see a puffin eat a fish

I got my spring schedule! Here it is:

I got every class I wanted. I was a little up in the air about what to take because i’m still not sure which direction I want to head with my time here but these are all good choices. The goal this semester is to try to combine more of my classes into a unifying theme. Not necessarily to hit a grand slam (one project – four courses) but to try to get move overlap.

This was done by Yury Gitman, an ITP alum who created the Magic Bike, one of the first projects I saw that got me thinking about ITP as a graduate school option. This heartbeat pillow is very much like our midterm project for pcomp. His is better designed and doesn’t overheat but ours supports bidirectional data transfer. Yury’s pillows beats like a heart and it’s up to a user’s heart to sync up with it. Our plushy listens to your breathing and syncs. So you listen to the plushy and the plushy listens to you.

It’s pretty exciting to have concurrently developed something so similar.

I’m flying to Boston tomorrow, the break is here. We are slated to present first for our Physical Computing project (December 7th) so when I get back we’ll have one week to complete our project. It’s going to be flat out until the end of the semester.

I got a copy of the Spring ‘06 course listing but i’m running around too much to evaluate it. I need to think hard about what I want to do with my time here at ITP and which direction I want to lean towards with my studies. I also want to work with as many people as possible and most importantly, I need to give space and time to nourish my ideas.

Yelena is getting married. She beat me to it. She wants me to perform the ceremony?!

It’s been a slightly less than stellar morale week. I think it’s the dip between my running the marathon and the anticipation of leaving town for the thanksgiving break. It helps to hang out on the floor more so that even if I don’t feel like doing much, everybody else’s collective enthusiasm rubs off on me. I want to say that last week was a quiet week but if I think back, as always, a lot happened.

This past week we were editing our communications lab movie which we were supposed to shoot the week before but actually shot late last week and started editing mid week. It was supposed to be a couple, breaking up, chatting online but the script was completely rewritten. I was in pcomp at the time but was hardly attached to the old script. The new one is a sort of disjointed telephone game played with cell phone. Lots of jump cuts and hilarity. Today is Monday and the whole movie is due tomorrow. We have to do some cleanup editing and still shoot the last scene but Gabe, the film making pro is in our group so we should be fine. He has been very helpful and has a fancy 3 chip camera so our footage looks much nicer than it would if our footage came from the equipment room cameras.

Clay Shirky, my adviser, spoke in front of our class from Red’s Applications on tuesday. It was a great talk. I’ve heard it before online when I found out he was going to be my advisor. Ontology is Overrated. Even though I knew the content of the talk, he was still spectacular to see. It’s a delight to see people so articulate about technology and new media, to cut through all the noise and make a distinct, interesting and enlightening point.

Last thursday, after I punched out from the Q, I decided to sit down and write Red’s M5 bus paper. I was running out of time. I had been holding out for something amazing, the history of garbage, the path of a craigslist advertisement, people who died in accidents along the bus route, but nothing was jumping out as practical or concrete. My rough cut of the paper worked out pretty well, the thesis being that older people who are more likely to ride the bus and are more threatened by technology, they also have stories to tell. Anna marked it up and I should give it another go later this week but i’m glad I got something down. I do have a hard time going back on something I wrote. I can’t tell what’s important and what I wrote just to write. What holds the piece together and what can be discarded.

In physical computing, Alice, Min and I have been building breath collection prototypes. We’ve been holding focus groups (that documentation needs to be posted) to collect breath, settling on pinwheels last week and building more breath collection prototypes this week. We’ve settled on a light box with pinwheel structures on each side. As a participant breathes into the box, lights turn on at different intensities using PWM. The box will have four sides accessible but the pinwheels will only be on two of the sides. Individuals can interact by blowing or just by looking at the lights. Participants can have a conversation, an interaction with breath and lights.

Idea:

When I read, I don’t think about where the sender was physically when they wrote the email. I may think about them as a person, or have a picture of them in my head from some memorable time we spent together, but I don’t think of them sitting in a computer lab, a bedroom, a coffee shop and writing email. I may be the exception.

I think something may be gained from bringing this data into the equation. Finer granularity would be preferable but as an initial first cut, the IP address of an individual could be converted into a physical map of their location. It could be another header, e.g.

From:
To:
Subject:
Body:
Attachments:
Map of Physical Location:

I think it would add an interesting dynamic to email and push email in the direction of networked objects.

Something to consider: Technically IP data may be misleading, especially for mobile devices.