAIRE OPENING TITLES" BY CURTIS GLATTER]
• [00:39:00.25] Well it's a form of recubing the original pattern, which you hear this high-pitched ba-dum bum, bum ba-dum. It's slowly fading out, but there's three note motives basically. In the very beginning of it, it's really quiet. So it's a matter of repeating that motive over and over again just by-- none of it was played on a melodic instrument, just to let you know. One particular program called Finale, there's another program called Cakewalk, there's another program called Sibelius. Basically, I wrote a piano piece, and the piano piece was very rarely played, so I decided to use the cursor. And because it had auto play on it, that means that the computer will automatically play what's on the bar or automatically play the music that's being performed. I used the mouse to retrograde, go backwards and go forwards over that particular bar line.
• [00:40:04.16] That's live music, but the horn is actually real, a horn player. But the percussion in the background is me with an electronics guy that actually just plays keyboards and electronics. And that was all written out by something called sketch music. Some people read score music, and some people read sketch music. If you're talented enough to read sketches, god bless you. But if you're not really familiar with the term of sketch music, it's just basically drawings on a page, and if you're able to follow the highs and lows, the squiggles, the bleeps and the bloops, then you're in the rare league of people that understand it. That particular sound that you hear now is a duo buckets, so we both are reading a notated bucket part, so they're both steel buckets.
• [00:41:13.68] This is a piece from a dance work which is called Estuary Dances, which is six movements. This is the first movement of the piece. Anyway, I think I'm going a little bit long. But I thank y'all for listening. I really do appreciate it. And hopefully, if you get a chance to come out to the Maker Faire, that'd be wonderful. And if you get a chance to come out on August 9, I'll be able to show you everything that I do physically. Thanks.
• [00:41:40.01] ELI NEIBURGER: Thank you. [APPLAUSE] OK. And then our next presenter is Larry Siden. Am I saying that right, Siden? And Larry's got a web project that he's going to show us. So please join me in welcoming Larry.
• [00:41:57.66] [APPLAUSE]
• [00:42:01.87] LARRY SIDEN: So back in the fall, I think it was September, October, I got a message on an email list that I subscribe to. I go to these lunches every Thursday, some of you guys might be interested, called A2B3, Ann Arbor Bi Bim Bop. We meet an Asian Accents. And somebody who doesn't actually go to the lunches said that they were-- I think it was probably just Ed Vielmetti who writes for annarbor.com was just kind of forwarding these messages that somebody was looking for a volunteer programmer to do a calculator for the University of Michigan Senior Housing Bureau. And later I sit down and met with her, and she wasn't actually from the bureau. She was from an organization called FINRA that deals with financial readiness, basically educating the public for financial readiness so people don't get taking advantage of, like by some of these home refinancing schemes that people got conned into before the mortgage bust. And also they were concerned about readiness for retirement.
• [00:43:10.26] And that segues into the housing bureau because one of the issues that the housing bureau was concerned about is the cost of senior assisted living, that when people are-- usually it's the adult children of seniors who are doing this. They have to find a place for a parent that they can no longer take care of by themselves, and they all have bewildering arrays of initial costs, deposits, and then monthly costs. They're all structured differently. Some meals are included, others, meals are extra. Cost for all kinds of different care that they need if they have continence issues or memory issues. And they wanted a calculator that would help people evaluate them and be able to compare them very quickly, because they said that once they actually start comparing the cost of these places, very quickly they realize that they can only afford one or two of them, and it's very sobering.
• [00:44:09.10] So I just brought with me, this is some material that they gave me that they prepared, showing the various costs and fee structures of some of the facilities in the area. And I wouldn't go it over here, but each one has its own fee structure and it's just kind of bewildering. So I kind of struggled with it for a while. Was wondering how am I going to possibly present and organize this in a calculator for people. Finally I realized that there is no one size fits all, that it has to be very-- oh yeah I was told not to touch that. I'm not good at following directions-- I had to make it very open-ended. So the first page just deals with people's own financial condition, their assets, income and expenses. And then that's the my finances part, and then they have the living options.
• [00:45:08.91] And here we have different options. You can actually rename them. You could type something else if you wanted to. And this is showing you the number of years that a person would be able to stay in each of these options that they're considering. They wanted me to use the word option instead of facility because one of the options could be living in your own home. In that case, the initial cost would be like renovations that somebody would have to do, like a wheelchair ramp or some kind of a lift on the stairs if they have an upstairs and downstairs, bathroom improvements to allow persons with disabilities to enter in and get around.
• [00:46:00.30] And then it's also sensitive to interest rates, because I wanted to do something that would be kind of like a financial calculator, because a person could require-- none of us really know how long we're going to live, so it could be three years, five years, seven years. So we need to take inflation and return on investments into account if the people have investments that they have that they can make any money from. It doesn't take into account for example-- it can't take into account different financial scenarios. For example, if a person lives long enough, eventually their assets will run out or deplete, and they'll have to go on-- I think it's, not Medicaid, I was thinking of-- I think maybe it is Medicaid. I forgot the term. They start getting certain Social Security benefits. Basically at that point, they become a ward of the government, of the state. And then the resources are completely depleted.
• [00:46:59.68] That's really what this is all about. We want to find out how long we'll be able to go on in each of these facilities if, god forbid, we live long enough, we live that long. I have a friend whose parents are in their 90s right now that's a very real concern of him and his siblings is how to continue to care for them financially when they can no longer care for themselves and their own assets are basically running out. This is just a demo site. The real site I'm still working on, is to connect it with a database. The database I'm hosting on a place called Heroku. I could go there now but I don't think it's necessary. The data storage part is written in Ruby. Heroku is a place that hosts various Ruby apps, and they give you a database. And right now, basically I just bootstrapped the whole thing on a shoestring budget. I think my account on Heroku was free, and when they go to log on to it, they can log on with their Google or Yahoo or Flickr or Facebook accounts. That's through a different website called RPXNow.
• [00:48:13.08] One of the things about this, and this is where my own self-interest comes in, I've decided, after kind of talking to the ladies of the Senior Housing Bureau, that the real value in this to me would be gathering this data, that if I can store this data in a way that doesn't compromise people's privacy, that I could license it to various either not-for-profit institutes and for-profit. For example, the very people who are running these facilities who would be interested to know, for example, how many people in certain zip codes have been using this tool and what do their financial assets look like?
• [00:48:58.50] But again, I want to emphasize that not one of the reasons I'm using other providers like Yahoo and Flickr and so on is that I don't want to be in the business of storing people's identities or passwords or managing them. All I'm getting back is basically an identifier that wouldn't make any sense to anybody, and I'm hashing that. And that's what I'm saving in the database. So next time they come in and they want to go back to their page, that's what it identifies them with. It doesn't actually keep their email, it doesn't know their addresses, it doesn't know anything about them.
• [00:49:36.24] Eventually I'm probably going to combine this with a survey that will ask them, again, very general, non-personal questions like gender, age, zip code, how many children do they have and so on. Just getting an idea of there overall financial health and how socially connected they still are. Can they do their own shopping, does somebody need to do it for them? Things like that, and then combining it with this data. I think it would be very valuable for researchers. But I haven't got there yet. At that point, I'll probably need a partner to help me market it who understands this kind of business.
• [00:50:21.56] That's basically it. I did the interface itself with a tool called SproutCore. I guess I can go to that site. And this is just the front page. And it's a library, it's completely written in JavaScript. So I almost wrote absolutely no HTML to create this page. It's all done in JavaScript. The lead programmer on the project is a guy named Charles Jolley. I think of Jolly Roger whenever I hear his name. And I think he's an ex-Apple person, and it was done by a bunch of people from Apple. I think they were doing a lot of stuff of Cocoa, which I think has to do with handhelds. And this is also supposed to be compatible with handhelds. Not not my app, but it's very easy to make another version of it that would be handheld compatible that I intend to do eventually.
• [00:51:21.03] And it's done so that each time they change something in a field, there's other fields that are basically listening. And so when something changes, like if I add a costs here like, we'll type 3,000, and then we'll see that that 11.8 years should change to something else. So that was exactly what I needed and I found out by going to another talk and hearing somebody else in town named Kevin [? Dangler ?] who's done a lot of work with JavaScript. He was the one who recommended this framework to me. And I just jumped into it in the deep end and I had no idea what I was getting into. It's very new, it's very undocumented. I think they just recently released their first official version. So I had to learn a lot of stuff as I went along and I had to talk to people over the IRC channel and on the Google group. So that's basically it. That's where it's at right now. And I hope to connect it soon with the database so it'll be able to go live.
• [00:52:27.46] ELI NEIBURGER: Any questions for Larry? OK, thank you very much. Our last speaker this evening is Philip Proefrock who's a local architect and actually worked on the library's Malletts Creek and Pittsfield buildings. So please join me in welcoming Philip Proefrock.
• [00:52:46.99] PHILIP PROEFROCK: Hi, I am Philip Proefrock, and I am interested in talking a little bit this evening about residential design with shipping containers. I should point out that none of the images that I have here are my own work. This is just something that I've started to experiment and explore a little bit. But the idea of using shipping containers as an inexpensive, green platform for residential experimentation has been around for a few years, and there are some examples that are already in place.
• [00:53:27.39] It's a very green option because there are thousands of shipping containers that are being produced every year for international shipping. And they stack up by the hundreds and the thousands in the ports of countries that are receiving goods from other countries. So on the west coast in the ports of Seattle and Portland and Los Angeles and Long Beach, there are thousands and thousands of these. There are hundreds of them in the Detroit area because of the auto manufacturing that's in this area. And as an armature for construction, they are very useful. They are designed to sit open on the decks of ships coming across the sea, so they are enclosed, they're relatively water-tight, they're relatively sturdy. They are stacked up as many as eight high oftentimes, and they're relatively inexpensive.
• [00:54:38.74] This is kind of a minimal model and not a particularly attractive-- this is nothing more than three 20-foot containers set up as a hunting cabin. There's no plumbing, there's no lighting, there's no heat. But it's a place to store stuff. Shipping containers are being used as construction site structures, on-site storage, and that's one of the versatile aspects that they offer is you could start out on a site with just a shipping container. It's designed to be locked, store your stuff there. And the idea that, as you go along, the structure of it evolves as you build on to it. You open it up and stop using it as just a storage shed, but begin using it as the facility.
• [00:55:47.54] There are a lot of examples of shipping container houses that get away from actually looking like shipping containers. And so much of it is cut away. As you can see in this, the sides are completely taken out and replaced with glass and it makes for a nice image, but it kind of gets away from the basic nature of the inexpensive box as the basis. And it's nice but it's expensive to do that. By cladding the exterior, you add a lot of material and it basically takes on a nature of being something else. This is an example from Quebec, which again, if you peer carefully into it, you can see the shipping containers there, but it's not immediately visible.
• [00:56:47.94] But that doesn't have to be the case. And I think that there is a certain aesthetic in leaving the containers in their more basic form and letting that be seen. This is an example that was built a couple of years ago by an architect who has created a company based in Minnesota that is doing a lot of design of modular homes based on shipping containers. This was two small, 20-foot long containers that he got for $800 apiece. He and his brother trucked them out into the woods, and just set them up on some cribbing. I guess, from the lighting, they now, in this image, have some solar power for the site so that they have a little bit of electricity there. But they started out with no water, no electricity. Everything was just what they could carry to the site. And they used to the two containers and then built the structure in between them to get this minimal and yet attractive in its own way structure.
• [00:58:15.78] There are certainly larger examples with shipping containers. This is an apartment in London, and a retail store for a company called Freitag in Zurich. That's actually cut off a little bit. I think there are actually four stories of shops in that, and then the tower above, which I don't think is actually inhabitable. But this is a company that makes handbags and other goods using recycled materials, and so the idea of recycling some of the shipping containers that were available was very much a part of what their company was about.
• [00:59:06.49] They're maneuverable, to a point. This is construction of a structure that ended up using two shipping containers. These weigh 8,000 to 9,000 pounds, so they're not the sort of thing you can take home in a pickup truck. But on the other hand, with a little bit of construction equipment, it's not difficult to work with them, get them in place. I mentioned that they're fairly inexpensive. Dealing with a container such as this, which is eight feet wide and 40 feet long, that's 320 square feet. If you can get a container like that, used, for $1,600, that's $5 a square foot. That's dirt-cheap construction, and that makes a very affordable and viable platform to experiment with and work with something that isn't necessarily a full-scale family of four, family of five going to fit in that. But as a vacation cabin, something that can be experimented with, trying some things out, without involving yourself in a lot of initial construction, just to get to the point of being able to do some experimentation.
• [01:00:29.69] And what this turns out to be is a cabin in the woods. A very nice effect.
• [01:00:44.32] SPEAKER 5: [INAUDIBLE PHRASE]?
• [01:00:47.00] PHILIP PROEFROCK: Certainly there are examples of that that are going on. There's a competition underway right now. It's not, I don't believe, Habitat for Humanity, but another-- maybe Architecture for Humanity is sponsoring a program. And that's certainly something that could be done. I think in a lot of instances, the issue is less one of the viability of it than it is having a location. The structure is cheap, the site preparation, all the additional work to get beyond just an open box to provide the other amenities that you'd need to make it livable are going to be a comparable cost. So it's not going to be that radical difference in cost from traditional housing.
• [01:01:48.75] But dealing with a location, a city or municipality, whatever, and saying we want to set up a community of these, you'd run into the same sort of issues you'd have doing anything with conventional construction. so I think that kind of political level is more that the difficulty, whether or not it's a good technology to use for that.
• [01:02:14.80] SPEAKER 6: [INAUDIBLE] on the ships, are they bolted together or held down with cable? What's prevents them from falling off when they're stacked that high?
• [01:02:25.90] PHILIP PROEFROCK: They do sometimes fall in very rough seas. So I think they're not necessarily fastened together. I don't know the particulars of it. I'm still investigating that. but I think just the way that they are designed to nest together and the weight of them. You've got 8,000 pounds plus all the goods, and the standard 40-foot container will hold, I believe it's about 20 tons of merchandise. So there's a fair amount of inertia wanting it to stay in place. But if there are really, really rough seas, there are instances-- there was an example that made its rounds on the internet where it was a shipping container full of rubber duckies that got knocked overboard and spilled. And scientists have been tracking the rubber duckies and finding out where the currents in the ocean flow from knowing the start point of this, and seen where they've gone.
• [01:03:36.89] SPEAKER 6: [INAUDIBLE PHRASE]?
• [01:03:39.64] PHILIP PROEFROCK: Yeah.
• [01:03:42.29] ELI NEIBURGER: Philip, I know a lot of building codes are written to be very specific for certain materials. Particular municipalities quirks excluded, are there challenges with doing container building when it comes to local building codes?
• [01:03:59.90] PHILIP PROEFROCK: I think that there probably would be some, I think, zoning and kind of community acceptance of the industrial appearance as opposed to something clapboard sided. I don't think that there's anything particular about the form of construction. It's basically a steel structure, so there's fundamentally nothing that much different from working with this as opposed to building a Butler building or a Morton building, a pole barn. This one's a little bit more structural. I think anytime you have a case where there's some unconventional construction, you're probably going to be asked for more information from the code-reviewing officials. But it should be a viable thing.
• [01:04:59.00] I think that's also why, in a lot of instances, these are showing up as kind of cabins. There are certainly instances of houses in town and apartments and so forth. But it's the sort of thing that's really well-suited to being out someplace. It's one trip with a vehicle to drop it off and it's there, rather than bringing a lot of materials. So it's got that going for it in terms of being able to reach a site only intermittently.
• [01:05:33.13] SPEAKER 7: I was wondering about the construction time from start to finish, for example, with just a basic structure. What would be the construction time? Would it be 3 to 6 months, or 8 to 10 months?
• [01:05:45.07] PHILIP PROEFROCK: I think that that is, again, going to depend wildly on what you're doing. If you're working with a single structure, you'd have the possibility of-- if you had a construction yard, which any small contractor would have, set it up in a corner of the space, build it out over time when you're able to, and load it onto a semi and take it. So however long you wanted to take, building it out would be one thing, and then it's a matter of trucking it and a crane lifting it into place. So it could be something that was done kind of instantaneously, like other kinds of modular housing.
• [01:06:36.08] Or to go back to the earlier example of this cabin in Minnesota they trucked the containers out over a couple of weekends. They spent several weeks trying to figure out how to get them raised up and set in place. Their first attempt using one pick up, pulling it to try to pull it off of the trailer with the other pickup going in the other direction ended up towing the other vehicle. So they had to work some things out. But then it was kind of just-- on weekends, they would go up there and work on it over time.
• [01:07:16.06] ELI NEIBURGER: Other questions?
• [01:07:20.36] SPEAKER 8: It seems like the main advantage that you'd want out of this is just having a cheaper structure to build. But it seems like that goes out the window as soon as you start adding different amenities and electricity and plumbing and all that. Are there any other advantages to building structures out of these containers?
• [01:07:42.61] PHILIP PROEFROCK: It's an available resource, and so it's large-scale recycling. Rather than using other virgin materials, wood studs or metal studs or whatever, you're starting with the structure already in place. Some of the things that I've come across, I've talked about building costs. If you're going to build an entire house, working with the shipping containers as a structure could be 20% to 50% less. So the raw square footage, as I said, can be very cheap. But the other parts of it still are going to be on par with more conventional construction. But there's the recycling aspect. Just from the standpoint of, again, if you're thinking of it in a remote location, it's well-suited to kind of being abandoned and not being burgled or broken into. The way if you were stick framing something and you had just your structure but kind of open to the elements.
• [01:09:06.74] There's an architect based in the Pacific Northwest who's done a number of cabins in Wyoming, Montana, and he designs them in-- they're on pieces of property that are subject to wild fire. And he's designed them so that the whole thing closes up with large metal shutters, and you have kind of a box that's somewhat fortified that if nobody is there for a period of time, no one's going to be able to get into it. But also if a fire comes through the area, it's also protected in that sense. So there are a couple of advantages there. It's not a panacea for everything, but there's some intriguing possibilities with it.
• [01:10:03.44] SPEAKER 8: A second question. You had showed up a picture of a fairly elaborate house before with a swimming pool. Is the swimming pool also made of one of the containers?
• [01:10:13.84] PHILIP PROEFROCK: I think that it is. I don't recall specifically. But it looks to be about the same module as that part of the house behind it. And it doesn't look from this perspective like it has a shallow end.
• [01:10:29.39] SPEAKER 9: I was going to ask, I guess this kind of segues into somebody else's question about getting all the amenities like electricity and plumbing, what does it take as a practical matter to insulate them? Because I think a container could get awfully cold in the winter and awfully hot in the summer.
• [01:10:45.29] PHILIP PROEFROCK: Absolutely. And that's one of the things that I'm interested in. At a very high end, there are now starting to be available nanogel insulation which is very thin. Since you're working with a unit that's only eight feet wide, if you insulated that to a reasonable thickness, you're going to start really impinging on the space that's there, and you end up with a hallway. Or you end up putting a couple of the boxes together and you start cutting out the walls and you're really destroying the integrity of the structure. But with a nanogel blanket, which is probably going to offset much of the price savings that you would have, you'd be able to have just a quarter inch of material that would give you a comparable insulation or better insulation probably than what most contemporary houses have.
• [01:11:54.16] ELI NEIBURGER: Any other questions?
• [01:11:56.04] SPEAKER 10: [INAUDIBLE PHRASE] what is nanogel? I've never heard of that.
• [01:11:59.80] PHILIP PROEFROCK: Nanogel is a material that is also sometimes referred to as solid smoke. It's made from silica and it is one of the lightest and strongest per unit of weight materials. And because basically it's a solid structure, so if you think of it as being like other kinds of extruded foam material, but there's much less material there and much more trapped air. So that gives it an insulation value that's very, very high because there's very little material to conduct any heat. But it's still a fairly expensive material to produce.
• [01:12:56.84] SPEAKER 11: Is it rigid or is it something you can kind of--
• [01:13:04.09] PHILIP PROEFROCK: It's fairly friable. It's kind of brittle. I've blogged a couple of articles about it. And I guess I would probably point you to that. There's, I think it was for jetsongreen.com, earlier this year, there's an article about nanogel insulation. And you can find out some more about it from that.
• [01:13:38.40] ELI NEIBURGER: Any other questions? All right. Thank you very much, Philip. OK, so thank you very much for coming. I appreciate it. I hope you look forward to the rest of the events that we have going on this summer at the library. And our summer reading game is for not just kids but for adults as well. So if you could please fill out a blue evaluation form for us, let us know what you thought about this event and how we can make it better in the future. And thank you all very much for coming. Have a nice evening.