(I was going to write this as a note to myself, but figured I'd put it here while I digest it)

The troubling thing about pinning down the nature of ambient displays is that too many end up being displays that forcibly get your attention when they have pertinent information (like the light on the answering machine or the shaking string denoting high network activity) or they need to be polled specifically, like the 'weather mobile' or, well, a clock in general.

Really good ambient displays provide their information nondisruptively during the course of the observer's everyday tasks.

Cases in point:

A kleenex cube is a poor example of an ambient display because it gives only the binary reading of 'empty' (no tissue sticking up) or 'not empty' (tissue sticking up).

Rolls of toilet paper are good examples of ambient displays because you know how much toilet paper is left, without ever directly polling the object to find out.

The key is that most ambient displays are tightly coupled with the objects they display information about. Successful man-made displays will probably rely on representative state-changes to metaphoric representations of the relevant objects, like fluid in a cylinder indicating how full a hard drive is. The display is even more successful when the user comes across the information over the course of their user's normal activities.

That's all for now...

Comments?

Probably my hottest passion in HCI is the concept of ambient displays. Ambient displays abound in nature. The way the spectrum of light changes a few minutes before rain starts falling, the way birds waking up at 4am let you know you've been studying too late again, your sense of balance. These are all examples of ambient displays.

In the HCI realm, the hot geek project de l'annee has been to create novel man-made ambient displays. Classic examples are the network activity dangling string and a thicket of waterfall and windchime-oriented projects. In the past few years most of these projects have been filed under the concept of 'ubiquitous computing' though I think this is a bit of a misnomer, since if an ambient display is truly ubiquitou, the 'computing' portion of it should be invisible to the user and therefore should no more have the label 'computing' than a car or DVD player should. The advancement of the field comes in the expression, not the computing.

At any rate, I've been wanting to create ambient displays at home for quite a while, but time, money, or other factors always got in the way. Now that I'm settling in to a new home, the desire to create an ambient informatic environment has risen anew, and I've spent the last several days thinking about two things: What form could these displays take, and what information do I want to display?

Though I don't have a shortage of answers for either of these two questions, I often find a disconnect between the two lists. Without any 'in the world' relationship between, say, traffic to fury.com and the sound of flowing water, that relationship has to exist in my head. Therein lies the problem, because there is a deliberate cognitive step that has to happen in my head when I hear the water surge briefly to understand what that display maps to in the real world. Further, someone who hasn't explicitly been told about the relationship between flowing water and my web site traffic (or in the linked example, the dangling string and the office's overall network activity), would never make that connection. This brought me to my first realization:

All ambient displays are learned.

Whether it's the flat sunlight before an imminent downpour, or the birds chirping at 4am, these displays only become effective as the user makes the connection (causal or otherwise) between the two phenomena. In the most effective ambient displays, this connection happens unconsciously, so that not only does the subject not know how they know it's about to rain, but they don't even notice that the light outside has changed.

In the network-string example, it's likely that the information needed to correlate the string to network traffic isn't available to the user, unless they start to realize that their web-browsing gets slower at the same time as the string gets more energetic. In the website traffic and water example, there is even less data to correlate because my website traffic is a metric completely hidden from someone sitting in my living room. The data that the subconscious brain needs to create this binding simply isn't available, and so explicit knowledge is required, negating the very nature of ubiquity.

To take it a step further, I believe that the linkage between the display and the underlying data should not only be available to the subject, but it must be available in a way where it is internalized inexplicitly. In other words, just having a sign saying "this string's activity indicates network traffic" won't do, because the knowledge of the linkage, while in the world, still has to be internalized consciously, and after the first handful of interactions with the display, the user will carry the knowledge in their head, but in their conscious attention.

This creates a direct obstacle to ubiquitous assimilation of the display's information, because a short-circuit to the conscious level has been created. When the subject encounters the ambient display, they think about the display and their explicit learned linkage, eliminating the opportunity for the display to affect them of its own accord.

It's like stopping hiccups: The most successful and difficult method to succeed is to think about something else entirely, only you can't, because you keep polling yourself to see if it worked, at which point you hiccup. By trying to use an ambient display ambiently, people will often try to see 'if it's working' which means it can't. When a linkage between display and data happens in the subconscious, there isn't that conscious recurrent check to see if it's working, because the conscious mind was never given a role in the experience.

So what makes an effective ambient display? What is effectiveness? Is ambience and/or ubiquity the most important facet? Or is it the fidelity to which the changing data is realized in the subject? It must be a middle ground, where explicit data is sacrificed for the sake of 'calm'. A cellphone ring is not an ambient display, while a static painting falls on the 'overly calm' side of the spectrum: a display that might have a deep meaning, but no change over time.

I'm still doing a lot of thinking on the subject, but rather than running headstrong into waterfalls and colored balls, I'm taking a step back and approaching from a research perspective. I'm going to start keeping a log of the ambient displays I sense every day, how I interact with them, and how I learned the relationship between the display and the information behind it.

My next step will be stretching a few of these displays a bit farther from their data, and see if they still work. For example, right now it's very quiet in my apartment because it's 1am. The ambient noise level is a display telling me very roughly what time it is. If I tied this kind of relationship to my radio, so that it grew softer as the evening wore on, and grew louder in the morning, mirroring the average change in ambient background noise, it might give me a better indication of the time of day, both when I'm staying up too late blogging, and when I should be getting up to start the day. In this respect it might serve as both an ambient alarm clock and 'time to sleep' notification, without any of the abruptness of a clock-radio. The most important difference here is that this radio doesn't attempt to tell you what to do or when, it simply gives you a better sense of the world around you.

Approaching the problem from the other end, I should take a look at the pieces of data I want that aren't adequately addressed by ambient displays. Then I need to find the right way to extend that data into the real world, as opposed to creating a display and an arbitrary linkage.

These are slow steps, but hopefully the results will have a greater utility to wow-factor ratio than most of the ambient work I've done so far.

Comments?

Along with the idea of a Radio TiVo, I'm also looking at outfitting my new home with custom ambient displays. I'm planting a few auxiliary speakers around the place, to be driven by my Lombard G3 laptop, and I'm looking at easily modifiable picture displays.

Though they' won't be on the market for another quarter at least, I'll be keen to take a look at Nokia's new photo pendants.

Comments?

I've lived in the Bay Area for over a decade (though never within San Francisco) and all that time this is the SF neighborhoods map I've needed all along to make sense of things.

Comments?

So it's only two days until I turn 30, but nature's present came early. I walked outside tonight at about 9:30 to go see a free showing of Goldmember in the park. Stepping off my porch, I stopped in my tracks. Between one warm evening and the next, the fireflies had come out in force.

From my first visit to Pittsburgh over a year ago, I was clear on the concept that I wasn't in California anymore: Bright sunny 80-degree days are no guarantee against a quick thundershower before sunset. When I came here to live last August, I learned about the cacophonous cicada and their 22 year cycle. Fall introduced me to the colors of which Pennsylvanian nature is capable, followed unusually quickly by Winter's blankets of snow, applied again and again. With the Spring came the rain, lush green grass right outside my window, and an ocean of dandelions. Approaching the end of the full circle, I thought that I knew all of Gaia's gifts to Pittsburg, but stumbling upon thousands of glowstick-green fireflies softly lighting and fading while weaving in front of, behind, and around tombstones in the twilight struck me dumb in a way I suddenly realized I had feared I was becoming incapable of as I enter my fourth decade.

I've often used the cemetery as my emotional soundstage over the last year, whether surreptitiously placing easter eggs on the statues with Rachel, picnicking on the grass, following foot-deep foot-holes in the snow on the way to the bus or striding hom, weaving through the headstones beneath the midnight moon with 'Rest in Peace' blaring in my iPod's earbuds. This felt totally different though. Tonight the graveyard was alive.

...

It was exactly 20 years ago today that I had last seen the faerie. A half a world away, in a vineyard an hour north of Florence, I was just two days away from my 10th birthday, travelling through Europe with my mom and sister. The fireflies were everywhere around the trees and the vines, flicking on and off, talking to each other, and speaking to me as well. It was a magical night outdoors, eating a fine dinner, feeling the Summer warmth, and walking a path under a waterfall reputed to take a decade off the ambler's age (a completely different prospect to someone not quite ten yet).

As we waited for the tour busses to take us back to reality, I urgently found a jar and caught a few of the fireflies. I was so proud. Mom told me that I could keep them if I wanted to, but I should know that they'd die within a day, and they would never glow again. I let them go just before I climbed the steps onto the motor coach. Mom smiled.

...

The faerie have changed in the intervening decades, but then so have I. In 1983 I was spastic with youth, and the fireflies reflected this with their fast binary blinks. Somewhere on their abdomen they were flittering their shutters open and closed, sending precise signals through the dusk.

Nature, digitized.

Today's gift was so different that at first I didn't even recognize it. A sine-wave of brightness in the corner of my eye, another floating above my car. I literally rubbed my eyes to clear these errant embers floating senselessly. After one travelled right in front of me, I realized what they were, so different from what I expected. Focusing out beyond the grass and to the headstones beyond I could see hundreds of them, brightening, peaking, and dimming to invisibility, seemingly constant lights drifting between this dimension and another. Seeing headstones literally lit by their passing glow, I thought to myself, 'Buffy can't touch this.'

Reality, smoothed.

I had to share, so I called Rachel to tell her that she was right and the fireflies had indeed come. "Of course, silly!" 'Will they stay? or is it a one-night deal?' "They'll be around all month! It's what they do."

Feeling the magic lift me, I got in my car and drove to the movie, seeing only one or two fireflies the whole way. Apparently the dead get first dibs. Well, them and their neighbors.

Tomorrow I'll see how well the video camera can handle this unique low-light setting. For tonight, I'm cherishing my first birthday present.

Comments?

Last weekend Rachel and I ventured across Pennsylvania to attend a wedding where, incidentally, Rachel was the Maid of Honor. We left early Friday morning with a map and a timetable in hand.

Trying to make the most of my time left in the strange and foreign land known as Pennsylvania, I couldn't pass up the chance to drop in on the Pennsylvania Dutch, and so we planned a 30 mile detour just past Lancaster and deep in to the heart of Amish and Mennonite culture. In this case, a rural town called 'Bird-in-Hand'.

At the urging of the buggy company's web site, www.amishbuggyrides.com, we took the "quickest, then most scenic way" in to town, in defiance of Yahoo Maps's directions. It's a bit of a quandary, when you think about it: Who knows more about the optimal route? The computer that warns you that roads it tells you to travel on might not even exist, or the Amish who are forbidden to drive cars and haven't travelled more than 15 miles from their birthplace? In this case, Yahoo had the direct route right, though the way we took may have been a bit more scenic.

We were already behind our tight schedule that would bring us to Reading (well, Hiedelberg, but who's counting?) in time for wedding rehearsal prep (involving the bride, her mother, bridesmaids, and a distinct absence of moi). Still, we made it, and the Buggy Ride bird was now in our hands, and we weren't going to let it go. Thankfully there was no line, just a buggy, a horse, and a driver (footnote 1). In 10 minutes we were underway. With a family of four fellow travellers sharing our buggy, I sat right up front on a small wooden footstool, right behind the horse. Unfortunately, the previous sentence isn't the only one that uses both the words 'horse', 'behind', and 'stool', but seeing as this sentence fulfills that prophecy, I don't have to bring it up later, but it happened, and at a trot, no less.

The first bit of the ride was along the highway, in the 'buggy lane'. I was impressed that the horse looked both ways before merging in to traffic, a good thing since it turns out that because horses aren't machines, there's no license or age required to operate such a beastie on the open road. We quickly turned off the main road on to a smaller road, where our guide pointed out the ways to tell whether a given house was occupied by Amish (dark-curtained, unadorned windows, no wires leading in to the house, often simple clothes on the washline) or by others. We passed a carpenter's studio with a sign declaring that he would be happy to make custom furniture to order. A few moments later we were passed by a large tour bus. I got a momentary insight in to the Amish lifestyle as twenty tourists crowded to the windows and pointed at us, the presumptive Amish they had come to see through their tinted panes.

It wasn't too much further when we pulled on to a dirt road, heading towards barns and silos. It turns out that this was the first day in a month that they'd been able to take this path, as the earlier rains had made the path too muddy for the cart's narrow wheels. We drove between fields, seeing a horse-driven plow team here, a person tending to a garden there.

Amish look Amish all the time.

The average Amish family has about 10 children, which is why every day is laundry day. It also explains their culture's survival. the Amish culture has just about zero population growth, since so many of the kids leave the farm.

Driving past a barn and scooter (Amish will ride push-scooters, but not bicycles), we came upon three girls working in the family garden. they were probably 20, 14, and 3 years old. When the buggy came, the middle girl came out and offered us chocolate chip cookies, three for a dollar.

Amish know their cookies.

We went on our way, and continued between fields, with silos in the distance, and grazing cows near the path. Trundling by the cows, I wondered: Does our horse know he's a horse? Does he look down on the lazy fat cows as he works for his daily fare, or does he lament his position? Do the cows laugh at him? Is there a parallel to be found here between the Amish and wider civilization? Are we the cows?

Amish Factoid Time:

• Amish don't work on Sundays. Sunday is God's day.
• Weddings always happen in October and November, when they interfere the least with tending the land.
• An Amish man shaves until he is married, then he grows a full beard, but never a mustache.
• Weddings are always held on Tuesdays and Thursdays. It takes a full day to prepare for a wedding, and a full day to clean after a wedding, so mon-TUES-wed and wed-THURS-fri is the only way to ensure that nobody misses a wedding while preparing for another.
• After the wedding, Amish newlyweds go door to door to collect their wedding gifts.
• Amish aren't permitted to drive cars, but can be passengers.
• Those Amish who require phones for their business keep the phone in the shed, a fair distance from the house.

I forgot to ask if the Amish vote.

Coming back to the terminus after our 30-minute ride, we saw a field trip of 20 kids in identical blue t-shirts. they were all going buggying. We asked how they'd handle them all, and sure enough a long buggy with lengthwise benches emerged to the kids delight.

A quick gift shop pit stop later and we were on our way to the rehearsal, plus a jar of blueberry syrup and a slab of rocky road fudge.

Amish Mennonites know their fudge. (Know the difference between Amish and Mennonites? Check the FAQ!) Actually, truth to tell, we thought they knew their fudge, and we wouldn't know any better for another two days, but that's another day, and another story.

Footnote 1: Driver is an interesting term. I was having a conversation with Ammy a few days ago about words that persist in our culture, after the literal meaning of the word has been surpassed by technology. Her example was an article about TiVo where it talked about taping shows, as if TiVo has anything to do with tape. I tried to think of others, but it's not easy to do off the cuff. 'Driver' is definitely such a word, as it derived [npi] from the person who 'drives' the horses forward. (go back up)

Comments?

I have a certain fondness for keyboards. Starting when I learned to touch-type on a fully manual typewriter in the 7th grade, I've migrated to all kinds of keyboards, with different looks and feels, strokes and weights.

I've always found both my writing style and general computing attitude to be greatly affected by the keyboard I'm using. In this regard (and only this regard) I secretly identify with Greg Kinnear's typewriter-afficianado character in You've Got Mail.

I've probably owned more than a dozen keyboards since I learned to type, from the clickitty IBM PC keyboards to the membrane keyboard of the Odyssey II, to the tiny keyboard of my Duo 210 to the Stowaway folding keyboard for my Palm V to my Sidekick's thumb 'keyboard', just to name a few. Okay, make that two dozen.

Atop the highest pedestal in this tactile pantheon sits my Apple Extended Keyboard II, which I got in 1989, along with my Mac SE/30. I called it a 'deck,' massive yet graceful, seeming more suited to the bridge of the Enterprise (1701-D) than on a simple 1980s desktop ("Hello computer!"). (Here's a great photo of Apple keyboards and mice through the ages. The AEK II is the big one on the top left.)

The keys had a soft stroke, and bespoke quiet power when pressed. Even stroking my hand across the full sweep of the 105 keys (I remember that there were 105 keys) gave more a sense of art than doing the same over the 88 keys of a grand piano.

Truly a thing of beauty.

Okay, back to the point, and the present day. For the last six months I've been living off my powerbook, using its decent keyboard while away from my desk, and jacking in to the orphaned keyboard and mouse that came with my now stilled G4 Quicksilver desktop. A decent combination. Well, as the avid reader knows, I sold my desktop machine last week, and the buyer opted for the keyboard and mouse as well. No problem. I'd just buy another.

For the last two weeks, since pulling the keyboard for the eBay photos, I've been using my backup Happy Hacking Keyboard, a tool which, while admirable for its efficiency, compactness, and lack of a caps-lock key, is ultimately cramped and uninspiring. Pair that with a Wacom as my primary pointing device on a desk so cluttered to not have room for it, and my writing was quite literally cramped.

With my eBay money firmly in my paypal account, I've been doing a little spending. I intended to replace my keyboard with another just like it, but it turns out they don't sell the black keyboard separately, only the white model. I wasn't sure how I felt about this inversion, but I went ahead and bought it anyhow, and I don't know how much is in my head and how much in the keys, but it feels more like that vaunted Extended Keyboard II than any board I've had the pleasure of keystroking since. (108 keys. Tee-hee!)

Suddenly writing is a pleasure again. Heck, I've already written 590 words on a new keyboard (on a new keyboard)!

This is a preface to say that, like the new owner of a Strat, I'm learning my instrument, finding our shared voice, but so far she truly sounds sweet.

If you think I'm a freak now, just wait until my new mouse and speakers arrive. Hey, at least it's not an iGesture Pad. God those things look cool.

Comments?

Here it is, another Wednesday night, another return from Parts West. It was weird being at the Plough on Monday, seeing friends that I saw last week, yet realizing that I don't have plans to come back before August, so the casual goodbyes really were 'goodbye for another quarter.'

It truly amazes me how easily I slide from one world to another right now. I used to feel that each place that had sentimental meaning to me also had the power to alter me when I went there, so there was 'Los Angeles Kevin' and 'Berkeley Kevin' and so forth. Now that I've been traveling so much, it's just me, and I carry my identity wherever I go.

For the most part, anyhow. I still seem to have layers that get highlighted more in specific environments. I'm identity tiramisu.

Comments?

Ever wonder what it's like to have prosopagnosia? How would you adapt to not being able to recognize faces as easily as the human mind usually does? Taking a look around the web, wondering about this, I came across a great page written by a long-term prospagnosiac, comparing rocks to faces to help the rest of us understand how it can be difficult to recognize the faces of people you see rarely, or every day.

Interesting to consider that an inability to recognize faces is more easily diagnosed, but agnosias come in all forms and severities, and what might be obvious to you might be obscure to others in ways that have nothing to do with logic, intelligence or insight, and everything to do with the higher-order precognitive recognition systems of the brain.

Comments?

I was going to write this specifically about iTunes, but I think it applies to most mp3 players. If any mp3 players have this functionality, I'd love to hear about it, regardless of platform.

A predefined playlist is just that, a queue of songs whose composition and order has been set up manually. Set on random shuffle, the order is mixed, but the contents of the list remains the same. That's all fine, but it's not how Iusually work.

A lot of the time I use music as my background, but to let it fade in to the background, I need one of a smaller subset of songs, almost like you need certain conditions to fall asleep, but once there can tolerate a lot more.

What I want is to be able to insert two songs or five into the playlist queue, even if it's on random. I want to be able to say "play this song now, then that one, then go on to your normally scheduled randomness."

I can do this already with a single song by finding the song, playing it, then unfiltering so that everything is visible, but first, that limits me to a one song push to the queue, and second, that song has to be in the same playlist that it will be going back to after that song.

I want a 'current song queue' box where I can drag a few songs in, order them around, and then at the end of my little list, drag in a playlist's icon, so as to say "and when you're done, keep playing from this playlist.'

With this system, more advanced functionality could be to specify "Play three songs from ths playlist, then 2 from that, then al of this playlist on random shuffle, before emptying out into a random play of the entire library." All this would be possible with a little interface work.

What would be even better would be a system that gets rid of playlists altogether but relys on markov chaining to create song queues that meld well fro one song to the next, gravitating towards one or another style of song. This is similar to something my group created in our 'home MP3 player' assignment this semester, but I'll talk more about that once I put the work we did online.

In other news my graduation present is coming few weeks early. Let's just say I need to find some more mp3s to fill the rest of the 30 gigs. ;-) (Thanks Dad!)

Comments?

For a seminar yesterday, we were to make a collage of our bathroom, real or ideal.

I took pictures of my own bathroom and mixed them together for a cognitive level look at my bathroom, with more important things taking up more space.

I can't explain how I forgot the actual toilet...

Comments?

Inspired by the many requests here last week from people wanting to see what my bedroom looked like before and after our re-do last weekend, Rachel surprised me by gifting me and you all with a peek at what changed.

Courtesy of Rachel, I'm proud to present Trading Spaces - Kevin Style! (shockwave)

Comments?

It's amazing how small changes can have such a large impact, but Rachel and I spent a good part of the weekend rearranging my apartment. I finally found the perfect layout for my bedroom, making it's perceived utility at least twice, possibly three times as much as it was before. I even reclaimed my little alcove room into a dressing room.

It's scary the inspiration that can be derived from a few episodes of Trading Spaces and Changing Rooms.

I have real, rich, enjoyable content in the barrel and almost ready to be fired your way. Just squaring away a few things today though.

Comments?

Snow keeps threatening to fall, or rather the Weather Channel keeps promising, with nature underdelivering. I'd complain except I expect she's saving it all up for a blizzard, and I'll wish I'd kept my mouth shut.

In the meantime, I've hardly got my camera locked up. The Fall colors here were (and, lingeringly, still are) stunning, and I took plenty of pictures.

For most of you, Fall is still in full swing and Thanksgiving, that cornucopia of Autumnal bliss, is just around the corner. With that in mind, I'm turning some of my better pictures into desktop pictures for those who want a little of the Fall spirit in your computer, without the worry of soggy leaves actually shorting out your screen.

Here's the first. I'll put the rest up one every couple days. for those using Mac OS X 10.2, you might want to try out the nifty new auto-change feature that can fade in a new desktop picture every day, hour, or 5 seconds, as you like. If you're on a PC, Wall Random does pretty much the same thing.

Choose your screen size:
800x600 | 1024x768
1280x854 | 1280x1024 | 1600x1200

Lemmie know if I missed any important screen sizes. The 1280x854 is for G4 powerbooks, and I figured (hoped) nobody was still running 640x480.

Comments?

The leaves they are a'changin' round these parts. Here and there it's as if a tree has burst into flame amongst its still-green brethren. More and more the trees are giving up this year's ghost, losing their chloraphil and letting their keratin shine through.

The leaves are changing, and changing fast. After a summer that stretched further into October than it ought'o've, Fall looks to be compressing itself into a few short weeks, as temperatures have been dipping from the 80s three weeks ago into the 30s and 40s now.

I think the trees were just hanging on until the cooldown, and are now feeling pressured for their wardrobe change before winter sets in, casting the city into a moder-world Narnia of snow and limb.

And they're rushing, too, perhaps because they're aware that the season's first snowfall is forecast to come as early as Friday.

Comments?

So by now you've all hopefully remembered to set your clocks back an hour. For me personally, the change was a subtle reminder of how ubiquitous computing is marching ever-forward. I've just counted, and I have fifteen timepieces in my life. Of those, four automatically changed time to adjust for the end of Daylight Savings.

I was a little surprised by some. Here's how they fared:

• Yahoo Watch - No update. Hardly a surprise; it's a dumbtech watch that barely knows what the day and month are, much less day of the week or time zone.
• Desktop Mac - Updated right on time. I came home at 1:30am (the, err, second 1:30am) and it was right on the ball.
• Powerbook - Same as desktop mac.
• iPod - Nope. It knows about timezones (thanks to the 1.2 update, which also gave it a clock and calendar) but it required me to go into settings and change my time zone from 'Eastern (EDT)' to 'Eastern'. It might have done it automatically if I'd sync'ed it with my mac. I won't know 'till April.
• Elph s100 Camera - Not only did it not know the time changed, but it thought I was still in California! Funny how little I pay attention to the datestamping functionality of my digicam.
• Camcorder - At 12:50am I checked it (just now) and it thought it was 10:50pm. I would have been a little confused if not for the fact that I had checked the elph moments before and it showed 9:47pm. So I thought, 'Neat! It thinks I'm in California still, but at least it did the time change!' Then I realized no: I simply had never set the time forward back in April. Now, writing this down, I realize I have it backwards: The Elph hadn't been reset since before April. The camcorder wasn't even purchased until after April. Anyhow, they're both just smart enough that they should know better, but don't.
• Car Stereo - As smart as it is, it doesn't know a thing about calendar dates, and seeing as how it doesn't get its time signal from a radio station, it knows nothing about daylight savings.
• Zen Alarm Clock - The thing's analog for crissake. And that's why I love it.
• Zeit Atomic Clock - The one item in my house that is expressly created to handle daylight savings time correctly, and it messes it up. A bit about this clock: It reads the longwave time signal broadcast from Colorado, and syncs itself to that signal all the time, so it's the most difinitive timepiece I own. Nevertheless, for the past two years, it adjusts itself for daylight savings time two weeks before it's supposed to, without explanation, or even corroboration by other Zeit clock owners. This month it fell back two weeks early, a not-so-subtle reminder of the impending shift, but fixed itself a few days later. Now, at its moment of truth, it ticks blithly on in defiance of the end of daylight savings. I have little choice but to wait for it to figure out on its own what's what.
• Bose Alarm Clock - Doesn't know about dates.
• Cellphone - As smart as my Nokia purports to be, and as hopeful I was when I activated the 'auto-adjust clock' feature on it, the thing is as dumb as a digital rock. No joy.
• Microwave Oven - Another example of dumbtech. I trust the thing to work as a countdown timer for food, but that's about it.
• Kitchen Wall Clock - Analog dumbtech.
• Digital Cable Box - Smart. I'd expected that, but considering that the phone line umbilical is currently cut, I wouldn't have been surprised if it didn't get the message for a day or so.
• TiVo - Ditto above, though I actually figured it wouldn't update the clock until it made its daily call, which it's been unable to for the last week, thanks to me and my non-payment of my Verizon bill. I should've known better though: A device with Linux at its core is smart enough to know about daylight savings, and adjust on its own.

As for my body, I put a little effort into trying to even out my sleep schedule. It's now 1:15am local time, and I'm going to sleep. Considering that I usually go to sleep around 3:15am, I'm compensating an extra hour, turning in an hour earlier than my biology expects.

I hope everyone else's weekend was good. I've got a few bits to write up in the morning, probably before most of you even wake up from your Monday Bonus Hour of sleep.

Comments?

Freeways and cars have two of the most evloved, iterated, and consistant design patterns around; far more so than computers, or even telephones nowadays. It can be funny how wrong it feels to break the rules.

A long time ago I realized, in the abstract, that a cloverleaf intersection of two highways is basically four line segment connectors and a single clover ribbon (hence the name, of course). I always knew that you could stay on the cloverleaf forever, but only as fiction.

Living in LA, I coined a term (probably only used by me, ever) called the 'Rollo', slang for a freeway U-turn, it stood for "Right, Off, Left, Left, On," and applied when you missed your offramp at a regular freeway exit (as opposed to a cloverleaf), and needed to get off at the next exit and turn around.

A couple years ago I was on Highway 92 East going over 880 (in Hayward) having missed the turn I neded to make, and I wanted to turn around. Using the cloverleaf to go from 92 West to 880 South, and staying to the right in the merge, exited 880 South to emerge on 92 West. Basically half a cloverleaf.

Just under a year ago, I was lucky enough to miss the turnoff from 80 East to 780 South, and in a flash I thought 'now's my chance.' I instead took the right-hand 270-degree onramp to 780 North, stayed in the right lane to come on to 80 West, and exited again to emerge on 780 South. If a 'right' is 90 degrees clockwise, then this was a case of nine rights making a right.

So my challenge, to those who choose to accept it, is to ride the cloverleaf the next time you have the chance. Get on anywhere, and take the ride for a spin once or twice. Don't be surprised if it feels somehow 'wrong,' like driving with contacts after years with glasses, or (second example omitted because this is (more or less) a family show).

Intermediate class: Try riding the clover for 5 minutes. Just don't use a cellphone at the time.

Advanced class: Do it with someone else in the car, like a parent, without explaining what's going on. watch them get inexplicably nervous.

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The word of the day is: Assuage.

Specifically, 'Assuage guilt."

I just got back from Columbus, Ohio, from the Buckeye Invitational Chorus competition. Mom did fabulously, as did the other 63 members of the Verdugo Hills Chorus, taking the grand prize for entertainment, boards, and overall. I'm really goad I drove out to see them. They're a really great bunch. It doesn't hurt that it serves to assuage future self-inflicted guilt for not being a good son.

Right now I'm writing to assuage my other guilt, writing on the weblog. It's really frustrating that every minute is occupied with something, most things of which are directly related to making my existence on this distant not-quite-coast habitable, both physically and emotionally. At the same time, I need to post because I want to write the trip up, day by day, and post the pictures (which I know Ammy is waiting for (even though she has other things on her mind at the moment)).

My fear is that you guys, my bit of social live that's ultra-mobile, happy to jump online for the journey, will get bored and drift off. Don't do it! Give me a couple days and real content, real stories, and real insight and imagrey (the kind where I know I'm doing something right because Trisha calls me on a sentence and asks me if I knew that sentence was great when I wrote it). It's all in me, and the strain of it bursting to come out is just even with the strain of improving my physical surroundings, not to mention spending time with Mom, who's here (helping with the aforementioned physical surroundings tasks) until Tuesday morning.

So, I hope I've successfully assuaged my blog-guilt for another day or so, but I'll only know by your comments.

It's amasing how isolation fosters insecurity. Pathetic, huh?

Oh, and my cellphone's dead. No explanation, and so far no resolution, so if you know my Pitts phone, I'll try to remember to plug the phone in when I get offline, and if you want the # and should have it, email me.

Take it easy. It's Sunday!

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I've been doing a lot of thinking over the last three months on the format of a blog. The design patterns of this type of site, and those that set it apart from a macrom site, or a static informational site.

Of course blogs are more timely, and are therefore stickier (mmm... sticky blogs...) but does this advantage come at a price?

They typical blog has a front page and date-indexed archives section. Some more sophisticated blogs also have categories, so you can find posts loosely related to the one you're reading, or look for things on a particular topic.

Having had both of these 'windows into the past' for a while, I don't think they're sufficient. I still look at some static sites and miss in my own site the qualities of relevance that they have.

There are two kinds of posts (okay, there are as many kinds of posts as there are posts, but for the sake of this post, I can make my point by dividing posts in general thusly): Those which have meaning within the running commentary of posts, or otherwise are relevant specifically to the time when they're posted, and those which, insights, information, commentary or otherwise, are items that would make it onto a static site, if that was what you kept. This second type of post is the kind of thing you wish people coming to your site for the first time could see when they're trying to get a foodhold understanding of who you are, rahter than forcing them to dig through sedimentary banality, or lurk long enough until they think they know you.

So this post isn't saying much more than that my current focus of blog framework study is looking at the more effective kinds of information presentation on static sites, personal or otherwise, that have a fair amount of data, yet easily allow people to self-select the kind of information they want. I hope to identify ways of building this kind of framework dynamically, and incorporate it into the blogging system, so that when I write what I think is a profound, timeless, or otherwise worthy piece, along with filing it dutifully away in the date archives and a few topic pages, it'll also find a home in the pantheonic 'static site'.

Clearly I'm thinking far too much about this for someone with a backlog of posts and only twelve days remaining before the Big Drive, but then there's always spare cycles to burn, walking down the stairs, showering, sleeping...

Hey, happy Monday, y'all!

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The more I use OS X as my regular operating system, the more Win2K starts to feel like KDE and Gnome when I turn to it...

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Last Wednesday I went to the monthly BayCHI meeting, where the computer-interaction experts of the Bay Area congregate to gab and see presentations.

That evening's main speaker was one of the founders of Google, who had a lot to say about a lot, and I took some notes, and I'll write up a little synopsis.

But not just yet. First I have to tell you about the mens room at PARC (where the meetings are held).

So before the presentation started, I went to visit the mens room. It's a testament to the true banality of this weblog that I not only feel compelled to inform the noble reader that I was going number one, but that it's vital to also convey to you that at least four, and possibly all ten of the people in this story also had to go number one. There was no number two to be seen.

Okay, the scene: One urinal, two stalls (one handicapped, one small, both with doors that come to a close when at rest). I walked into the restroom and there was one person using the sole urinal, two people waiting for him, and two closed stalls.

Standing there for at least a half-minute, the guy waiting in front of me cautiously taps the handicapped stall's door. No response, so he gently pushes on the door. It opens onto an empty stall. He's in business. Err, so to speak. Urinal guy is done and the other waiter takes his place. I'm tempted to knock gently on the second stall, but as someone comes into the restroom and starts waiting behind me, another temptation enters my mind (no, this isn't that kind of story!).

I wait.

Handicapped guy finishes, I go into the stall, and by the time I'm done, there are now six people in line, all waiting for one urinal and two stalls, one of which (I peeked from the other stall) has stood empty for the last five minutes.

Heh. Usability professionals... he hee... Unless each one of them was performing the same experiment I was...

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My family's starting a foundation. Though still a nascent idea in need of a lot of nurturing, planning, and formalization, my uncle has brought together the larger family to found a family non-profit in the name of my grandmother, Frieda Fox, a thoroughly incredible woman. I don't want to talk about it too much now since, again, it's still just an egg of an idea.

It was to learn more about the nature of family foundations that six of us, four family, two friends of family, joined up in New Orleans on Wednesday for the 16th annual Family Foundation Conference, organized by the Council of Foundations. We were actually planning on attending last year's conference in Chicago, but extenuating family circumstances forestalled the trip until now.

I learned about a world of philanthropy that I only had a vague notion of before. I met dozens of incredible people whose foundations make a real difference to thousands, if not millions, of others. Very uplifting, very educational, and above all very supportive and positive. I've been to lots of conferences, but this was the first conference where every participant can gain more by sharing with every other participant, with no sense of corporate rivalry or other competitiveness to apply what the conference had to offer.

I'm sure I'll write more about this as things progress and evolve over the coming years, but it was a great experience.

...

And then of course, there's Mardi Gras.

I didn't even realize that Mardi Gras overlapped our time at the conference. Sure, the Superbowl was last Sunday, and I arrived (very) early Wednesday morning, due to fly out Friday evening, but I thought that Fat Tuesday (literally 'Mardi Gras') was the initiation of the festivities, not the culmination.

We didn't really have much time outside the conference to explore New Orleans N'awlins, but we did spend a few hours Thursday night walking the few blocks to the French Quarter, eating dinner, and wandering along Bourbon Street which, even then, was starting to build into something warranting an MTV broadcast pod.

It was weird, with my only real concept of Bourbon Street coming from Volkswagon Jetta commercials and random flashes of cultural knowledge. The next afternoon, between the close of the conference at 1 and our need to leave for the airport at 3, Kristina, Natalie, and I had a chance to walk along Riverwalk and the less crowded streets of the French Quarter.

What can I say? Walking into the French Quarter, I was reminded more and more of New Orleans Square at Disneyland, the ironwork balconies, sculpted faux columns, intricate and colorful paintwork and plants melding into a combination my brain only had one pattern for. I kept feeling like there should be an entrance to Pirates of the Caribbean, or a nondescript door with a buzzer that would provide an ingress to Club 33.

As we approached Bourbon Street, the illusion of Disneyland faded step-by-step into an illusion of Grad Night at Disneyland... with porn. Turning the corner on to Bourbon itself, the disillusion was complete, a bastardization of the uniqueness of the French Quarter, with neon and drunk fratboys replacing dignity and culture. I don't mean to disparage the uniqueness of Mardi Gras itself, or the doubly unique incarnation of Mardi Gras that exists on these few blocks, I'm only pointing out the extreme dichotomy of experiencing the cultural, historical, and architectural beauty of the French Quarter with the extreme cultural manifestation of that uniqueness, spawned by it, but year by year less relating to it.

Don't get me wrong, there's a lot to like about Mardi Gras, even (and yes, many would say specifically) on Bourbon Street. As most of you probably know, the celebration of Mardi Gras is intended to be the debauchery, the glut of gratification before the 40 days of Lent, the feast before the famine, as it were.

It's easy to look at Mardi Gras and see drunken sex-crazed teens, and of course you wouldn't be wrong, but unlike Daytona, Ft. Lauderdale, or any other Spring Break staging area, the story doesn't end there. Above all, Mardi Gras is the epitome of New Orleans, of their pleasure-seeking nature and openness and respect for others. The parades of the diverse krewes, the music, and the people bind together into an overall celebration of life.

Writing this, I realize it probably sounds stupid to some, but maybe not to everyone. Even on Bourbon street, with guys and girls hanging from the balconies, I saw people cherishing each other, and cherishing themselves. Instead of a riotous Palm Springs gropefest, this was a place with all the sexual overtone, but grounded in the energy of feeling comfortable with sexuality, your own, and that of people around you. Maybe its the beads...

So, while I came to N'awlins for one education, I got another as well, of a city melding its cultural heritage and values and reveling in them more than anyplace else I've seen.

Epilogue: This post reads pretty stupid, with book-reportish idealism and trite realizations that would make Mark Twain roll over in his grave. Twice. I realize that. A lot of it has to do with my own sexual repression. I kept re-reading and tweaking it, but I can't get past the fact that it sounds like I feel like I'm a southern prude trying to justify not being prudish. Heck, I don't know, maybe I am. More likely though, I think I feel like I'm supposed to be aloof in some sort of counter-culture Daria-esque kind of way, and that I'd sound stupid if I just wrote a gung-ho rah-rah Mardi Gras tit piece. Then again, maybe the real problem is that I wish I felt like I belonged there on Bourbon Street, while at the same time laughing at the lemming horde they blur into.

I think the truth is that I'm both at once, but just have trouble admitting it.

I held off posting this until I finished the gallery, but with my sudden flu I didn't get to it. I'd have done it on the train today, but I left the pictures in my other iPhoto. I'll put it together and put it up this weekend.

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Ever get the urge to customize your desktop environment with a new background image, font, or system beep? Luckily, it's easy to do and there are countless sites out there to help.

But would you really want these system sound replacements? Am I the only person who's reminded of "Duff Man"? Maybe just the thing for the office...

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Thinking about the interface, right now we have a narrow, linear keyboard interface (okay, slightly 'chorded' when you consider simultaneous keyboard and mouse activities (shift-clicks, etc))

Lots of directions are being taken to make this pipe wider and deeper at the same time (voice control, intelligent appliances, etc.). Eventually, the best interfaces aren't going to be little command pipes connecting the human to the device. It's like a jacket. It works because of what it is. It stays with your body because of its construction. You don't have to tell it to keep you warm. You don't have to tell it to move its arm when you move yours.

The jacket is not smart.

But it does its job very well. So many 'ubiquitous computing' initiatives are about making very smart things, then hiding that intelligence so that it seems to just 'act naturally'. Maybe going the other direction isn't so bad: Making devices that are so dumb that we know how they work the way we know how a towel works. Give them small, yet powerful functionalities that don't currently exist, and manipulate them, combining their capabilities in ways people understand, not via APIs, interfaces, and coding linkages, but by stacking them, putting the jacket over your sweater, putting the 'heatball' in the water to cook it, or point the remote control at the TV and hitting the 'ON' button.

There's a good one right there: One remote with the basic cognitive tasks (play, channel up/down, volume, power, blah) that's directional enough that you point it at the unit you want to control. Point it at the TV and the TV's little red light glows a little brighter to say "I'm the one the Remote sees now" then you press the button you want. One remote, no modal interface.

This is obviously a rough cut, but I'm so busy at the moment (and for so many moments previously and henceforth) that I just wanted to get it out in any form, as a topic for discussion...

Your thoughts?

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I'm almost finished reading "House of Leaves" by Mark Z. Danielewski (and written less than a block from my own house . It's a very strange and interesting book, one that I wouldn't recommend others take on until they read my (forthcoming) or another person's review. This is a book some people I know would love, others would hate, and others would get trapped inside, forced to claw their way to the back cover regardless of their feelings during the journey (that would be me).

At any rate, most of the story centers around this house that has a black, featureless, and ever changing labyrinth inside it. The labyrinth is both a menacing antagonist, and a trope for our own unrealized fears. At any rate, one of the most unsettling (pun not intended, but noticed retrospectively) features of the maze is that the walls (and floors, ceilings, etc.) will change arbitrarily, around a person, and when they're not watching.

Jumping back to reality, last night I dropped off Emily at San Francisco International Airport at around 10:15 last night, and was absolutely zonked. It was hard enough to stay awake going there (jetlag still telling me I should absolutely be asleep) but trying to get back without someone keeping me awake seemed an unlikely venture.

So, after dropping her off I drove to the area known to some as international terminal short-term parking, someplace I rarely think about and never visit. Pumping in and out of turns I make my way through the newly-constructed labyrinth of concrete and halogen to that desolate parking arena, wind up the corkscrew to the third level and find a spot between cars, pull up the emergency brake, throw back my seat and lie on top of it for a good nap.

Having set my cellphone alarm to wake me in an hour, I wake and look around to find that the tide of cars, the defining members of the space around me, has receded, with no car to blemish the yellowblack concrete walls for a hundred feet. Resetting the alarm for another 15 minutes I wake to see the walls restored, bracketed by SUVs and Mercedes. Back to sleep and the cars change again, but nobody's ever there. As I pull out two hours after my arrival, there is no sign of humanity save for the smarte-carte nuzzling my own Honda, obviously lonely for steel companionship in this tidal maze of concrete and industry.

Anyhow, I got home fine, after paying $8 in parking fees and driving through the midnight caltrans construction traffic that, like the tides, serves as the slightly lesser swell in the 24-hour Bay Area traffic oscillation.

Well, off to work!

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While the technical production of Qwer is done, there's still a lot of work to be done on the user-experience end of things. Basically I need to make it something that has an obvious purpose to someone who stumbles upon it. I've got plans, and they'll make things a lot clearer.

For the time being, Qwer is an 'internet clipboard' that you can use to easily pass urls or other text-based info from one computer to another.

Say you stumble across a url for a file you need to download on your other computer. Rather than copy the url by hand or email it to yourself (assuming you have email on both your compuers) you can just go to qwer.org/something and paste the url in, then go to qwer.org/something on the other computer to pick it up.

This is also handy when you're on the phone and you want to share a url with someone you're talking to. If it's a deep link (like an amazon page, or anything else with a messy url) you can just put the url into qwer.org/yourname (or anything else) and tell your friend to go there to pick it up. The site is called qwer.org because 'qwer' are the four first keys on the (qwerty) keyboard, and it's one of the easiest and fastest urls that's still out there.

There are other possibilities for uses and features that I'm sure will emerge. One thing is that it's entirely not registration or cookie based: There is no security, other than through obscurity (It's unlikely that you'd stumble across qwer.org/4gnnfn45y5y954 accidentally). I may introduce additional features, like the ability to search qwerbits, but if I do, I'll also make a checkbox so people can exclude their qwerbit.

The most interesting thing I think is to find out what uses people make on their own. One possibility is the communal qwerStory... More ideas? Share with me, or better yet, share with everyone!

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Okay, it's probably not the way most people would look at this article on the military's research into things that smell bad, but I found it fascinating as a statement on interface design. Forget about computers for a minute and consider the article from the standpoint of how senses and sensibilities are often learned instead of innate.

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Trivia for a lazy Sunday afternoon:

Size of the combined California Adventure and Disneyland Theme Parks in anaheim, CA: 140 acres

Size of the UC Berkeley Central Campus (Gayley to Oxford, Bancroft to Hearst): 170 acres

Next time you go to Disneyland, check out how you can almost never see more than 100 meters in a given direction. It makes it seem a lot bigger than it is.

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The emoticons of the new millenium, iMood stickers can be as innocuous () as they are revealing (), a speck of insight () into a person, with a dash of TMI ().

Actually, while a lot of people are putting these on their web pages, automatically updated with their current mood whenever they visit iMood, I think this is just the beginning. I see a future where people start embedding the graphic in their .sigfile, so the reader knows, not how the person felt when they sent the letter, but how they feel now. You read their flamemail but notice that, at this moment in time, they're . Maybe you're going to make a pass at that girl at the mall (6 years from now), but your glasses heads up display warns you that she's .

taking it a step further, what if you did have a wired pair of glasses (or contacts, corneal implants, or straight up implants in your visual recognition system)? Wouldn't it be nice if everything had tooltips? Stare at something or someone for more than a second or two and:

Now imagine that this overlay is the only computer interface you ever use...

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So I couldn't go this year but, surprisingly, there are some fantastic pictures from the event in the SF Gate's Photo Gallery. I especially like this one, that one and the other one.

All I can say is wow...

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I saw a bunch of cool visions today that made me wish I always had a camera at the ready or a mental freeze frame.

The first was driving to Karen and Crystal's place on Alameda Island just before sundown. The sun was setting over downtown San Francisco across the bay, and a biplane was silhouetted coming almost straight for me, but a little to the left. A jet that was still climbing from an Oakland takeoff went right by it, so close that the jet still appeared about three times as large as the biplane, though the biplane was so close I could almost see the pilot. I'm sure they were nearly a mile apart, but it looked like a montage that would scream false if you saw a photo.

Second was driving home to Berkeley. Just after the split from 980 into 24 and 580/80, taking the left hand Hwy 24 lanes, there's a jumble of overpasses that makes a four layer concrete jungle which 24 goes right under. It was all lit from below by floodlights pointing straight up because they're doing construction on the bart tracks there (just before Macarthur station) and I was thinking how Brasil/Blade Runner it seemed, then someone started arc-welding deep in the concrete maze, lighing it up with blue lightning and it all seemed perfect.

After those two the third is just a stupid sight gag and I won't bore you with it. Maybe later I'll go take a picture and put it up.

Have a good one!

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Okay, I am studying mostly, but I can never sit still, so after studying in Moffitt Library, I went up to the Haas Business Library (much more comfortable chairs, and less people) then to I-House for a snack and more reading, then to 50 Birge which, surprisingly, was empty. (It's a 200-seat classroom with stadium seating). I found that it has a pretty good sound system, even when you're playing a CD on your discman, through your headphones and into the lecturer's microphone. Mmm... Mortal Kombat...

Anyhow, plunging back in, seeing how well I can do tomorrow through force of will tonight.

Rented Dogma last night. I saw it in the theater but it's one of those movies you've got to see twice. If you haven't seen it, do. Heresy was never so intelligently, violently, and humorously done.

Ah well. Back to the stacks...

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I'm going into the city this afternoon, and I couldn't help but notice how many Starbucks there are in the financial district:

Soon they'll just be another utility: Garbage, gas, water, coffee...

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So I was walking through campus about an hour ago when the Campanile started its noon music, an intricate piece you wouldn't think to hear played on giant bells in the sky, and I was thinking again about how I wish I kept an audio recorder on hand to capture moments like this. If for no other reason than to see how much of the moment could be captured and conveyed in sound alone (or sound with a log entry). At that moment my friend Ammy calls my cell and says "Campanile?" when she hears. She's been gone from Berkeley for five years, but memories stick.

Not two minutes later I was walking through Sproul Plaza, listening to Earth Day devotees and dot-com hawkers, when I heard a distinctive beat coming from Lower Sproul. It was a small band brought in by Superb called Shrinking Violet (NOT to be confused with Shrinking Violets). Anyhow, walking into Lower Sproul, it sounded like I was walking into the Bronze (I am not ashamed to make Buffy references). Very cool music, and even with three guitars, you can still hear the words. They're in the Bay Area for the rest of the week, so look 'em up, or see them when they're back home in Thousand Oaks (Los Angeles).

On an unrelated note, I saw my CS project partner there and we were discussing Japanese culture, and how they love to import all things that represent the 50s in the U.S. I used to be scared of the time when they would move on and start idealizing the 60s, but now I realize it's happened. Now I'm appropriately scared of what the 70s may bring to the land of the rising sun...

Seeing Cirque du Soleil tonight. I'll check in tomorrow.

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