Life & Research Notes

I’m in one of those weird limbo periods when it’s hard to decide how to invest in the present when I don’t know what the future holds. Reminds me of the mellow uneasiness I felt in Fiji almost two years ago, right before I came to the lab.

I have some pressure to wrap things up here, both self-imposed and external, and each with different expectations. There is also a lot of practical stuff to take care, like changing addresses, packing and mailing belongings, and cleaning up my house to in preparation for Anita to take over the lease in two days. Not to mention saying goodbye to friends.

This weekend my good friend Burak was in Detroit for a music visualization performance at the Detroit Electronic Music Festival. I’ve been keeping up with him on his photo feed, and his post has some great videos of previous performances. Wish I could’ve gone with him. Only a year out of PLW and el Burak is already emerging as a rockstar.

I haven’t written in two weeks, and I’m not sure that last one even counts, since it was just a copy-paste job and an upload. I’ve been distracted in catching up with life: friends, jobs, sleep, moves, music, flights, movies, books, bikes… It has been a strangely busy few weeks.

I have a “lite” version of promiserver in the works, as well as the portfolio I stalled out on a few months back. Mostly I’m looking forward to seeing Jenn and my family in a few weeks when they come out for graduation, and I’m gearing up to move back to the bay area. I’ve been passing around my resume to folks there, and I’m lining up some potentially interesting opportunities.

The main new development is that I seem to have really shed some stress that I wasn’t even aware I was carrying around. I don’t have a solid plan, yet it all feels very effortless right now. I’d like to keep this feeling going.

This thesis envisions the future of trust and social commitment in a highly connected society. Starting with a distributed, democratized labor force and economies of efficient niche production and consumption, we predict radical shifts in the meaning and methods of commitment and the institutions of trust. The central experiment of this thesis is Promiserver, a web-based service and toolset for creation of lightweight contracts—dubbed promises—that are written as code. The service decouples commitment logic from specific applications, providing a generalized tool and forum for dynamic creation, binding, and evaluation of promises. The goal of Promiserver is to facilitate new models of collaboration by offering a sensible, lightweight, and agile promise system as an alternative to traditionally heavy legal commitments.

Promiserver: Procedurally Executed, Socially Enforced Microcontracts
(100 pages, 12MB PDF)

Reading up on Rem Koolhaas a little today after Tak mentioned something about him, I stumbled on ‘the barcode’:

Don’t know why I hadn’t seen this before, and I don’t yet know how I feel about the rest of Koolhaas’s work, but I find this thing stunning. As a design this is almost along the lines of the MIT Press logo in its engineering, but this is in full, perfectly politicized technicolor. It is even adaptable to allow addition of other flags as more countries join.

I’ve been ready for this warm weather. I’ve been sleeping with my window open lately, which has been great. Tonight, for the first time this year, I got home and opened my back window to hear the sound of my neighbors’ air conditioners. While I actually don’t mind it being 73 out and a little humid, it sounds like others do. I guess I can put up with a little hum, though personally I’ve generally been happier to be a little warm with quiet.

With the sunshine comes relaxation. I’m shedding my winter and springtime worries, handing over theses for signatures, and feeling a little more comfortable. It’s hard to distinguish where the sun and warm breezes end and where my own reemerging sense of satisfaction begins.

I have a structurally complete version of my thesis now, and I’m just waiting to work on revisions based on feedback from my readers, John, Hiroshi Ishii and ML alum Brent Britton. Though I know I have some more work to straighten it up, and the deadline is coming right up this Friday, it feels really good to have all the parts in place.

The other news is that I resuscitated OPENSTUDIO today, putting it on our newer server, which also involved switching it to apache2.2 and mongrel cluster instead of fastcgi, and setting up Postgres and PHP, plus some Tomcat fiddling. Way too many technologies happening in that project.