Life & Research Notes

The Unfinished Swan – Tech Demo 9/2008 from Ian Dallas on Vimeo.

Via arikan’s delicious. Quite lovely.

Yay, after being, uh, kinda dead for awhile, I finally resurrected Yummy, the little delicious timeline that could. I updated its code to a slightly less embarrassing state and put it under the Taco Lab masthead.

Yay, the Taco Lab postcards showed up just in time (well, actually a little late) for Dave’s visit to the ASTC museum conference.

Please please: Vote for Gentrify! (quick signup with OpenID) Support 734m by casting your vote. And tell your friends! Voters even may get prizes!

In case you missed the last post, Gentrify is our Rails Rumble 2008 entry. We pull in data from Google, Craigslist, and Yelp, offering a better way to find desirable locations in San Francisco. See also Huned’s post. It’s a little rough around the edges, but given our 48 hour limit we pulled off a lot of useful and entertaining functionality. In fact I think our usefulness to bug ratio is pretty damn good. Vote now!

Tired of stepping over homeless people on your way to bikram? Jonesing for a Yacon Root smoothie? Gentrify helps the elite urban bourgeois find their natural habitats.

Gentrify is currently in alpha lite preview stealth mode edition. Created for Rails Rumble ‘08 by 734m: Huned Botee, Brent Fitzgerald, Visnu Pitiyanuvath, and Gerad Suyderhoud.

A new look for October, including redesigned page transitions, mini slideshows for project images, much improved IE6 compatibility, and no more weird plaid background.

I felt a lot of PLW and MIT Media Lab pride reading John’s RISD inauguration speech, Start Here. I particularly enjoyed the last bit:

The creative mind is not limited to black and white. It is comfortable with ambiguity, and “doing both,” as I like to say. You can be both a designer and an artist, a humanist and a technologist, a student and a teacher, a hand craftsman and a Photoshop guru, a global and local thinker, a leader and a servant, a president and a citizen. And we can start as many times as we like when we are open to the spirit and rigor of the creative way of being.

It’s a wonderful start to just the sort of boundary-bridging creative imperative kick in the ass I’d hoped he’d bring to his new role. Read the whole speech…