so i think this is my last post here. not sure entirely, but it just might be. i'm going to start using tumblr more. i prefer it's interface, themes and overall feel.

follow me here.

the end

the show is up. mon came out for the opening :D and now i'm tired. here's a video of the final installation. more after i recover.

working update

VIDEO

video of the mechanics of the first two levels of city one. also just figured out what i'm going to do for the motion of city two.

this is for my show at NP3 "and the dreams so rich with color"

"winning" is up

my first show at np3 is now officially up.

westerhavenstraat 27

the home of np3's host family and my abode for the next 6 weeks. click on the photo for more web goodness.

palin triclops

found off of nerdkore.com, the meme oil paintings of jeremiah palecek.

i love this

lego wargaming. nuff said.

what i left at home

lessig on palin

LHC webcams!

HERE

what i really meant to say..

LHC day (yesterday)

via boingboingvia someonetheycan'tfind

one of those iwishihadthoughtofit moments

"speakingObject" by Jorg Pringer (via boinboinggadgets)

oh evenmorewow

in lieu of a real post, i give you this.

oh wow...

i just realized that i've been home for a month already. the time here has passed as a blur. so many things done, so much to still do. i'm working at a gallery, same as last summer. though this year i'm remodeling. more or less dragging the space into the 21st century. and my two shows at the gallery NP3 in groningen are definite! the first one goes up oct14, the second nov14. the closing/opening reception for both shows in nov16. if you're in gro around that time, come see!

the wedding is approaching, less than two weeks away. everything is coming together. even if it's not. more later, i promise.

Rather than Later

my tummy is all-a-flutter. tonight is my last night in groningen, i start my 24 hours of travel tomorrow evening at 10pm, CEST. oh, and tomorrow i also have my end of term review/critique/assessment. still not entirely sure what to call it, but it's definitely more like a final crit than anything else. i'm working steadily on the final touches of one piece: making amputees out of toy soldiers, getting gibberish from the brain of my plastic franken-sculpture (sadface), and saying farewell's and goodbye's to some of the other students; whom i've grown close to over these final weeks.

oh, and potentially huge news today or tomorrow... :)

Yo Yo King

a little perspective

http://tinyurl.com/jbvpo

FRANK CHU

i found out about frank chu today. you should, too.
my favorite bit: 2007 Award for "Best Pathological Citizen", SF Weekly

Winning, finished

well, it's more or less finalized. just a few things to do, server side. click on the image to see a video and more. you can also go here.

here's an excerpt from a description i wrote about it:

"I was in the Marines for a couple of years. I trained to be a machine-gunner in the infantry, but halfway through I woke-up to the reality of my situation. I realized what I was allowing myself to be used for and decided that I couldn't live with that, so I sought a discharge. I am not a violent person, but I have seen within myself the capacity for an unthinking violence that both scares and fascinates me. Violence is one of the heritages of humanity. This game acts as a window for me (and others) to approach this capacity in a socially and physically safe manner.

To underline this ludicrous but seductive dynamic, I modified the existing game so that the rounds continue almost indefinitely, the environment never changes. Both models, the terrorist and the counter-terrorist are wearing me, they embody me as a player of the game. It is not about me fighting myself, it is about seeing myself (ourselves) reflected in this perpetual cycle of violence. One that is as repulsive as it is fascinating."

Clay Shirky on Cognitive Surplus

image from ralphhogaboom's flickr stream


I just finished reading an essay entitled "Gin, Television and Social Surplus" by Clay Shirky and I wanted to post of few excerpts,

"If I had to pick the critical technology for the 20th century, the bit of social lubricant without which the wheels would've come off the whole enterprise, I'd say it was the sitcom. Starting with the Second World War a whole series of things happened--rising GDP per capita, rising educational attainment, rising life expectancy and, critically, a rising number of people who were working five-day work weeks. For the first time, society forced onto an enormous number of its citizens the requirement to manage something they had never had to manage before--free time.

And what did we do with that free time? Well, mostly we spent it watching TV."

"Now, the interesting thing about a surplus like that is that society doesn't know what to do with it at first--hence the gin, hence the sitcoms. Because if people knew what to do with a surplus with reference to the existing social institutions, then it wouldn't be a surplus, would it? It's precisely when no one has any idea how to deploy something that people have to start experimenting with it, in order for the surplus to get integrated, and the course of that integration can transform society.

The early phase for taking advantage of this cognitive surplus, the phase I think we're still in, is all special cases. The physics of participation is much more like the physics of weather than it is like the physics of gravity. We know all the forces that combine to make these kinds of things work: there's an interesting community over here, there's an interesting sharing model over there, those people are collaborating on open source software. But despite knowing the inputs, we can't predict the outputs yet because there's so much complexity."

"We're looking for the mouse. We're going to look at every place that a reader or a listener or a viewer or a user has been locked out, has been served up passive or a fixed or a canned experience, and ask ourselves, "If we carve out a little bit of the cognitive surplus and deploy it here, could we make a good thing happen?" And I'm betting the answer is yes."

there's a lot more to his essay and if this sort of thing interests you, read it.

MarsPhoenix Lander Lands & Twitters..

the mars phoenix lander has landed and is twittering. :D if you twitter as well, follow it.

Winning

i play counter-strike: source, the most popular online first-person-shooting game and the most perfect example of cyclical, random violence hidden behind a thin veil of purpose. for a long time (ten years) i've played and been fascinated by this game, but unable to make art of out it.

recently, i've been working on a new piece titled Winning. it's a simple idea: make a small room, place two opposing players (computer controlled bots), make it perpetual and see who wins. by removing the pretext of purpose from the game itself, distilling it down to the basic element of communication between the two sides, it very quickly becomes obvious how pointless this state is. one of the bots will win a round, but then the game resets and they play again and again and again. no one wins; because it doesn't end. it just goes on and on.

i had it running, projected on a wall, life size, volume cranked for an hour today. at one point the sheer pointlessness of it was too much and i started laughing like crazy. i had the giggles, the kind that leaves you red-faced and gasping, for 3 or 4 minutes. maybe that's what we're coming to in the world. the point where all of us stop pretending and just start laughing.

jump through this hoop to see more images and a really bad video. i'll get a screencast soon. hopefully i'll be able to exhibit this piece in october, here.

The Day with No News

via boingboing

Arduino LCD Knex Twitter

i've been really bad about updating here lately. it's spring, the weather is finally remembering what that means and i've been outside a lot, but not enough. i'm fighting my way through the final 5 weeks before i get to see mon after 6 months of digital substitution. wedding plans are coalescing and it's getting really exciting.

my work has been slow, but this weekend it picked up. some of you may know that i've been working on some kinetic sculptures built from knex. when i say some, i mean, really, just one. i have a smaller prototype and a much bigger (but not big enough, i think) alpha version in which i'm incorporating some of my crazier mechanical ideas. the mechanics of these knex machines are the easy and fun part. construction progresses intuitively and playfully, reminiscent of how i paint. since the outset i've been searching for a way to make these works interactive and/or networked. i've been stumped.

it's been a hard transition for me. going from media-centric, passive art to what i now know is "post-media", active work. but after taking a couple of days off this weekend, i figured it out. i use twitter. twitter is an extremely fascinating example of simple rules spawning a complex system. it asks, "what are you doing" and gives you 140 characters or less to answer. it can be used and accessed through a wide variety of media. it's free. it's open-source, to a point. the api is available for development and hacking. the basic idea is you say what your doing, other people do the same and you can "follow" or subscribe to all the other people twittering. it's like quick n'dirty, stream of consciousness blogging. and it's been used during times of crisis when traditional communication has broken down.

i've decided to incorporate live twitter feeds, via an arduino and lcds, into my kinetic sculptures. largely because i'm starting to see these knex machines as social sculptures. sculptures based on and influenced by cities and society. and twitterfeeds could arguably be called the societal stream of consciousness. i've not thought through them completely yet. i'm still building. i'm still excited. that's gotta be a good sign.

wind and trees and light and citysounds

Wind and Trees and Light and Sound from Alex Myers on Vimeo.

new grown up website

i finally took the time to make a real website;

alexmyers.info

enjoy.

and pictures...

the new one

AND DO LIKE from Alex Myers on Vimeo.

knexwithlight

knexwithlight from Alex Myers on Vimeo.

knexdaythreeish

knexdaythreeish from Alex Myers on Vimeo.

tumbl'd

i started a tumblr page. just to see if i like it. it's a cross between a blog and twitter.

mian novan arton updated

well, it's evolved a bit. colors are a bit off in these pics. more to come... as always, click on the pictures for more.

mian novan arton - in progress

"my new art" in esperanto. (something else new for me.) ideally i'll have a dozen or so. most, if not all, will have kinetic elements, either motor or hand-operated or both. all made from knex, fake grass and collaged images. click on the images to see a detail shot. thoughts? comments?

PLEASE, VALvE, BE MERCIFUL

mr. johnston, the creator of some seminal counter-strike source maps, especially dust2 the one i want to modify for one of my projects wrote back to me, quite quickly i might add, to tell me that, alas, he doesn't own dust2. :( but, he said, valve does and they're nice, happy, art-loving people. (hear that valve?) so, please, keep your various appendages crossed.

cheers.

i don't usually do this, but....

watch it.

mr. johnston, please say "yes"

i've officially contacted the creator of de_dust2 the map i hope to modify for an installation i'm working on. i hope he reads my email when he's in a good mood. keep your fingers crossed. :)

Howard Zinn, "Empire or Humanity?"

An short video of an excerpt, entitled Empire or Humanity? from Zinn's new edition of A People's History of the United States, retitled, A People's History of American Empire. Video narration is by Viggo Mortensen, illustrated by Mike Konopacki, who also illustrated the new edition.

from seed's daily zeitgeist

take that creationists!

THIS IS NOT A GAME

i've started playing this alternative reality game, the lost ring, by jane mcgonigal and others. a long time ago, i got really excited by the prospect of these games. especially "majestic", which came out during my first year of college. i was dismayed to hear, at the time, that shortly after it was scheduled to begin, the game was stopped. it was only recently that i found out that this was part of the game, which now, seems obvious, but then i was just a silly, trusting 20 year old.

flashforward: 2008 and one of my favorite game designer/theorists (the above-mentioned ms. mcgonigal) has developed an ARG. so, even though it started a month ago, today, on a rainy sunday, i dove right in.

if you'd like to join me, go here and get started. erase huizinga's "border" between game and reality. remember: "this is not a game"

cave test

i went to the cave today (a four plane, immersive virtual reality setup) at the high performance computing center of hanzehogeschool to test a project i'm developing for it in conjunction with one of my teachers, daan tweehuysen. after a nausea-inducing-hour-and-a-half (long live the dash!) i had a good idea of how i want to progress from here. click on the pics above to see more.

UPDATE: i've gotten a few emails asking what the cave actually is. here's what wikipedia has to say

eyes wide open exhibition @ the stedelijk in ams

UPDATE: due to a lot of crazy mishaps, i didn't make it to amsterdam. i'm in gro for the weekend.

tomorrow (friday) i'll be in amsterdam to see a number of exhibitions, one of which is this group show, "eyes wide open" at the stedelijk.

see a short video

Now Playing

screens from the hammer editor in sdk that i'm using to edit dust2, the most popular counter-strike map. it's a bomb map that i'm filling with "collateral damage."

march hard on geeks

i'm a bit late blogging about this. all i can say in my defense is that i'm lazy.

march saw the deaths of two of my childhood heros, gary gygax and sir arthur c. clarke. gygax, besides having an awesome last name, was most notable for creating dungeons & dragons and sir clarke was an amazing visionary who wrote 2001: A Space Odyssey and thought up geo-synchronus orbits and satellite communications.

there are numerous (better written) articles out there in the tubes for you to read, so all i'm going to do is point you towards a few of my favorites.

gygax:

nytimes op
blog.wired
playthisthing.com

clarke:

bbc.co.uk
teahouse on the tracks - alastair reynold's blog

my life is richer because of you two, thanks.

The Hellanic Report

again, i'm really behind on my posting, but... well, i'm lazy.

so i'm back from greece. i've been back for a week or so and have had time to ruminate and distill my experiences into a neuron-frying post. actually, i just remembered i hadn't written about it. the two things to keep in mind about my trip,

i had a lot of fun and,
northern greece (halikidiki and thessaloniki) look like someone flooded southern california.

that said, i went with two friends to visit a third. we did an all-night train trip from groningen to dortmund so we could catch a cheap easyjet flight to thessaloniki (saloniki to the locals). from there it was a short 2.6 hour flight to hellas (greek for greece; i'm still boggled that we don't use their word for themselves, even though i did some research and have a semi-solid theory about why we don't, silly romans).

we spent three days in thessaloniki at the apartment our friend lives in, seeing the sights/sites and meeting her friends. the power company of saloniki was striking so every day we'd have a 2 hour, or so, period of blackout which meant whole sections of the city were dark, while across the street it would be buzzing and alive. the most potent experiences with this were that we sometimes had to take cold showers (or go without) and that we ate this fantastic meal at this little restaurant in this little alley in the dark. or near dark. we had candles.

on the fourth day we drove 2 hours to ierissos, a small village of 2000, where our friend grew up. it was on this drive that i really started to notice how much southern california looks like greece. albeit there's much more dynamic coastline in greece, but the topography and vegetation is startlingly similar.

we did this drive on sunday, the last day of carnival and our friend thought it would be fun to stop in the capital, polygyros, for their celebration. it was. we saw a parade, dancing and ate some free food.

once we arrived in ierissos we stayed at her parents apartment and got to meet her cousin, grandparents and childhood friends. we spent the next days exploring the area, going swimming in the sea, and visiting a few tourist spots. since it was off-season most places were closed or offered limited services, but this made for a much more authentic experience and limited the surreal displacement i sometimes feel on being caught in the plastic tourist frenzy.

i'm glossing over a lot here, but really, you should go yourself. i took a horde of photos (of course) and they speak better than i do.

Crayon Physics Deluxe

some bit of goodness mon found and passed along. :D thanks mon!

FMI Open Dag

saturday was the fmi open day. they asked me to install this knex project i've been working on. i found this great space that was the main stairwell for the buildling. more words later, more images now.

music video pays homage to 80's bumpers

Justice - DVNO [NEW]
by PeteRock

some new work in progress

click to see some images of what i've been working on lately. the conveyor belt feeds to a camera. ultimately i'm think four or five projections with a mix of camera feeds, videos, and still images. better pics when i get more done.

Latest ImprovEverywhere

Three pranksters of ImprovEverywhere brought their PCs to starbucks and proceeded to down koffie and browse the web.

Fez - 2D platformer in a 3D environment

from boingboing gadgets, via kokoromi
SQUEAKOFJOY! i wanna to play it!

Game Criticism, Why We Need It, and Why Reviews Aren't It

today on the excellent playthisthing costik has written a call for serious discussion of games as art. link.

the joys of blogging...

i'm sitting at this moment in the de balie main hall in the back row's "blogger section" and i look to my left and see, on the screen of my neighbor, my blog :D i don't know how she got there, but she was. brought a smile to my face. ahh, the intertubes...

Ken Jacobs, "The Image, Finger Raised to Lips, Beckons"

Such intense feelings are evoked by his films. "Let There Be Whistleblowers" was an 18 minute wandering through b&w found footage of a railyard and the people in the the trains and in the yard that ends in a starkly contrasted tunnel that flashes and pulses while the whole movie is scored to minimalistic drum beats by Steve Reich. It becomes so surreal and aggressive that I started thinking of it in terms of life and death.

I can't give summaries of his films, you just have to see them. all I can say is that each and everyone of them as left my stomach clenched and twisted, my eyes sore, my mind numbed, but I've felt pushed through all this to come into some inarticulate synthesis of feeling and thought.

some excerpts from the essay he handed out at the beginning:

"We don't need all sense to be called on to enjoy any of them, and there's nothing strange in not wishing to divide attention between them. the 3-ring circus was a terrible idea, a scattering of attention and a perfect example of more is less."

"...many people can close their eyes and visulaize music, see abstractions or changing landscapes...the music video is something else, not a synesthetic elaboration but a mini-movie blotting out such felt connection; a manhandling forcing correspondance with musician's faces and bodies and antics, telling a story to the beat and contour of the music. Celebrity worship, promos for the bands."

"...as someone involved in painting I should have come to the silent image sooner...these days I wouldn't ask the imagery of ORCHARD STREET to move over and make way for sound."

"I watch films without sound to better pick up on what there is to see, foregoing story-justification for the things that happen. I like that they happen just because they do, as in real life, whenever the rationalizing mind is thwarted in its need to justify the strangeness of...real life. It's a child's vision, I suppose, when one miracle after the other passes in revue."

He ended with Brakhage's "Window Water Baby Moving" and I felt just like the baby.

blogging practices while at sonic acts

this is just a quick note to let you, my faithful readers (i really have no idea how many, if any, regular readers i have, if you're one, leave a comment, let your voice be heard!), know that anything with the prefix "sonic acts" is a direct copy of my post on the sonic acts xii website. you can follow the conference in all it's artistic glory via live webfeed and chat, as well.

Sonic Acts XII: Jeffery Shaw on Interactivity and Immersion

Jeffery Shaw, a pioneer in his use of interactivity and immersion in his installations, gave a talk about his work in the De Balie main hall this afternoon. Shaw’s work is the next logical step in the conference series after Erkki Huhtamo’s presentation on The Diorama: Revisited. He started off with the quote, (in part)”…it is the type of image produced that determines the narrative, not the reverse…” from Raul Ruiz, “Poetics of Cinema”, Editions Dis Voir, Paris, 1995.

I think this adequately summarizes both Shaw’s work and his method. Shaw’s work seems to setup situations in which the narrative building tendencies of the human mind are completely stimulated. But his work is still rendered from only one specific location, the center, which has the interesting side-effect, he noted, of being extremely disconcerting for those not standing directly in the center. they are watching a scene move and shift from someone else’s perspective. I think this is one of most powerful effects of his works.

see here and here for more of his work.

Sonic Acts XII: Erkki Huhtamo, The Diorama Revisited

22feb08, 10:08-11:36

erkki huhtamo just finished a lecture on the history of the diorama and it's many mutations and iterations. i'm not going to give a summary of the lecture as sitting around me there were 5 other people furiously typing away. erkki covered mostly the "dioramic" (my term, not his) technologies of the mid to late 19th century, such as panoramas, dioramas, and then they way the have evolved and manifest themselves today.

during the q&a though, a question arose, (and i'm summarizing) about whether he saw a continuity between pre-renaissance practices of visually immersive environments and the dioramas of his talk. erkki responded that yes he sees the connections, but doesn't find it interesting. i found this... not satisfying, but understandable.

i think there is definitely a connection between the various media we make to look at, but that perhaps it is too broad, to primitive a concept, to be of much use to a media archaeologist (hence i understand why he doesn't find it that interesting). the question seems to be, at it's root, the basic question of why people create. the cultural continuity between cave-paintings and video games would then seem to be culture itself. the basic fact that we made it, because we want to create.

a more detailed summary of his talk here, pictures here, and here.

Sonic Acts Opening Exhibition at Netherlands Media Art Insitute

21feb 20:22

my cohorts and i just returned from the opening of the sonic acts 12 exhibition at the netherlands media art institute. the exhibition gathers work from four international artists, boris debackere(be), kurt hentschlager(at), ulf langheinrich(d) and julien maire(f).

just an initial impression, but, i was most impressed with julian maire's exploding camera (2007). essentially he dis-assembled a vhs camcorder onto a table and built a system of arms/alligator clips, leds, theatre lights and other bulbs to shine onto the exposed ccd. attached to a transparent disc, rotating just above the ccd he placed select transparent slides and film stills of detainee's, military and other pseudo-political images. the feed from the ccd is displayed on a television about 2 meters away from camera guts strewn across the table. as this low tech video creates itself, a soundtrack of sound bytes, gun shots and explosions fills the space.

as i watched other people watch this piece, i noticed that they were most interested in the dissected camera on the table. hardly anyone was watching the video. i kept thinking that perhaps it would have been better to fill the environment of the exploded camera with projects of the video it was creating. in essence turning the camera completely inside out, placing the viewer inside of the apparatus.

the rest of the pieces were quite nice as well, though i found ulf langheinrich's OSC (2006) piece too hard on my eyes to spend more than a few minutes with. kurt hentschlager's scape (2007) was also interesting in it's visual and techinical minimalism. i sat there for 20 minutes just enjoying the experience of the ever shifting scene before me.

check out pictures here and here.

SMS the Oracle Machine at De Balie

you can send an sms to the oracle machine at de balie in amsterdam by texting +31 06 5555 0131. this is also something you can do through skypeout if you have it.

Nebraska Library starts to include CC-licensed editions of books

via boingboing's cory doctorow,

The Nebraska Library Commission has begun to include Creative Commons licensed editions of books in its catalog -- so you can check out my novels in the Tor editions, or just nab a copy from the library's site.

link to nlc
link to boingboing

Sonic Acts 12: The Cinematic Experience

i'm off to amsterdam tonight with my fellow gradschoolers, (sounds a bit like pre-schoolers, which is better than pee-schoolers, imho), to attend and live-blog sonic acts 12: the cinematic experience festival. stay tuned for constant updates over the next few days.

Insane Domino Setup in Art Museum

the perrucci brothers set up this massive dominoes chain at the brattleboro museum and art center

super mario vs the many-worlds-interpretation of quantum physics

via boingboing via mechanically separated meat

mind mapping

i've started using this opensource mindmapping software called "freemind" to help organize my thoughts. and i love it. it is a really flexible tool for plotting and showing the interconnections between my many ostensibly disparate thoughts. i have so many ideas all the time that i often lose track of the ones that are worth while. this results in dropping many projects that have real promise and not being able to fully develop my ideas and feelings. this is a png of my mind map as it sits at this moment (8:02pm CEST, sunday, feb17, 2008). eventually i hope to have an interactive applet of my mind map up on this site so you can see how my ideas take root and branch off. (turn the image 90 deg counterclockwise).

Ghent'd

not much of a travelogue of the ghent trip to see paul mccarthy at SMAK, sorry. i did enjoy the exhibition more than i thought i was going to. i've seen a few of his videos before (via the intertubes) and they've always struck me as needless sh(ti)ock art. but after seeing an entire museum transformed for his labyrinth of depravity and ketchup, i must say i'm dulled. and impressed. my overall impression is of becoming numb after twenty minutes or so of walking through spaces bombarding my visual and aural senses. and then frantically seeking beer and fresh air. i'm glad i went, i just never will again. but this opinion may temper as the visceral memory of the experience fades and i've had more time to try to pull something meaningful out it. :S

so the reason why i'm not writing more about the trip at the moment is that i've been getting ready for a presentation i'm giving on wednesday (ala the magic of freemind) and also for going to amsterdam wednesday night for five fun-filled days of sonic acts 12. at which i'll be one of many "live" bloggers. look for posts here and at the sonic acts blog. cheers.

Going to Ghent

View Larger Map

tomorrow! fmi has organized an excursion to SMAK in ghent tomorrow to see the exhibition of paul mccarthy (link is to a web-article praising mccarthy; not exactly the stance i would take, but it has heaps of information). personally, i'm not a huge fan of his flavor of art, but i've been assured that ghent is a beautiful city and well worth the trip and it's only setting me back €17. look for an travelogue in the next few days.

From Me to You

just what you need on a monday.

Tragedy of the Commons Explained with Smurfs

from The Science Creative Quarterly, snip:

"So in order to prevent Gargamel from smashing all the Smurfs into gold, or Coal Plants from giving them neurological disorders by dumping mercury all over them, or farms from polluting their water with run off fertilizer we need to establish a market system that approximates the value of smurfs. We need Smurf Credits, which are like Carbon Credits, only cuter..."

Obama in Omaha

barack obama was in omaha last night. mon made it, i didn't, but she said it was breathtaking.

and i found this while looking for a clip of obama in omaha.

Guy In Polar Bear Suit Arrested During Greenpeace Protest

via boing boing

Finally an Update, part 2

here are some pictures of my new studio as it looks tonight. i'm not writing much at this moment because i'm tired and i want to go home and catch up on my reading. which is, currently: towards a philosophy of photography, by vilem flusser; kant and the platypus & the island of the day before, both by umberto eco; latro in the mist by gene wolfe and still plugging occasionally at the fabric of reality by david deutsch.

as a side note, i want to start using this blog to share my ideas as i work on them. i've read numerous accounts of the benefits of this kind of "open source" development and i think it can only make the work stronger. so please, help me by posting comments on the pictures and words your see here.

ta-ta.

Documentary about MMORPGers: Second Skin

from the website:
Second Skin takes an intimate look at computer gamers whose lives have been transformed by the emerging genre of Massively Multiplayer Online games (MMOs). World of Warcraft, Second Life, and Everquest allow millions of users to simultaneously interact in virtual spaces. Second Skin introduces us to couples who have fallen in love without meeting, disabled players who have found new purpose, addicts, Chinese gold-farming sweatshop workers, wealthy online entrepreneurs and legendary guild leaders - all living in a world that doesn't quite exist.

Finally an Update

pardon my lapse. i keep meaning to give you an update, but events conspire, the planets align, butterflies flap their wings and i never seem able to get it done. this will either be two mid-size posts or one really long one...we'll see how much writing i get done before i need to go to the store.

where to begin?

since my last post of any substance, i've visited the radio observatory/research center in dwingeloo, had my assessment, settled on two (or three) projects to work on, seen a houseboat sink, said goodbye to some old friends, and moved to a new, bigger, studio. when i write it down like that it doesn't seem like much, but somehow it has completely filled the last three weeks.

the visit to the radio observatory (lofar/astron) was very cool. astronomy is one of my pet hobbies, but sadly, one that i've seriously neglected in the past 10 years or so. lofar (low frequency array) is essentially a number of small, inexpensive, networked, omni-directional radio sensors that are digitized and combined to emulate a much larger, more expensive conventional antennae. my colleagues and i were taken on a tour of the facility/control center and shown the real-time feed from the small lofar network (6 stations so far, i think). another excellent aspect of lofar is that it is not used just for radio astronomy. because the network is spread all through-out europe they've been developing applications to use lofar as a more generic Wide Area Sensor Network. this project really underlines the implicit power of networks.

my assessment came and went. there's not much i want to say here on the matter. those that know me and have talked to me about know how i feel. i will say this: i have a much clearer idea of what i want out of myself while i'm here.

and with that i think i'll end for today... tune in next time for the exciting conclusion!

Immaculate Rules to Live By

yeah, normally i despise these "rules-to-live-by things" but these are too close to my own ideals that i couldn't pass it up. via boing boing

Mac Book Air

i didn't make this, i just love it:



from these guys

Games I'm Playing Right Now

these first two are via playthisthing.com:


this is FINAL VISION, a delightful low-rez side scrolling fantasy rpg. i've just started it and i love it. definitely not to far into it, but it's proving fun and addicting.



this is battleships forever, another excellent find via playthisthing.com. it also sports a custom ship maker. i'm not getting anything done now... :D

and i found this at a thrift store:


MECHCOMMANDER 2!! one of the most excellent games ever. i really enjoyed playing this at a friend's house when i was a kid and now it's MINE! MUAHAHAHAHA!

all in all, i'm doing lots of (ahem, research) gaming to get ready for... something...

On Not Using Anything But The Manufacturer's Power Pack w/My Very Valuable Exhdd

yeap. that's what happened. perhaps not so dramatically, but that's what it felt like. i stupidly tried to use a third party variable-voltage power pack in one of my exhdds. nothing happened at first, which is bad, then i tried the one manufacturer's pack i have that has a europlug and the led on the front of the drive casing just flashed weakly. it was the tech equivalent of the death rattle. the damage is all the images i had. everything. work, photos, play, miscellaneous stuff. most is on the web, but some isn't. especially older stuff. and i have no backups. i'm so dumb. after trying numerous things with the aide of pascal, my studio mate, we/he came to the conclusion that it is dead dead dead. there is maybe one recourse left to me, but pursuing it depends on the cost. there are firms that can open the hard drive up and place it in a new casing and see if the drive will work. keep your fingers crossed.
i am a virgin no longer. do i get a t-shirt now? or a special decoder ring?

I'm not a Pusher..

i don't usually push my vegetarianism on others. it's my choice, not theirs. i even go so far as to eat most non-veg meals that friends and loved-ones make, especially when i consider my recently accredited status (by the u.s. dept of edu) as an economic hardship (i'll leave that one alone :D) or was it as "suffering" an economic hardship? either way. but then i found this. so, i'm pushing for a day. we, as a species, really need to reconsider our relationship to...well, pretty much everything.

link to the humane farming association petition to investigate HKY, Inc., a pig production facility in Wausa, Nebraska.

Rupert, why is the news all lies?

via boing boing via the technologyreview.com:

"The most memorable reporting I've encountered on the conflict in Iraq was delivered in the form of confetti exploding out of a cardboard tube. I had just begun working at the MIT Media Lab in March 2006 when Alyssa Wright, a lab student, got me to participate in a project called "Cherry Blossoms." I strapped on a backpack with a pair of vertical tubes sticking out of the top; they were connected to a detonation device linked to a Global Positioning System receiver. A microprocessor in the backpack contained a program that mapped the coördinates of the city of Baghdad onto those for the city of Cambridge; it also held a database of the locations of all the civilian deaths of 2005. If I went into a part of Cambridge that corresponded to a place in Iraq where civilians had died in a bombing, the detonator was triggered..."

Link to the rest of an article by a former journalist-now-MIT-Media-Lab-critter John Hockenberry on why news sucks.

Home

oh wow, it's been almost a month between posts. i've been a busy boy. the last three weeks of december i spent getting ready to leave, finishing projects, inadvertently starting a new project, coming to some sort of less-murky clarity with my thesis-thingy, starting another new project, christmas dinners (3-4ish) and finally almost 36 hours spent trying to cross the atlantic. albeit, 27 of those were spent twiddling my thumbs in schipol, amsterdam's airport.

let's see, what's new.. in reverse, i spent 4 days at summerhaven with mon's (and soon-to-be mine) family, had a small hockey accident (i can skate... i can't stop), was given some excellent books, gleefully ate way too much and just as gleefully won a game of munchkin! >:) before that i spent christmas at my grandparent's with my family. it's always fun to see everyone together. my family dynamic works a bit like the new york stock exchange, lots of loud talking, frantic hand gestures, odd quiet moments and feverishly renewed gesticulating. i love it. :D

i haven't spent as much time relaxing as i thought i would. mon and i have gotten some movies and game playing in, though not much. and i've spent time with the cats, who acclimated quite quickly to me, thankfully. i was a bit worried that the youngest wouldn't remember me.

mainly it's just been good to see and spend time with them.

now i'm taking care of all the things i've yet to take care of. getting ready for a class i'll be TA-ing at UNO next semester, "games as art" or something similar. reading like crazy to get ready for my assessment/research defense on the 23rd and when i get back to GRO i'll be making like crazy for the same goal.

and sometime during all this i turned 27. :) happy birthday, me.

i hope your holidays were fun and safe. a more-less-christmas-letter-ish post will be forthcoming. cheers!