The other day my watch stopped. If it was up to me I wouldn´t wear one, and free myself from the daily tyranny of clock-watching, but as an English teacher one must be punctual, so I took a stroll across the plaza on the hunch that I had seen an old watch-repair shop on Calle Argumosa where I could get the battery changed. And I was right: tucked next to Ali´s bar was a premises with a faded sign and a tattered awning that was once blue and yellow. I stepped through the entrance and into one of the smallest shops I have ever seen. I have been in bigger elevators. Imagine four telephone boxes knocked together into one and you get the idea.

The air was thick with smoke, coiling up from a half-smoked cigarette in an overflowing ashtray on the counter. Tucked in the corner was the owner, an elderly gentleman wearing an antiquated eye-piece which made him look like a minor character in a Ridley Scott sci-fi film. Shrivelled but benign, with wisps of white hair, yellowed fingertips and a grey smoker´s complexion, he was illuminated in a pool of light from an ancient angle-poise lamp. He put aside the watch he was fixing and set about dismantling mine to replace the battery. I glanced around the shop while I waited.

It was a kind of nightmarish vision of time ticking away while he worked. Among the collection of old clocks there were ghastly carriage- clocks that you might once have been given on your retirement, at least five grandfather clocks, two cuckoo clocks, and a dusty glass case full of defunct time-pieces like a watch graveyard. Tick… tick… tick….. all out of synch, all of them caked in dust and running at their own particular rhythm, competing with each other, the sound broken only by the occasional mournful chiming of one of the grandfather clocks. I doubt the shop had been decorated since its inauguration which looked to be some time in the fifties or sixties. The ceiling flaked with damp, there was a stained corduroy board at the back of him and where there was paint it flaked and peeled. He had a geriatric till and one of the prototype credit-card machines that remind me of the instruments used back in the days when shoe-shops measured childrens´feet for fitting.

As I waited a fearsome-looking woman bustled into the shop and, squeezing next to me, lent over the counter to ask him

´Have you finished mine yet?´

´Not yet, I´m afraid.´ he replied calmly, taking a drag on his cigarette, meticulously replacing it in the ashtray, then worrying away at my watch with a miniature screw-driver. ´I´ve been rushed off my feet all day.´

I was in no hurry so I suggested he finish the lady´s order while I waited.  Of course, I got no thank you from her, more fool me, just an evil look and a tightening of the folded arms across the chest. But I was happy for her to be served first while I waited, soaking in the weirdness of the shop and its owner. I left a little later, five euros poorer but with a functioning watch. As I left he methodically returned to the previous task, adjusting his magnifying eye-piece and lighting up another fag.

How can I explain how happy it makes me to find surviving pockets of old Spain in this age where our purchasing habits are run by a virtual police-state of supermarkets,  global corporations and health and safety regulations? These little gems are dotted around the city still, and if you look hard enough you will find them. Like the shop near Atocha that sells only screws. Any and every type of screw you can imagine and nothing else. Luckily for us, gone are the days when you had to wait in the bank queue until the teller had finished his or her cigarette and phone call, only to turn a baleful eye on you, but it still makes me disproportionately happy to think of this wizened old man smoking himself stupid in his tatty little shop and raking in the money (´rushed off his feet´). Time functions in mysterious ways in Lavapies- on the one hand it leaps forward into multiculturalism with barely a moment to catch its breath, and on the other hand in these hidden, dusty corners of the city it decides to stand perfectly still for forty or fifty years. And that is the infuriating and fascinating dichotomy of Spain- you´ll never get your internet connection repaired on time, a straight answer from a bank, or even eye contact while buying a new shirt, but you do get the Old clinging fiercely to the New, rising to the surface like a trapped air bubble. And if there is a gaping hole which could be (but isn´t) filled by Northern European efficiency, in my opinion the tenacity of everything that is old and traditional is ample compensation.

Light guide clock part 9, originally uploaded by Black Heart Industries.

Shortly after this picture was taken, I managed to fry the four LEDs that are illuminated. Oops. Stopped, ate, and I’m now enjoying a Lagunitas Imperial Stout. Damaged LEDs have been replaced. I’m powering them from a Heathkit tri-power supply. I can’t increase the current with this supply. The LEDs become brighter and whiter with more current. White LEDs are similar to fluorescent tubes. They emit ultraviolet light that causes phosphor to fluoresce, producing visible light. When underpowered the ultraviolet light doesn’t excite the phosphor properly, so you see some of the ultraviolet, making the overall light blueish. The proper way to control the brightness is to use pulse width modulation. This means that the LED gets the current it needs to be the proper color and is just strobing at a very high frequency to reduce emitted light. More parts are arriving on Saturday, so until then, all I can do is start to populate the boards. These are the new changes: A way to supply a constant current is being added (allows control of color and brightness), external 9 volt power supply, internal 9 volt time backup battery (unplug the wall-wart supply and the display goes off but the clock is still running), and an old switch to set the time. The modules are 1.5″ x 2.5″ x 1.5″. The colon will be two LEDs in a 1″ wide piece of aluminium and will blink once per second. You’ll notice there is a three dimensional aspect to this display. I have some interesting light sensors in glass tubes, like electron tubes. I thought of using one as a way of controlling the brightness in relation to ambient light. It could dim the display when the room is dark. Maybe I’ll do that when I build a Nixie tube clock.

Again in my travels I came across this beautifully simple take on the cuckoo clock. It’s available in a variety of colour (five) with golden yellow being my favourite.

Prices seem to vary massively from £250 to £140 so search around if buying.

It’s so clean and a great modern twist on the kitsch Black Forest, Bavarian traditional clock. It moves away from the template by not having pendulums, but I don’t miss them, and it makes it so compact and simple.  Enjoy….

You can visit Pascal’s site by clicking here.

meridiana cuckoo clock front

Above the Clocks is Minerva who represents the Roman Goddess of  Wisdom and Protector of Cities.

Located Town Hall High Street, Liverpool.

Shopping is one activity that is exciting and physically rejuvenating for most people. It is something that is thoroughly

enjoyed by most folks, with the  exception of  a few. It is undoubtedly the best thing to do in your spare time but what

 happens when you are running out  of precious seconds and the clock is ticking away which happens a lot when the

holidays are around the bend. That is when every precious second counts and you really have none to spare. At this

moment,  the internet comes to your rescue in a lot of beneficial ways, which are  more than one.

At a time when you got to get so much spring cleaning done around the house and decoration boxes to be

brought down, there is just not enough time for one to rush to the shopping mall to pick up stuff. The options available

online are such a boom at this time and all you have to do is just log on to the internet.    It is so great to know that most

businesses, small or big have taken their businesses online in order to make their business a success. And this is beneficial

 to the customer who needs that particular product and has no time to go shop hopping. You will always find options that are

within the area that you live in or close by because of the boom of the internet. Distance is not a problem anymore.

Once you have identified the store or items, even delivery is not a problem. Get your gifts  delivered to wherever you

want it and within the time frame that suits you. What more could one ask for? It works out

 really well in terms of time and money.  www. order-gifts.com  is your key to freedom from

crowded shopping malls during the holiday seasons and sweating it out. You are now equipped

 with the ability to still shop for your gifts and needs in a very constructive and regulated manner. And

what sounds even better, is the fact that you can carry on decorating your little haven the way you want to

as time is all yours. That extra time at home can go in baking goodies and cakes for the family that you love

so much.

Calculator Watch - photo courtesy of Ulrich Kruener

How do you measure time? I remember when all the cool kids at school had calculator watches – these amazing devices that combined a calculator with a watch and took up half of your arm.  Today, they are just one of many antiquated time keepers in our historic past – and I’m not admitting to how far in the past they were.  Cell phones, iPhones, iPods, PDAs and lap tops are the preferred devices for capturing the ticking of hours and minutes in modern culture. Wrist watches have become more fashion accessories than actual time keepers.

Between the “totally rad” calculator watches of my youth and the slick iPhone’s of today very little time has actually elapsed. However, more than 4000 years has passed since the very first time recording device made an appearance as a prop in the production of humanity.

Before the advent of plastics, metal, and glass, from which our modern time pieces are constructed, there was water, dirt, and sticks.  Our early ancestors used the great time piece in the sky, referred to as the sun, to track the passing of time.  Life revolved around its rising and setting. However, as man began to expand his horizons, both physically and mentally, he demanded a more precise means of tracking those risings and settings.

The earliest means of tracking time were sundials and water clocks.  Some scholars site evidence of water clocks in China as early as 3000 BC.  Both methods for tracking time had their advantages and disadvantages. Sun dials work well on bright sunny days, but not so well during cloudy dark days.  Water clocks can be inconsistent due to the properties of water – evaporation, freezing, and its flow is subject to change in pressure.

Today we still see sundials scattered about, usually more as garden decorations. However, you’d be hard pressed to find a water clock.  These dynamic time pieces were eventually replaced by the pendulum clocks of the 18^th century, but their construction and use laid the foundation for our modern watches and clocks, including my super cool calculator watch.

Joe Kissell, a self proclaimed “author, computer geek, traveler, and dreamer living in Paris”, gives more insight in to these early watery time keepers….

Of course, units of measure like seconds, minutes, and hours are a mere arbitrary fiction. Days, years, seasons, and perhaps months (at least lunar months) correspond to easily observed natural phenomena, but any unit shorter than a day is a pure human invention. Had history unwound differently, a second might be shorter or longer than it is now, or we might have divided the day into, say, 537 bligrots. The specific choices our distant ancestors made are, in the grand scheme of things, not nearly as important as the mere fact that they figured out a way to quantify time, repeatably and fairly accurately. It is incalculably important that we be able to determine such things as how long a lawyer should be allowed to speak, whether the athlete who won the race today went faster than the athlete who won yesterday, or when lunch begins…

Clepsydre - Musee de l'Agora antique d'Athenes - courtesy of Marsyas

The simplest water clock design, known as an outflow water clock, was basically a stone or earthenware container with a small hole in the bottom and graduated markings on the inside. As water dripped out (at a more or less constant rate), the water level dropped, revealing successive hour markings. Inflow designs used two containers: one to dispense the water and another, into which the water dripped, to measure it (additively rather than subtractively).

Some sources credit the Chinese for inventing water clocks as early as 3000 B.C.; others say water clocks appeared much later in China and that it was the Egyptians, around 1500 B.C., who first came up with the idea. In any case, water clock designs certainly developed independently in more than one place. We do know that the Egyptian design had made its way to Greece by 325 B.C., where it was given the name clepsydra, which means “water thief.” – Joe Kissell (Interesting Thing of the Day)

So next time you check the time on your iPhone, cell phone, or laptop, be grateful you don’t have to carry around a bowl of water with a drip hole. Carpe Diem!

Holy smokes do we have a new product payload for you.  Christmas time is around the corner, so we thought we should add some products that might make your shopping a little easier this year. Over the last month, we partnered up with Taxor, a manufacturer of men’s watches, women’s watches, and automotive clocks.  But what makes these time pieces are extra special because they feature the logo of your mistress de la garage.

• GM Watches for Men -  Because you want the world to know that you drive a Corvette.
• Honda Watches for Men – So you can keep your Honda boxers to yourself.
• Nissan Watches for Men – So you can time your car going from 0 to 60 in about 9 seconds flat.
• Dodge Watches for Men – Because strapping a Dodge Hot Wheels on your wrist is unacceptable.
• Ford Watches for Men – Tired of holding your Ford key out in hopes someone asks what you drive? Wear a Ford watch instead.
• Dodge Watches for Women – Unless your special talent is telling time by the location of the sun, you need this watch.
• Ford Watches for Women – Because no outfit is complete without at least one Ford accessory on your wrist.
• GM Watches for Women – To tactfully remind others what kind of fancy car you drive.
• Honda Watches for Women – It’s about more than just punctuality–it’s about having mad style.
• Ford Clocks – Hickory Dickory Dock, tell time with this Ford Clock. C’mon. You knew we had to use it.
• GM Clocks – Better than running out to your car to check the time–now you can tell time the GM way on your wall or desk.
• Honda Clocks – Don’t spend your money on a box. Don’t spend it on a fox. Don’t spend it on a sock. Spend it on a Honda Clock.
• Jeep Clocks – Jeeps beep and clocks tock. Now, Taxor brings you Jeep Clocks–sorry they don’t beep.

And if time isn’t your thing, then we’ve got a few other items that’ll rock your Christmas socks:

• AVS Seamless Ventvisor – Seamless stockings, seamless rain gutters, seamless plots and now—Seamless Ventvisors.  Get’em today, they’re Ultra Low-Pro for a look that’s slicker than your grandpa’s comb over.
• Tailgate Cargo Box – No, it’s not a miniature Doug Henning prop; however, the Tailgate Cargo Box does carry all your gear and then magically transform from a cargo carrier into 2 chairs and a table.  Works great for camping too!
• Hypertech Max Energy Sport – You may have heard about this, you may have even seen spy photos of it, but the day has almost come; Hypertech is entering the world of sport-compacts!  We should have these puppies in stock soon, check back if you want to give your import some extra juice!

i know right now we are two broken clocks.

i know right now our timings off.

i know right now only time can tell.

i know right now we both just feel like hell.

i know right now this is also true.

i know right now that in my life i still always need you.

We were featured on Breakfast Television this week with the Make It Vancouver Show, thanks to Jenna and Chandler from Make It Productions! We are really excited about the market this weekend and hope to see you there!

In my previous post I experimented with a tetrad-fourfold hybrid analysis of media and discovered that the tetrad could be used to look at non-human specific media. Laws of Media (LOM) was a fascinating read that has encouraged me to seek out some more McLuhan. This post brings together insights from The Gutenberg Galaxy and Understanding Media, of which I can report that there is a lot more to  them than this simple tetrad. This article aims to outline many of the arguments from LOM towards a questioning consideration of Heidegger and technology.

One of the many surprises from reading the McLuhan’s LOM, is their reading of Heidegger and the phenomenological tradition. Firstly, they are aware of the importance of the ground/figure relationship for Heidegger and the limitations of his approach. The McLuhan’s want to not only recognize the ground/figure dif-ference, but the figure is the ground and visa versa: ‘[Heidegger] has not noted that the ground is formed as a mosaic, structured acoustically, nor that its structure is entirely due to its interface with figures’ (LOM, p.63). Essentially, the McLuhan’s critique the notion of thinking being beyond beings. For the McLuhan’s, Graham Harman and Levinas, this is impossible.

LOM is not the only place the McLuhan (senior) has commented on Heidegger. In The Gutemberg Galaxy (TGG), he makes the claim that “Heidegger surf-boards along on the electronic wave as triumphantly as Descartes rode the mechanical wave” (TGG, p.248). Heidegger claims that technology is a mode of enframing, which as the McLuhan’s explain “is not a batch of concepts, but a special technique of perception that reveals the ground” (LOM, p.63). Heidegger understands this in the negative as ‘fleeing from the question of being’. It is in the notion of ‘question’ that we must question. If we no longer question being, then we no longer respond to the absent gods as they beacon us to wonder at being. Put simply, if there is no longer an absence that brings us to question the relation with beings, we have lost the RTH and have become PAH automatons. Thus, Heidegger’s favourite philosophical demon (not daimon), Descartes, whose mechanical and mathematical metaphysics of presence, is the main culprit for our modern ontologically degenerate forgetting of the question. Or so he thinks.

Descartes championed the mechanical which was then repeated by Newton. McLuhan comments with wonderfully dry whit in Understanding Media that Newton “in an age of clocks, managed to present the physical universe in the image of a clock”. Whilst “Blake spoke of the need to be delivered “from single vision and Newton’s sleep,” knowing very well that Newton’s response to the challenge of the new mechanism was itself merely a mechanical repetition of the challenge”. Concurrent to Blake, it would be an understatement to say that Heidegger was not fond of mechanization. However, McLuhan notes that Heidegger champions the electrical. McLuhan makes the claim that Heidegger has a non-literate bias in his philosophy and language. Heidegger wants to ‘turn’ the being of Dasein towards the ground of being, the RTH withdrawn essence in contradistinction to the PAH revealed relations of scientific and mathematical representation. In LOM we learn that media which focus to the figures of visual space are conceptual, while acoustic space brings focus to the ground. It is in this acoustic space that Heidegger sees the no-thing which characterizes Eastern oral traditions of the non-literate. This turning towards the acoustic is hampered by the medium Heidegger’s work circulates within: the phonetic [orthographic] alphabet.

‘The interiorization of the technology of the phonetic alphabet translates man from the magical world of the ear to the neutral visual world.’ (TGG, p.21). The manner of his work is abstract and visual, even though he is trying to ‘explore the occult (hidden) area’ of beings (LOM, p.63). In McLuhan’s terms, Heidegger’s concern for the essence and saving power of technology is a response to the ‘left brained’ visual/conceptual logos interpreted as logic which characterized western philosophy since the instantiation of metaphysics with Plato amplified by Descartes and culminating with Nietzsche. Graphocentricism followed in the 17th century, which is why Heidegger re-enacts the pre-Socratic logos of Heraclitus, a logos of the oral tradition of beings gathered by speech. Heidegger’s turn towards poetry exemplifies the ‘right brained’ acoustic/perceptual spiritual line of flight away from the PAH, towards a ‘hearkening’, a hearing beyond sound and tone, that indicates a deeper dense of perception of an openness to the simultaneous withdrawing and the taking place (On the Essence of Language, p.88).It is this ‘hearkening’ to acoustic space that Heidegger’s ideas can ‘’surf’ along the electronic technological revolution commanded by the mosaic image of the television and visual display unit, while simultaneously, his message is replicated through the medium of the printed page, the flat visual space Heidegger despises. To compromise, he turns to poetry.

The poetry of Trakl, Holderlin and Rilke (and Heidegger himself) is a ‘cool’ medium that requires participation. Like Nietzschian aphorisms, which signal an incomplete reasoning, poetry presents a gap which forces the reader to think instead of swallowing a complete package or method of thought. This is in contrast to Heidegger’s ‘Being and Time’ (B&T), which is hot in it’s attempt at an exhaustive deconstruction of the meaning of being. The fact that B&T was never finished, party shows the movement from hot prose to cool poetry that would characterize his later work. Although, in essence, his tool analysis fourfold was present as early as 1919, B&T was a product of the hot medium of phenomenological analysis, whose practice of the epoché created mountains of paper analysis in the name of phenomenological ’seeing’. Thus the momentum and style of Husserlian phenomenology was still in top gear as Heidegger was writing B&T, only later to ease off the accelerator and take the fourfold’s cool structure seriously.

There is no essence of Dasein that needs protecting and saving through the poetic return of the gods: McLuhan stresses that “the acoustic power available to the poetic establishment that Plato warned against was puny by comparison to the sensory stress exerted by any one of our technologies and its grounds” (LOM, p64). The human essence is always already a fluctuating media-being through the facticity of worldly equipmentality. There is no ‘clearing’ (lichtung) which sets the horizon of meaning, as human Dasein’s worlded horizon changes according to newly acquired media practices. Heidegger fails to notice that new media all always demonized before they are normalized. As McLuhan observes in TGG, there was ‘considerable alarm and revulsion’ at the mounting use of of books in the late 17th century which contrasts with the modern concern for the ‘end of the book’. Technology itself does not have a moral dimension, but provokes a moral response because of its transformative powers: technology is not itself a disaster, only the myopia of being unprepared for the fundamental changes to human perceptions, habits, values they could bring.

NB – Heidegger’s logocentricism was deconstructed by Derrida, who, through McLuhan’s eyes, was responding the hypocrisy of Heidegger surfing the electric (i.e. the visual space of writing) while promoting the acoustic space of speaking. Heidegger was in neglect of the arch-writing that makes speech possible and thus Heidegger remains committed to a metaphysics of presence: as writing involves the absence of the speaker, whereas the speaker is always present to the listener. Derrida’s archi-writing seems to not only recognize speech and writing as modes of signification, but that neither is subordinate to the other when seeking being qua being. McLuhan knowingly  deconstructs himself when he notes that contained in the fourfold structure of the self proclaimed amazing revolutionary thought of the tetrad itself is its reversal into ‘the external logical method’: hardware (the physical stuff of the world) becomes software (word), “thereby losing their murky, non-linguistic materiality” as Harman writes in his article ‘Phenomenology and the tetrad’. He wants to make us aware of the acute workings and transformations of media, just as Derrida wants to engage in inter-textual deconstruction while making us aware of the impossibility of the end of his task.

This is a particularly interesting clip of Heidegger’s. Most people use TV’s and Radio’s yet have no idea how they work, except for a few technically minded people,  in the same way, most people think they are thinking, yet only a few people actually know what it means to think. For Heidegger. what we think is thought is the message which hides a medium which enframes how we think. This analytic visual space prioritizes being expressed through its presence in visual space. Thus, beings forget the acoustic space of being.

C O P Y R I G H T © A L I C E D R O G O R E A N U 2009

The line of boule clocks is inspired by a clock exhibited in the Hermès Museum located above the boutique at 24, Rue du faubourg Saint-Honoré, in Paris. Hung from a stirrup, this clock sits enthroned on the former desk of Emile-Maurice Hermès (1871-1951), who patiently built up an exceptional collection of objects relating to the equestrian world.

It can be yours from Hermés Paris for just $560,000. *speechless…

Technical characteristics

Functions
Hours, minutes

Movement
Mechanical, hand-wound
Exclusive Calibre H1951
60 mm in diameter
6.7 mm thick
18,000 vibrations per hour (2.5 Hz)
200-hour power reserve, five series-coupled barrels
231 parts including 25 jewels
Hand-bevelled bridges and mechanisms
Bridges adorned with circular “côtes”, rhodium- and black gold-plated

Glass
Two half-spheres in BK 7 magnifying-effect optical crystal

Dial
In 750 white gold shaped to form a spiral
Openworked hands
Hand-engraved numerals

Clock
Exterior parts in 750 white gold
88 mm in diameter
Total weight: 1063 grams

Today I observed a pattern in my writing. I have been working on a story that goes by the working title of Clocks for some months now. It is one of those stories that emerges by accumulation. Every so often I add another paragraph, or a sentence, or even just a word. It is now 1800 words long, and into that small linguistic space I have condensed three point-of-view characters, at least a dozen scenes (some only a few words long) and enough angst to power a small work of literary fiction. Which gives me a choice. I can leave this dense narrative nugget as it is, or I can treat it like a seed from which, with care and attention,  might grow a real story. In the case of Clocks, I think I’ll take the second option. But I have realised that I produce these Story McNuggets quite frequently. I know at least one other writer who seems to work this way, but I’m wondering if there are any more of you out there?

Things that I like…

The Guardian interview Neil Gaiman about the experience of being buried alive under a huge pile of awards.

Electric Velocipede announce recent fiction purchases including me and my two Clarion friends Keffy R. M. Kehrli and Monica Byrne.

Funky Fish Clock

Truth be told, keeping time has never been a top priority for us at 365Beach. In fact, if it weren’t for computers and cell phones, we could honestly say you would be hard pressed to find more than one working clock on the premises. Not to mention that wrist watches serve more as fashion statements than time keepers. It’s not that we’re opposed to being on time. It’s simply that we are more inclined to enjoy wasting time…particularly beachside! 

Certainly, our coastal friends understand the luxury that is being oblivious to the passing minutes. And we know it’s a popular concept among musicians given the number of songs that reflect upon the virtue of wasting time. From the classic Eagles song, Wasted Time  ”…maybe someday we will find that it wasn’t really wasted time…”  to the recent favorite from the Dave Matthew’s Band, Stay (Wasting Time):

Wasting time
Let the hours roll by
Doing nothing for the fun
Little taste of the good life
Whether right or wrong
Makes us want to stay stay stay stay for a while…

Okay, you get the point. Wasting time remains a favorite past time!  That said, if we have to keep time (after all, how else would we know when it’s time to head to the beach?) then we’ve finally found a way to happily do so. These distinctly coastal-inspired time pieces from Daylilies Online could easily convert us into clock watchers.  Among our favorites are the “Funky Fish” and “Funky Flamingo” hand-painted pendulum clocks.  For a little more whimsical island flare, the “Tropical Girl” clock does just the trick. Each clock is just under $55 and is the perfect, quirky addition to any time waster’s wall!

Tropical Girl

Funky Flamingo

Modern styling check, space age time keeping accuracy check, keeps time for 6-8 weeks on one fill check.  Never has being environmentally sound been so easy and modern at that. Retails for $16 here

Had a mild panic attack at work when I looked up at the clock after what felt like FOREVER since 7:30pm. It read 7:40. Someone proceeded to take it down to replace the batteries and move it to 9pm. Sigh of relief.

In college, we would leave campus and drive a few hours north of Boston into the backwoods of Maine and spend the weekend at my friend’s cabin that, while equipped with electricity and running water and most of the creature comforts that had become necessary to our winter of 2005 survival, lacked two major components: television and internet. So, in the backseat of my used Saturn, we wrapped a towel around an oversized plastic container with a matching bottom, a little metal bowl and a big sack of grass. We sat around the kitchen table drinking glasses of aggressive red wine and took hits off the gravity bong, allowing the plumes of smoke to overtake the lofted cabin and lull us all into a quiet, post-adolescent thoughtfulness, the herbal smell dissipating only days later when we packed up our possessions—the plastic-cut jugs, the empty bags of grass, the wine bottles and corkscrews and university sweatshirts, the video camera with philosophical-leaning footage of questionable taste—, loaded them back into the Saturn and drove off with the headlights on bright, our eyes twinkling and our lungs darkening in the dusk.

 

Light guide clock part 8, originally uploaded by Black Heart Industries.

This is the improved oscillator design by Peter Wendt:
http://www.mcamafia.de/

Update from Peter Wendt:

The 4060 didn’t cope very well with using +9V as AC-ground. The circuit started faster, the over all deviation was lower and the sensitivity against voltage changes was lower – but the circuit was more sensible against stray signals and hand-touch. Trimming it required a long plastic rod and a hand distance of least 10 cm away from the trimmer – or the counter goes erratic. Using GND as AC ground for the xtal circuit the xtal goes into overtone mode – which is not what I wanted. Therefore the “old” design is the better I’d say. The new one has some advantages, but you need a properly designed board.

Light guide clock part 7, originally uploaded by Black Heart Industries.

God damn it! This is the most frustrating electronic project ever! Nothing is working right. The oscillator is way off, about 10 seconds short every minute. The decade counters are the most touchy bullshit ever. I thought I had the seconds counters working, no. The seconds ‘ones’ is working, and so was the minutes ‘ones’ counter. When I tried to trigger the minutes ‘ones’ counter with the seconds ‘tens’ counter, it just keeps reseting, but it works when triggered by the seconds ‘ones’ counter. I striped everything upstream, and the reseting parts. Now the the minute ‘ones’ counter just doesn’t work. The counters go crazy when you touch the wires. The LEDs have an effect on the circuit. Probably the source of the reset. Something to do with the negative spike though the resistor at pin 15 to ground. WTF! Ok. Peter Wendt sent me an improved oscillator design. I wasn’t going to change the circuit, but sense it’s completely fucked, I’d thought I might as well. The image was also made by Peter, it’s of the modifications needed to make this work for a 12 hour arrangement, which I explained in part 6. After 60 minutes have elapsed, the minutes counter sends a pulse to pin 14, advancing the hours ‘ones’ counter one more hour. Sense the counter starts at 0, an offset is used. Q0 will display 1, Q1 will display 2, etc. The roll over will be in the wrong place, so we use pin 11 into pin 14. Master reset is triggered when the display tries to show 13. Or at least it’s suppose to, if the fucking thing would stop freaking out! I’m starting over with the new oscillator. One interesting development, the LEDs get whiter and brighter when more power is feed into them. This project is all about learning, and I’ve learned I don’t like decade counters. I’m going to look into how Pic processors work. That’s more like programing, not looking forward to that. I am the most stubborn person in the world, so this will get done. No matter how much it hurts.

Run Lola Run: a stunning red head must find 100,000 Marks within 20 minutes to save her boyfriend. Despite this movie being almost all action you really get to know the two mains, thanks to them nailing their characters in what little screen time they have. The biggest feature for me was the music; pounding German dance tracks that emphasise the urgency and get you totally pumped up, especially through the first 15 minutes. Paying attention to every detail shows how neat and well-planned the film is, but doesn’t necessarily to add enjoyment – just a nice touch. It also has a themes of fate, coincidence and the butterfly effect, but again, they’re just there, and you don’t have to analyse them. It’s a very original idea, executed brilliantly and remains stylish throughout – all the scenes with Lola / Manni are striking in one way or another. With the dominant music, stunning visuals and a simple story it’s like a long music video, yet it never wears thin or peters out. A great example of film-making and essential viewing.

Score: 8.5/10