Life & Research Notes

One messy, one clean. I like the messy.

Not sure if this’ll work for you IE folks. I’ve never actually tested excanvas.js.

This is thesis time. I’m going to have to buckle down and crank out some code, then some writing. I figure if I start writing in March with an aim to have my drafts for readers by mid-April (wishful thinking?), I’ll need to produce two pages a day, every day. So I’m going to have to focus. This means:

1. Stay human by going to bed and waking up early.
2. Exercise regularly, at least 3+ times a week. I should have gone today. I will go tomorrow.
3. Take strategic breaks to let my brain cool off. Watch movies and read.
4. Stay connected with Jenn.

I’m laying it down here and now.

Today I am 28 years old. Thanks everyone for wishing me a happy birthday. It was a little lonely with Jenn on the west coast right now. But a lot of people remembered and some even gave me unexpected gifts, which felt good. I was also lucky to have my two good friends Anita and Luis with me tonight. We ate pizza at Emma’s, followed by ice cream with hot fudge up in Harvard Square. Yum.

Unless I’m mistaken, John is the only faculty member at the lab who consistently keeps a blog. Why aren’t other faculty members self-publishing their thoughts and work on blogs? In the emerging media landscape, blogging is no longer simply about promotion of one’s identity, ideas and reputation. It is about preservation. If the lab and its faculty continue to ignore this medium they will simply and quietly drop off the collective radar. And if they can pick it up like John, Henry Jenkins, and others, they will find an audience.

I really want to clear my brain and go to sleep, but instead I keep looping through the events of the past few days, and periodically checking the clock to see just how little sleep I’m actually getting. This does happen to me from time to time, especially when I slip off my wagon of caffeine-freeness and indulge in the mid-afternoon coffee. Like I did today. Well I figure the less I sleep tonight, the more tired (and hence less stressed) I’ll be tomorrow. Yup, tomorrow night I’m going to sleep just fine. But in the meantime tomorrow is my busiest day of the week, with two demos, a meeting, and an early morning (8:30!) Sloan class I’m trying to audit. Let me just stick pins in some of these thoughts…

Being a dilettante. With the web, there is so much to know, but we don’t actually have to know very much of it. We just have to know how to find it. This has been said before, but I don’t remember exactly who said it…

Mentoring. Relevant to the last point on dilettantes, I’m only now beginning to understand that I will never find that single mentor to teach me design, programming, electronics, woodworking, surfing, gardening, and cooking. Oh, and wheel building, finance and investing, and welding. I’m going to have to find lots of mentors. So I have to be my own meta-mentor.

Luis’s definition of the three eras of our group – VLW, ACG, then PLW – as direct consequences of a single element of the almost messianic McLuhan vision. The VLW were the explorers of the digital medium, remapping tools and techniques to work in new ways within the digital space. ACG played with the medium to create messages that were previously not possible. And now the PLW is shedding the VLW and ACG boosters, pulling out of the gravitational field of the medium/message dichotomy, into a future in which people’s lives are so tightly woven into the media as to be indistinguishable from it.

promiserver.org. That’s the old placeholder still, but note that I actually bought the domain. Oh, and the .com too. It just seems like a good name. The actual code is really coming along too. My goal is to have something up and usable online by the end of the month. It’s very important that I beat all the other procedural judicial systems to the market. Competition in this space is fierce.

Speaking of domains and tlds, somewhat related is Niue. They have a most excellent tld, free community internet, paradisical, and sovereign. Seem like it would be a place worth visiting, especially with Jenn.

iTunes plugin. Anita and I have decided this would be a nice side project. I see the SDK for the visualizer plugins, but how did iLike make theirs? I’m thinking they’re using an unpublished API. Some more investigation is in order.

Perhaps I’ll reread this post tomorrow, quickly realize I was sick with sleep deprivation, and promptly take it down. But it is, I think, perfectly blog-like, perhaps more so than anything I’ve previously written, so I may have no choice but to leave it up.

Playing with the canvas a little tonight, I pulled in and modified some of the spirograph code from the Mozilla developer documentation. I was interested in simply getting smooth animation out of canvas, and it turns out it is totally straightforward. Check out each of the variants below, and click to view a movie…

It’s nice when your code not only works right away, but also pleasantly surprises you with the results. Javascript really is an enjoyable language once separated from the DOM mess, and the canvas provides a nice, light, and increasingly cross platfrom space. I predict this sort of browser based work will soon be an important medium for dynamic graphics code, similar to how processing became so dominant a few years back.

Over the past several years I’ve noticed myself hearing phantom cell phone rings. I reach for my phone, thinking I hear its little tune or feel its vibration in my pant pocket, but it will turn out to have been only the music I’m listening to, or just a slight shift in the fabric of my clothing.

It was eerie when it first started happening with some regularity. But then it turned out that I’m not the only one. My sister has also mentioned hearing phantom rings, and tonight Anita confirmed that she too has often noticed hallucinatory vibrations. I just looked it up and found various other sources have been reporting on this for a while now. I guess I missed this meme when it first gained attention; there are evidently even special words like “ringxiety” for the phenomenon.

I felt relieved as I learned that this experience is so common. Yet I also found myself unsettled by how hard-wired I’ve become to this modern world, how much subconscious thought and energy I put into scanning for these mundane patterns, to the extent that my pattern matching has become over-exuberant and jumpy. And even more discomforting was the realization that my experiences are so very non-unique, and that so many other people are becoming wired in nearly the exact same way.