Here be the tale of Doc...

...Or part of the tale, since it's still being written.

Hello my brothers and sisters. Been a while since I've been here, but definiteley havnt forgotten this place. Truth be told I've been drowning in university work and that's been the main reason I havnt been showing up - Mainly, because I havnt been playing bass at all.

It's not all been uni work, however. I've also been working on some things which I hope you fellas can enjoy, in spite of not being directly related to bass or music.

A while ago I came across this group of people who work in a branch of the arts of which I knew nothing, called New Media Arts. This group in particular is called Medialab-Prado, they are based in Madrid, and they organize workshops with people from all over the world where you are invited to go and develop projects in which you combine art and technology, or new media.

For every workshop they take proposals from all over the world, and then select a few of those and bring them to Madrid to work with them for three weeks and develp the projects... Well, I had one such idea and decided to send it in - And what d'you know? The folks in Madrid liked it, so they payed for me to go and stay there with them while we developed the project.

I'm not going to go into much detail, but to sum it up the project consisted in a system which took the values of blood pressure of a person and used those values to generate an image which could then be used to know what your blood pressure was without having to read the numbers. The images generated where the graphs of a mathematical figure called a Lissajous curve. The idea was to create a system which was intuitive (a pretty/symmetrical graph indicating good health) and that helped relate this abstract mathematical figures with the real world, and indeed with every person. Well, this is what it looked like:

http://www.youtube.com/v/pHmSYT5jVrE

(that's me testing my system) 

That's the product of three weeks, four broken TVs, and a fare share of electric shocks and fires (The moral of the story is, CRT tvs are dangerous kids!).

Anyways, I got to work with engineers, artists and activists from all over the world (not to mention the parties, which I'm sure Rasta would've aproved of), so of course since I got home after that I've been pumped, trying to start a project of the sort here in my hometown where no one has heard of this type of art. I've been working more and more with electronics and electricity everytime, trying to make more interesting systems, so it hasnt left much time for bass playing... However, as I said, I havnt completeley forgotten this.

I have got a few projects that involve music, and my latest project is a little gift I'm making for the music comunity - This is what brought me back, actually. I'm designing and building a small and cheap headpone amp, powered by a 9volt battery, with a gain and volume control small enough to fit inside an Altoids tin. The idea is make a system simple and reliable enough that anyone can build it and that wont set you back very much. That's still in the works though, but I'll be sure to post when its done.

Other than that, I also took up martial arts (Kung fu), so there's another thing that's been keeping me busy...

Anyways, it's nice to be back, this has gotta be the best internet community I've been in, and I'm glad to know it's still the same.