The odd cloud formation in the top photo are mammatus clouds, by the way.

So Christin and I travelled through dark and drizzle to the Eyebeam "Mixer: Version" party out in Chelsea last Saturday. Britta and Rebecca had invited us to come check out the public installation of their excellent Windowfarms project, a take on DIY urban gardening. Photo below.

A handful of other projects were installed at Eyebeam for the event. We played a quick round of David Jimison's Mad Libs+karaoke thing (we needed more alcohol, honestly) and after doing a round of meet-and-greet with the (actually surprisingly small) contingency of former ITPers we settled in for a round of the very well put-together World Series of [You] 'Tubing project. Check out the link for the details, but quickly: A player goes to a kiosk and picks out five of their favorite funny/absurd YouTube videos. Mind were mostly along the lines of hamsters having sex and cats acting weird. I know what I like. And then you go up onstage and "play" your videos alongside someone else's video choice. And the audience decides who has the better video by pointing with green laser pointers. Hamster sex video? A winner! Cat swatting at a hammer? A loser. I lost. Overall. So my YouTube skills must be weak. But. Very fun game. Very nicely put together.

The pic at the top of this post (and the one below) are of Hans-Christoph Steiner's hacked iPod musical performance project. Briefly: You pick an instrument. Each has an iPod stuck to it with custom sound-generating software that you kind of "scratch" (DJ-style) by touching the scroll interface on the iPod. I fiddled with the drums which apparently worked by pushing the four buttons above the wheel (on a third-gen iPod) — but it had crashed or something and I couldn't seem to get it to work.

Now. I'm not trying to get on Hans' case — I liked the project. It looked great — I loved the whiteness of everything. Plus, it was quite a technical achievement. And people had a lot of fun with it — I mean, check out the pics. Girls gone wild. But. The sound was wild cacophony. Wild cacophony can be good, at times. But this wild cacophony came from people having a rather limited perception of what sounds poking at the iPod would make. And if they knew that, then they seemed to have little idea about how to use the sounds (besides just poking furiously). And if they figured out something good to do, they had no way to coordinate with the three other people making random noises on stage. And this is a very common problem for projects which expect audience members to come up and participate in the creation of sound.

So. My graduate thesis for ITP (called "MMMI") kind of sucked. I mean, it had its moments. The technology was kind of clever and I think I had a very polished visual design — but the resulting music wasn't so hot. So, y'know, failure. It was a musical project, afterall. Specifically, a project that invited about twenty people to interact with the same musical interface at the same time with a specific goal of creating an intelligible piece of collaborative music. (The project also involved a bit of phone-to-screen technology which I'm not going to get into because it's neither here nor there as far as this discussion. If you want to know more, go here.) Okay. I failed. But I think I was on the right track. Here's why.

People need structure. People need to be told what to do. Or, at least, to be given a shove in a certain direction. Whole broad swaths of design are built upon this notion, from architecture to web design to game design. People need this because they want to have success with things they may not be experts at. I want to successfully use the bathroom in the Chrysler Building despite the fact that I have never stepped inside the building before in my life and don't even know how many floors it has. I want to successfully buy a Hickory Farms beefstick party pack from their site despite not knowing intimately how payment authentication on the web works. I want to have fun with Call of Duty: World at War even though I don't know each and every level inside out and don't even really know how much damage the different weapons do to bad guys.

But in a creative environment people don't want to be told exactly what to do. They want hints — signposts that can direct them, but be ignored if the user thinks of something better they'd like to do or try. And this is where I feel like applying "game-like" design strategies to musical instrument design is key — especially if you want several people who have never played your instrument to be able to collaborate in some meaningful way.

My grad thesis, MMMI, tried to solve this by giving players points by hitting the balls on the screen and making sounds. Everyone had the same score, so it was cooperative rather than competitive. I wanted players to keep the musical balls bouncing on the screen, so I rewarded them for doing that. How they bounced the balls around to make different sorts of sounds — that was where their creativity and freedom came in. But. In order to advance "levels" — to get to the next set of sounds and visuals — they had to reach certain points thresholds. So. If players liked where they were and didn't care to advance, then the points could be ignored without any penalty. Good, right? I offered a structure, but also allowed players to ignore the structure without serious consequence. This is one of the reasons I call this sort of thing "game-like" design or "applying game-like mechanics" — it's not a game in the usual "win-lose" sense.

So, yeah. My particular implementation wasn't that awesome — this sort of design can be challenging, it turns out. (It also, just to note, probably alludes to the generative composition movement and possibly the sort of audience-performer breakdown of a "happening." But who knows.) You have to provide a game-like structure but kind of modulate the punishment and reward systems to match what you, as "composer," think would be a positive experience for your amateur performers.

Why not just have a musical score for your players? (Score like sheet music, not like points.) Well, that's certainly another way to go about it. But I think that feels just less "fun" overall — maybe because I'm biased towards the term "game" over the term "score." The latter feels like something you have to do. The former feels like some you explore and play with.

Anyway. Obviously this sort of application of "game-like" design for creative purposes interests me quite a bit. I feel like this has been touched upon, but we still haven't seen it flourish. People credit games like Flower or Guitar Hero with being in this realm, but they're not. Electroplankton kind of is, but at this point it's fairly dated and obviously incomplete. I might go so far as to say if you can lose at something, then it's not what I'm talking about here. I mean, you can paint a shitty picture, but if you start painting the sky green and the grass red your canvas shouldn't abruptly vaporize and tell you how much you suck. Because maybe that's what you want to do. Maybe that's what you want to explore. What if I want to play all of the wrong notes in Guitar Hero? The song shuts off and I hear booing sounds.

Okay. Don't lie: You haven't read this far. Okay. Maybe. Just in case, here's a conclusion: I haven't had the opportunity to work on a project with this theme in a while — since my thesis, really. But I want to. I'm currently exploring a few ideas for applying this sort of thought to iPhone games. And, actually, what's neat about the iPhone is that there are a handful of apps which kind of do what I'm talking about. No, not "iFart." (And not Brian Eno's "Bloom," either.) The Smule apps, I mean. "Ocarina" and "Leaf Trombone." (Given the jillions of apps out there, I'm sure there are more.) Whereas my examples in the previous paragraph land a bit on the "this is just a game" side of the aisle, those two kind of land a bit too far on the "this is just a toy" side of the aisle. But it's nice that they're there. So, yeah. Hopefully I'll come up with some clever notion and will get to write another windy blog post about it, here.

Onward!

The peeps at Montauk last summer.

"What would email look like if we set out to invent it today?"

I've been watching the Google Wave video over the past couple of days. It's a bit long, but they give a very complete overview of the service. Even though there are a million "tech du jour" blogs and I normally prefer to stay away from that kind of stuff on this blog, Wave struck me so I might as well toss out a few quick thoughts on the matter. So:

1. Yeah, e-mail certainly feels like it could use some modernizing — it hasn't changed in any meaningful way in, like, forever. At least since I've been using it (circa 1994). It's still "to," "from," "cc," "subject" — and replies still stack inline, although now most e-mail clients will render replied-to text in different colors or something. Progress!

2. Wave is cool. It looks nice. I want to try it out. I like clever web interfaces. And I have a lot of respect for the team that put it together. As alluded to above, I wish more people would put thought into improving how e-mail works. Because doing so seems insanely challenging, especially given how deeply ingrained e-mail is into our concept of how the net works. Getting people to use a new service for the same task is difficult enough — cf. Firefox vs. Internet Explorer. For people my age and older, using e-mail is almost a reflex. Sending e-mails. Checking my e-mail. I do these almost subconsciously. They are cognitively low-overhead tasks for me. To get me to move to something conceptually different would require changing some rather deep wiring (although, yes — presumably parts of Wave will make their way into Gmail). (And I admit that younger generations may have a very different relationship to e-mail than my generation does. Maybe I'm already a crotchety old man. Sweet. Get off my lawn.)

3. There is almost nothing new to Wave. Except the cool presentation. (Which is, yes, a rather big exception.) You can do this now: if your e-mail client renders the web properly. I like the live collaboration inside Wave and I love that slider that lets you replay a Wave over time. But can't dozens of websites do essentially what Wave is demoed as doing (minus some interface jazz)? Can't I go set up a poll somewhere and link to it in the e-mail? Can't I link to a map? Or photos? Or embed them? Widget-like? Why doesn't e-mail support HTML well enough that I can send a frame that contains the contents of a live webpage that can be whatever I want? It could be a realtime Wave-like app. A Google map. Chess. A poll. A video. Whack-a-kitty. Etc.

Instead of creating this third paradigm between the web and e-mail, we need to realize that the web and e-mail are actually the same thing conceptually — they're just displayed inside different windows (or, hell, the same window if you're using webmail). And especially with all of this social API stuff floating around, the concept of e-mail being private communication and the web being public communication is breaking down. Or, rather, has broken down.

4. I don't like Gmail. Personal preference, sure, but I prefer desktop apps to internet ones when given the option. I find Gmail to be visually cluttered and putting ads on my private e-mails — are you fucking kidding me? No. I prefer Apple Mail. So I'm predisposed to being very much not interested in web-based "e-mail-like" communications technologies. I only really use Google for maps, search, and ads (I use AdSense on some of my sites). I'm not a huge fan of their collaborative tools.

When I tweeted about this ^{[1] [2]} (sigh — "tweet" is the worst verb since "blog"), I asked "And where's Apple on this?" I meant: Could Apple's Mail team please get off of their cans and put some thought into Apple Mail so we could do things like this? I mean, I love being able to send e-mails of travel photos that look like they've been thumbtacked to bamboo — but let's think bigger, here. Please. Screw Google, just use the existing e-mail protocol in some creative way to make embedding live web content into an e-mail simple. It's a UI problem, mostly. And then to copy Google's "Polly" poll tool, for example, you could whip up a polling widget (if one doesn't exist that works well) in, like, an afternoon. With basic HTML and Javascript. And maybe a little social API or something to hook into address books. You have millions of developers who could make little widgety things and blow all of this Wave crap out of the water in no time.

5. I had a dream about ZZTop last night. Surely that's not healthy.

Anyway. In a week this topic will seem quaint and all of my opinions will be wrong, I'm sure.

First: I've been playing World of Goo, a recent indie game that involves stacking sticky gooballs to one another in order to construct ever more elaborate towers and bridges and such. These goo structures kind of bobble and sway like jell-o scaffolding, so after staring at them for an hour, everything on my screen kind of bobbles and sways like jell-o paragraphs. I swear if I don't counter-balance this paragraph some of the words are going to unstick and drop forever down into the goo pit on the bottom left-hand side of my blog. You've probably never noticed that. No worries. Neither have I.

I digress.

Well, not too far. So one of the guys from 2D Boy, the makers of World of Goo spoke at one of the SXSW panels I attended last week. A panel including folks from several indie game companies including Kellee Santiago of thatgamecompany and Jonathan Blow of Braid fame. Well, not Jonathan Blow — a male blow-up doll in a hoodie. Blow got sick or something. Anyway. I enjoyed the panel. And not so much for any technical or business info I picked up. It was mostly, as I texted to Adam Simon, a sort of "chicken soup for the game developer's soul" deal. Talk of second mortgages and the gloomy dark place of being six months into a game and having six months more development to go and wondering if you're really doing anything more than wasting your (and other people's) time. At least this stuff resonated with me, being waist-deep in my own game project (with Charles Pratt) and having a similar sort of fearful lack of confidence — which is, I guess, just the way it goes with creative projects with long development times. So it's comforting to be reminded that successful people have similar experiences.

Ironic that Adam (and the rest of team SocialBomb) missed, because for the first couple of days they were going through their own gloomy moment, I'm sure. Their great Paparazzi iPhone game worked very well, but they had plans for a SXSW-specific game which seemed to fall apart at the last moment — and I totally, totally, totally know the feeling when it's launch time and bugs pop up and you're sitting at home (or someone's parents' home, in this case) working through obnoxious fucking fixes instead of going out and enjoying yourself. All developers know this feeling, I imagine.

Otherwise, I think the conference went fairly well for the SocialBombers. All four of them stayed with us at my parents' home in northwest Austin. Everyone has iPhones these days, so we all got our chance to photograph and tag people in Paparazzi and get our points. Very nice. The other big iPhone app release for SXSW was Dennis Crowley's and Naveen Selvadurai's FourSquare — or: Dodgeball with Achievements. Both Adam and Dennis presented along with Kevin Slavin of area/code (where both Dennis and I have previously worked), another former ITPer Daniel Liss and a guy from Zynga. Good panel, though the problem with having a panel the morning of the final day is, well, people can be a bit washed-out. As in, the audience. Me. I'm often a bit hazy. Before noon. On any day.

Other good sessions: Tony Hseih, the Zappos CEO (who reminds me somewhat of Xanga founder John Hiler), gave his talk about Zappos' business culture and some of his broader thoughts on customer service and "happiness" as a business product. Which I really enjoyed. One of the major takeaways for me was from his description of how Zappos hires new employees. Finding people who fit into the corporate culture is key, according to Hseih, so they have a variety of measures they take to make sure that personalities fit and that the people working at Zappos feel integrated into the company. I don't do much hiring these days, exactly, but I do work on a wide range of projects with an assortment of people and I felt like some of his ideas about hiring could be applied (in less rigorous ways) to my own selection process of deciding people I want to work with. (Not that I need to ask everyone I know how lucky they are, but just as a way to guide my own thought process.) I think I've kind of implicitly done this, anyway, in the couple of years since I've graduated from ITP. With a couple of minor exceptions, I haven't worked for or with anyone in the past couple of years that I wouldn't call a friend aside from work — even if I first met them through a work project. And we're all in the same extended social circle. I feel like this is such an important element of my lifestyle at the moment — I really enjoy what I'm doing. So something's going right. Hseih's talk definitely also dovetailed with the recent "science of happiness" movement — which I appreciate, as well. On a more business school note, he also spoke about customer service as a marketing expense — a topic which I loved. I feel like I deal with crap every month from companies like AT&T, companies that seem to go out of their way to make life difficult for me because the've already got my money and, so, well, fuck me. I exaggerate. But. Online, reputation is all you have (well, and price, I suppose — but I would argue that reputation trumps price, overall). And so I like to see a company that considers their core product not selling clothes — but delivering a good customer experience. Zappos has also embraced Twitter as a means of communicating with consumers and, true to form, after I twittered (twitted/twote/twat) about Zappos Tony Hseih followed me. Sweet.

An aside: Let me make one general point about panels: Look, folks. We have (for the most part) paid money to hear you panelists talk. Between airfare and a festival badge and possibly a hotel room, we've shelled out a lot of cash. To hear your ideas. SO. When you do your panel, do some friggin' prep work and have some actual non-obvious points you'd like to make about your topic. Y'know, you don't even have to be 100% right, but you should at least make us think. Open up a discussion that you seed with ideas. Don't just mill around and jabber about nothing in particular. And for fuck's sake don't spend half of the panel introducing yourselves and then ask the audience for ideas about how to improve your business. I charge a consulting fee for that. (I'm looking at you, everyone on the "New Think for Old Publishers" panel, except Clay Shirky (obvs).) Rude. And you make yourself look ridiculous and out-of-touch in front of exactly the sort of people you should be trying to engage.

Two more panel notes:

1. Josh Klein spoke about his Creative Commons-based whatIWantToSee.is project at the Day Stage on the first day of SXSW, Friday. Good. He's got a good story with his experience marketing his novel Roo'd, a very good argument for first-time creatives (authors, musicians, etc.) to consider CC-licensing their work. If I might summarize, it's something like this: Be honest — your first work is probably going to be flat-out ignored by everyone. So give it away. And reap the social benefit. And parlay that into your second project.

2. Bruce Sterling didn't give the final talk of SXSW Interactive, as is usual, be he gave a good one nevertheless. No crying this time. But he does what must be very, very difficult at a conference like this: He knows how to handle a crowd and really create an experience, in a turn-off-the-laptop sort of way. This time he started off light, as is the norm, and even cracked open a Shiner and popped a bag of chips while speaking (a reference to his not hosting an after-party at his home this year). But eventually he got to the sort of Big Picture thinking which is why I think he's so valuable to a conference like SXSW. I, for example, get so caught up in the day-to-day of the web and social media and really develop a cynical view of so much of this stuff because I'm defensive about people marketing to me and I think almost anyone who seriously calls themselves a "microcelebrity" is an asshole and I think your blog is a steaming turd, you Twitter too much, and your genius idea is kind of stupid. And your "clever" t-shirt sucks. Etc. I like it when someone gracefully reminds me — hey, all of this stuff is actually ground-breaking, world-changing shit and, despite the annoyance of having several new "social marketing gurus" following me on Twitter every day and pounds of spam e-mail, it's all really quite miraculous when you step back for a moment. Clay had a single slide at "New Think for Old Publishers" panel I mocked earlier which said: "The internet is the largest group of people who care about reading and writing ever assembled in history — now what?" A powerful reminder of what's amazing about this field. Sterling's was (something like): Despite all of the crap that may go on in the world (collapsing economies, etc.), social media is the thing that keep society from fully collapsing into something like World War I or II. We're all too connected, now. We all care about too many people from too many places and backgrounds to be baited into hating one another. An oversimplification, maybe. And I've probably somewhat distorted what he said in my week-later retelling. Regardless, I like the sentiment.

Okay. Enough about the sessions.

What else? Some dinners and after-parties. Oh: I lost the AMODA/SXSW Laptop Battle in the first round. Controversially, I might add! The judges kind of generally sucked, in many rounds totally ignoring the crowd response when making their choice. Not sure what the deal was. On a few occasions both performers would play and the crowd would almost all be cheering for Player #1, everyone waving a "1" with their fingers — and the judges would go with Player #2. Erm. Okay. Anyway, we kind of bailed after the first round of everyone performing, so maybe it improved. (At least I get to come back if they do it again next year.) It's disconcerting to feel like you honestly did a better job than someone only to loose to them. Sounds like I'm an egotistical asshole, huh? But I don't think I am. I just know laptop electronica because I've been making blippy noises with computers for the better part of the last fifteen years. Okay. I'll stop bitching. But. I will note that Todd Simmons and the AMODA crew do awesome events and I know it takes a tremendous amount of energy to pull something like this off (just for me to crap all over). And the musical performances mostly totally rocked! The whole thing was, in fact, really fun. Just those judges kind of messed stuff up. Argh. </venting>

Other stuff: We also went out to eat with a huge crew of ITPers-and-associates, as well. Serrano's = excellent for evening margaritas. BBQ at the County Line the night before the cenference started. Big fat steaks at the Hoffbrau on Christin's birthday (Tuesday the 17th). And a few social media parties, including one with a burlesque show. Although way fewer than last year. There were fewer start-ups in general at SXSW this time around. Just to note.

This is getting long, so I guess I should:

1. Mention that ten people stayed at my parents' place this time around. Four SocialBombers, Leah Wechsler, Josh Klein, Daniel Liss, Tikva Morowati, Christin Roman, and myself. I still think the record was set the first year all of the ITPers came down. 2006. But this certainly came close.

2. On Christin's last day in town we rented paddleboats and paddled out west on Town Lake. Through the Hill Country. Beautiful. And a good respite from computers. We saw lots of turtles and I almost dumped myself into the river crabbing my paddle.

3. Note the one SXSW music event I attended: the Erykah Badu + Explosions in the Sky show at Auditorium Shores on Saturday night with Joe Stern and his girlfriend Laura (a yoga instructor in Santa Fe). Warm night. Love outdoor shows. Erykah showed up way late, so her back-up band the Cannabinoids played on their own for a while before she turned up to sing about fifteen minutes worth of songs. Then Explosion came out and did their thick, pulpy thing. Followed by an onslaught of actual explosions in the sky — fireworks — over the river. Good stuff.

So. I guess that's about it. If you've read this far, let me reward you with a video of a cat with its head stuck in a bag.

Oh, and AT&T sucks. They've been nothing but fail during SXSW. Sure would be nice to be able to get a phone call at the conference, guys! Or send a text message! I know no one could've predicted that tens of thousands of people would show up this year except for, well, everyone except you. Anyway. Poo.

Magic Moments

Clay and Josh Klein talk over burgers.

Dinner at Serrano's went well...

Clay even finally revealed his superhero alter-ego, Troubleboy. ("Be the trouble you want to see in the world," his shirt reads — an example of a clever t-shirt that does not suck.)

Christin with the biggest shoe ever.

Pillows don't lie.

Adam and Mike Dory at the Poodle Dog Lounge. Not shown: Lots of shuffleboard.

The end!

More about this soon, maybe. I'm exhausted.

Rebecca Bray and Jimmy Graver — "Brayver," for the portmanteauphiles — got married a couple of weekends ago. October 12th. Very nice! (And, coincidentally, on the same weekend my friends Christian and Shilpa got married in D.C. — congrats!)

So. I'm not sure of the full story. But, as far as I understand it, Rebecca's family — the Hurlbuts — have owned this farm in western Connecticut for about 280 years. Her aunt and uncle live and farm there, now, but Rebecca spent some of her youth living there and it's a special place to all of the extended Hurtbut clan. And it's a beautiful piece of land — so what better place to have the wedding. Outside. Under a tall, craggy tree. Amidst the bright Autumn colors.

Instead of walking down the aisle, Rebecca and Jimmy made their entrance through a corridor of apple tress. Which — incidentally — our wacky band of misfit asses almost missed due to a rather inept adventure renting a minivan and driving (six of us) from Manhattan up to Hurlbutland. Turns out it takes four hours to make a two-hour drive if you take forever at the car rental place and then get lost somewhere in the Bronx. So we arrived literally minutes before the ceremony began. Not enough time to grab any snacks or booze from the food tent the family had set up, but just enough time to unload in the bathroom after at least an hour of "we can't stop!!!" as we zoomed by anything along the highway that we might've been able to urinate on. Whew. But we got there. And it was lovely.

The wedding was not religious. Instead Rebecca and Jimmy did something unique: They invited six couples from their lives to come up together and say a few words about how they made their relationships work. Each one had a different theme and, I believe, made a little art project to give to Rebecca and Jimmy. Some young friends spoke and some older couples spoke. Rebecca's moms — in the photo above — said a few words about their relationship, as well, and sung a cute duet (I forget which song, though!). Rebecca's bio-mom (left) looks just like her. Again, very nice. And thoughtful. Not boring. No offense to anyone whose weddings I've attended, but the ceremonies themselves can be a bit dry. Using it as a kind of salon on the topic of long-term love, though, was great.

And then Rebecca and Jimmy said their vows. A couple things to note: 1) Jimmy wore the same suit his grandfather got married in. 2) Jimmy's an actor. As is his brother (who provided the musical accompaniment for the afternoon on acoustic guitar, as well). Having actorly people throw a wedding is kind of great. Wedding is theater and it's fun to have a creative presentation. And it just makes it more meaningful for everyone than just doing the typical thing. So. Very lovely service.

Afterwards, we boozed it up. The bartenders made some pretty strong rye and ciders. Left-to-right: Josh Klein, Christin, Kati, Chell.

The wedding dinner took place in a converted greenhouse. We had assigned seating and each of our seats had a book on it for us, picked out by either Rebecca or Jimmy. I got a copy of "A Brief History of Time" which I accidentally left. Erk.

Sheep! Yup, it's a farm.

Chris and Christin. After dinner. We mingled around with a bunch of different people, including some of Jimmy's friends, Jimmy's brother, one of the women who worked on the Meatrix with Rebecca, and Rebecca's British brother — who's about eighteen and at just that age where he's trying to figure out religion and philosophy and "deeper meaning of life" types of things. Having a background in such things myself, I enjoyed having a slightly tipsy discussion with him about it. Jimmy's brother was also interesting — he regaled us with stories of his life as an actor in LA.

I took a break after dinner to try to get some interesting night shots of the area. They mostly turned out quite blurry and not-so-great — I had no good way to stabilize my camera for long-exposure stuff. This one I liked, though.

After dinner and a couple hours of drinking and talking over near the greenhouses, the full wedding party broke up a bit and those of us who were planning on staying the night (and a few others) relocated up the hill to a bonfire set up near the tents. Some of us took turns down at the rental minivan changing back into our outdoor attire, although by that point my nice new dress shoes and slacks had been pretty well dirtied up by wet grass and mud. So it goes. But, man. It was so nice up by the fire. The night got cold. The fire was toasty. (Although: No marshmallows. Boo.)

I took a few sneaky shots of Rebecca and Jimmy by the fire. Jimmy has a bongo drum. A guitar also circulated through the crowd. Being able to play a bass guitar does not mean you can play a regular guitar. Unless you're drunk.

And so, yes — the night was bitter cold. Christin and I were stuffed in our sleeping bags in the tent and the tent sat somewhat on an angle on the hill, so we sort of slowly slid to one side as the night progressed. By morning everything had become damp with dew and I took a considerable amount of time to get my pants on and trudge my way barefoot through damp, thick grass down the hill to the minivan to change clothes and then to the small outdoor sink to brush my teeth and make some feeble attempt to control my hair. The family had set out a small continental breakfast sort of thing in the greenhouse, so I hung out with Klein and some other folks over coffee and pastries.

You can see our tent camp and remains of the fire pit above. Rebecca and Jimmy spent their night in a cabin up in the woods a bit, still on the property.

After Christin got up and active we, of course, made our way down to the sheep pen, again. This time I was allowed to pull down the wheelbarrow full of butternut squash husks that had been used as soup bowls the night before, which we tossed out to the animals. Above Christin's feeding one to one of what I called the "emo cows."

A note about the sheep. So. You can see different colored splotches on some of them. Pink. Blue. This is how the people running the farm know who has mated with whom. The males all have packets of colored chalk strapped between their front legs. So when they mount a female, they also leave a colored streak on her back. (And some of those ladies had quite a density of colored chalk streaks, not to make any moral judgments.) Fun fact!

Being Connecticut in Autumn, obviously there was much to photograph.

Getting off the farm took some effort. First, there were six of us carpoolers scuttling around here-and-there. Second, there was a bit of clean-up to attend to and we didn't feel altogether comfortable just leaving the mess for the few remaining family and guests. So I helped take down the tent that had been over the outside bar and we did some trash removal at the firepit/campsite. This and that. Eventually, though, we got everyone stuffed into the minivan and were on our way. (Klein, as well, found a praying mantis eggsack which I'll let him explain to you if you ask him. He used it to play an entertaining round of scare-the-shit-out-of-Christin and now has it somewhere in his home. Which I assume his wife Hulda is totally happy about.)

We didn't get far.

So the Hurlbut's also have a small country store at the edge of their property. Though officially closed on that Monday, when she got word that we were poking around Rebecca's aunt came down and opened up the place for us. Christin did our produce shopping for the week and we got the grand tour of the place. I got my parents a few jarred items. The whole place was just incredibly cute. They even had a small rabbit hutch in the front with a shaggy puff of an angora rabbit inside. Smokey was his name, if I remember correctly.

So, anyway, we got home safe (after a quick bit to eat in a little restaurant/convenience store in Connecticut) and got the car returned and finally got home, showered, and took a nap. Good times! Rebecca and Jimmy should totally get married again next fall. Thanks, R&J! And, of course, congrats on getting married!

Cross-posted to Game Design Advance.

I started watching the "Speed Racer" movie last night. And fell asleep in the middle. But it still kind of triggered a cascade of thoughts about games and movies and narrative and such. Maybe nothing terribly new — but, like a clean pre-owned car, new to me. So.

I've been reading Jim Rossignol's new book, This Gaming Life. (Awesome cover, by the way.) It's good as a kind of well-written overview of the state of computer gaming in 2007, not incredibly deep, but fun to read and with a fun travelogue feel. In one chapter he writes about Will Wright's notion of "the model" — which Wright speaks of in this Seed conversation I found: "Well, when kids ... play a game there's a model in the computer that they're playing against. And when they play they're reverse-engineering that model. As they get better at the game, they get a more accurate representation of that computer model." And that's quite satisfying, the feeling of discovering how the game works. Again, nothing shockingly new, but I liked the way he put it and while I've added "game mechanic" to my vocabulary over the past few years, thinking in terms of a game being a combination of a mechanic and a model seems useful. Maybe they're really one-in-the-same, but there seems to be some subtle distinction. Okay.

"Speed Racer" is like a fourteen-pound bag of Skittles — an over-saturated sugar explosion with almost nothing apart from that immediate rush. And I think it's one of these movies which has decided to be more "video game-like." I'm trying to think of other examples of these, but I think most major superhero movies have sequences which are supposed to be "video game-like." And they usually kind of suck, except in the raw sugary spectacle sense. Why? Because in "Speed Racer," at least, I have no idea what the "model" is. Flickering clips of cars spinning around and doing all sorts of cartoony shit with almost no attempt at internal consistency — it's nearly impossible to cheer for a win when I don't know what the rules are, what the track looks like, or, really, anything about this hyperreal racing universe. The story sucks — they attempt to make me care by setting up a story of the little guy taking on the corrupt Ol' Boys Network. But I don't care. If the only thing worthwhile about your movie is the racing scenes, then I want to know more about how the racing works.

I want to contrast this with John Madden's take on football. I don't watch too much football, but I found this article, Summa Cum Madden, fascinating. (BugMeNot login here.) Long quote:

"During [an early game], Madden diagrammed Bill Walsh's new West Coast offense on the CBS Chalkboard, an early version of the Telestrator, and pushed CBS producers to abandon the TV-friendly tight shots for wider angles that showed how the players work together. 'He told me, "You ever show me a replay with just a guy running with the ball in his hand, you can expect silence,"' says Sandy Grossman, who was Madden's director for 21 years. Thus, the first tenet of Maddenism: a football game can be understood only by analyzing all its complexity. As he once put it: 'Football isn't nuclear physics, but it's not so simple that you can make it simple. It takes some explaining to get it across.'"

And this is kind of what's exciting, right? I don't really care if some over-paid jock hot dogs or thanks Jesus when he makes a touchdown. I don't really care if Speed races to save his family's motorsports business. But if you want me to get into a game — even a completely fictional one — I have to have some sense of what's going on and some sense that if I were to put myself into the game, I would still be wowed by the pure awesome skill or athleticism of the characters — real or fake — also playing that game. It's not fun to watch videos of people kicking ass at Halo because I don't play Halo or know Halo. It is fun to watch people kicking ass at Team Fortress 2. Because I love that game and if someone does something spectacular, well, that's meaningful to me.

So that's all I really have to say about that. If I had to make a recommendation for the next director of a "Speed Racer"-like movie, it would be: Give me some way to understand what the actual game or sport is in the story — give me a sense of the "model" (show me what the track looks like, for example) — so when something cool happens, I give a shit. It's tough, but if pro football can be explained to a bunch of people who've quite possibly never held a pigskin, then surely this can be done. At least it would give your movie something to occupy its time with instead of some dumbshit canned plot. I'm excited to see games that are more cinematic and movies that want to include elements of video game culture. But while developers of the former seem to be innovating hard, creators of the latter seem to be flailing.

Note: This is the second of a few interview pieces I originally wrote for the now-defunct Nokia Workshop blog. That blog died before these could go up, so I'm going to post them here instead. Thanks go out to the folks who took the time to participate — and apologies that these couldn't wind up somewhere slightly more prominent.

If you're at all interested in social software or mobile applications you're probably familiar with Twitter, the simple SMS broadcasting tool that launched a couple of years ago. Twitter has continued to grow at a fast clip and has taken on a certain amount of cultural resonance, so I decided to ask Twitter Co-Founder and Creative Director Biz Stone a few questions about the social design and interaction design behind the service.

I should note, also, that Twitter has a lovely API which indie developers or experimenters might find quite useful.

Josh: Twitter is sort of shockingly simple. I'd like to know more about the initial design choices: How did you settle upon Twitter's interaction model?

Biz: Our inspiration was the concept of status-like the away message in Instant Message applications. However, current status is only so interesting when you're always in front of a computer so we wanted to take that idea and make it mobile. That's where SMS came in. When we built the web site, we thought a little push in the right direction would help so we came up with the question, "What are you doing?"

Josh: Were there existing mobile apps that influenced and inspired you guys to build it as you did?

Biz: There were no existing mobile apps that inspired us. Instead, we took inspiration from broader subjects like the dispatch industry and the history of the telegraph.

Josh: Yeah, Twitter has a sort of "telegraph-like" feel to it. Have you read "The Victorian Internet" by Tom Standage? Were there any specific ways that looking at the dispatch or telegraph industry informed Twitter's design?

Biz: Yes, I happened to be reading that book around the time we first prototyped Twitter. There was nothing specific that informed the design — I'd say it was more of an inspiration.

Josh: Did you have to actively hold yourselves back from adding features that might've cluttered the project? And how have you gone about deciding which features to incorporate post-launch (such as the "@username" means of addressing someone)?

Biz: To some extent yes, we needed to restrain ourselves from adding complexity with additional features. However, it helped that the service got very popular and we had less time for feature building. In general we prefer to take our time and allow behavior to show us how we can make the service better. When we saw users adopting an @username protocol we decided to implement it in the system and created the "Replies" tab so folks could track those links.

Josh: Is the 140-character message length holy, or is it merely an artifact of the length of an SMS? Would Twitter ever consider raising or lowering the allowed message length?

Biz: The 140 character length is holy to us but it is also an artifact of the length of an SMS. From the beginning, we wanted our service to be device agnostic — a message created on a computer should work when received via SMS. The lowest common denominator was 160 character messages of SMS and we left 20 characters for the username. However, we also very much believe that constraint inspires creativity so the 140 character limit is not going to change.

Josh: The Twitter API seems like an important factor in Twitter's success. Have there been applications built on top of Twitter by third-party developers that have particularly impressed Team Twitter? Anything especially bizarre or unexpected?

Biz: The API has been a boon to Twitter and it accounts for a much larger percentage of traffic than even our web site. Several applications built on our API have particularly impressed us including Twitterriffic which as recently won an Apple Design Award and Twittervision which was recently featured in New York City's MoMA. Early on, we used to be confused when at 5pm PST each day Twitter seemed to be taken over by what appeared to be lots of kittens twittering in Japanese. It turns out there was a popular tamagotchi game built on Twitter — that was bizarre. I think the plant that Twitters when it needs water is strangely compelling too.

Josh: What about community-forming? Were there conscious and pro-active steps you took to develop and nurture the early Twitter community? Do you have any suggestions for social application developers on that front?

Biz: We attracted early adopters and our API helped form a developer community around Twitter. My only suggestion would be that you're building a product for yourself as well as others. Everything else forms around that — or doesn't if you're not personally interested.

Josh: Are there groups who use Twitter that have totally surprised you? Twitter's effect on social justice movements, for example, is fascinating.

Biz: For sure, the story of James Buck who escaped from an Egyptian prison using Twitter highlights the social justice and activism use cases. Emergency workers and news organizations who value the real-time nature of the Twitter network were not exactly a surprise but their fairly rapid adoption has been pretty impressive.

Josh: It seems like many people have strong opinions about what Twitter should or should not do. For example, some people think it should have groups. Or it should have more refined privacy controls. Or whatever. You probably hear a ton of these. How does something go from suggestion to being built into the Twitter infrastructure? Are there any new features like this in the pipe or is this the sort of thing that you like to see users take care of themselves via the API or other hacks?

Biz: It's true, many people talk about wish-list features. However, it's important to measure activity and behavior patterns as well. You'd be surprised at how many people bring up a feature and then just as quickly dismiss it because they love the simplicity of Twitter. We have to be careful what we add to the experience. Certainly, API projects that solve certain user needs are beneficial to us so we continue to encourage that work.

Josh: Where does Twitter go from here? Will there be various regional (or socially-regional) Twitter clones that exist mostly independently similar to how Facebook and MySpace users remain walled apart? Or will we see a rise of services that bridge between these?

Biz: We'd like to see Twitter grow into a global utility around the world. We see existing networks like those you mentioned as devices not dissimilar from SMS. Twitter will remain complimentary to these services as well as new services inspired by Twitter.

Josh: And what about more powerful mobile devices that can run fuller-featured apps and aren't constrained to text messages? Does Twitter depend on outside developers building on the API in those cases? Like Twitterrific for the iPhone.

Biz: Patterns are emerging on Twitter. Already we see three different types of messages — traditional status updates, replies or conversational updates, and messages sharing some form of media. Right now, sharing anything over Twitter is done via URL which renders as linked text and conversations can be hard to keep track of. We'll be looking at these patterns and considering ways to improve the experience while remaining simple and true to form.

Josh: Thanks for your time!

Biz: Sure thing!

You've probably seen the Sean Tevis XKCD-style campaign comic. It's a pretty fucking charming way for a politician to make their pitch, I must admit. (Tevis is running for Kansas House of Representatives District 15 — representing parts of Olathe, a Kansas City suburb, and some surrounding turf.) He seems like a great, smart guy and it's sort of amazing to see what happens when an information architect — a web nerd (with a blog) — runs for office.

And while the outporing of internet love is great, people donating money to his campaign who do not live in his district are acting irresponsibly. He has apparently received donations from almost 6,000 people (~$50k). I bet almost none of those come from people who live in KS HR District 15. I'm not going to link to anyone specifically because I don't want to be a jack-ass, but plenty of people who clearly do not live in Kansas have announced on their blogs or Twitter that they've given money. I don't think this is right.

Everyone in the United States deserves proper representation in their state and national governing bodies. Sean Tevis is not running for representative of the Internet — he's running for representative of Olathe, Kansas. I worry that by making him beholden to a vast network of contributors who live in California, New York, Texas, etc. that we are actually somewhat disenfranchising voters from that area. If you do not live in Olathe, you are not his constituent. If Olathe is conservative and would prefer to elect a conservative to represent them, well I certainly don't personal agree with the politics. But that's their decision. I have my own state and national representatives it's their job to make my voice heard. Not Sean Tevis'. No matter how charming he may be.

I live in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. My representative in the US House is Democrat Nydia Velázquez. She's apparently quite a well-respected businesswoman — she chairs the House Small Business Committee and sits on the Financial Services Committee. My rep in the NY state Assembly is Joseph R. Lentol. And in the NY Senate, Martin Malavé Dilan. None of these people have cute web-meme-friendly comics on their sites, but I think the best way to use this excitement about Sean Tevis is not to give money to Sean Tevis — it's to get excited about your local politics and learn a bit about what's going on with the people who represent you. You're paying them, after all...

End of rant.

July 27th Update: Sean Tevis responded in the comments (cool!) and I've somewhat revised my thoughts on the matter.

Andreas Tilliander at my Oscillate Night 01.

I've decided it's time to reunite the band. Sort of like in the Blues Brothers, except instead of wrangling up my old hands at diners and dive bars I'm gathering together my software install DVDs and product activation codes. I've been meaning to do this for a while, but this afternoon it dawned on me that I could get Apple's Logic Studio for cheap. Which includes Logic Pro 8 — the updated version of my compositional weapon-of-choice — along with a variety of other audio tools I don't know but might be fun to fool with (like the Impulse Response Utility, which apparently lets you "snapshot" the reverb acoustics of a real-world space and import them into virtual reverb and spatialization plug-ins — whoa). So I purchased Logic Studio. Good for me.

Logic Pro, Ableton Live, and Native Instruments Komplete. My holy trinity of audio production and performance. They're a good combination for the synthy sound I like. Flexible. And they don't require any equipment besides the laptop. So now I've reacquired Logic. And I got the new Ableton Live free as a part of my Laptop Battle winnings — so I'm only really missing Komplete. My four-year-old, three-versions-out-of-date Komplete 2 install DVDs didn't really work (not a huge surprise). So I'm deciding what I want to do about that.

Anyway, it's been bugging me not having my little electronic music creative outlet these past couple of years. It's also refreshing to think about making something that's not interactive for a change. Maybe you'll get lucky and if I know you I'll start bugging you with my shitty techno.

Note: This is the first of a few interview pieces I originally wrote for the now-defunct Nokia Workshop blog. That blog died before these could go up, so I'm going to post them here instead. Thanks go out to the folks who took the time to participate — and apologies that these couldn't wind up somewhere slightly more prominent.

Say hello to Mosio, if you haven't already met, another application exploring new ways to build social software on top of simple text messaging. Mosio do Q-n-A: Text out a question and if someone using the service knows the answer (or is at a computer), they'll send you a response. They won a 2008 SXSW Web Award — that's where I first heard about the project. Co-founder Noel Chandler was kind enough to answer a few questions for me.

Josh: Thanks for taking the time to answer a few questions for the blog.

Noel: My pleasure.

Josh: So the primary Mosio app is a crowd-sourced question-and-answer system that uses text messages. It's like Yahoo! Answers or Ask Metafilter, maybe, but focussed on mobile.

Noel: Exactly, with more on-the-go focus, specifically tied to speed of results. People who are mobile want info asap.

Josh: To start, how did you arrive at this idea? Did you find that you were often in a situation where you needed such a service? Or did you begin by looking at the mobile space and dreaming up new modes of social interaction?

Noel: It was a little bit of both. My Co-Founder (Jay Sachdev) and I were working together on some cool projects for our regular jobs, found out we were both passionate about mobile over some drinks after work. From there we started talking about cool things you could do with your phone, built a few apps and then the "how cool would it be if you could text any question and have it answered by a real person?" idea came up, so we started building it. It sounds sort of cliche for a start-up to say "it all started out as an experiment," but the truth is, it really did. In fact, the name Mosio is taken from "mociology" (mobile sociology), the study of how humans interact socially with mobile devices. We really just wanted to see what would happen.

Josh: Mosio seems like something that's useless until you reach a critical mass of users. How did you go about building the Mosio community? Does receiving an award like the SXSW Web Award result in a boost of users?

Noel: Yeah, building a self-sustaining community is definitely not easy, but we were determined to make it work. Also, we were lucky enough to have a small group of friends and people who truly wanted to see it succeed, wanted to be able to have the service around when they needed information. Some of those same folks are still an active part of asking and answering, but in addition there's a whole new group of people who we're grateful to for continuing to make the service great. Without them it wouldn't be helpful, informative, funny or addictive.

Winning at SXSW was such an amazing experience. Mosio started out as a "2 dudes in a garage" idea, our first office was literally in my garage, so being able to go to Austin, have a great time in a super fun city and bring home an award was great. The win has definitely helped increase the number of users and partners for us. I'm a marketing guy and Jay is the engineer, so while I've always wanted the party to be so big the house falls apart, he's done a good job reminding me of the fact that if the house falls apart, everybody has to go home or find another place to party. Somewhere in between we have an incredible steady growth of amazing users sprinkled with growth spurts of new people who really like the service, so we're both happy.

Josh: Are there any groups of Mosio users that you're just totally surprised by? Or people using Mosio in ways you hadn't thought of?

Noel: Definitely. I'm constantly surprised by people using the service, so helpful, yet there seems to be an irreverent and smart ass tone that they use when answering. People sometimes ask "why would I ask Mosio about the weather when I could just use Google SMS?" The reason is because Google SMS doesn't respond back and tell you you're lucky that your weather is warmer than where it is or that you should probably pack a jacket just in case. The human element keeps it really cool and the fact that people are volunteering to help each other makes it even better.

My favorite things are the "above and beyonds" with the site, true favors. They come in the form of making a phone call for that person, some people have asked for someone to make a dinner reservation and others have called a store to confirm something before they text back an answer ("I couldn't find store hours on their site but I called for you and they're open until 9pm." or "They said they'd fix that kind of watch for $30 plus $5 for the battery.") I never would have imagined that so much relationship advice would be given out or that people would be so nice and encouraging to those asking for it. It's really cool.

Josh: It's interesting to me that even in this age of sexy high-end phones like the Nokia Nseries and iPhones and such that the lowly text message still seems to have so much potential. Obviously Twitter, for example, has capitalized on this. Do you feel like this is just the fragmentation of the mobile communications space — similar to how we have instant messaging and e-mail and such co-existing on our computers — or will mobile applications eventually absorb the SMS function? Does Mosio have any plans for a mobile application?

Noel: Very true. I heard a quote the other night at a mobile event that was basically "targeting smart phones means 10% of the market. Targeting 'dumb' phones means 100% of the market." While I agree and understand why it was said, at Mosio we believe in the near future almost all phones will be smart phones and we're working under that premise. That said, I'm not sure if other mobile apps will completely absorb the SMS function, but I feel like there will always be a need for SMS, even if "short" means 500 characters instead of 160. We live in a burst culture where RSS feeds, headlines and status updates keep us informed. There's always going to be a need for that quick, set-it-and-forget-it communication function on your mobile, kept separate from email. We love that SMS is ubiquitous, but we also have our SDKs open and studied. You'll see a "beyond messaging" element to Mosio within the next 3 months.

Josh: How do you feel about the 160-character limit? I see you try to adhere to it, but there are some questions (and answers) which I suppose were asked via the web that go much longer. Do you consider it a limitation, the character limit, or a tool for keeping people a bit more concise and to-the-point?

Noel: I really think a lot can be done in 160 characters, but at times it can be limiting. This will show itself even more when a lot of free services begin to monetize and need the real estate to do so, cutting 160 characters to 120 or less. The way we extend that character limit is through a tool on our site that enables you to send a two message response, showing you what your response will look like before you send it. We did it so people could see all they had to do was truncate/abbreviate a word to save the asking person a text and I think people both utilize and enjoy the thinking behind it. I definitely like the by-product of keeping people short with their answers, because it prevents someone from just copying/pasting a whole page and blasting it, which is the exact opposite point. Mosio members now use the acronym WYGO (When You Get Online) to send a link where more information can be found later (or now if you're really interested and have mobile web access). WYGO links are super helpful for that extra information, giving you the option to read it now or later.

Josh: I see you've integrated the Mosio Q-n-A service into the Twitter API. What led you in that direction? And how do you feel about the Twitter API? Are they offering an interesting sort of social platform for SMS-based apps a la the Facebook App platform (a stretch, maybe) where you plug into their social graph so people don't have to go through the hassle of duplicating it on your site? Or is it just the popular hang-out of the day?

Noel: Our decision to develop it came down to two things:

1) We're big Twitter fans and there's an interesting thing going on with people seeing it used in certain ways and then immediately thinking of how they could use it or what they could create for it.

2) When we first built the Twitter Answers App, it was because we kept seeing all of these cool applications being built for Twitter, but mostly in the ways of either repackaging the tweets gleaned from the public timeline or new ways to post to Twitter. Through the same thinking I mentioned in #1 above, we created Twitter Answers.

Our thinking didn't too much to do with plugging into the social graph or anything like that, we just thought it was a cool way to use Twitter. We haven't created a Facebook App yet because we haven't thought of anything yet that we feel would be a great way to use or contribute to Facebook for a long period of time. I think the social graph elements to all social networks is incredibly interesting, each has it's own small nuances. For example, I found out a friend died from Facebook updates, I found out Tim Russert died from Twitter and I found out Heath Ledger died from Mosio when a handful of people all asked if it was true. Not to bring up such a sad topic, but each example is the distribution (and confirmation) of immediate information that is important to people.

Josh: Finally, where's Mosio going in the future? I see you have a myriad other text messaging services at the Mosio.com site — everything from random humorous Chuck Norris "trivia" to automatic birthday reminders. Are you branching out to more services or are you keeping your focus on the Mosio Q-n-A application itself?

Noel: I can't go into too much detail with specifics, but it's a little bit of both. It all comes down to listening to what our users want. You can now post photos (video posting coming soon) which has turned out to be really well received in spite of the fact that we haven't promoted it heavily on the site. The apps are helpful and let people use their phones in new ways, so we'll be building out more of those with some more specific focus on Q&A + location.

Thanks so much for the interview!

mosio.com

Oh, Watchmen. They're finally turning you into a movie (apparently after twenty years of trying and to the chagrin of author Alan Moore).

I loved this book as a teenager — I remember first getting into it around age ten, reading by sort of flipping from section to section out of order, not really understanding much but finding myself thoroughly absorbed in the Watchmen universe. The Rorschach section, especially, sticks in my mind.

These kinds of stories typically get abused by Hollywood. For example: the charisma-neutered Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy movie. But the preview's pretty damned striking and Zach "300" Snyder is helming, so there may be hope. Also, they seemed to have nailed the look of Dr. Manhattan (the glowing blue naked guy) — probably the most difficult character to render to the screen. The only real casting miss seems to be Ozymandias, who duesn't really seem to have quite that golden Master Race aspect to him like in the book. But whatever.

Very curious to see how this turns out. March 2009.

Something has to happen with this blog. Apparently I don't really have the time or the wit or the whatever-it-is to churn out the lengthier sorts of essays I prefer. So I've come up with a bit of an experiment for myself — a personal challenge. Every day for ten weeks I'm going to write (around) ten sentences about a single idea.

This seems like a good length to sketch out an idea. Feeling like I have to expand an idea out into some 3000-word treatise just adds a weight which suddenly turns the whole thing into another fucking task I have to add to the pile and then explain to my poor girlfriend why I'm spending another evening fiddling with my website rather than fiddling with her. So this is also an experiment with a somewhat lighter-weight blogging style (which I haven't really tried for, like, years).

Blogs have, by and large, settled into a handful of formats — so maybe this is also an expression of my urge to shake Auscillate up a bit and start trying out some of my other ideas. Maybe I'll even turn Auscillate back into an actual breathing blog again...

Art school graffiti.

Hello, there. I'm going to do a few more detailed write-ups and interviews for the Nokia Nseries Workshop blog, so I'm not going to get too much into the nitty-gritty details here. But I thought I should write a few words about the Mobile Music Workshop and my experiences here in Vienna. I'm sitting in the cute little apartment I've rented — it's off in the western part of town in a neighborhood called Ottokring (after Ottokar II, I assume). The windows are open, letting in the air. And a few bugs.

Richard Widerberg talking about IMPROVe.

This has been, just to note, one of my least touristy trips to Europe ever. Between prepping for the Workshop, covering work, and just generally allowing myself the opportunity to sit around and read books or catch up on my TV shows, I just haven't had much time or energy to go and do the full-blown sightseeing thing. I have been to Vienna before and to Austria several times, so I've seen the highlights, I guess. But in a way I've just experienced the city mostly how I would if I just lived here: Get up, go into the University for the conference. Work or read at home. Go grocery shopping. Etc. Not to say I just sat at home staring at my computer all day. I got out. Spent Sunday walking around town (shots from Prater are in my previous post). And yesterday I went to the MUMOK (Museum Moderner Kunst — Museum of Modern Art) and wandered around the old town a bit. The weather has been amazing — unseasonably warm according to one of the locals at the Workshop, very sunny and bright. Cool in the evenings.

Having a seat, waiting for the show.

MUMOK, by the way, has an exhibition going on called "Genau+anders" ("Exact+different") which traces 500 year, or so, of pure mathematics impacting visual art. A lot of what they have up is, frankly, dumb. "Math-ish" art done by people who don't naturally "get" math or who don't really sit down and really explore it produce some really bland crap. Writing Fibonacci sequences on things and drawing squares around circles doesn't really qualify as using art to "explore" mathematics. Or the other way around. It's just kind of lazy. Math != Minimalist. That being said, there was some good stuff. Their earliest pieces, drawings of solids by Albrecht Dürer from the early 1500s were amazing. And for many of the more contemporary pieces if you detach yourself from the "math" and just accept them as "minimalist" or "suprematist" or whatever many of the pieces were very nice. The giant Sol LeWitt optical illusions, for example, were great (photo coming soon). But back to Dürer, for a sec: I found it very interesting to place into a larger historical context some of the "computer art" (god, what a horrible phrase) that I do and people at places like ITP do. And by that I mean stuff like that from Dan Shiffman's Nature of Code class, stuff that aims to create art out of the math that computers are so good at handling. We're in a luxurious position, in that to visualize a Platonic solid in a nicely rendered way requires a few lines of code, at most. Albrecht Dürer and his contemporaries — up through, say, 1970 — had to draw such things by hand, a much more arduous process. But I feel a similar kind of mentality going into it: A desire to See the Thing that the math describes. And a desire to play with it.

Using bikes as mobile instrument controllers.

Okay. I'm way off-topic. So: The Mobile Music Workshop. The reason I'm here.

One of the break-out sessions.

What is it? Well, it's a small, three-day event that consisted of a mix of talks, workshops, and performances — all exploring in some way the notion of "mobile music" (obviously). So there were technical talks about new tools, design talks about the nature of interactivity and touch, and various technical demos. Lots of Nokia N95 phones — heh. And a few projects with Wii remotes and Nintendo DSes (both great tools for experimenation, by the way). The MMW moves every year and this year was hosted by the University for Applied Arts Vienna and had about 25 attendants. Most of whom presented something. There was only one event at a time, so we all did everything together. Which was quite nice, actually. I think I met and had good conversations with more new people here than I generally do at a big thing like SXSW where everything's just so overwhelming. I had a great time.

Go PhonePlay!

My project — games made with PhonePlay — went off well. It took me a couple of days to get the European telephony stuff worked out (including one evening spent with tech support from one company on the phone and another in chat — erg), but once that issue had been ironed out, things became easy. I installed it at the University and showed my thesis game, called either "3001" or "Paddler," and the game I made for Digium on my trip out there last December, called "Blocks." (Naming these games has become somewhat of a problem — nothing I do sounds right. "Blocks?" "Paddler?" Awful names. But, anyway.) PhonePlay got a fine reception — people seemed pleased. I clumsily fielded a handful of technical questions and that was that.

A Wiimote-based performance.

Like I said, in the coming weeks I'm going to submit a bunch of articles about this to the Nokia blog, so I'm not going to get too deep, here. One subject Nokia might not be interested in, though, is the Nintendo hacking that has been going on. There were a couple of Nintendo-related projects at the MMW: One was a project called "Mobile Tangible Interfaces as Gestural Instruments" and featured homebrew musical software for the Nintendo DS. These were simple musical toys a la Electroplankton. Very nicely done. The DS is essentially a big-screen smart phone without the actual phone calling capability. It's got the touch screen, the wifi, the mic, etc. The difficulty in programming it is probably what's holding back development — why isn't Nintendo pushing this, though? I guess the DS sells just fine on its own... Anyway, another such piece was a performance on the final night of the MMW which features three guys with speakers attached to mic stands which they could gyrate around the generate noise. (You can kind of see what's going on in the photo above.) Attached in front of the cones of these speakers were Wiimotes which, I assume, measured the orientation of the speaker and could also be "plucked" to generate sounds (each Wiimote was mounted using an elastic sort of material). So the performance consisted of these three guys moving these speakers around in the air and plucking the Wiimotes. Clever.

Setting up for a vegetable-based performance with the Institute for Transacoustic Research.

Another performance that night was done by a group called the Institute for Transacoustic Research (see photo above and the two below). I don't know much about these guys, but they seem to be a part of the larger group of people who do performances with entire vegetable-based instruments. Beating carrots on gourds and such. I saw them do a set in Barcelona when I was out there for SONAR in 2005. At the MMW performance they had a few vegetables in effect, but mostly they just had huge piles of kind of everything in effect. From carrots and potatoes to modified bass guitars and a video projection and homemade automated instruments and a mess of digital and analog hardware plus computers. And, as you can see, mice. It sounded good. And they were quite fun to watch because you got to kind of try to figure out what they were doing and there was so much to see them do. Very nice.

Live video projection, also from the Inst. for Transacoustic Research.

A mouse-based controller, also from the Inst. for Transacoustic Research.

So what else to say? This is a kind of messy, incomplete report of the event. I really didn't even mention most of the cool stuff going on. It did feel like I'd found a warm little community of people, which is good. Jonah Brucker-Cohen (my thesis advisor) and Jamie Allen (my NIME professor) are apparently parts of this extended family, as well. So that's cool. Hopefully I can stay involved. I'm a bit irritated with myself for not applying to NIME this year. That seemed to be the next stop for everyone...

Watching a performance.

These were all taken in Vienna's Prater. I arrived in Vienna Saturday afternoon. The weather has been amazing, as you can see. Sunday I spent wandering around town, checking things out. Wound up at Prater, home of the Riesenrad (the century-old ferris wheel in the final shot).

I'm here for the Mobile Music Workshop at the Vienna University of the Applied Arts. I'm showing my thesis — PhonePlay, as it has been rechristened. Should be fun!

More details soon...

I remember when Netscape 1.1 came out. Background colors were the big new thing. You could suddenly change the background color of your web page. Red. Blue. Black. Amazing. I remember when "tables" first came about: 1996 — about the same time I landed my first big web contract. HTML 3 hit soon thereafter. Then in 1998, HTML 4. 1998. XHTML 1.0 came about a few years later, but the changes were negligible (especially compared to the craziness of the mid-to-late 90s).

So in a very real sense the most basic technology of the World Wide Web — the HTML specification itself — has remained essentially unchanged for about ten years. CSS has become widely used, which is great. And "dynamic web" techniques with Javascript, AJAX, and such have become quite popular. So the web has changed. But HTML itself remains a bunch of <body> tags and <div> tags and <p> tags and <a> tags, etc... The same old pig underneath all of that fancy new make-up.

So here comes HTML 5, a new draft specification from the W3C. (I'm specifically looking at this document.)

Okay. Cool. Just hearing the term "HTML 5" brings to mind changing the way HTML works to fit the way we make and use the web today. So much of the day-to-day of web development involves awkwardly fitting new ideas into the increasingly creaky structures of HTML 4 and XHTML, even if most web people have become so used to this that they don't even really consider it an issue anymore. Think, for example, of how one makes navigation on a web site. A developer must either appropriate <p> or <li> — for tasks they were not designed for — or they must use completely vague semantic tags such as <div> or <span>. Clunky. To say the least.

(Using the <table> tag for layout purposes is another prime example, even though most web developers no longer do this. The <table> tag was designed for displaying tabular data.)

Five years ago I wrote up my impressions of the XHTML 2.0 working draft. That document included many suggestions, including a navigation link tag (<nl>) and a new <section> tag to make page organization easier. And these (and other ideas in the draft) were great. But. They were merely incremental changes and fixes from the previous specifications. They didn't address the semantic web very deeply and the specification has stalled. XHTML 2.0 is still just a working draft. It has changed quite a bit since I wrote about it, but doesn't appear to have been touched much since the middle of 2006.

Semantic HTML and More

HTML 5 attempts to take semantic layout to all sorts of new extremes. (I'm looking at this doc about the differences between HTML 4 and HTML 5.) Look at all of the new structural elements:

• <section>
• <article>
• <aside>
• <header>
• <footer>
• <nav>
• <dialog>
• <figure>

Wow. Now we're getting somewhere. The only major thing that seems to be missing as I look at it now is an <advertisement> tag. Imagine how easy it would be to automate translating web pages for mobile devices (for example) if they were all properly marked-up with tags such as these?

(Interesting to note: They reached this list in part by looking at Google's web authoring stats, which Ian Hickson (quoted below) also developed, and seeing what people were already using. Clever!)

Besides the <advertisement> tag, what this collection appears to miss are structures that would be used with web applications. These are great for articles and papers. But now we're all very used to apps like Facebook or Basecamp or Gmail which are most definitely not about presenting info that way. They're dashboards and data views.

A List Apart further discusses and explains these semantic changes.

HTML 5 also appears to want to make life easier for developers. Take, as a quick example, the "ping" attribute for a link. This is an amazingly great idea. It invisibly (to the user) tells the browser to "ping" (notify) another script or page when the user clicks through a link. This could make tracking user activity much easier and save us from the obnoxiousness of all of those click-through and redirect URLs that we have to go through when clicking off of sites like Fark that want to know where we're going. It also saves us the headache of that silly image or iframe trick for keeping track of web usage stats. Good.

The draft also describes much more flexible forms, scoped CSS styles (finally), and upgrades to the DOM (document object model) which would made dynamic Javascripting somewhat easier and more intuitive. Wonderful. There's also some repetition and event-handling stuff in there which I don't fully understand. I also haven't read up fully on the new APIs for client-side storage, drawing, networking, and media playback — although integrating these elements more tightly into HTML seems like a good step for standards. The easier it becomes to do these things, the more people will play with them and make cool(er) stuff with them.

Another interesting addition are the <audio> and <video> tags for embedding media. If they can streamline the still amazingly clunky way we embed media, then make it so, Number One.

Slimming Down

The HTML 5 draft also strips away some fairly major parts of HTML 4. Including (drumroll, please) frames — the decade-old bane of usability and accessibility designers. I have a hard time believing that this will end the use of frames entirely, though. They're still quite common they do have their use. And iframes will stick around, it appears. The draft also drops some other tags (and attributes) I'd basically forgotten about such as <big> and <dir> (directory).

Additionally, they are stripping everything having to do with presentation. No more "align" attribute. Not more "background" in your <body> tag. "Height" and "width" attributes look like they'll also basically disappear. Bam.

Good! Frankly. If we're going to split the content and presentation once and for all, then let's just do it. We've been talking about it for over a decade. Although, again, I think breaking developers of their habits will be difficult enough — even those who want to write HTML 5-compliant mark-up — that browsers will still have to pay attention to those attributes. The same way browsers still know the <font> and <blink> tags. (Yeah, that's right: I used a blink tag. I went there. And I loved it.)

And, again, I'm all in favor of seeing the HTML part of a web site become a very slim, streamlined, and very semantic sort of affair. The less crap, the better. Everything in it's right place. Design in CSS. Content in HTML. It'll make data portability much easier and will allow services such as Google which rely on semantic parsing to do a better job or what they do.

You get the idea. If you want to know the fine details, go read the docs.

Coming Soon?

So. XHTML 2.0 has been floating around in draft mode for at least five years. But today it seems relatively dull and incremental. HTML 5 has some exciting new ideas, though we have a wait before we see an HTML 5 web. WHATWG, the group spearheading HTML 5, say:

"It is estimated by the editor that HTML5 will reach the W3C Candidate Recommendation stage during 2012. That doesn't mean you can't start using it yet, though. Different parts of the specification are at different maturity levels. Some sections are already relatively stable and there are implementations that are already quite close to completion, and those features can be used today (e.g. <canvas>). But other sections are still being actively worked on and changed regularly, or not even written yet." - WHATWG (source)

And:

"It is estimated, again by the editor, that HTML5 will reach a W3C recommendation in the year 2022 or later. This will be approximately 18-20 years of development, since beginning in mid-2004. That's actually not that crazy, though. Work on HTML4 started in the mid 90s, and HTML4 still, more than ten years later, hasn't reached the level that we want to reach with HTML5." - WHATWG (source)

Heavens to Mergatroid. 2022. Or later? Holy crap. But it sounds like it's coming it bits and pieces — and parts are already implemented in some browsers.

"We're trying a new spec design model with HTML 5, where certain parts of the spec can be considered "done" before others. This is because we have parts of the spec that are very mature, with multiple implementations, test suites, and active use, and we have others that are very new, and very much in flux." - Ian Hickman (source)

At any rate, HTML 5 will slowly creep along. Maybe it'll become a full specification, maybe not. But hopefully HTML will continue to evolve and become more useful. For a field that changes so much and so rapidly, it's amazing that's we're still stuck with such (relatively) ancient specs as the foundation of everything webby.

So. In addition to blogging here (sort of), I'm now on the blogging team over at the sleek-and-shiny new Nokia Nseries Workshop site. (I love the official Nokia Sans font, just to note.) Anyway. I write about mobile technology and about how to do cool things with Nokia phones and other Nokia tech. Since I've been slow about blogging on this site, I figured I would post a collection of links to my articles over there every once in a while. So you could see what I'm up to. And maybe learn a thing or two if you're getting into mobile application design yourself.

So here we are — my four most recent articles for the Nseries site. (I've added extra notes after some of them.) They're all about writing software for your Nseries phone. Enjoy.

How to write and run Python scripts on your N800 [internet tablet]

"Put your N800 into developer mode and you'll be able to write and run your own Python scripts. Here's a step-by-step guide to how it works."

The N800 is a funny little device. I won one at the MobileBarCamp a couple of months ago as a part of some jokey business plan pitch competition. (My group came up with something involving the remote torture of pets.) It's not a phone at all — it's a hand-sized Debian Linux box. It can run Apache. Ruby on Rails. PHP. It doesn't seem to want to run Java, but whatever. Anyway, it's probably been getting the most use as a video player on flights. And it's good for small games. I'd call it an iPod Touch for the Linux crowd. What it lacks in sex appeal it makes up in hackability. And though I haven't yet tried it as such, I could see inexpensive N800s being used for applications in which you need a bit of computing power but not much. Like as a Tivo for your radio (see next article).

How to script the FM radio tuner on your N800

"The Nokia N800 internet tablet has a feature you may not know about: a built-in FM radio tuner that you can script using Python. Here's how it works."

Now — finally — I own a radio in New York City. Turns out radio kind of sucks.

How to get started with Python on the N95 [phone]

"Find out what it takes to install Python, run a basic "Hello World!" script and get started with your own scripts on the N95."

I've had the N95 for about a month as a development unit. It's fun. It's so easy to write J2ME apps for, which is my big thing right now. And it's nice to have access to the GPS, as well. A few of us have a clever new idea we're fleshing out at the moment for the N95 (and other GPS-friendly phones) — I'll share more about that later. I've been using it as an iPod lately, as well, but I've kind of decided I don't like having my phone and iPod as the same device. I get so bothered when people call me while I'm listening to music — especially if I'm jogging. First, it stops the music and rings in the earphones. Yack. And then I have to fumble around to ignore the call and get back to what I was listening to. No good. Otherwise, though, it's a lovely device. Maybe I just need to get used to shutting off the phone part when I don't want to be disturbed listening to music or watching something.

How to write apps with Mobile Processing on your N95

"Mobile Processing is a great application that makes writing Java (or, more specifically, J2ME) apps for your N95 simple. Learn how to set up Mobile Processing and write your first application."

And more coming soon...

Yup. So that's them. Let me know what you think! Either here or over there, though if you comment over there you're more likely to get discussion.

I hate flying. I have expressed it many times before. And, I mean, I hate commercial flying. Although I am getting better: I've got five travel days in December alone and in order to maintain health and sanity I just can't freak out each time I get into an aircraft.

So. It was a bit of a personal challenge to get it together to fly with Mark out in Alabama. The last time I had been in a prop plane, I jumped out of it (with a parachute). That was back before the Fear set in, though — I think I was 19. Anyway. I did it! Last Friday afternoon, December 14th, Mark took me for a short spin around Huntsville, Alabama. It was a beautiful day — mostly clear (as you'll see) with a nice evening sun casting shadows and really throwing everything into a nice relief. Between moments of feeling extreme peril, I managed to get off a few shots. (Note: Mark did an excellent job flying — any sense of danger came from my own miswired brain.)

Here's another shot of the plane. Mark owns a 2007 Diamond Star XL, apparently the plane in its class with the highest safety rating. And a nice looking vehicle, to boot. It's a four-seater, but it seemed like three is really the practical limit.

This surprised me. Maybe it shouldn't have. It shouldn't have surprised me. But the majority of the instrumentation existed on two flat-screen monitors — one had the artificial horizon and various metrics, the other a GPS-tracked map of the area showing landmarks and, optionally, weather. There were redundant analogue gauges, as well, in case of problems with the digital systems. I mentioned to Mark that it made the whole thing feel kind of like playing a video game — you really could do basically the entire flight just by watching those screens. And pilots do. It's called "IFR" — "instrument flight rules." If you're in a cloud or something, that's what you use. (As a novice, even what's probably extremely entry-level information is still pretty novel.) The opposite of IFR is VFR: "visual flight rules." Anyhoo.

Here's Mark talking to the tower. We both wore big headphones with mics to speak to one another and to the ground.

The Digium building is the L-shaped building about 3/4 of the way down and 1/3 of the way from the right. It's angled like a "V" in the shot. You can also see a Saturn V rocket in the distance. NASA has a large research facility in Huntsville and there is quite a bit of aerospace business happening.

A nice sunset out of the side window.

Okay. So Mark buzzed his Farm so I could take some shots, but the tilting of the airplane really freaked me out. 30 degrees really does seem like a lot, especially if you're more-or-less encased in a glass bubble. I tried to get good shots, but, well, I was hanging on for dear life. You can see Mark's barn in the far lower left-hand corner, poking out of the trees. We could see the rest of the property quite nicely — the main house, the ravine, the open patches where we rode ATVs — but I just couldn't get a good photograph off. D'oh.

Heading home, now. This is a shot just straight forward out of the cockpit.

And, finally, the Tennessee River.

So. I had a really good time and would probably go up again if invited. Though it spooked me, it really did feel more comfortable than your average commercial flight. A couple things probably contributed to this: 1) Mark sat there and gave me the play-by-play as things happened. So no surprises. 2) Flying slower, lower, and in such an open cockpit just felt generally more relaxed and pleasant than being wedged into a small seat with a foot-wide window to look through. Very nice. Thanks, Mark!

Life got hectic, so I haven't had a chance to blog about my trip to Newfoundland, Canada in August. It's been almost three months — wow. Regardless I thought it'd be worth sharing a bit about it.

Newfoundland? Yeah. So. Many Americans of my generation have a shared experience of grandparents who served in or had other direct experiences of World War II. WWII was intense and surprisingly poetic, especially upon reflection — I think explaining and relating how you as an individual fit into this huge, overwhelming narrative became an important part of the identities of, especially, people who were young during that time. And as people such as my grandfather related their experiences of World War II, their stories became Stories that became cemented over time into legend. My grandfather on my mom's side was stationed in Gander, Newfoundland during most of the War. And my mom and I have both heard stories of his time there for the the entirety of our lives, so the area has a bit of mythic significance, exaggerated somewhat by the remoteness of the place and the fact that (as far I know) know one I know has been anywhere near rural Newfoundland.

So my parents — Texans — took a trip up to Newfoundland for the first time a couple of years ago. Just to look around. Besides the grandfather connection, they also like remote places. Alaska. Kenya. Wilderness. And then they decided to buy a place to spend half of their year in (the Summer half). They got a place in Elliston, a hamlet of maybe thirty people out on the end of a peninsula up the east side of the island, just miles away from where John Cabot became the first Englishman to reach the New World in 1497. (St. John's, the capitol and largest city in Newfoundland is the oldest English settlement in North America.) And not too far, actually, from Gander.

I got to go out August 16th through 21st. I stayed with my parents in St. John's (above) on the first and last nights and in their place in Elliston over the weekend.

The bay in Elliston. My parents' place is on the far coast a bit to the left on the waterfront. Apparently icebergs float along here until the late spring. Those buildings on the far left are downtown Elliston.

Foggy cliffs near where my parents live. Also home of a huge puffin population. Every summer Elliston has a Puffin Festival to celebrate these goofy little birds.

Puffin rock during a sunnier day. You can see puffins speckled about. This is, by the way, in the bay from the photo above.

One surprise about the area: Blueberries were everywhere. On the sides of trails. In the yard. By the road. Everywhere. My mom carried around a little container and grabs handfuls here and there which wound up in pancakes and cobblers.

My dad picked berries, as well.

This is an old boat (or replica) in Bonavista, where John Cabot landed.

Newfoundland is very rocky and craggy, not unlike Ireland or Iceland.

Lobster's big.

Above is a lighthouse at King's Cove, on the north side of the penninsula. Below is a church in the same town.

I could go on. But I won't.

For something interesting, read about the collapse of the cod fishing industry. It's a good "tragedy of the commons" sort of story.