Last week I decided that since the weather’s getting warmer my newest hobby will be biking. I went up to Target in Westchester with my gf this weekend and bought me a shiny new schwinn along with all the cool (admittedly geeky) accessories – helmet, rear view mirror, lock, front and rear lights, pump, etc, etc. The whole shabang. Yesterday I suited up and rode the bike for the first time from my place in the East Village to work in Dumbo, BK. Went off without a hitch. Then I rode back home, in what I now refer to as “The Ride from Hell” Riding up the first half of the Manhattan Bride I hear some grinding gear noises. Then the chain pops off. I put it back on, but it promptly falls back off. Put it on again, falls off. At this point a friendly veteran bridge biker named Dave pulls over to help this distressed newbie. We flip the bike over, turn the pedals, and I notice that the back gears, which are supposed to be tight and flush on the wheel, are now loose and flopping around. Another biker sees the commotion and says, “you’re in luck, I have tools.” He takes one look at the 2 day old bike and says, “oh s**t, you need special tools for that, you’re screwed!”

you can't look much tougher than this

So now I’m on the midde of the Manhattan Bridge with a bike that doesn’t pedal. I managed to roll down the second half of the bridge basically with my legs pointing upward in a V so as not to touch the pedals so the gear doesn’t fall off again. People laughed and pointed. I was traumatized, but at least I could use the hill and I didn’t have to walk it on the bridge. Then came the bikewalk of shame through Chinatown, and up to the East Vil. I saw people riding 30 year old bikes by me without a care in the world as I walked my beautiful 2 day old bike with my shiny new helmet on my head. I walked all the way to the bike shop on 3rd and 1st to get the bike fixed (I wasn’t about to walk it to Grand Central to take a train back to Target in Westchester to exchange it). So now I’m going to prepare a nice email to Schwinn and Target’s customer service to see how they will remedy this situation. If they care at all about their customers they would at least pay for my repair bill. A little kickback for pain, suffering, and embarassment on the bridge would be nice, but I won’t hold my breath. I’ll post their response when I get it.

One day last year I decided it would be a good idea to make a customized music player for my music productions. I didn’t want to use any of those standard players, I didn’t want to have to code html, I just wanted to design a cool interface.

So, I decided Flash would be the best avenue – despite the fact that I didn’t know flash at all. I had seen my roommate design in Flash and I though it would be no problem. My idea was to make an MPC drum machine that will allow you to play the drum machine using your computer keyboard. Also, if you click on each pad with your mouse it will play one of my songs. Seemed like an easy idea at the time, but as a total beginner it was a long development process. This turned out to be a great project to get a good understanding of Flash and have a good time doing it.

Here’s a (very) quick rundown of how I developed it:

Read a bunch of tutorials on Flash design. Started out with a stock picture of an Akai MPC2000 and Photoshopped my logo over theirs. Imported the image to Flash.

Added buttons to each drum pad on the pic. Wrote actionscript that triggers a different drum pad sound on a mouse hover. Assigned each of the drumpads to a keyboard key. Wrote actionscript to trigger a different song for each pad on mouse click. Actionscript for play, stop, volume, MPC displaying the song titles, etc.

And there you have it, no you can build your very own custom flash drum machine/streaming music player! JK, it wasn’t that easy, and I don’t have the time to write about all the development steps here. If anyone is actually interested in learning the ins and outs of this please feel free to drop me a line and I’d be glad to help.

Now have fun with a version of the drum machine below, or play the full sized version at my DJ Chima site homepage. It’s easy to use, just hover over “instructions” to see how. And as with any flash module, you have to click anywhere on the picture in order for it to let you use your keyboard keys to play the drum pads.