We did not have a chance to visit the Tacoma Museum of Glass last weekend (beyond stumbling upon Dale Chihuly’s Bridge of Glass installation), but I do hope to see his exhibition at the de Young Museum sometime before it ends on September 28.

What an incredible piece of photojournalism by Shiho Fukada:

This photo appeared on the front page of Wednesday’s New York Times (May 28, 2008) alongside the article Parents’ Grief Turns to Rage at Chinese Officials by Andrew Jacobs. The equally enraging caption for the photo read:

Jiang Guohua, the Communist Party boss of Mianzhu, knelt Sunday to ask parents of earthquake victims to abandon their protest.

After three weeks in not-so-stealth-mode, it’s time to take the wraps off a new joint venture between me and Stephanie, which we’re calling White Noise Lounge.

It all started about a month ago when we were joking with each other about the idea of an internet radio station that broadcast nothing but white noise—24 hours a day. At some point this joke crossed over into the realm of possibility, and we started working on it like a real project, albeit in the form of an audio blog.

The format is pretty simple. Every post is built around a short audio track that we’ve recorded from our environment. The sound could be anything, we’ve got a long list of ideas, but usually something continuous, rhythmic, and ambient. Every post contains a black and white photo of the sound’s source, in keeping with the site’s monochromatic color scheme (a nod to the “snow” of video static). As this is a blog at heart, we’ll also write something about the place or the sound.

Our goal is to post something new at least once a week, so please feel free to add the feed to your feedreader or audio podcast fetcher. We’ve submitted the site to iTunes, but haven’t heard back yet.

Update: We are no longer updating White Noise Lounge. All the old posts have been imported into Justinsomnia.

So I’m checking Boing Boing for the umpteenth time tonight (in the middle of a casual project), when I see a new post about Maker Faire Austin: “Adventures in Time” teaser film. The accompanying screengrab looks interesting enough, so I clickthrough and start watching the video.

A lot of the footage looks like it came from the recent Maker Faire in San Mateo—the one that I experienced with my dad and Stephanie last May.

So they’re showing all of the familiar exhibits, and I’m wondering whether there’ll be any mention of the rubber band cars I’ve heard so much about—the ones that the husband of my mom’s college roommate, Mike Rigsby, will be demoing at Maker Faire Austin, and that my dad is building a life-size version of.

Update: here’s the original video of my dad and his car:

I was on vacation (from work and blog reading) when he began posting about the construction of the car in earnest (part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, and part 6 with original video), so I didn’t read about it until after I got back. Definitely check out parts 4 and 5, where he describes some of the initial structural failures and his subsequent engineering solutions.

Of course I’ve been meaning to blog about it, especially after seeing the work of art that is the car’s chair:

Serendipitously seeing my dad on a video linked to from Boing Boing was just the impetus I needed to finally write a post.

Shameless plug: if you’re going to be around for Maker Faire Austin, Mike Rigsby, my dad (Brian Watt), and the human-sized rubber band powered car he built will be on hand for test drives. Definitely check it out!