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

Différance Part II

Thanks to Skitch’s RT skillz, I found this neat translation equilibrium site. It converts from English to Japanese and back again until some sort of “equilibrium” is found.

Of course, I ran the first few lines of Derrida’s lecture (from before).

Filed under: art

Miner, Bronc Rider, Friend

I went to the thrift store the other day to pick up a baking pan. While I was there I decided to get an inexpensive refill on Louis L’Amour paperbacks. At 65 cents a piece, these little books are meant to be consumed by the stack, but I am really enjoying these low budget Westerns.

After reading Chabon’s Yiddish Policeman’s Union, and a review of Pynchon’s new book in the New Yorker (and another review in The Stranger) I get the feeling that noir is back to being a stylish repository for real intellect. (Whoo!)

Seriously, from the review it sounded like Pynchon (Pynchon!) has written a novel that’s like The Long Goodbye, The Big Lebowski, and a little Easton Ellis (the west coast Ellis) all rolled into one. I’m pretty excited to read it.

Maybe the Western has already been played, but somehow I see it making a similar stand. There are characters, tropes, and story lines which could play nicely when modernized. (I wish the guy who made Brick would make a Western…) And I wonder, if I decided to make a building that was in the style of one of these Louis L’Amour books, what it might look like.

Filed under: architecture, books

Salon, And thanks for all the fish.

My lovely partner, K, has organized a “Salon” at our place and we’re about to have the second of what is hopefully a long series. Basically, we pick two of our talented and unsuspecting friends to give a presentation on something that interests them.

I’ve built a little website for the event here. (still working some bugs and content fixes!)

If you’re around Seattle, and would like to come, please let me know. It’s been really great to talk to people in depth about subjects that they find fascinating.

Maybe you could present?

Filed under: hobbies, personal, projects

Nupdates

I’ve been away from this blog for a while, but it’s because I’ve been sort of busy…. and also lazy, so lazy. Here’s a batch of updates in no particular order. More to come, of course.

For work, I’ve been managing construction for two interior projects at Microsoft.

One is an office remodel for my group, Office Labs. We’ve been working in an old building: Building 4– the buildings are numbered by when they were built on the Redmond Campus– that’s been less than ideal for team work and collaboration. Basically, we’re taking down a lot of walls and putting up some glass to provide areas where people can work together more easily. I’ve designed a couple really simple pieces of furniture for the space too. Pictures will come soon.

The other is the second phase of the Envisioning Center, a lab space where my team (the Envisioning Team) will experiment with different software and hardware prototypes. I’ll talk more about this later. There’s still much more work to be done on the space. Another phase. Furniture. Technology pieces. For now enjoy the renderings.

At home, I’ve been playing around with type and some Oppen lines (many thanks to K). Posted a few more to flickr.

In older news, my friend, Pablo Herrera, has published a book which accumulates the work we’ve (Kenfield, Daniel, Pablo & our students) done in  a series of Rhino Workshops in Latin America.

Last but not least, my good friend Arthegall is finally engaged to the lovely R. Congratulations! (It’s about time.)

Filed under: architecture, art, friends, hobbies, personal, projects