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.
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.
Should have heeded the warning
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.
“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 …
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 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 …
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.
A bit more.
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.)
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.
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.
Mission Elapsed Time: 20:00:21:06:42:40
Recently this blog (and my Flickr account) turned 20 years old, forever in Internet years. I went back through it all, retracing digital footprints made on what feels like a different planet. Here are some highlights.
The Terror Tourist
A roughly monthly exploration of places in horror fiction — real or imagined, geographical or psychological — culled from The Heavy Leather Horror Show.
Subscribe to the podcast or the email newsletter or just read through the archives posted here.
The Ampcamper
How I hauled myself, two teens, an 80 lb dog, and a whole load of crap 4000+ miles across six states in twenty days using an electric vehicle. And survived to tell the tale.
