Adding insult to injury

Revenue Bureau,
City Of Portland

To whom it may concern,

On April 14th I attempted to pay the Portland Arts Tax. I used the city’s online payment system at https://www.portlandoregon.gov/revenue/artstax/ . I didn’t know that the city had extended the deadline for payment by a month, and wanted to be sure I paid all my taxes before the April 15th tax deadline. At your website I completed a transaction, was thanked for my payment, received a receipt and a confirmation number, and thought the matter settled.

Then, on April 24th I received a demand for payment from the City of Portland for sixty dollars — $35 in unpaid taxes plus an additional $25 “returned item fee,” on or before May 4th. I investigated with my bank, who assured me that they had not returned any items, or seen any transaction attempted at all, even though funds were available in my account for the whole month of April. They suggested I may have made a typo.

I paid the tax again online, on April 29th, using a credit card. I have confirmed that the funds left my account on April 30th..

I am writing now to protest this ludicrous and arbitrary assessment of $25 — an extra 71% on top of the tax itself — as well as your infuriating demand that I pay the Portland Arts Tax by May 4th, eleven days earlier than the May 15th deadline for all other citizens of Portland. Why is this my reward for trying to responsibly pay a tax that thousands of citizens are trying to dodge?

How can such fees be justified? If the City of Portland has incurred any costs or damages due to an online banking transaction error (which I highly doubt), they might as well consider it part of the cost of extracting wealth from their citizens, like any other entity that accepts online payments. I don’t know what caused this transaction error. I may have mistyped a digit, or there might just as easily have been a technology failure with your website, or at your bank, or at my bank. At any other online payment site, a transaction is checked before it’s run, and if it fails for any technical reason the user simply tries again. To levy massive fines against honest customers for unexplained technical failures or simple human mistakes is pure extortion.

I have paid my taxes on time, and that is all I’m paying.

Sincerely,

Mykle Hansen,
ARTIST

I have always been fascinated by noisemaking devices, and for years I’ve been hoarding unwanted speakers, amplifiers and tape decks in my garage. Lately I’m in a closet-cleaning mood, so I conceived an art project around the idea of pushing these beautiful old machines out into the world.

Each robot was loaded with a loop cassette: either abstract robot music or obnoxious robot commands. Very little electronics knowledge was involved in this project. I had to file the corrosion off of some old battery contacts, and install a bunch of godawfully expensive C-cell batteries. Instant mechanical oppressor, just press “Play”!

I’ve been feeling very fond of cassette tapes lately, but actually trying to use them has cured me of my nostalgia. The tape mechanisms performed well enough on the test bench. But when I took them on a Pedalpalooza ride called Robot Storytime, it literally rained on my robot parade.

The plan was to set these up in various public spots in Portland, playing their tapes to the world. But I learned that it takes only one raindrop to remove all traction from a tape deck’s capstan, and in this way several of my robots were silenced. At least this one remained sassy:

Hello universe … nice hat! Please lend me your undivided attention for this Public Service Announcement!

There once was a band of malcontent street musicians known as The Bad Mintons, who embarked on a noble quest to serenade drunk people out of their spare change and cigarettes. The Mintons earned their money the hard way, and they spent it on the hard stuff. Whiskey was their muse, tobacco was their breakfast, and the Devil was their personal friend.

And lo, this band of neer-sing-wells minstrelled to and fro across the face of our great nation, bringing joy and laughter wherever they did play. Their friendly, cheerful music kicked sorrow in the face and crushed the windpipe of unhappiness. And they did this, and they did that … blah blah blah, time went on, et cetera … now they’re old and boring.

BUT! They made a music video, which will be released this month! It’s the video for their superhit megasingle SNAZZY PORTLAND — shot in the streets of Portland, Oregon! Staring the people of Portland! Co-starring the streets, buildings, and inanimate objects of Portland! It’s a song about our city: why we love it, what’s great about it, and how much other cities suck.

We’re very proud of our little film, and we want to show it off to you. In the next two weeks, we’ve organized three — three! — special chances for our Portland neighbors to watch this video on the big screen, in advance of its internet small-screen release.

YOUR FIRST CHANCE TO SEE IT: If you pitched in with the huge volunteer effort to make this video — or if you’d like to be part of the huge volunteer effort to smear it all over the Interwebs like mayonnaise — or if you just want to come say hi — then please swing by our SNAZZY PORTLAND VOLUNTEER PREVIEWFEST and barbequeue hoedown this Friday the 15th of June, at 5536 NE 27th Ave. Between 7 and 10 pm we’ll be grilling hot dogs in the back yard, watching videos in the living room, and at some point there might be a tearful speech in the kitchen. It’s an early-evening all-ages affair because we know you’ve got lots of other music video release parties to get to that night. Bring a friend! Bring something to share!

YOUR SECOND CHANCE: On the night of Thursday June 21st, we’ll be screening SNAZZY PORTLAND at the Solstice Pre-Funk, a wild dance party at Refuge PDX with live music from Solovox, Pumpkin and the Woo All-Stars! Black Rock attire is optional but fabulous. It’s Matt & Tanya’s ten year anniversary!

YOUR THIRD CHANCE: June 28th, at Alberta Street’s notorious LAST THURSDAY art-melee, the Bad Mintons will be out marauding, yodeling, strumming and honking, on your block and in your face! Then at sunset we will show SNAZZY PORTLAND on the big screen at Rose City Vaudeville! That’s on the corner of 19th & NE Alberta. Fire dancing to follow!

YOUR OTHER THIRD CHANCE: If you passed out early from those last-Thursday mimosas … shake yourself awake and stumble over to the late-late screening: Midnight @ The Know: 21st and Alberta. We’ll play this video one more time, with VJ Nono and his amazing EYE CANDY!

What’s that? You say you want to watch this amazing video, but you don’t live in Portland? Well, that’s remarkably poor planning on your part. But don’t fret: the YouTube/Vimeo/Facebook/Tumblr/Flickr/Sniffr/Pootr release of Snazzy Portland is coming to a handheld device near you soon! You’ll hear it here first, soon! Just glue your eyeballs to this blog and all will be revealed … SOON!

SNAZZY PORTLAND — the epic music video for the smooth-metal superhit of the same name — is nigh upon complete! Kudos to Rick Kent of Kentwood, California for taking on the crucial dual roles of editor & taskmaster, and driving this sucker out the front door!

In late June, we’re going to throw a little party to thank everybody — gadzooks, dozens upon dozens of you — who contributed your time and talent to help us complete this overambitious project! Watch this space for an official invitation.

Meanwhile, we thought you might be tantalized by a few production stills ….

This is the first moment I’ve had in six days to pause and document stuff since I landed at MSP last Tuesday and dived immediately to work on our contribution to this biannual festival of art, architecture and strange behavior on frozen Medicine Lake in Plymouth, MN.

Despite all our long-distance planning we got a severely late start on the actual construction of our shanty. By the time I arrived Brady had organized a workspace, tools, materials and a lovely recycled platform donated by members of the 2010 Vista Shanty team. The two of us worked around the clock for three days straight, and with the aid of some very helpful volunteers our Audio Adventure Shanty just barely squeaked in under the official Friday night deadline for installation on the lake.

By then we were exhausted, sore, sleep-deprived and covered in splinters. Fortunately Kelly Peach arrived Friday night from Santa Cruz to lift our spirits. We stayed up late preparing our audio equipment and attaching the lovely pink headphone cozies that Kelly had been stitching all week.

Saturday morning we met the public on the lake. We offered them our first of many Audio Adventures: a five minute audio vacation in the sunny Caribbean. It was a big hit, possibly because it was so cold outside.

Our nutty pink tetrahedron felt right at home on this landscape, clustered among so many odd and lovely little shacks, shanties and giant robots.

Saturday was exciting, but still very harried and full of first-day stresses, and I admit I neglected to wear enough socks. But today, Sunday, was magnificently sunny and warm. At times, our transparent shanty got sweltering hot. At 1PM we debuted our second audio program: the Dance Mob! A twenty person disco on synchronized headphones.

Everything went splendidly. We’re finally starting to settle in and relax. Tomorrow is another day on the ice for us, so come join us if you’re in the area. Ours is only one of two dozen excellent art shanty experiences to choose from. (Also, the ice skating is excellent.)

In two days I fly off to my home town of Minneapolis, Minnesota for ten days of bone-chilling, back-breaking, ear-warming good times with my pals Brady Clark and Kelly Peach. Together we are making a piece for the Art Shanty Projects, a recurring winter arts fest on Medicine Lake that I’ve been wanting to see for years.

Even though I’ve never been to the ASP, I’ve been describing it to my Portland friends as “Burning Man without heat.” Since 2003, Minneapolis artists and roustabouts have been installing various decorative or interactive art-huts on Medicine Lake, all inspired by the local architectural vernacular of ice-fishing shanties. Like all good ideas the ASP has grown year-by-year and is now supported by an organized, funded non-profit with a website, a hotline and some modest ability to provide grants. (Here is an excellent historical summary with lovely photos.)

For many years now, my usual January practice has been to construct a temporary shelter in my backyard and throw parties in it. This year, we’re constructing a shelter on a frozen lake and delegating the party.

But our project, the Audio Adventure Shanty, is about more than the transpyramid pictured above. The real meat of our project is to provide interpretive audio tours of the action on the ice. We’ve got dozens of MP3-playing pink earmuffs to hand out, and we’ll be documenting, conducting interviews, field recording and editing audio for the duration of the event. (Here you can read our project description, and a dozen others.)

This project is going to combine my core skills like never before. Writing and editing, designing & building, audio recording, public speaking, looking fabulous in a furry pink suit — these are my strengths! But when before have I ever gotten to use them all on the same project? Working with superheroes like Brady and Kelly, our victory is assured. Color me psyched!

The only downside, if you want to call it that, is that there will be no LIGHTBAR-per-se this year. Sorry, Portland. I have a new book out and need to focus on promoting that. (In fact, I’m squeezing in a reading while I’m in the Twin Cities.) LIGHTBAR will live on, don’t worry. And if you already bought your outfit, there is another all-white party you can attend instead. Maybe Art Shanties are the new Lightbars. They certainly do inspire.

I’ve just returned from an excellent near-death experience, courtesy of our local post-apocalyptic bicycle buccaneers known as C.H.U.N.K. 666 . We rode amphibious bicycles across the Willamette River, battled aqua-Nazi CHUDs, claimed Ross Island as our own nation, roasted weenies, amused the Coast Guard, drank whiskey and got home in time for tea.

CHUNK are the original Portland bike freaks — they put the rest to shame. I first wrote about them for the Portland Mercury way back in 2000, and they’ve only gotten worse since. The Chunkathlon, their yearly gladiatorial melee, was elevated to a higher plane of existence several years ago because they broke this one. The core team members have all grown, mutated and metastasized. Some have been raising a new generation of bicycle warlords. Others are writing books, playing the viola, doing jail time. Chunk 666 has kept such a low profile lately, some people have even dared to suggest they ride no longer.

But fuck those people. Chunk is still chunking along; they do it for themselves, not you. Last weekend’s ride was on the Willamette River. On it, not next to it. Try that on your fixie.

My friend Gabe & I became the godparents of a certain bastardized Indonesian rickshaw (or Becak) two years ago. This thing has been everywhere, and on every new voyage it’s had something else welded to it. We put new wheels on it and repaired a broken joint, but it rode so crappy we figured it had no future on land. So when we heard the call of the Chunk-sirens, we got busy.

In order to bicycle on water you need either Jesus Christ or some pontoons. We found Jesus but had trouble strapping him to the bike. Fortunately, discarded food-grade plastic barrels are easy to find in Portland because of the industrial quantities of imported food that yuppies eat. These used to contain foie gras.

In structural engineering terms, our strategy was to … err … screw a bunch of shit together and strap it on real good. Meanwhile, these Cyclecide jokers came up from San Francisco just to make us look bad with their custom canoecycle, the Sea Nympho:

Fortunately for my fragile self-esteem, the rest of the team kept their engineering up to the strictest Chunk standards.

All in all, I think we set out with ten watercraft in our expedition, and came home with six, half of them capsized. Our mission plan was simple: bicycle to Ross Island, obliterate all CHUDs, eat Hobo Pie and sausages, take a nap and sail home. But getting to the water was harder than crossing it. The designers of Portland’s bikeway system cruelly discriminate against bicycles wider than six feet! We had to lift our four-hundred-pound three-seater over a six foot concrete wall and a couple of bollards. Which we did; it happened kind of miraculously with about a dozen people involved. I would have photos of that but my hands were full.

I won’t keep you in suspense: we all died.

KIDDING! We had a great night exploring Ross Island, a former gravel mine and home to one of Oregon’s most dangerous amusement parks.

We searched for CHUDs but found only scrap metal and deerprints. Someone swore they saw Bob Pamplin’s ghost, but it turned out to just be Bob Pamplin. Here’s us eating him:

In the morning we lashed all our broken, capsized bullshit together into a big worrisome hunk of drifting pondscum and attempted to sail home with two tarps and no mast. It took us three hours to cross two hundred yards of water. But they may have been the best three hours of 2011.


Jul 21 16:08:39 snowy postfix/master[6565]: daemon started -- version 2.4.3, configuration /etc/postfix
Jul 21 16:08:39 snowy postfix/qmgr[6567]: DE1D92E78E75: from=, size=3602201, nrcpt=9 (queue active)
Jul 21 16:09:39 snowy postfix/master[6565]: master exit time has arrived


… then you’re not alone! Many people are reporting the “master exit time has arrived” messages, which seem to be just unwanted log noise. But if, between “daemon started” and “master exit,” you are seeing the same e-mail message logged over and over, then you and I are partners in digital miscommunication. Outbound e-mail is getting stuck.

Today I suffered from, investigated and solved this problem. Here’s a quick fix you can try:

• Edit /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/org.postfix.master.plist , using a text editor, Apple’s Property List Editor (if you have the Developer Tools installed), or whatever other tool you prefer for editing XML. You need to change the third string under “ProgramArguments” from “60″ to some larger number, like “600″.
• Open a Terminal window and type the following magical incantations, providing your password when requested:

  sudo launchctl unload /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/org.postfix.master.plist

  sudo launchctl load /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/org.postfix.master.plist

  That tells OS X to re-read the file you just edited.

• Now watch mail.log (in the Console application) and see if anything improves.

Basically, it’s quite possible that your postfix mail daemon was unable to deliver a message because that message takes longer than sixty seconds to deliver but Apple was only allowing it sixty seconds. if you followed the instructions above, you just granted it ten minutes.

In today’s internet, an e-mail message rarely takes sixty seconds to deliver, but it can certainly happen. Even ten minutes is not technically impossible, but it’s more likely indicative of some other serious problem, whereas the sixty second timeout could be due to a large attachment, a slow internet connection, a sluggish remote server, or some combination of those. If that’s your problem, then your mail messages will seem to just vanish as if successfully sent, while in fact they never leave your computer.

Apple really screwed the pooch here. Sixty is a nice round number, but in this context it has no other redeeming qualities. I don’t understand why Apple felt they needed to put a limit on run time; I don’t know if Postfix even has one by default. In the various online support forums, only OS X users are reporting this error. (I’m running Leopard; I’m not sure which other OS version have this problem.)

Why am I even sending mail this way? Well, I activated Postfix because I have a mailing list of friends who want to hear from me, but my boneheaded ISP won’t allow me to send to more than 25 addresses per hour, 75 per day, through their SMTP servers. It’s their way of preventing spam by also preventing legitimate mail.

I solved that problem by configuring Mail.app to send outbound messages to the local Postfix daemon on my laptop. Postfix then looks up the MX records for each address and connects directly to each recipient’s mail server to deliver each message. (FYI, if you want to do this you’ll also have to do some other technical stuff to reassure the internet that your host is a legitimate source of mail from your domain. This is how smart people prevent spam.)

And all of that has worked great, up until this recent problem with some outgoing messages not out-going. I only spotted it when, due to a local network failure, the messages finally bounced back with DNS errors. They both had large attachments, but they were both the sort of legitimate, high-quality, amusing yet poignant e-mail messages that the internet has come to expect from mykle.com .

In closing, I’d like to whine about how Postfix sucks. But you don’t want to read that, do you? Suffice it to say, the “-e” flag (for “exit time”) to the postfix master daemon could also be called the “-f” flag (for “fail to deliver messages, bounce them, or even report an error.”) Qmail, to my knowledge, does not offer this feature.

UPDATEDZ! Core77 now has a ton of photos online, some video too. Here are great pix and a play-by-play of the complete fab process (trés fab!) and here are a bunch more action shots of the float conquering Portland.

I haven’t blogged about this much, but last month I was tangentially involved in helping the good folks over at Hand-Eye Supply light up their float for the Starlight Parade with about 1000 feet of animated extra-thick electroluminescent wire.

Actually, the smartest thing I did was get Paul Stoffregen involved, and he has an excellent blog post about the whole project, with lots of pictures. If you’re thinking of doing something with a thousand feet of EL wire, read it.

I mention it here mostly for completion’s sake, and to brag that our float, christened “The Creative Spark”, won the Sweepstakes Prize for Best Illumination, which is like the Best Picture award at the Oscars, but for blinky rolling things instead of major works of cinema! How awesome is that? Massive congratulations to Laurence, Eric, Jon, Tobias, Paul, and all the other busy volunteers who brought the vision to life.

The last three months have been rainy, indoorish months for me and Portland. Writing books is still my day job, but I’ve also be surprisingly, enjoyably, annoyingly busy with these smart lights. It’s been an educational odyssey: so far it’s required circuit-board fabrication, AVR programming in C and assembler, iPhone hacking, waterjet cutting, lamp design, bicycle maintainence, and lots and lots (lots!) of soldering. I’ve enjoyed it all, but what a time sink! (If only I could flip one of these AVR pins to source time instead of sinking it …)

Something about blinking, glowing light is still compelling to me, but I really do hope that the sun will come out soon and I’ll lose interest in this weak substitute. The goal I’ve set for myself is to have these lights mounted on my tallbike in time for Pedalpalooza, Portland’s three-week bicycling festival. I’ve always wanted ambulance lights on my tallbike, and these should provide the required traffic-shifting pep.

Before I describe what I’ve been up to with these smart lights, let me just announce that “smart lights” is a dumb name, one I’m no longer going to use for fear of it becoming the de facto Actual Name. It makes these lights sound like military ordinance. So I’ve decided to give them the less threatening name of “Unicorn Lamps.” Just like real unicorns, they are delicate, beautiful and slightly pointless. They consume time and emit rainbows. I, a microcontroller virgin, am drawn to their magic.

Having said that, here’s a quick overview of what the unicorns and I have been up to.

At a Dorkbot PDX meeting in January I was introduced to TouchOSC, a toolkit for building Star Trek TNG-style control interfaces on IOS devices, and decided I wanted to use it as my user interface to these lights. Once I design the screens on the mac and sync them to my phone, TouchOSC’s plethora of buttons, knobs and faders can turn my finger taps and slides into messages in the Open Sound Control protocol (aka OSC), which it can send to any host on the internet.

But what host? To make this work, I need an OSC receiver. It has to be a small, light and battery-powered computer with tcp/ip, wi-fi, a serial port and some decent development environment. Probably there is a way to do that with Arduinos, but I’m a Unix guy at heart and I have been saving my trusty iPhone OG for just such a situation.

Remember when these were valuable?

It took four hacks to make this work. First (and easiest) I had to gain access to my own property, by jailbreaking my iPhone. Not hard. I then installed sshd and some basic unix commands, so I could log in and poke around the operating system.

Next, I had to mate the iPhone’s ttl-level serial port to the rs-485 bus on which the Unicorns frolic. Paul Stoffregen recommended the MAX487 chip for that job, and I designed a circuit around that, built it on perf-board and sealed it in a mint tin.

Since I was hooking to a 12v power source anyway, I added a portion of the MintyBoost circuit (really, just the charger-detection trick) so the iPhone can draw its power from the same source as the lights. The circuit connects to the iPhone through a standard iPhone connector. The one I bought from SparkFun was an incredibly delicate and fiddly little bastard, full of leads thinner than my hair. To protect against breakage, I filled the entire cavity of the connector with hot glue. I also keep the project box and the iPhone velcro’ed togther at all times. It’s kinda ugly, but it works. Any bits I send out /dev/tty.iap are dutifully repeated on the light bus. (BTW, this is also potentially a wireless DMX controller, if any of you DMX people are interested.)

Next I had to reconfigure launchd on the iPhone, so that a thing called “iapd” would quit freaking out about the presence of satanic non-Apple hardware on the serial port. Basically, “launchd” is the OS X equivalent to init, configured by a rat’s nest of XML files in “plist” format, some of which are compiled into binaries so they can’t ever be read by humans. One of those plist files tells the OS to run a daemon that runs another daemon that then speaks some kind of Apple-undocumented remote control protocol on the serial port. I deleted that file, and the port was mine. (In retrospect I could probably have accomplished the same thing with launchctl.)

Lastly I had to work out the complicated Makefile options to let me compile C programs on my Mac that will run on my phone. Most of that is voodoo to me, copied from other projects. The current Developer’s CD is a free download with all the compilers, libraries & headers one needs; it’s mostly just a matter of CFLAGS and LDFLAGS pointing to obscure locations under /Developer/Apple/iPhone/Apple/Developer/iPhone/Etcetera.

(The iPhone kernel as supplied by Apple would also require all my programs to be digitally signed with a developer’s key that Apple would charge me money for. Jailbreaking the phone freed me from that fascist bullshit, and good riddance too.)

With all that finally solved, the iPhone can now launch my custom middleware that uses liblo to receive network OSC messages, translate them into Unicorn and spit them out the serial port. In a pinch, it can also create its own wi-fi network, blink the lights in sync to audio on the built-in mic, text me its GPS coordinates in case of theft, and a million other things. A unix-based smartphone makes a great embedded server! And a bicycle without an embedded server is like a unicorn without a fish … or something.