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I want to make a tongue-in-cheek commentary on President Yudof's yearly salary, which is 540,000 a year (while President Obama makes 400,000).
I got a sound chip from a greeting card that plays the song "Taking Care of Business," the meaning of which is that Yudof treats the UC system like a business, raising student fees by 15 percent instead of cutting administrative salaries or cutting back on construction. It activates every time someone opens the cookie jar. I chose the cookie jar because of the saying of "having one's hand in the cookie jar." In my opinion Yudof is taking too many cookies.
The project is metaphorical, the technology of the speaker serving image and the image serving language, so really, it's an old-fashioned sort of project. The metaphor of "taking care of business" ceases to be a metaphor, while the act of having one's hand in the cookie jar becomes a metaphor in the act itself. The cookie jar is meant to have a very kitschy quality, Yudof looking rosy cheeked and benevolent like he knows what's best for everyone. The project was largely inspired by a New York Times interview with Yudof: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/27/magazine/27fob-q4-t.html?_r=2He sounded incredibly cavalier, and made more jokes than he answered questions. I imagine that he hums "taking care of business" confidently to himself while making decisions that affect the more than 220,000 students in the UC system, and giving a 9 million dollar raise to administration. Of course, the issue of funding is very difficult, and there is no way to make everyone happy. But I think the UC system should have a more involved leader.
To do thisproject, I got a light sensor, and activated the sound depending of if there was enough light past a threshold of 100 coming from the analog input. I used a 47k resistor for maximum range. I took out the batteries of the sound card so that arduino powered it. I tried it with the batteries in, but I couldn't get it to stop playing. I decided to use the threshold instead of a transistor because it didn't work (I thought I might have put it in backwards, but it didn't work facing either direction). This is the code that I finally madeused:
int sensorPin = 2; // this is for the light sensor input
