Until Monday, I will be on some non-Earth planet. When I return, refreshed and invigorated, my life will be different. If you need to get in touch with about something, do it Monday (Feb 4) or later and your return will be far greater.

To check out later: very cool Manhattan Timeformations (via Arcloguesadia). Also, Forget Magazine.
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Walking out of the office door to grab a coffee a few days ago, I saw these tire tracks in the back lot:



I bet the drivers never even saw what they left behind.
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* I've been out for three days with a kick-in-the-head kind of sickness (thanks honey!) which I could have easily avoided by regularly getting more than five hours of sleep per night. But now I can't help but get 12, 18 or even 24 hours of sleep “a night”. I don't prefer either condition.

Also, it really, really snowed (five inches or so downtown — first snow that I remember lasting more than an hour since I moved to Vancouver). Also, I had a pretty pronounced scintillating scotoma (or was that an occular migraine? a fortification spectrum? it looked something like this).

...at its height it seemed like a fortified town with bastions all round it, these bastions being coloured most gorgeously...All the interior of the fortification, so as to speak was boiling and rolling about in a most wonderful manner as if it was some thick liguid all alive.

is one way to describe it. I just said that it is like a block of coloured snow in my visual field.
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Matt has one of those days:

A big dark cloud descended on me last night. In the morning I'd been jamming with a mate on some technology / product problems. Absolutely product/tech-riven ideas. Lunatic nonsense. Potentially ungraspable apart from by us and maybe a geeky, early-adopter percentile of our audience. Fun! Spent the afternoon confronted by (unrelated) realities of accesibility, compatibility, appropriateness and implentation... the morning felt like a guilty pleasure I had to consign to a secret chamber of my mind and shackle there. I had a come-down as profound as a drug experience! It was horrible!

I recommend following the link above, for all its good second-cousin links and a glimpse into the ethos — the horribly conflicted inner workings of those who at once desire adherance to best practices, innovation and real creative expression — the mind of the worldly web designer.

I'd be thinking like that too, if I wasn't so tired. 3:03 AM, and I am just leaving the office after finishing two big documents in the time since everyone else left the office. (I am behind on email, but I am behind on a lot of things.)
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I wish I had more time to write this out: early in the day, there was all kinds of talk (!) about non-verbal communication (models for, limits of, and so on). Then, in the evening, there was all kinds of talk about all kinds of things, but specifically, in part, about the 20s, 30s and 40s as an intellectual epoch, and more specifically, more in part, about the greatness of Otto Neurath.

(Two of us distinctly remembered the time when we first realized that Otto Neurath was Otto Neurath; and the more I learn about Neurath, the more I admire him. Note to Derek: the continually-reconstructing boat trope predates his escape to Holland.)

So, doing the day-wrap surfing, from that second Neurath link, we find the Center for Nonverbal Studies — “The Center's goal is to promote the scientific study of nonverbal communication, which includes body movement, gesture, facial expression, adornment and fashion, architecture, mass media, and consumer-product design.” — home of the Nonverbal Dictionary of Gestures, Signs & Body Language Cues
/ which / brings / us / back / to / do.
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At one of my current gigs, with the venerable CBC, under the auspices of the still-mostly-under-the-radar Radio 3, we are doing a foundation-up reworking of the CBC's kids-web stuff. As part of that work, I've been spending some time inside kids' houses getting them to show me the sites they like. Kids like neopets. (Also, as an aside, surprisingly, kids read on the web).

So I've been spending some time on neopets.com, trying to figure out how there came to be 24,621,080 user accounts with 38,730,917 pets on the site. (At right, you see my neopet, Whukuna.) I am starting to understand why: the things people do on the site and the things that just happen have automatic significance there, because (inter-)actions are persistent and cumulative. Just add people and, in a sense, you have a world. This ties into the Sims ... (more later).
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Speaking of really cool work, Q42 is mind blowing. Win/IE5.5+ only for now, but if you have the goods, try out Quek, a multi-user avatar chat on top of pretty much any web page (my example uses this page) with great co-browsing possiblities and lots of neat features (try typing “superman!” or “fart!” into your text box) — version 2.0 is in the works and will support more browsers and new functionality.

Or edit (Dutch weblog) alt0169.com (wait — is it dead?) using xopus, their in-browser XML editor with a very slick UI (you might want to look at the xopus product page for background). Also of note are Lime, a WYSIWYG in-browser HTML editor & soon to be Zope-integrated CMS front end, and MemoChat (scoll down) another demo built on the same communications framework as Quek.
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Bruce and Ann Marie, who live downstairs from me, do some really cool work (I really love the Coca Cola India ad (second from the left, top row) on Bruce's showreel).
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Needed: DOM/browser-client guru to join a small but experienced development team. Must be smart, creative, motivated to change the world (wide web) for the better, and know DOM like the back of your hand. Professional developers with solid programming chops, team lead experience, and a passion for well-documented code will grab our interest. XSLT (yes, we hate it too) fluency is handy. If you're a relaxed but focussed professional with a healthy sense of humour you'll fit right in. Burning Tiger is an Angel-funded, Vancouver-based startup working to realize the vision of a writable semantic web.
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If you're interested, let me know and I'll hook you up with the appropriate person.
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Internet Moving Images Archive: Movie Collection

About 1000 short films from the Prelinger Archives. Huge files (300 and 400MB MPEG-2s) ? I'm downloading them to my backup drive while I sleep. But with films like these, it's all worth it:

• 6 1/2 Magic Hours  ca. 1958
• Sponsor: Pan American World Airways
• The comfort and delight of transatlantic air travel at the beginning of the jet age.


• A is for Atom 1953
• Sponsor: General Electric Company
• Animated classic presenting what an atom is, how energy is released from certain kinds of atoms, the peacetime uses of atomic energy and the byproducts of nuclear fission.


• How Much Affection? 1958
• How far can young people go in petting and still stay within the bounds of personal standards and social mores?

Also, the Television Archive (“The events of September 11th affected the entire world. Reactions around the globe have been captured in this archive of television news broadcasts from the period following the attacks”).

(Are these just links that I missed the first time around? They seem so cool that I'm really surprised I didn't know about them before.)
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The Case Against Knowledge Management (via evhead)
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An interesting/horrible thing about sleep: one's sleep deficits are recorded immediately and with perfect detail by an internal comptroller. Immediately, usurious interest is calculated and compounded and the accrued debt can only be repaid in suffering; one's surfeits of sleep are noted on slips of internal paper which are promptly misplaced and attempting to overpay and store extra sleep away results in nothing more than wasted time and additional grogginess.

(Or so it seems sometimes.)
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Forbidden experiment* idea: get some person. Write a program that displays a single digit of pi at a time and advances by one digit every time the spacebar is hit. Sit the person in front of the computer and get them to guess what the next number will be. Have them hit the spacebar. (“2?” 5. “7?” 1. “8?” 3. “4?” 4. (Yay!) “9?” 2. And so on ...) Have them do this all day every day for, say, 20 years or so. See if they eventually get the knack of it, or at least get significantly above chance at guessing.

One the one hand, the sequence is random, so how could they guess? On the other hand, there are algorithmic processes for calculating pi to any arbitrary digit (using elementary calculus; polygon and Monte Carlo methods, plus methods for e and more). Could you train a brain to do some sort of implicit calculation? (Using the even the simplest of the real methods would be far too slow to do explicitly, never mind being impossible to keep it all in your head.)

Why not? There were Oliver Sacks' famous retarded twins who could find 20 digit prime numbers in their heads (see also: “Test your sensitiveness about prime numbers”) and many other mathematical savants who had the ability to do various kinds of implicit calculation. The spacebar guessing method may not be the way to train a brain — maybe one just has to be born with it — but you never know.
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Three pleasant evenings in a row of breaking bread with interesting people has gotten my mind off my backlog of to dos and brought the stress level down to a level where I can cope and actually get things done (thereby further reducing the stress, in a nice feedback loop) Maybe I can even get this site finished (and the new 5k together ...)
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FORMs and GET. A thread on the W3C's public XForms mailing list about the deprecation of HTTP GET (“one of the most important parts of the Web infrastructure” according to thread originator Paul Prescod). Fascinating conversation (for 0.01% of the world's population) and a great example of how hard it is going to be to clean up the mess we made of the WWW (or is should that be “artificially constrain the organic growth of the medium and fix what ain't broke”?)
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On the kids front, I read Louis Sachar's Holes (not to be confused with Varzi and Casati's Holes and Other Superficialities which is something a little more adult and perhaps my 23rd favorite book that I don't myself own) as well as the first of the Lemony Snicket books. Holes was great and Lemony Snicket was good too, but at a crucial juncture the protagonists had such implausibly poor decision making skills that I found the story ultimately disappointing.

Both were very plot-driven but then again, I don't know what a character-driven kids' book would look like: kids like stories and all the complex introspective things that adults do just aren't that interesting as stories, at least not until you have a certain amount of experience.

On order is a book called Pictoplasma, a “global collection of contemporary character design” (click on the exhibition link — no, not that one ... the other one). It's fun to browse through the 3,000+ characters created for all kinds of media and situations.
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The Turk's game. You know it is bedtime when there is something you are desperately interested in and trying to read but can't stay awake for. Good night.
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Extreme Programming vs. Interaction Design: Kent Beck and Alan Cooper square off in a debate that didn't make sense to me when it was initially announced, but came out just as provocative as one could wish, assuming that one cared about this sort of thing. Which I do. Strangely enough, given my CV, I came down more on the XP side (link from Michael F.).
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Some of the comments on those photos indicate that I'm not as original a location scout as I thought. But then, at least I have a good eye for quality. (For those of you who were asking, the camera is an Olympus 3030.)
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“Join Ginnie Mae, DeeDee and Remmick on an adventure of personal finance and home-ownership” @ ginniemae.gov - yeah!

I'm looking for top-notch examples of kids' web stuff — entertaining and useful to nine and ten year olds, but in a context of supporting their development as active, curious, engaged citizens. Know of anything good? Have a child in that age range? What sites do they like? Is there anything that you like them liking? Assuming that they are not just (typically) whiling away the dull and painful hours until death inevitibly takes them, what are they looking to get out of time spent on the web? If you have ideas, send me an email, use the contact form or leave a comment.
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Justin was here for the weekend and though he came over explicitly for the purpose of taking pictures, I had to snag the camera from time to time to satisfy the craving for picture taking that has grown over the last six months (since I broke my camera).

I managed to get a few good night photos, but I'd like to go back and do some of those locations again. In fact, I could spend a few weeks just on the locations we scouted this weekend (in the downtown east side, the Port, and Fairview) and a few months covering all of it thoroughly. I'm starting to understand how someone can take the same shot a few hundred times.
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Walking down Davie Street towards Melriche's for meeting, I spotted local harcore punk star Bif Naked. She was with a friend, all punked up, and just after they passed me he pulled out his keys and made a "beep beyuup" to unlock the door of his new Lexus. With white leather interior. And two little white poodles. That's not punk.
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I am not alone: http://woodrow.mpls.frb.fed.us/sylloge/
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A couple of days ago, something reminded me of this very interesting positive feedback loop in interaction design: they way we design things affects people's expectations of how computers operate and react to the efforts of the people using the system. (That “computer-like” is a meaningful, even evocative, descriptive phrase points to the extent to which our perception of system behaviour is laden with expecation.) Our actions can't help but reflect this cognitive positioning and thus design affects (indirectly) itself.

And people who use computers get idea of what it is to be computer-like very quickly. The specific example I remembered involved a someone at CHI interviewing kids about their dream computers and one of the kids imagined that her computer would have a “WRK” button — when you want to do some work with it, you'd press the WRK button. Genius! The strange but familiar obfuscution (the missing “o”) —perhaps necessitated by tight constraints— and the gratuitious compliance with superfluous convention (ALL-CAPS) encapsulate “the computer's” typical (il)logic.

But lo! There's the article itself (pdf | google's html version) and here, verbatim, is what Rebecca Wagner, Age 10, had to say:

It can be different colors, it can be furry. You can work with it by pressing a key called WRK. It is small enough to fit in your pocket. It will do what ever you want it to do. You will have to walk it when it wants to. But it is not selfish. You have to take very special care of it. It tells you what time it is. If you are new with the computer it comes to life and helps you. It will tell you every single fact about the computer.

“You have to take very special care of it” indeed.

This also reminds of a problem faced by designers of natural dialog systems for voice interactions (a step up from menu-drive voice interfaces — the computer recognizes your speech as words and then parses the phrases to extract commands). First, if callers didn't know that they were talking to a computer, they'd use a lot more words to explain their problem. It was easier to take input when the callers used fewer words. But if the callers knew right off the top that they were speaking to a computer, they would start talking in this awkward, stilted halting voice with unnatural intonation and timing.

The systems were trained up to recognize a wide variety of voices and accents and line conditions and synonyms, etc., but it was hard to recognize what callers were saying if the callers weren't talking the way they normally would. Therefore, finding the presentation balance (where it is on the continuum from a natural human voice to the system initially announcing it is a computer in Radiohead voice) was a key research goal and design input.

(See “Natural spoken dialogue systems for telephony applications” by Susan J. Boyce in Communcations of the ACM Vol 43, Issue 9. Pp29-34. You have to be a subscriber to the ACM's Digital Library to get the full text of the article (I think) but you can get some information on this page (I think — it's hard to tell with these things).
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I've had this exact same thought:

What I've always wodered, though, is why there's never been a laptop designed so you could fold it over backward into an "A" shape and set it on the desktop as a monitor. (Hardware or software could rotate the screen 180 degrees.) Dock it into a "monitor stand" with connectors for external mouse, keyboard, and other peripherals and it becames a compact desktop computer, yet it's still portable. It's such an obvious idea I wonder why nobody has made something like it before.*

When do I get one?
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I was deliberately avoiding this peterme post on places/spaces first because I thought the distinction that Weinberger was making was bogus, but then because I was wondering if I've just been totally wrong all along. Still pondering that. While I do, I intend to read the links offered in those comments: Re-Place-ing Space: The Roles of Place and Space in Collaborative Systems and Running out of Space (pdf) — thanks Eric and tpodd.

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I am so far out of the groove right now — an unacceptable state of affairs. I need a desk with a top like nobody's business.
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