Archive for the ‘Outside’ Category
Baby Bears
We stayed in Custer national park for a few days where you hang out with wild goats, sheep, buffalo, deer and the like. It’s spectacular. Here’s a short video of baby bears in a pen acting cute.
On the Road
Anna and I are driving cross country, moving west from Boston to Seattle, seeing how everyone else lives. We’re in South Dakota now, having passed through a number of the smaller states (they get bigger and bigger as we move west). We only have the massive ones left and are going to take our time passing through those. This is my first trip where I have heavily used mobile applications and have actually found them useful. Makes me yearn for a mobile device with a full keyboard so I can use the applications more easily.
I’ve been using Opera Mini to look stuff up, Wikipedia to get historical information on the cities we pass through, Zurfur to stay in touch with my friends through Flickr, Google Local and Yahoo! Go to get around, Gmail Mobile to check my mail and Shozu to take photos. I have an old version of ZoneTag on my phone but once I upgrade to the newer one i’ll be using that too. The use of these applications isn’t gimmicky, i’m actually finding them very useful, sometimes even indispensable throughout our adventures.
As I come to depend on them it’s more irritating when they don’t work, like when I asked Google Local for a parking garage in Chicago and it came up with a nail salon in Providence. But I love the incredibly fast mobile tile maps that Google Local Mobile provides. I also like the individual approach of separate apps for mail/maps/etc from Google versus the one monolithic app approach of Yahoo! Go. Makes it hard to get things done. On the other hand Anna checks her Yahoo! mail with Yahoo! Go so it’s been useful in that way.
More updates later. Trip photos are on my Flickr feed.
For the Genius Bar
What Anna’s computer looks like when it’s broken:
Thesis Week
It’s thesis week here at ITP. Graduation, the show and thesis presentation all compressed into a two weeks. Last year I was just a spectator, this year it’s on. My thesis class is presenting last, this friday evening, which gives me plenty of time to get nervous and rehash my presentation in my head. I have a feeling it’s going to change a couple of times as I watch other people up there and see what they are doing right. This is the last time we’re going to be together as a class, doing it up at ITP. A little sad. But the community is tight and there’s a lot going on this summer. There’s a Mobile BarCamp, a bunch of conferences and i’m going to Seattle for the summer with a new digital camera. Driving cross country along the way, not bad.
This weekend I was back in Boston, helping Anna pack up her apartment. Our marriage was saved by renting a storage space in Cambridge. I can’t stop talking about how awesome it is. We no longer have to decide what to keep and what to throw out, whether to rent a van to drive our crap to Maine thus making it inaccessible without a four hour drive, what we should put in my parents’ basement, all that fun stuff. We can just shove and look the other way. We need to gussy up our storage space a little, maybe put in a Warrant poster or something.
More Vonnegut
I’ve been in the 3d labs all day trying to get two televisions to talk to each other in Second Life. Idiot box(ing)? Who knows. Here’s a Vonnegut short story, 2BR02B, being read on the Time Traveler Show. Enjoy.
