Salon Number Four

Salon Fremont Number Four. This Saturday.

Filed under: culture, friends

Paraphrases

Three things I very much want to talk more about, which I think are connected, but I haven’t the words to explain how yet:

Number #1

From a recent post by T, which has truly tapped the zeitgeist. (Although I’m still unpacking some of the links in the post, I have just ordered Ong’s book; it sounds awesome.)

“Sure,” you say, “Ong claims that writing changed the human consciousness — but what does that really mean? What is the mechanism through which consciousness could be changed by a technology, radically or at all?”

The answer is memory – and it’s here where I hope some of your ears will perk up. Both speaking and writing function as technologies allowing us to extend and supplement our own memories, even beyond the extent of our own lives. (This is, for me, a working definition of culture.) For people who only have access to the speech technology, an oral culture, this remembering is structured through verbal recitations composed from formulaic patterns which are interchanged, repeated, and combined into the working linear narratives which structure memory. Ancient Greek literature, the Odyssey and the Iliad, are primary examples for Ong — hence my questions about Milman Parry. In a literate culture, on the other hand, the technology of writing allows cultural memory to be crystallized in a different form — the separation of the word from the speaker-of-the-word allows revision, tree-structured (‘analytic’) thought, and abstraction from experience to concept.

Furthermore, most of us don’t even really realize how deep this change from ‘orality’ to ‘literacy’ really was, and how thorough its effect is on our own consciousness, until we try to examine and recover the modes of thought that are specific to purely oral cultures.

Number #2

A passage from Neuromancer:

He turned on the tensor beside the Hosaka. The crisp circle
of light fell directly on the Flatline’s construct. He slotted some
ice, connected the construct, and jacked in.
It was exactly the sensation of someone reading over his
shoulder.
He coughed. `Dix? McCoy? That you man?’ His throat was
tight.
`Hey, bro,’ said a directionless voice.
`It’s Case, man. Remember?’
`Miami, joeboy, quick study.’
`What’s the last thing you remember before I spoke to you,
Dix?’
`Nothin’~.’
`Hang on.’ He disconnected the construct. The presence
was gone. He reconnected it. `Dix? Who am I?’
`You got me hung, Jack. Who the fuck are you?’
`Ca — your buddy. Partner. What’s happening, man?’
`Good question.’
`Remember being here, a second ago?’
`No.’
`Know how a ROM personality matrix works?’
`Sure, bro, it’s a firmware construct.’
`So I jack it into the bank I’m using, I can give it sequential,
real time memory?’
`Guess so,’ said the construct.
`Okay, Dix. You _are_ a ROM construct. Got me?’
`If you say so,’ said the construct. `Who are you?’
`Case.’
`Miami,’ said the voice, `joeboy, quick study.’
`Right. And for starts, Dix, you and me, we’re gonna sleaze
over to London grid and access a little data. You game for
that?’
`You gonna tell me I got a choice, boy?’

Number #3

A failed art project of mine: Biggie Bot. I took a javascript version of ELIZA, written by Norbert Landsteiner, and substituted Eliza’s menu of phrases with Christopher Wallace lyrics. The result isn’t quite what I had hoped for (it doesn’t flow), but it’s a start.

Some brain glue to hold all these together coming soon…

Filed under: art, technology

Unbearable Liteness of Being

I was sitting in a brainstorm with some colleagues from Office Labs a couple months. We were all talking about the various social networking softwarez we use. At one point, Jeremy, who had been writing while everyone else was chatting, described the two lists that we had written down. He’d made a list of all the web apps that he signed up for in one column and then the lighter, simpler version of that service that he actually used in the other. Instead of twitter, destroyTwitter; instead facebook, facebook lite; instead of Ta-Da list, he uses the iphone app; etc, etc, etc.

I thought he was onto something here… Although I’m not sure exactly where the “ah-ha” moment is, the idea of finding the simple-est, little app for assisting a task rang very true. Not just with how I think many people work that way when on the web, but also how the apps on the iphone have infected all these moments in our day. (There’s an app for that.)

Underlying this trend there’s this idea that our lives are divisible, with each parcel of this division nicely paired up with a piece of technology. What I find lacking in this scenario of these apps-as-endpoints is that we end up without enough glue to hold them together. I’ve written a little bit about RSS (and Yahoo Pipes) as a glue that might allow you to string together endpoints with some amount of intention, but it’s not good enough. And with a mobile phone you get a set of destinations that don’t really connect well to one another.

What I want are applications that step into the flow of my life and talk to each other. For example, if I wanted to grab a beer with some friends tonight I could: use the Yelp app to find a bar (first, suggesting one’s that my friends already like), tell my calendar event automatically notify my friends of the location, and when I’m ready to call a taxi– I don’t have to type in my location. Not that complicated, really. But difficult to do when all apps are in their own silo.

Not to be regressive, but I need some sort of aggregator, glue, dashboard, whatever you want to call it. Maybe we should care about our OS again?

Filed under: technology, work

Likeness

Last night, I went to Ignite Seattle 8, an event which has people speak on various topics (mostly concentrating on design and technology– like a TED talk). The format is 20 slides at 15 seconds each, giving each person a five minute sound bite.

The presentations were hit and miss, with a couple good ones (Eugene Lin and Jeremy Bingham were very entertaining) and some not so hot.

One of the presenters was Peter Wilson, who gave a talk entitled: Google vs. Microsoft: An Insiders Guide.

Google vs. Microsoft: where will the battles be fought, how will each companies strategies and blind-spots impact the outcomes, and who will win? The speaker spent 9 years at Microsoft and 4 at Google, and so thinks he knows something about this…

There were some good points,overshadowed by his obvious zeal for Google. (The claim that Google was a “White Knight” in particular struck me as being a bit over the top.) He talked about the differences in the two companies strategies and culture: words which he used interchangeably, which I thought was interesting. I’ll try to summarize his presentation.

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Google’s Strategy/Culture

Google is interested in getting as many people to spend as much time as they possibly can on the web. The more traffic there is on the web the more chances that you have of clicking on Google’s ads. This is includes search as well as all the “Beta” apps that google releases. (If you’re in Google Docs, then Google can feed you ads.) As such, Google has an interest in open source, because open source stuff gets more people online.

Microsoft’s Strategy/Culture

Microsoft is interested in creating and owning platforms and then licensing that technology, whether it’s the OS, browser, or even their platform in the cloud. To do this, they find partners to work with and keep most of their code closed source, as opposed to Google’s model of open-ness to all communities.

Overall

Cloud computing is the future. The Microsoft way of doing things is outdated and in order to do better they need to give up on the idea of platform and embrace open source models. Google is doing great and is probably going to win.

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Five minutes to explain the differences in these companies might seem like 30 second bunny theater, but actually I think Peter Wilson brings up some great points and misses some big ones. Let’s start with a painful truth (for some): Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Adobe and Apple are much more alike than they are different. These large companies all share employees, finances, projects and ideas. The Google branch that Peter Wilson helped start was mainly staffed by ex-Microsoft employees (including Mr. Wilson) and much of the software they made were “Googlely” versions of Microsoft products.

Anyway, I think Wilson’s take on Google’s strategy is pretty accurate (with a couple, small exceptions). And yes, I think Microsoft’s way of turning everything into a “platform” is a little short sighted at times. But I’m not sure the strategy should be tossed out the window. If we took Peter Wilson’s speech and substituted “Apple” for “Microsoft” we’d have much the same argument, but probably a much chillier reception. Apple has a tightly controlled software and hardware platform, most notably in the iPhone, that’s absolutely crushing the competition… including Google’s web friendly, open-source phone. Apple closely partnered with AT&T to exclude the competition and now it finds itself the most profitable mobile company in the world.

Let’s look at facebook. Sure, on an iPhone I can open Safari and load up facebook. But everyone uses the app instead. The same for gmail. If that’s your primary mail client, and you’ve got an iPhone, you’re probably using the phone mail client (built on their proprietary platform) instead of gmail in the browser.

There are some big differences in the two companies. Most notably where their revenue comes from. And I suppose a discussion comparing them could go on and on. But my main interest is in where Peter Wilson thinks we’re going in the future. While I’m jonesing for a web based OS and Google does own the internet, I’m not sure the software I use right now fits well into that model.

I get the feeling that my attention/time is being broken into smaller and smaller pieces on the web; it’s very much the opposite of a seamless experience. I have another post on this feeling in particular, brewing in drafts…

Filed under: technology

Wave.wav

I wanted to write a blog post on Google Wave from within Wave and then publish it straight from wave neatly to my blog (as promised in the tutorial video). But this didn’t happen. So instead I just cut and paste what I sloppily wrote from wave here. Boo! On the wave were a number of coworkers who are interested in social media. But I’ve cut out their comments because there weren’t many and to protect their privacy.

Here’s my very random thoughts on Google Wave after only using for short period of time

First let’s get the ugly out of the way.

The UI is pretty awful… not just in terms of looks, but pieces of it actually don’t function correctly. (scrollbars I’m looking at you) This is pre-pre-alpha stuff… needing frequent browser refreshes after many crashes. That said, it’s getting better every week. And features show up daily. For example, a few days ago in-line commenting appeared. It crashes wave, but it’s there. Note to Google: I want an “undo” please.

Now here’s what’s nice about Wave.

I was invited to Wave by my bud T (of course). My first conversation on Wave was just asking him how to use this. The first little bit of awesome in this interaction was watching someone type. When you communicate “synchronously”, you move faster. There’s no waiting, and there’s no lag, which means I stop trying to multitask outside of wave. Seriously, I want my IM program to have a mode where I can talk this way.

After a short chat with T, we started talking about old projects so he created another wave and started writing a document that listed out our various potential projects and had a short description of each. In places he called upon me to fill in information, which I did by editing his post. Meanwhile, we had several concurrent conversations about whether other ideas qualified as projects. We also thought about inviting another participant who neither knew personally, but who we thought might have some expertise. So I started another Wave added T and the twitter bot, then we tweeted the friend and asked them for their wave ID. After a short dialog on twitter, (which should have been  conducted through wave, but becuase the twitter bot doesn’t have some basic features), we brought our internet friend into the wave and kept talking. All of these things were happening simultaneously and we were all working in a very fluid multichannel way. Wave as a sort of light weight wiki that enables chatting and document editing in one place works really great.

I really like the idea of the bots in Wave. They have a lot of potential. I see them as ways to aggregate all of my conversations into Wave. For example, all the convo’s happening on Twitter, Facebook,gReader comments, on blogs, and of course, on Wave should be seamlessly accessible inside and outside wave. This is why, even though it works like crap, the feature that I’m most excited about is the Wave to Blog bot. This bot can take a Wave and turn it into a blog with comments and vice versa; any comments on the blog appear in the wave. The commenting/conversation absence was one of my major problems with gReader; potentially, Wave could fix this issue. Right now, however, a lot of them are hollow shells of usefulness.

The other potential of Wave as an aggregator is an ability to unify content across social networks. I’d really like to move some of the stuff that I check in Reader daily (because the network I’ve cultivated there is producing content I can use) over to wave in order to talk about it with people outside of that network. Delicious is the example I’m thinking of….

Of course, since I work for Microsoft I was wondering what our company would make that’s similar to this. In some ways it is actually similar Outlook in terms of the way it uses panes and attempts to have some continuity between messenging and phone (Google Voice is going to be supported, right?)  But if I tried to imagine the above scenario with T and chl in Outlook… it just wouldn’t happen. Nor would a lot of the communication that I do in outlook translate over the Wave very well.

However, the closest piece of Microsoft software that I could imagine using for a similar collaboration is OneNote. In some ways, Wave is like OneNote without the tabbed navigation (which I don’t like very much anyway), but with a paned communication UI on top of it. (Aside, one of the bots for Wave is a whiteboard app, adding to the OneNote smell.) I wonder what a version of OneNote created specifically for the web might look like. Courier, maybe?

Filed under: technology, web, work

Frontiered

I have made it a personal goal to read every novel that Louis L’ Amour has ever written. It may sound like a daunting task, since L’Amour has written over ninety books. But given that they each are only about 150 pages, it’s like running a marathon in kilometers. (Also, apparently reading pulpy trash novels from days of yore is “trendy” these days.)

One thing is difficult. I’d like to keep track of what I read. I only buy these novels at used book stores and thrift shops and therefore, I’m not reading them in any sort of chronological order.  I have managed to get by by remembering cover art, but since each edition had a different cover design. Add to that fact that L’Amour often reused plots and characters and it looks like I might be reading a lot of doubles if I’m not careful.

Since I’m pretty much the worst organized person in the world, how can I do the least amount of work and still have a record of all the books I’ve read? (Maybe I need something like Pivot?)

Filed under: books

Cadence

I thought this font by Jonathan Perez was quite beautiful.

From the website:

This character is a revival of a metal type font, which comes from a French type specimen of the nineteenth century. I do not know who is the author of the original ornamental design. This work is not a strict revival of the original character: the main thing was to retain the strong aesthetic and conceptual bias, while making the system evolving, notably because of the evolution from metal typesetting to digital typesetting.
The character is remarkable for its process of construction: contrary to a classic ornamental font combining a lot of simple geometric elements, this one combines a few number of highly-complex non-geometric elements. One of the consequence is the speed and ease to set sophisticated pattern with a great rigour of construction. Another consequence is that the eyes are “lost” in front of the pattern: we hardly find at the first look the hidden construction as we do not see the shape of the basic elements. It refers to a kind of psychedelic aspect in the resulting aesthetic.
The font is designed to be used at large sizes (55 pts in the character’s specimen). It is made of 3 versions, intended to be combined easily by the user to make patterns.

The images come from a sample pdf, which is an unbelievable piece of work. Everything fits together!

Filed under: art

Friendsters

It’s been a while since I posted anything here. Instead of talking about my work, I thought I’d give a little shout out to all my friends who are making interesting things happening.

A friend of mine from MIT, Sarah Dunbar, is showing a piece at the biennial in Korea. She’s posted a few in progress photos of the installation to flickr. It looks amazing!

Image:Sarah Dunbar

Image:Sarah Dunbar

Bryan Boyer, who works for Sitra these days,  just finished running creating the website for a Low2No a sustainable design competition. Arup was the winner in a field that included REX and BIG. The designs were “sketchy”, but I thought the design brief itself put some stakes into the ground at the appropriate scale– somewhere in-between an urban and architectural project. I’m excited to see what comes out of it!

In the spirit of green, my friends over at Howeler Yoon have posted a couple of rad looking renders of a new project they’re working on. I wonder if those pods are truncated octahedrons.

Image: Howeler Yoon

Image: Howeler Yoon

Last but not least, Stephen Perdue, one of my close friends from MIT is recently underemployed thanks to the construction recession in Boston. I’ve worked with him on a number of projects and he makes beautiful work. The upside of this is that you can hire him. He’s quietly updating his portfolio here. (Expect more great stuff in the next couple days.)

Some of my favorites are “Malibu Nights” and Stephen’s thesis “MegaShed”

Image:Stephen Perdue

Image:Stephen Perdue

Filed under: architecture, personal

Perpetuals

I thought this project was quite beautiful: http://storyteller.allesblinkt.com/

It’s a drawing machine that samples from the patent library and best selling books. From the website:

Basic procedure

1. The program downloads and parses a part of the text of a recent best-selling book.
2. The algorithm eliminates all insignificant words like “I”, “and”, “to”, “for”, “the”, etc. The remaining words and their combinations are the keywords for the patent drawings.
3. Using the keywords in chronological order, it searches for the key-patents.
4. The program now searches for a path connecting the found key patents. This is possible because every patent contains several references to older patents – the so-called “prior art”.
5. All key-patents and the patents connecting them semantically are arranged and printed.
6. Goto step 1.

The result is a sort of infinite illustrated technical manual of technology and literature. I wish they could make a campier version which sampled lyrics from pop songs.

Be sure and watch the video.

Filed under: art, technology

Regressar

I spent last week on vacation with K. No, internets. (whew!)

We backpacked for 3 days in the Olympics, which was beautiful even though it pretty much rained the entire time. In a show of solidarity, Mattie packed in and out her own food.

It was really amazing. Afterwards, K and I stopped by Olympic National Park (which doesn’t allow dogs– so we’ll have to come back another time without the furry one) to see the rainforest.

I used to read a lot of fairy tales when I was a kid… [Aside: When I first learned to read my father would only let us read books in the non-fiction section. But I found a loop hole! Myths and fairy tales have a call number, so they count!] Anyway, fairy tales and even Tolkien have represented the woods and forests as something mysterious, dark and even scary. For the most part, I didn’t understand it. At the Olympics National Forest, the trees are huuuuge, with roots that make strange shapes, burrows and passage ways. A series of trees will grow in a row on a fallen log and form a nurse log colonnade. Then the log will rot out and you’ll have a tunnel of roots underneath the trees. Architecture!

Filed under: hobbies, personal