There's a lot of ways to communicate information. But we seem to get stuck in the same ways old ways we have always used, because they seem simple, we've trained ourselves to use them, and so we reach for them out of convenience. But with the sheer amount of information available to us at any given time, putting more data into the firehose won't result in anything actionable or noticeable unless it's either truly compelling, or interesting enough to stand out. 

I was taken with the idea of the ambient orb, and began playing around with ways to build one myself. It took a little bit of finessing to figure out exactly how I wanted to set it up. The biggest challenge is to get enough light out of the LEDs to be visible in all situations. A single LED just isn't gonna cut it when the sun is up and shining through the window.  But just as importantly as the technical aspects, I was determined to make the object pretty. It had to fit into the ambience of the area I intended to put it - the lobby of a multi-million dollar scientific facility, surrounded by works of art and natural beauty. 

So of course, I turned it from an orb to a cube. 

The lighting was brightened by using a BlinkM MaxM LED - a stupidly bright RGB LED that is super easy to work with. I tore apart carefully disassembeled an old, non-programmable ambient orb to see how they had tackled the diffusion. Answer: frosted wax paper. Engineers are a practical people. The cube came from some $5 Amazon toy - I threw all the functional part of it away, and just kept the plastic cubey bit. 

Now for the base. I took a piece of burl buckeye that I had in my workshop, and carved back the suface to accomodate the cube. I haven't done much carving, but I love working with this wood. I've made some small box parts out of it in the past, and it is both light and dense (a great combination for woodworking, but a bitch on the sawblades). Best of all, it has a gorgeous natural grain that is warm and interesting. 

Never mind the rust on my chisel. My barn isn't hermetically sealed, and it's a constant battle with my steel tools. 

I routed out the underside of the block to accomodate the arduino board and components (I installed an ethernet shield on it as well), and drilled a hole through the center of the square cutout to slip the LED through. Then it was just a matter of plopping the cube into the slot. 

It still didn't look quite finished to me. I also knew I'd be putting it out into a rather sunny location. Even with the MaxM LED, in direct sunlight, it has to be pretty bright to be seen. So I grabbed a small sheet of stock rolled brass, and bent it into a shade. To keep with the artsy feel, I used a torch to discolor and oxidize the brass a bit. 

Added bonus: Fire! 

The little sketch I wrote for the cube can be found here - pretty straightforward (you will need the BlinkM_funcs.h and WebServer.h libraries as well). But you set the IP of the ethernet sheild, pass the color you want the cube to turn in standard RGB values via a webservice, and it shifts prettily to the next shade.

Several applications of danish oil to protect the base and And boom. We have ourselves a remotely programmable ambient cube, that can automatically be set to change as any metric we choose to monitor shifts. Here it's set to "purple." 

The idea for the metric is simple. We picked paper usage for the campus, because environmental stewardship is an important core value for our organization.  But we could've picked pretty much any goal.  If the cube is red, we used less paper yesterday than we did the day before.  If it's blue, we used about the same. If it's green, we used less. 

While we played with different and more complicated algorithms, the goal is just to do a little better every day. If we do that, it adds up to thousands of pages saved each year.  The numbers are easy - our print servers record every print job by printer, sender, page type, etc. anyway. All we had do to was setup a simple automatic comparison, and send out a little nightly web call to the cube. 

By putting it out in the lobby to be seen as people walk in each morning, it becomes both a visible reminder of our core values as an organization, and an opportunity to reflect on our choices. 'Oh. Today is a red day. Maybe I won't make as many copies of that report, and will just email it instead.'

But we said it better in a video - I put this together for internal communication. It explains the concept and the meaning. 

And there you have it. Information presented in an interesting fashion that becomes actionable, for less than fifty bucks and a few hours of effort to put together. 

Growing up, I always thought of my mother as a fantastic cook. 

She worked full time as a nurse throughout my entire childhood, and still somehow always managed to have a meal on the table for us at night.  Not to mention the myriad of other things done to take care of the household. At some point in the early 1980's, she was a participant in the Mrs. Georgia pageant, right down to the swimsuit on the runway. My mother can kick June Cleaver's ass without breaking a sweat, is what I'm saying.

She has also always been extremely frugal. She was raised in the tiny little hamlet of Blue Ridge, Georgia, in the post World War II days. Her father worked in the copper mines, and her mom kept four kids and the house running. It would've been a sin to let anything go to waste that had a shred of usefulness left in it. 

In our freezer, my mother kept a big, empty ice cream tub. (I never knew where the ice cream went. I certainly never ate it. But we were never short on the big plastic tubs when we needed them). 

Whatever she cooked, she cooked a lot of it. Often, there was a crockpot involved. Or one of those big electric skillets that you could set to "low" and walk away from. There were three kids in the house, and she had a busy schedule. We probably ate more than our fair share of lasagna, stroganoff, pot roasts or bean soup. It was also the 70's, so there were a lot of food that entered our kitchen in small, colorful boxes, or things that ended in "Helper". 

Whatever we didn't eat after the second night re-heat went into the big empty ice cream tub, and back into the freezer. It might be the leftover green beans. Or some spaghetti sauce. Or a crusty end of meat loaf. Or maybe some of that bean soup.  Over the course of a month or two, you could pull the tub out and look at the strata of leftovers of different colors and textures, like some sort of geological artifact in miniature. 

When it approached the handle of the tub, my mother would declare that the next day we would be eating leftover soup. 

I hate leftover soup. 

The tub would sit out on the counter, lumpy & covered in a little layer of hoarfrost with an occasional English pea or browned crusty onion (was that an onion? I think that was an onion) breaking the surface.  This would be dumped into the crock pot once it had loosened up a bit. She'd add a can of something from the pantry - this also varied. Sometimes diced tomatoes. Maybe cream of chicken/mushroom/celery. If there hadn't been enough solids in the leftover tub that month, she'd toss in a half bag of frozen mixed vegetables. (not the good kind. The ones that all tasted like penguin ass for having been left in the deep freeze section of Sav-a-lot for 6 years before being marked down as a 'must sale' item).  Whatever it "looked like it needed".  

A couple of cans of water to leven things off at the brim, and it would slowly meld together into soup while we were all out at school or work or wherever 

Remarkably - whatever had gone into the leftover tub all month, the soup always looked and tasted the same.  

And it wasn't good.

It was too thick to be a soup. Too thin to be a stew. It was always reddish. It always had things you didn't expect to find in it. Like kidney beans with your peas. Or corn with your stroganoff noodle. Or a hint of what I can only assume was the original rainbow sherbert that had been in the bucket. 

My brother still swears he liked this soup. My brother has always been a little off. 

Years later, I was in my parent's house over a long weekend, and they were headed out to some other prior engagement. (Which was odd in itself. They pretty much swore off of "prior engagements" when they retired and moved to the hills of Tennessee a few years back).  Despite the fact that I had lived and fed myself successfully as an adult for a couple of decades, my mother was worried that I wouldn't be able to find and create some form of sustenance out of whatever groceries were in the kitchen. 

"There's a leftover bucket in the freezer," she called as they backed out of the garage. "Make yourself some soup."

*shudder*

No thanks, Mom.  I'll find something else to tide me over.  

I took a lot of pictures. It was almost intimidating to sort through them all. So I'll let you do that.  Click any of the photos to see the expanded set. 

There was a lot of beach time.  It's a country of islands. Drive a bit in any direction from wherever you are, and you're going to hit a beach. 

We took full advantage.

But there are other things to see. We hit four or five islands - Bohol was probably our favorite. It's a mid-sized island someplace in the middle of the country without  any major cities on it. It has things like ancient coral hills (the Chocolate hills) and the world's smallest primate to see. 

We also hit Cebu (briefly) on our way to Boracay, and then back up to Manila, the local Chinatown, where we ate food being sold by people in small carts. 

There was a lot of excellent food eaten on this trip. 

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But maybe the best thing eaten was the grilled chicken intestine on a stick ('isaw').  By the Boy. Who forced his mother to trade his other options so he could have more. 

That many islands required a lot of schlepping around. In various means of transportation.

Ok. I admit. It was mostly boats.

But I know you. You've only been looking at these pictures waiting to see the wild monkeys. That's ok. I'd be the same.  But first: drag dancers on a beach throwing fire.

 The kids were fascinated by this show. I couldn't drag them off the beach. About a half hour into it, I asked the Critter if she knew that these weren't really ladies, in the makeup, with the bikinis. Her jaw dropped onto the sand. 

Ladies, men or something else - the show was definitely worth watching. 

OK, ok. Now, monkeys:

I made them stop the van so that I could get out and take that picture. My Bride's cousin came out with me. 

I took some pictures of this group of monkeys sitting idly by the roadside. I took a few steps closer and took some more picture. I took a few steps closer again, and brought my camera up. I asked my cousin: "Hey - is this monkey gonna charge if I get too close?"  "I don't know, bro. But if he does, I'm tripping you and running back to the van."

Thanks, cuz.

Eventually, we had to head home. It was a fantastic trip and worth repeating. 

After all, there are still 7,000 islands we haven't seen.