mykle systems labs

Here’s one more plea for LIGHTBAR help … but you don’t even have to step away from the screen this time.

I’m going to be delivering a slideshow on the history, theory and technology of LIGHTBAR at Portland’s next Pecha Kucha night, as part of a great bit light-arts symposium at PSU called Illuminated City How cool is that?

A Pecha Kucha is a kind of slideshow-on-crack public event first invented in Japan in 2003. Presenters get to show only twenty slides and you get ONLY TWENTY SECONDS PER SLIDE! Picture it as 50% arts-n-culture, 50% used car sales. A group called Project Cityscope has been putting them on in Portland for a while now. This particular episode of it, Volume 9, has a theme of “spectrum,” so of course I had to apply … and today they gave me the green light! Color me excited.
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I am buzzed to report that our first cider-making efforts have borne fruity booze.  The five-way apple tree I planted nine years ago yielded enough fruit this year to fill a 5-gallon carboy with juice.  Add yeast, secure airlock and stand back!

Hard cider may be the easiest alcoholic beverage there is to make.  Unlike with beer, no boiling or cooling is involved.  The internet is replete with conflicting advice on how best to ferment cider, and almost all of the available instructions seem to give fine results.  Here’s what we did: Read the rest of this entry »

There once was a chicken, silver and gray.  It was broody and uncooperative at our friends’ farm.  We got it for free; we thought a change of scenery might help it.  But in sixteen months it never laid one egg.  Worse, it became tangled up in an underground egg-eating ring — a ring that we recently busted.

I am a licensed poultry farmer in Multnomah County, but I am not the operator of a sanctuary for troubled chickens.  I cut that chicken’s head off last Tuesday, plucked and eviscerated it, and began fantasizing of fine cuisine.  So it goes. Read the rest of this entry »