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March 27, 2007
Security perverts
An open letter to depraved male travelers who are titillated by security procedures at airports:
Sirs, I know you travel a lot. Travel is tough. Long days and nights away from your significant other. This is understood and I empathize. But this does not give you the right to turn the airport security checkpoint into a private fantasy.
Here are some tips:
- Partial disrobing in proximity to a woman doing the same does not constitute foreplay.
- The woman in front of you definitely does not find it funny or novel when you snicker "Any more clothes into the bin and this would be R rated!"
- Barefoot does not mean nude.
- There is nothing you could possibly want to see going on behind that curtain there. Just move on.
- A blouse is not an overgarment so settle down there, Sparky.
- You may not choose who gives you a patdown. Also, there is no patdown with release.
If you absolutely need your fix of TSA-inspired turn-on, I recommend the Internet. I am quite certain there is a niche fetish forum devoted to this sort of thing.
Thank you for your understanding.
Technorati Tags: airport, security, fetish
Posted at 9:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | Topic: Travel
March 26, 2007
The joy of spreadsheets
I’m really liking Google Spreadsheets.
Fact is, I’ve never had much use for spreadsheets, which is why I’m hopelessly lost in pivot tables and anything more complex than a sum formula. (My wife, by way of contrast, can make a spreadsheet compile to solve prove Fermat’s Theorem, I am quite sure.) Still, I have always loved spreadsheets’ boxy structure. I keep lots of data in spreadsheets, but it doesn’t do anything. Just sits there. Tabularly.
But a shared online spreadsheet is a different beast altogether. I have a variety of home-related data in gSpread (sounds dirty, no?) so my wife and I can reference the same stuff. Two co-workers of mine and I keep track of daily You Don’t Know Jack scores in a shared sheet. (By year’s end — assuming Google adds charts to the tool — the YDKJ score log should be an interesting set of data to mine.)
This weekend my college pals and I conducted our annual fantasy baseball draft. It is an excuse to get together in person for much hazing and idiocy, but this year gSpread made it much more efficient. Most of us had laptops open with a Excel sheet imported into Google. One person updated the main player list, another the By Pick list, and another the By Team list. We all saw everything instantly, editing the same tables simultaneously. As did a friend at home who could not make it to Chicago. A perfect use for shared data.
But the best use by far is what I call two-player, slow-motion Tetris. Actually it is a kind of a merger of Tetris and checkers or Connect Four. Each player (or collaborator in gSpread parlance) clicks on cell that randomly selects a piece (=randbetween(1,7)) then places that piece in whatever rotation desired. The goal is to clear a line as in normal Tetris but also to block someone else from doing so. Letters in the pieces let players know which pieces are theirs — useful since the game takes weeks to play out. Fun, but dorky. No, fun because dorky. Who’s in?
Tags: google, spreadsheets
Posted at 9:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | Topic: Web
March 25, 2007
Italy calling
In 2003, my father and brother and I travelled to Barile, Italy, birthplace of my great-grandparents and the town they emigrated to the USA from 100 years before. The trip marked the beginning of my foray in blogging (on a private family site). It is also the prologue to what promises to be an amazing return trip this summer.
For years my family discussed our great-grandparents, Giuseppe Tolve and Grazia Botte, who had come to America. We knew little because they both died relatively young after having a bunch of children (one of whom was my grandfather), so there was no one with first-hand knowledge to ask about their roots. We came to believe that my great-grandfather himself was an orphan and that he was from a small town in southern Italy called Barile. My grandfather’s and parent’s generation was far more interested in the American dream than in mining the past — especially a past in rural, poverty-stricken southern Italy. But my siblings and cousins were curious and adamant, and as the older generation left us, my father also realized the family history that was slowly slipping away.
So we went back. And what we learned was life-changing. If you’re interested in the details, e-mail me and I will point you to the private site with a dual travelogue from my father and I. Suffice to say that many family myths were debunked, much new information was uncovered, new family we didn’t know we had were found, and a love affair with the region of Basilicata was begun. Here’s an excerpt:
Basically the rest of the day became a person-by-person, cafe-by-cafe hunt for Roberto’s cousin Anita Di Tolve. He had never met her, but he knew she lived there and that her family owned a gelateria. It was like a scavenger hunt. We’d go from place to place gathering new information. At each place word of our presence had preceded us. “Oh, Di Tolve! Yes, yes, we heard you were here.”
Finally we found her. She was in her late 70’s and wearing all black because her husband passed away last year. Once she figured out what was happening she invited all seven of us into her tiny cave-like home and started balling. It was extremely emotional. She insisted that we let her take us to her wine cave (there’s a much a longer story about why most Barilesi have caves), the local cemetery, and to cook us dinner that night. We let her do all of the above. She had to put on black stockings before we went out because if the fellow townspeople saw her without them there would be gossip. She was, after all, a recent widow.
In the cave — a good 25 degrees cooler — we sipped homemade spumante that her husband had bottled five years ago. At the cemetery we searched the above-ground tombs just like we searched the yellowing church records for evidence of Tolve, Botte, Urbano, Paternoster, and Schiro families. Anita could not get in to her father’s tomb because she and her sister were having a dispute and her sister had changed the lock. Typical Italian family bickering.
About a year ago I got an e-mail from a Michele Brucoli, part of the external communications department of the regional government of Basilicata. He had come across my infrequent postings on Barile and was interested in learning more about my perspective on his region as a descendant. We’ve stayed in touch over the past year and he’s sent me plenty of information. Basilicata is eager to promote tourism and investment and, independent of Michele, I’ve long supported this. Basilicata could easily be the next Tuscany or Amalfi Coast. The region boasts two separate coast lines (one on the Tyrrhenian Sea and one on the Ionian Sea), mountains, and dense forests. Like Sicily and Cyprus, Basilicata was a waypoint for whatever conquering empires were traversing the Mediterranean so there’s a diverse ethnic and cultural fabric that you don’t often find in Roman northern Italy. In short, I agree wholeheartedly with Michele that the region is ripe for discovery.
Recently Michele mentioned that the city government of Barile had discovered my blog, including the private diary from 2003, and that they were preparing to give me an award and a “day of celebration” this summer, if I could return. I was floored. I don’t exactly know what the award is, but I assume it has something to do with promoting the Lucani nel Mondo (or people of Basilicatan descent — also known as Lucanians — who live outside of the region). So, it looks like my family is ready to head back with me. I’m excited. Details are somewhat scarce right now, but it is obviously an experience I could not pass up. An award for being intersted in my roots! Hard to believe, really. I may even bring my five-year-old son.
As a sidenote, if you live in or near Chicago and want to get a taste of Basilicata there is actually a restaurant on the north side called Anna Maria Pasteria run by two sisters from Ripacandida, a small town near Barile in Potenza. The menu itself is fairly broadly Italian, but the place feels like the rustic kitchens of Basilicata, and if you ask Anna or Maria specifically they will cook you up real local dishes. Recently, as my father, uncle, cousin and I were leaving from dinner there, I mentioned my name to Anna. She grew up with my grandparents and extended family on the south side and seemingly knew more about them than we did. It is a small world when you are from Basilicata.
Tags: barile, genealogy, italy
Posted at 12:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (5) | Topic: Italy | Topic: Return to Barile
March 23, 2007
Go Vandy!
This doesn’t happen very often.
Update: But this does. Ouch.
Tags: basketball, ncaa, sweetsixteen, vanderbilt
Posted at 5:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Topic: Fun
March 21, 2007
Velcro tie
So I’m at Starbucks, behind a cop waiting for his double mocha-frappa-hoohaa. His tie is a little askew so the baristas, who clearly know him, start giving him a hard time about it, saying it looks like a clip-on, ha ha ha. Schoolyard-bullying (of a man with a loaded gun). He goes along with it and then yanks it off completely. Velcro! Oh then the name-calling really begins.
And then he explains that the last thing a cop wants around his neck is a built-in noose.
Duh. Laughing stopped.
You gotta think this was learned the hard way after some cop-on-bad-guy fracas, somewhere.
Apologies to ZZ Top.
Posted at 2:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Topic: Notes
March 20, 2007
Heading for a black hole
This is how things get done in Hollywood, so why not for the new Coudal film 72°?
“It’s always the sign of a good meeting when you decide to go grab a quick drink right after work and you wind up leaving the neighborhood bar at around 8:00.”My god, what have we done?
Posted at 6:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | Topic: Fun
A group is its own worst enemy
Lots of people and companies want to know how to put together a great online community. Or scale an existing one way up. Not as many people consider what happens when a community goes bad. This was the topic of a great presentation by Chris Tolles at SXSW called When Communities Attack.
Here are a few points I found interesting.
The tone in discussion forums gets more friendly if posts are geotagged. The rationale, while not proven, is that a degree of anonymity is lost this way and that no one wants to associate a shameful post with their vicinity (or perhaps even suffer being located).
Lots of people have “conversations” with themselves in online communities using alternate screen names to establish credibility.
The word for the non-machine-readable letter grid that is often required for users to input to validate themselves is called a “captcha”. Didn’t know that.
Registration often works against decorum by keeping out good posters who prefer anonymity and by encouraging flamers since registration implies that this community has something good going on inside of it.
I’ve been noodling on this question from a different panel, called Bridging the Online Cultural Divide, since Austin:
Do social networks conjoin communities — i.e., technology facilitates connection where it could not be accomplished before — or does it merely create closed communities by allowing like-minded folks to cohere and separate from the ‘others’? Put another way, is a social network inherently based on segregation or inclusion?
Post title from this great paper by Clay Shirky.
That’s it for recaps of SXSW. Back to the other stuff …
Tags: community, dialogue, socialnetworking
Posted at 12:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Topic: Notes
March 17, 2007
Hack the planet: Spore and Worldchanging
The two most powerful presentations I saw at South by Southwest concerned vastly different topics — gaming and environmentalism — but their essence was the same. How to engineer a planet?
The first was Will Wright’s mile-a-minute discussion of interactive narrative and demo of the upcoming Spore (update: video) .Then, later that day was Alex Steffen’s captivating Worldchanging exploration of living for a sustainable future (udpate: podcast).
Spore of course is really Wright’s “SimUniverse,” starting you off in the protoplasmic goop as a unicellular creature in search of not dying and concluding, if evolution is kind, with you at the helm of a stable, interstellar civilization. Spore is, in short, a massive modeling tool for the complex systems that make up a world. It looks like a hell of a lot of fun.
Steffen’s presentation was about modeling a future world too, though in this case it is the one we’re currently living on. Where An Inconvenient Truth highlighted the problem, Steffen’s site, book, and organization work to demonstrate solutions. He is a powerful speaker. The audience was as spellbound as it was during the Spore demo and probably for the same reason: waiting raptly to find out how this particular world was going to turn out.
Both the game and the strategy for a sustainable Earth have to do with little things that have big consequences. In Spore this might be giving your creature asymmetrical appendages, something which may serve you well when foraging in nooks and crannies but which might turn out to be a liability in hand-to-hand combat or when piloting a spaceship. In Worldchanging, it might be car-sharing, for people who share a vehicle tend to be more efficient drivers since they have to plan their excursions. Both talks were essentially about sliding the scale on civilization and seeing what happens, what Steven Johnson calls The Long Zoom. (His recent book, The Ghost Map, focuses on the interplay of scale between the cholera microorganism and the urban patterns of 19th century London.)
Wright calls interactive narrative of this sort “filling in possibility space”. There’s always structure and constraint, but an element of free will allows for gameplay. You might argue the same goes for environmentalism. Natural resources, physics, and the human imagination are our constraints. We must merely fill in the possibility space, change the narrative for a happier ending.
Wright says that “the process of playing the game is the process of making assets for the game.” You could say the same thing about SimCity too, of course, but you could also say that about life. If life is a game — and in non-trivial ways, it is: a set of goal-directed actions to maximize returns — then we’ve got a rather tidy analogy on our hands. You don’t live in a static world; you make the world as you live.
Consider these quotes:
“One must dematerialize the extraneous stuff that gets in the way of the experiences we want.”
“Compact living in well-designed cities dematerializes transportation and infrastructure allowing access by proximity.”
“Many things are only garbage when they are in the wrong place.”
All from Steffen, all about eco-friendly living. But they’re absolutely relevant to Spore. Which isn’t to say that Spore is an in-your-face green manifesto. It isn’t. You might create a perfectly sustainable planet with oceans of methane. But in doing so you’ve foreclosed many possibility spaces suitable to human beings. Fun in a game, not so fun for carbon-based lifeforms.
Some other bits I found interesting in the Worldchanging session:
Car-sharing is an old idea (it just sounds 1970’s) made useful only through recent mapping and GPS technologies. ZipCar and iGo are successful because technology has finally made it easy for people to find a car when they need one.
Steffen asked how many in the audience owned power drills. Most hands went up. (This was a geekfest after all.) He then told us that the average power drill gets used for six to twenty minutes in its entire life — an epitome of unsustainable waste. What we want is the hole not the drill.
Measuring things changes the way you use them. The example he gave came from the UK where a test group had their energy meters moved inside the house. This act by itself reduced power consumption. When you see the meter you think about the meter and when you think about it you turn the lights off.
Why can’t we separate practical objects from objects that mean something to us? Your childhood teddy bear means something to you emotionally, where your washing machine most likely doesn’t. What if most practical objects were leased rather than owned? The effect would be greener production. If a cell phone manufacturer had to take the phone back at the end of its useful life the company would be far more likely to make it easy to recycle. (Steffen called computers — which nearly everyone in the audience had on their lap — an “environmental nightmare” because of their unrecyclability.)
It was interesting to me that some of the technologies found in the third world are the greenest: evaporative refrigeration, fog-catchers, rainwater recyclers, wired infrastructure leapfrogging.
The final bit of advice was to “green your geek.” Don’t stay up at night worrying about paper versus plastic. Rather focus on whatever you are really into (i.e., “your geek”) and try to change just that. Simple, potentially powerful.
In the end these two sessions about Spore and Worldchanging kinda merged in my head. To create a sustainable world you have to imagine what you want, then build it. Spore gives us a simulator; Worldchanging gives us an imperative.
Reminds me of the History Channel City of the Future design challenge. Much more on this soon!
As a sidenote, it’s been remarked that the panel-heavy structure of South by Southwest doesn’t allow for sustained exploration of an idea. I’m still a fan of the conversational tone of the panels, but in looking back on the week that was I admit that the three most powerful sessions I attended had a single speaker.
Tags: environment, sustainable, sim, spore, worldchanging
Posted at 2:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | Topic: Earth | Topic: Virtual Worlds
Spring dust-off
Except it isn’t spring in these parts for about two more months.
For those of you who follow Ascent Stage in a feed reader, I have changed the blended feed for the main posts and marginalia to http://feeds.feedburner.com/AscentStage. This feed appends [del.icio.us] to all Marginalia links to ease the distress of clicking on a link only to learn it is merely a link and not a meaty post. You know who you are. The old feed should still work properly. And if you’re not subscribing to the blended feed, why not? By the way, the margin links are not ads. They’re other places in the tubosphere that I find interesting.
MediaLoom, that dinosaur project that I’m still rather fond of, has been moved into the Ascent Stage empire. Nostalgic for Macromedia Director and platform incompatibility? Click here!
Many busted links fixed. Not all, certainly. But many.
That is all.
Posted at 10:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Topic: Housekeeping
March 15, 2007
Worldbits
Some thought-bombs from SXSW. Sorry not to properly attribute quotes. Was typing too fast to look up. If not in quotes, it is just my observation and, thus, suspect.
- “Closed formats suck!” [applause] — Raph Koster, referring to Second Life and prims.
- People are pretty much salivating for a Google Earth-powered virtual world.
- “I want to see high-detail interiors.” — referring to the next step in Google Earth’s evolution.
- DIY data visualization sites like Many Eyes and Swivel could create lots of valuable overlays for Google Earth.
- John Tolva: “page-based vs. spatial internet” vs. Ben Cerveny: “document-based computing vs. relationship-based computing”.
- Justin Hall’s Passively Multiplayer Online Gaming.
- “Why do all the robots ‘live’ in Japan? Because the Japanese have an animist tradition and they have no problem that a non-living thing could be talking to them.”
- “Why is it that as soon as we get the ability to do anything we want in a virtual world that we immediately try to recreate ‘Menlo Park’? Painting sought a new direction when photography made realism easy.’ Why can’t we do that with virtual worlds?” This is one way of stating the oft-heard praise of the playful Wii versus the realist firepower of the PS3. Why must virtual worlds be photorealistic?
- “Online consumers are essentially non-player characters because their actions are so constrained.” LOVE that.
- Avatar psychology (from an audience response):
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
— Walt Whitman, Song of Myself - “What is the role of the non-player character in a non-gaming world?” Um, how about a tour guide?
- You do know that Flickr, archetypal Web 2.0 site that it is, started as a game, right? The .gne extension you sometimes saw at Flickr stands for Game Neverending.
- Jamais Cascio asked: “Where is the 3D Wikipedia?” Answer: “I think that might presuppose a taxonomy of everything in the world and that might be, you know, a challenge.”
- “VRML wasn’t so useful for VR. It was too heavy. Online 3D spaces pull much more heavily from games. In the end, the commercial formats ended up being the good ones.” — Raph Koster
- “The number one form of user-created content is the screenshot.” — Raph Koster
- Word: “toyetic” — the toy-like enjoyability of something (Sketchup was the example).
- Word: “extimate” — opposite of intimate, but not the same as distant, referring to avatars — Jamais Cascio
- “It is far easier to make a Mii avatar than an SL avatar, ergo, there will be more Mii avatars. It is just that simple.” — Raph Koster
- “Humans actually relate to iconified individuals better than photorealistic individuals. 3D does not have to be photoreal.” — Raph Koster
- “We need some aesthetic honesty here. Mashups suck.” — Bruce Sterling
- Bruce Sterling describes the new global order, channeling Yochai Benkler:
- First World - the global market
- Second World - all forms of governance (local, regional, national)
- Third World - socially-motivated, commons-based peer production (e.g. Craigslist, Wikipedia)
- Fourth World - disorder (the largest and fastest-growing)
Tags: conferences, virtualworld, sxsw, web2.0
Posted at 1:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | Topic: Virtual Worlds
Universal format
So, I spent much of my time focusing on spatial tech, 3D worlds, metaversy stuff this SXSW season. There were so many good observations. I’ll sprinkle some in series a posts.
In the green room before our panel I was noting to Ben Batstone-Cunningham how odd it was that teens could not take their friend lists with them when they turn 18 and “graduate” from the teen grid to the main grid on Second Life. As a former Lindener, he said that this was entirely by design for security reasons (the two grids having no messaging interconnects) but that you could in fact bring your inventory with you to the new grid. But he also asked rather pointedly, which would you rather take, your list of friends or your actual things?
That’s not being crass. It is a statement about the non-techncial nature of people networks, the foundation of the success of any social world. You can’t export a personal relationship. Or, rather, you don’t need to. It is a universal format. It persists across platforms. Your app may facilitate the creation and maintenance of such relationships, but the relationships themselves move smoothly between any world. Watch as the Twittersphere shrinks post-SXSW. But the relationships — at least some of them — will persist.
There was much talk at SXSW about OpenID. When will x application support OpenID? So people are of course thinking about identity across worlds and this will help relationship networks bridge changing technologies.
But it does come back to people. Just like blogs, podcasts, and just about anything we seem to care about. This should be the focus first. Then technology.
Tags: socialnetworking
Posted at 6:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Topic: Virtual Worlds
March 14, 2007
Optimism
Kudos to Boingo for treating my request to not be signed up for a monthly charge not as a problem, but an opportunity. No, no. I am an Unlimited Upsell! Consider the possibilities for this hapless day user!
The browser window itself was called Click Capture. At Boingo, they are all about giving it to you straight. Straight somewhere.
Posted at 8:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Topic: Notes
Texas nerdquake
A great last few days here in Austin. SXSWi has just wrapped up and I’ve got a bucket of notes, unvisited links, and ideas to sort through. Which is exactly the way I like it. Ingest complete, begin digest. Look forward to a few excreted posts in the coming days.
A few morsels.
Twitter, oh my goodness Twitter, was the darling of the festival. Literally everyone was using it to catch up with one another or just buzz softly in the great hive mind. There were screens set up in public areas that provided a steady flow of tweets. It definitely took the place of the room-by-room IRC channels from previous years. In a way, Twitter is just really slow IRC. But you can already see where this is going. Eric Rice is right when he says that a fest like SXSW is perfect for Twitter (especially given the overloaded WiFi) but that the long-term usefulness of such a dump of minutiae may be questionable.
There was a lot about virtual worlds this year — more about that soon — but it wasn’t completely dominated by Second Life, which is good. There was a lot of buzz about an impending Google metaverse (what with the Earth renderer, Sketchup, and their purchase of Adscape Media). Of course last week’s announcement of Sony’s PS3 Home got a lot of people talking, mostly skeptically. And the Wii is simply adored.
Hardware DIY was big, especially given the deification of Phil Torrone for his Frogger hijinks on 6th Street last year. He and Limor Fried provided one of the keynotes. The Open Source Hardware movement is very interesting indeed. Fried demonstrated an illegal cell phone jammer to a room full of astonished geeks. I gotta get me one of them.
Last year’s darling — tagging — was scarcely heard from this year. Tag: tired.
As always the best part of SXSW is what happens away from the convention center. This year’s dorkbot meetup was especially well-done. You simply can’t beat drinking free beer to the sound of humming tesla coils. Though the conference grew in size by almost 80% the parties didn’t seem any more crowded than usual.
Best way to make a friend at SXSWi: pull a power strip out of your bag.
Overall, wonderful. I knew more people this year, but met fewer. I’d prefer to meet more, but that’s the dark side of an expanding social network I suppose. My only complaint is that the size of the fest is such now that they’ve had to expand into other, very hard-to-reach areas of the convention center. It made for long slogs from panel-to-panel and also cut down on the mingling.
Special thanks to my panelists, by the way. A great discussion.Tags: conferences, sxsw
Posted at 8:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Topic: Notes
March 11, 2007
Died and gone to heaven at SXSW
Been wanting to do that since last year.
See also the view from above.
More of heaven.
Posted at 8:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Topic: I Like
March 10, 2007
“Okay, I’m a little bummed. I didn’t learn anything.”
Best blog comment on my panel at SXSW this morning, above.
A good time and great discussion. Diverse panel, mosty sober audience (and panelists). Crappy interweb in the room though. Not sure it streamed into SL. Anyone know?
A few more thoughts here:
Note: lots of smart people at SXSW. Lots of good insights. Proficiency using microphones: not so much.
The truth hurts, don’t it?
Transcript (ish) on 3pointD here. More soon …
Tags: conferences, sxsw
Posted at 5:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | Topic: Virtual Worlds
March 8, 2007
Digging in the virtual sands
It seems like just yesterday that the Eternal Egypt website debuted. In fact it has been over three years. Image content has steadily been added since launch, but the most popular experience on the site remains the Virtual Environments, 3D recreations of important places in Egyptian history. On the website these environments are panoramic slices of fully-modelled locales. In 2004 there was no good way to put a 3D world into a browser (still isn’t, come to that) so we rendered off static QTVR’s from dozens of vantage points. Compelling, but clearly a step down from the actual, navigable models.
Ah, but there’s more to that story. The Eternal Egypt Kiosk was developed as a freestanding unit that displays the full environments, arcade game-style. These kiosks have been donated to museums around the world and are quite a hit, especially as Egyptomania has resurged of late.
Here’s the latest list of museums that have a kiosk out for visitors. Coming soon to a town near you! [Embedded version removed ‘cause it was choking Safari and IE.]
Here are some screenshots from the three environments: the Tomb of Tutankhamun, the Great Pyramids and Sphinx, and Luxor Temple.
With a joystick and a few buttons you move about the world learning as you go with the help of text and image overlays. It’s a lot like a MMORPG, without the MM or the G. And that’s the thing, the kiosk is great fun, but it is utterly devoid of others. Like you’re the last archaeologist living. Gee, if only someone were creating a truly collaborative cultural heritage MMO …
Posted at 6:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Topic: Egypt | Topic: Virtual Worlds
SXSW Screenburn panels in Second Life
The good folks at Electric Sheep will be streaming the SXSW Screenburn track of panels onto Sheep Island starting on Saturday. If you can’t join us in Austin, how about visiting there? Who knows if the kinks will be worked out by Saturday morning for the first panel (mine), but we’ll be in there if all’s well. Nothing like sniping at panelists from the metaverse.
Sheep Island this-a-way.
Tags: secondlife, sxsw
Posted at 8:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Topic: Virtual Worlds
March 7, 2007
Dude, where's my car?
Some people misplace their car keys. I misplace my car. Often. See, I don’t drive very much, commuting to work by train as I do. And I park on the semi-anonymously gridded streets of Chicago. Add to that the frequent dustings and dumpings of snow and loaning it to friends in the neighborhood and it can be damn hard to find.
Enter Twitter. I’ve been wanting to do something with this much-buzzed, nanoblogging tool, but I really didn’t think my daily minutiae interesting enough to submit. (And I still don’t.) Hell, this blog is boring enough.
But as a mini-blog of my car’s location, it is absolutely perfect. I give you …
Don’t steal my car please. Oh, and someone add geotagging to Twitter. That’d be nirvana. (Update: thank you very much.)
Tags: car
Posted at 7:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Topic: Notes
Shudder
Yesterday I watched two extremely disturbing movies, Open Water 2: Adrift and Jesus Camp. One was infinitely more troubling than the other.
Open Water 2 is a sequel only in that it uses the same premise as the first which is simply and completely this: people stranded in the water at sea. Horrible, of course, but this one tries to up the ante by plopping the bobbing humans into the drink right next to a yacht that they cannot climb back onto. Whoops, forgot to put the ladder down! Panic ensues. People die. But wait there’s more. Did I mention that there is a baby who’s been left on board the boat? And a monitor on deck that faithfully transmits her hungry, neglected wailing to the stranded floaters (including her parents) boatside? Sound awful? It is. Most movies of this ilk ask for a generous suspension of disbelief, but Open Water 2’s premise manages to be completely unbelievable yet still disturbing. I don’t recommend this movie if you are a poor swimmer, afraid of the water or being alone, a parent, or if you’ve ever been a child.
But the stomach-churn caused by Adrift pales in comparison to Jesus Camp, last year’s documentary about an evangelical summer camp for young Christians. I actually had to turn away a few times. Simply couldn’t watch as little kids trembled and cried and threw themselves to the ground for God. The adult organizers of this camp are truly scary as they prompt the kids into ever more ridiculous shows of their faith. The implicit — and a few times stated — impulse is that if the Muslim world is creating armies of mindless devotees in madrasas then Christianity best do it too. What’s so troubling is how mature these little kids act. Like they are reading from a script. There’s absolutely no shred of free-thinking or even childishness. And that’s the great shame: to be raised in an environment of such unquestioning dogma that the wonder and curiosity of childhood is not even an option.
I’d rather be the kid trapped on the boat, frankly.
Tags: evangelical, drowning
Posted at 1:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | Topic: Movies
March 6, 2007
Ghana@50
Today, the nation of Ghana and its sizable diaspora celebrate fifty years of independence from colonial rule.
My family, while not Ghanaian, feels a special affinity for the country. About six years ago, we first met Margaret Kumi, an experienced nanny looking for a new family. In short order she was part of ours, and we part of hers. She introduced us to the Twi language, Ghanaian foods, authentic kente cloth and a world much beyond our own. Margaret is no longer our nanny. She’s more like a grandnanny, a Poppins-esque treat for the kids.
Seems like just yesterday I was getting emotional for a country I’d never been to as they marched further into the World Cup than anyone thought.
And mark your calendar Chicagoans. Ghanafest 2007 is right around the corner.
Tags: ghana
Posted at 7:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Topic: Notes
March 5, 2007
Shadows of ice
All that is solid melts into air.
Posted at 1:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Topic: I Like
March 1, 2007
Paleocomputing
Anybody out there sitting on vintage computing hardware circa 1972? (If so, why?)
Coudal Partners is creating a great short film (for which I am an Executive Producer) and they need some help for their set. We have a few options, but could use some more.
Not familiar with Coudal’s film work? Well, the Copy Goes Here.
Tags: 1972, coudal, film, computing, vintage
Posted at 6:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Topic: Science/Tech
