I went to a rave last night (Saturday), absolutely incredible. The beats were hard and fun, the people were dancing, I was throwing my body around like a rag doll. It lasted from 10-5:15, it was all ages, and it was free. Can it get any better than that? They called it Free Love and I think the love was in the house last night. People were down. It was all about music, dancing and getting together with people. I didn't do much talking or such, but I'm a quiet type normally. One cool thing is that this happens every week at a reasonable price. It's also pretty cool that there's a party every day of the week in Seattle and five on weekends. You can find a nice list at NW Tekno.

I think that one cool thing that I saw was an application of my law of electronics. Jav's Law of Electronics is:
The addition of blinking leds can make up for lack of functionality in any electronics circuit.
At a rave, this is especially true, but a corralary can be made:
The addition of colorful blinking leds can turn bland humid dark greenish room into a happening rave scene.
Another corralary would be:
A green laser controlled by a microchip and a disco ball can turn a nearly pitch black room into a dance floor.
My law of electronics is a hint to developers and a harsh look into the reality of product development. A modem has the functionality of sending data over a phone line. A hub has the functionality of sending data over a network cable. These items would do their function without blinking leds. But leds allow for debugging of erroneous situations. If a cord is broken, the lack of light will tell a person this. But hubs and modems are not all that sophisticated. The technology has been around the consumer market for 20 years. Back in the day they lacked serious high bandwidth functionality, but many made up for it by adding leds to tell the user that data is being transferred. In every program there is functionality and then there is blinking lights. Where the functionality will not do it, they make up for with blinking lights. An engineer will obviously be outraged by the above, pointing out that the functionality is key. Without the functionality, the product is nothing. But the lights give the user a positive reinforcement even without functionality. It cannot make up for complete lack of functionality, but certainly 50%. So sitzen sie zuruck und sehen aus die Blinkenlights.

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Above is the latest Hack Mars development as of the writing of this page. I got inspired to do something that I was afraid of doing a few days ago. If you don't know much about me, you know that I have two states which I switch between every two weeks: productive and slump. I just started productive today. I only worked 4 hours today, but I got a second wind at 10 PM and worked on the one thing done in the picture and finished it at 5 AM. 7 hours plus 4 hours is good. Tomorrow will be even better. W00!

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