About three years ago a friend of mine was starting the wheels in motion to get a radio station at his college: Indiana University Kokomo. He was hoping an FM license would be possible, but settled for a web radio station for now. Anyhow they got their station set up, loaded in some music for an auto-player, and started recruiting people to do shows. Since my wife was actually a student at the school for a time, she started her own show, and one week I filled in for her. After that, I asked the station manager, the same guy who was responsible for putting the station together in the first place, if I could have a show. This was in February of 2011, and since then I’ve done about 25 shows.

The focus of my show is generally comedy and novelty music, much in the way of Doctor Demento. The goal was always to push it into something with guests and so on, and have it be a little more talky and a little less musicy, as the few times I’ve had someone to co-host with, it’s always been a smoother ride.

For some examples of bits of my show, we’ve had “Some Contestants May Receive…”, an announcer-style reading of items you wouldn’t want to win on a game show, and “consumable of the week,” where a mystery item is provided to me for my consumption and I talk about it for a bit, and follow it up with a song about food in general. I’ve also done brief poetry-reading style bits of “Excuses,” a publication I’ve written off and on for a long time.

So my questions are thus, Ms. Jules: Do I sound potentially useful to you, what do you need someone to do, can it be done from afar, and… uhm… so on.

Please and thank you,
-T.J.

A friend suggested using I2C, but I’m not that smart. Yet.

Link to that post from RasPi here: Pinout for GPIO connectors

In the midwest there’s a tailgating pastime called cornhole. It’s a game where you throw beanbags (cornbags) at a board with a hole in it. Well I’m an electronics geek, so I’m working out how I would build this. So here’s the outline:

The control will be performed using a small single-board computer, the target platform is the Raspberry Pi Model B. This board has the key features of GPIO pins and a network interface. The latter is important because the control of the board is to be via a web application accessible on my smartphone.

The GPIO pins will then interface to a series of CMOS chips that hold the information to be displayed on the board. These chips will drive transistors to generate enough power to drive the board, which will be a series of seven-segment LED displays, which I will construct myself out of discrete LEDs. There are some very large 7-segments out there, but they are very expensive. LEDs cost less than 10 cents each, so a very large digit can be made for just a few dollars.

The timeline for this project anticipates completion some time late next spring or early summer. Since the Raspberry Pi isn’t available yet, I’m mostly in planning stage right now. I have a circuit diagram drawn up, which I will post soon and see if anybody can tell me if I’ve made a grave error in my calculations. Check back for updates, and there’s a link at the top that only shows posts relevant to this project.

-T.J.

Saturday, 2pm: previous week’s show
Saturday, 3pm: new show
Mon-Thurs, 4pm: alternating the previous two weeks’ shows

Listen at http://radiofreekokomo.org

Now here’s the thing. I’d like you to listen. I really would, that would be fabulous. What would be even better is if you like what you hear, that you spread it around a bit. Tell people on Twitter, Facebook, shout it from the rooftops, leaflet-bombing, whatever you have to do. That’s what would mean a lot to me. So give it a listen if you think it sounds like the sort of thing you’d enjoy, and tell your friends (or enemies if it’s that bad) and send me a tweet (@Cantplaypiano), e-mail (radio atzors cantplaypiano.com), or leave a comment here to say hi.

Thanks, have a great week, and enjoy the show.

2:00pm: New previously-recorded show.
3:00pm: Rerun of an old show. (Perhaps the first show? That’d be fun.)

I’ll be busy this Saturday from what I can tell. And that’s the plan.

So here’s the new plan (Didn’t we just go over this? Oh, that’s not how this plan works, gotcha. Continue.)

• On Tuesdays, you’ll get to see the plan for the following Saturday.
• On Wednesdays, you’ll get to hear this little bonus item called Midweek Monologue. This is where I flap my lips in the direction of a microphone for a few minutes and hope that you’ll listen and enjoy.
• On Saturdays, at the prescribed magical time of 2:00pm ET, you’ll hear something. A fully proper show will consist of the 2:00 hour being a pre-recorded show consisting of a number of songs as you’ve come to know and love. The 3:00 hour will consist of a more talky sort of format, with some songs thrown in to break it up. I even plan to have guests. If you’d like to be one, hit me up on Twitter, email, or carrier pigeon.

So I’m going to tinker with the layout of the time block as follows:

2:00pm: New show, all pre-recorded. Mostly the same as what you’ve been hearing, oriented towards music.

3:00pm: We segue into a slightly talkier live show for an hour, with some songs thrown in to break it up. I’m hoping to arrange guests to fill some time, and we’ll just have fun for an hour. It’ll be great.

Upcoming schedule (all times Eastern):

8/27: Reruns. (Edit: I lied the first time. Sorry.)
9/3: New show, 2 hours pre-recorded.
9/10: First show with new format.

So if you’d like to be a guest on the show, you don’t even have to come to Kokomo, that’s how easy we’re going to make it, folks! The best case scenario is if you’ve got access to Skype or Google Voice, either way we can make that happen! Barring these options, if you’ve got a telephone, you can be on my show! You too can be on the air, it’ll be a blast. So if you can clear some time on your busy schedule on a Saturday afternoon and want to take part in my show, shoot me an email at яadio at cantplaypiaиo.com and we can try to make that happen! Or if you’re totally awesome but not available during the show time, I might even make arrangements to pre-record a segment with you and we’ll work it into the show. I’m flexible like that, it’s great.

Professionally, I work in I.T. I like doing this (clearly, otherwise I would have given it up long before now) but periodically I get a pang to work on something more creative. Such as:

• January 1998: Excuses, a weekly newsletter/list style humor publication. I was 12 at the time.
• 2000-2001: Excuses 2000.
• Early 2001: Started writing song parodies. Entered and won grand prize in contest for song/art/poetry contest for Pi Day. (Yes, even the creative pursuits are geeky.)
• 2001-2002: Excuses 3. Took a creative writing class and was member of the club for the school’s literary publication. For some reason never put these two pursuits together. The song parodies were waning by this point. In the interim I’ve written a number of them but never recorded any.
• 2004-2005: Excuses Four.
• 2006: Tried to restart Excuses again, wrote one issue and gave it up.
• 2010: Successfully restarted Excuses again, tried to get into doing some video/podcasting with limited success.
• 2011: Started Wacky on (Wednesday | The Weekend), a comedy radio show on an Internet station in the middle of Indiana. Still doing this to date, and enjoy it. Yes it’s a bit slapdash, but 1. I’m not getting paid, and 2. It adds to the charm. Kind of.

So hey, it’s a work in progress, as always, and I look forward to hopefully being around 10 years from now to be able to make another meaningless quasi-sentimental blog post.

Cheers!
-T.J.