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  Neglected to mention
That conference was a little bit of a DISappointment. The theme was "Processes, Practices, Methods and Techniques" but there was very little to be found along those lines, or it seemed that way to me at the time. Looking through the proceedings, there are quite a few good papers that never got presented (it was mostly posters). And there was no one there who lit a fire in me (or in the audience as a whole).

I kept thinking that this conference only happens ever few years, it is about Designing Interactive Systems and it is the year 2000. Where's the — Hey! How cool is that?! How cool we are! What an amazing time to be alive! I think the revolutions are here or here or here. This is the future. No! This is the future! Look at what's going on with mobiles. Look what's going on with object-izing servers, with XML, with natural language interfaces, with adaptability. This is how we're doing it. Herewegowhee!

Instead, it assumed what struck me as an artificial distinction in the context of this conference: HCI and design. There was a design day and an HCI day and a "building bridges" day. Fuck that. Only people who straddle the gap should have been at the conference. And we should have got down and dirty about how we did it and how we were going to do it from now on.

However, I did come away with a few good slogans:

• Interaction design deals with systems that reveal their functionality over time.
  (So says Karen Mahony.)
  
  
• All designs are predictions, all predictions fail.
  (Uttered by Malcolm McColluch, who couldn't remember to whom to attribute it. If you know, tell me; I'd like the see the context.)

Also, in the my last 10 minutes in New York, waiting for a cab outside the Phillipe Starck-designed Paramount hotel in central Manhattan (I love saying that, over and over, right?), someone stole my wallet. (Or so I think; I don't normally lose things like that.) I didn't notice until it was time to pay the cabbie at JFK. Eep. That sucked.

  Friends of a friend, I got to have dinner with the creators of Mappa Mundi last week. I thought Mappa Mundi was the shit. Only the good die young.

  view source genius

  From (alice), via email: The Gettysburg PowerPoint Presentation. If Lincoln used PowerPoint. Genius! I hate PowerPoint so, so much.

Includes:

• "government not perish"

  Vox Populi, the free public software service that allows me to make dumb polls went down for most of the time my last poll was visible on the site, which meant it didn't get all the responses it could have. [Or perhaps I'm just an idiot. Fixed this one.] Undeterred, I'll try again:

  Almost done. I owe you one.




Sunday, August 27

  I made foodpix and now they're at foodpix.net. Lunch at Kisha Poppo with Theo & Kate about a month ago. Salmon Nigiri, Yaki Soba & "hey! what is that in my wasabe?" (doesn't it look like an eyeball?).




Saturday, August 26

  ALMOST LIKE TV, BUT WITH MORE FIDDLING

I don't have a TV. But I'm not holier-than-thou about it; I just get enough screen time already. (Some part of me must crave it though, since I'll watch TV in hotel rooms for hours.) Anyway, once in while, I want to watch something. Something less involved than renting a DVD or going out to a movie or walking to a friend's house to watch TV.

So, every so often, I try video sites. And the night before last, I had some luck with atom films. I found:

• Creature Comforts
  By Aardman Studios (creators of Wallace and Gromit, Chicken Run, et al.). Could be my favorite short of all time. ("... not grass! which gives me hay fever, every day!") I once was given a copy of this on video. Now I can watch it for free.
• The Adventures of Handyman
  A charming peek into one couple's geriatric erotica.
• Rex the Runt: Dreams
  Frenetic surreal discombobulated dreams of a talking dog. (The rest of the Rex the Runt series, like Easter Island, is also excellent.)

Another thing I like to watch is WhiteCap, a visualization plug-in for WinAmp (and MacAmp). Perhaps, if your recreational proclivities are sufficiently different from mine, you will not enjoy it as much. I like to "see the music", mostly because it makes me aware of all kinds of nuances that would otherwise escape my attention. I hear things I wouldn't otherwise hear.

But there's something weird about it. The sound source (in this case, mp3) is turned into a .wav, output to the amp via the soundcard, from there to the speakers, then some vibrations in the air, the frequencies at various amplitudes are detected by sets of auditory neurons along the length of the inner ear, from there to the temporal lobe and then, presumably, diffused through the brain.

At the same time, the sound source is analyzed and turned into a series of values for a graph. The graph is then repeatedly transformed over time, the transformed values turned into instructions for the monitor's electron guns by the video card, the projected light hits the cornea & lens, refracts and spreads across the retina, cones respond to the various wavelengths causing a ripple of activity up through the h-cells and other ganglia, down through the back along the optic nerve, mixing it up at the optic chaism, stopping off at the LGN and through the layers of the optic cortex and there, again, off to who knows where.

While normally I think of hearing as taking place "all at once", there is clearly some retroactive processing going on here. Whether or not it actually takes more time for the computer to do the math and send me the images via the monitor than it does for the sound to get to my ear (and it seems to me it should), the patterns of activity stemming from the image are not getting to the temporal lobe at the same time or prior to the auditory signal (who knows if they are getting there at all?). Yet from the phenomenological point of view, the picture undoubtedly affects (my appreciation of) the sound.

Generally, I'm inclined to agree with Dennett: there is no place where it all comes together (example paper: Time and the Observer). But it is hard to explain otherwise.

Anyway, I made a picture while thinking about it.




Friday, August 25

This action shot of a three card monte game makes me feel like I could be a photojournalist. I couldn't.

Hopefully I'll get all my NYC pics together at some point. Some good stuff in there.

  GENEROSITY REDUX

I get a knock on my door (unusual in an apartment). It's my new neighbour who says that she is still waiting for the bulk of her things to arrive and can she please borrow a plate. I oblige; she says "I'll be right back" and I call after her that she can wait until she is finished with it.

I go back to work (or whatever it is that I do) and 30 seconds later there is another knock. My plate is back, but it has a generous slice of gorgeous lemon meringue pie on it.

Way to make friends. I was inspired to buy gifts for three people I hardly know. Generosity. Pass it on.

p.s. The Subterranean Note-taker sends the OED's citations:

gift horse. (Earlier given horse.) A horse bestowed as a gift.
to look a gift (+given) horse in the mouth, to criticize and find fault with a gift.

• 1546 J. Heywood Prov. (1867) 11 No man ought to looke a geuen hors in the mouth.
• 1616 B. R. Withals' Dict. 578.
• 1663 Butler Hud. i. i. 490 He ne'er consider'd it, as loth To look a Gift-Horse in the mouth.
• 1707 J. Stevens tr. Quevedo's Com. Wks. (1709) 334 It is a madness..to look a gift Horse in the Mouth.
• 1888 J. Payn Myst. Mirbridge xxxii, He would be a fool..to look such a gift horse in the mouth.

  About a week ago, I finished reading The Elements of Typographic Style, including all the appendices, even "Appendix E: Recapitulation". It took me eight months. Herman Zapf himself said: "I wish to see this book become the Typographers' Bible."

And it was excellent. I used to always recommend Spiekermann & Ginger's Stop Stealing Sheep (in contrast, I read that book in a single afternoon and found it delightful — not an adjective I use often). Now, I'd say, if you want to know something about type, read Stop Stealing Sheep. If you want to know everything about type, read The Elements.

Other books that I have been reading, on and mostly off for an inordinately long time, even though I have been enjoying them: Tristram Shandy (about 2-1/2 years) & Disclosing New Worlds (about 10 months).

  A old friend and co-worker who moved many thousands of miles away writes in to say:

Do you know the actualy story of the gift horse?
The original one had gold coins that came out of BOTH ends, but the people who had the horse wanted more gold, and decided to cut it open to get all the gold at once.
Didn't work though...

I did find a reference to St. Jerome writing: "Noli (ut vulgare est proverbium) equi dentes inspicere donati."




Wednesday, August 23

  MY NEW JOB

I am a dentist for gift horses.




Wednesday, August 16

  It was full too.

Me: Mom, airplanes used to be shiny, right?
Mom: They're still shiny now honey.
Me: I mean they used to be all metal on the outside. Shiny metal, not painted. Right?
Mom: Yes dear.

  Stewart starts an argument. I've been meaning to write that for years now ...

  My DSL was down for a while there. Now I am going to Victoria, then, immediately after, I am going to New York. So lower your expectations of me.

I got this email a few days ago:

Date: Fri, 11 Aug 2000 13:53:29 +0400
Subject: Greeting from Russia!
From: "HTML a r t .RU TEAM" [KOHTAKT@htmlart.ru]
To: stewart@sylloge.com


Hi Stewart!

We are russians. But we are also netizens. And, may be, we are netizens more than russians. :)

Well, the story is. 1 month ago we were so exited by 5k idea, that founded similar russian project "HTML a r t .RU". And since yesterday it becomes available in English also.

Pls look at our child at:
http://www.htmlart.ru - follow "in english" link

Let's be a friend! (Or brothers :)

Now we are going to advertize it in the Net and would ask your advice. We are very expirienced in the russian part of the net, but haven't such expirience in the english one.

Hala Va, Danilito

  Powers of Ten Thousand (now quoting Eric:)

proposes a new method for browsing a very large space (such as a street map of the entire United States): a "macroscope display"

"[which] should comfortably permit browsing continuously on a single image, or set of images in multiple resolutions, on a scale of at least 1 to 10,000."

  If you are interested in working for company whose naming policy is as ridiculous as they come, check out the "Hot Jobs" at Scient, including Applications Architect ("The Applications Architect is a supporting technical resource on Scient projects to ensure that a solution, which is reliable, available, scalable and secure enables Scient's technology endeavours."), Data Architect, System Architect, Infrastructure Architect and Information Architect. (Can you imagine how stupid it looks when a Scient project team meets with a client and hands out their business cards?)

Now, I've mentioned before that I really hate the job title "information architect" (silly, pretentious, an insult to real architects, current usage ignorant of that the term was invented to describe, misleading, used completely without discretion, etc.) but I feel like I must be close to alone in this. (Well, like anything else this popular, a backlash must be coming soon, so I won't be alone for long.)

My take is that if you are doing interaction design, call it "interaction design"; if you are doing UI design, call it "UI design"; if you are doing information design, call it "information design" (do you see where this is going?). If you really are working in the field of library and information science, you already have a name: librarian (or "archival researcher", "information scientist", etc.). Learn to love it. (As an aside, I have no problem with talking about a site's "architecture", since then we are using a metaphor. Once you call yourself an "architect" though, it is no longer a metaphor.)

Anyway, it would be interesting to determine how close to alone I am in this sentiment. Hence the poll:

[Cheaters take note: this time I've put cookies on the poll so you can cheat.]

  Death, Life.

I found this —A Turing Machine in Conway's Game Life, extendable to a Universal Turing Machine— by surfing off some weblog the other day, but I can't remember where. Amazing. I knew there was a proof a long time ago that a TM could be implemented in Life (and many other kinds of cellular automata) but I had no idea that anyone actually did it. What a pain in the ass. A beautiful pain in the ass. Images of complexity fascinate me.

  My grandmother just died earlier tonight, 35 years after her husband, I think of a loss of memory. She used to make me pies if I would pick enough blackberries from the yards at that old house on Finn Bay. I called her "Goah" because, as the story goes, I couldn't quite say "Grandma" when I was very young. Everyone called her Goah. I bet she didn't remember what year it was more than once since last new year's eve, but she remembered living in Harlem in the 30s (or was it the 40s?) and the duck farm in Framingham where she grew up and the house in Weston where she raised her three sons.

It's not really that sad — she has stopped participating in this world slowly over the last decade (that was sad); but she wasn't ill, no time in a hospital, it was peaceful and painless.

Bye.

  This was the fireworks tonight.




Wednesday, August 9

  Wow. I'm glad I'm not quite that smart: History of High IQ Societies




Tuesday, August 8

  Very large Vegas movie (Quicktime, ~ 10 MB).
Restart it once it has played for a few seconds and the results will be better.

The editing was totally linear because — here's something annoying — (i) the little floating menu bar for Quicktime has dissapeared on my (Windows) machine and nothing (including uninstalling/reinstalling) can get it back and (ii) there is no keyboard shortcut or regular menu option for adding tracks in Quicktime; you have to hold down ALT + CTRL (Win) or Option (Mac) and then open the edit menu. As you might be able to imagine, without having a menu bar, that is impossible.




Thursday, August 3

  I'm going to Vegas tomorrow afternoon. Back on Sunday. Expect some funny pictures.

The week after, it is NYC for DIS 2000 (and sundry delicious extra-cirricular activities — see?). I'm excited.

I'm still pissed off that the UPA decided to move their conference so that it conflicted with DIS, which only happens every few years. I didn't renew my UPA membership this year because of it. Eh, that'll show 'em.

I keep forgetting to mention this (no more!): my grandmother was in town from Montréal a few weeks ago, and I went to have dinner with her and my uncle. I was asking her if life just kept on accelerating or if it just reached a constant (high) speed and flew by. A year when you are six is about five years when you are 26, but is does the same relationship hold between 56 and 76? (Apparently, it does. The acceleration increases, but not at a constant rate.)

Anyway, "Auntie Sarah" (one of those family characters whose precise relationship to the people referring to her in that way was usually unclear, but it was very rarely the same as the reference would indicate, viz., that of aunt-neice or aunt-nephew; she died, in her 80s or 90s when I was a teenager) — sorry, anyway, Auntie Sarah is remembered to have said, frequently — and I should point out that I don't know if this is common Polish or Romanian wisdom or just an Aunt Sarah-ism — she used to say, all the time, that:

The days are long, but the years fly by.

  Ask me to describe something that hasn't happened yet, this is the sort of thing you get:

"Motivations for the creation of the 5k. Review of the results. Humorous anecdote. Futile attempt at explicating lightness in terms of simplicity, clarity and efficiency. An examination of the question, Why does doing something with less deserve more admiration? Examples interspersed. A quick survey of constraints in creative activity (fugues, sonnets, lipography, etc.). "Less is more" considered as a principle of communication. A satisfying metaphor or analogy which ties the whole thing together. Applause."




Wednesday, August 2

  I had to write a description of a talk I'm not going to give for three and a half months. I find this oppressing in a special sort of way. How should I know what I'm going to say that far in future? I don't even know what I'm going to say 15 minutes from now. (E.M. Forster: 'How do I know what I think until I see what I say?' ) I don't want to commit to something that I may not turn out to have much to say about, or claim a point I will later give up on.

It was just like having to choose my thesis title before I had started writing the thesis: the same sort of agonizing was provoked. And of course, I did want to change the title once I was 3/4 of the way done (the change was not allowed).

I remember the red matte card stock which served as the backing of my thesis, the black comb binding. The day of my defense, I wore a red sweater, a blue shirt, my lucky pants. I walked across Christ's Pieces (a park; always found that a funny thing to say) to Orchard Street, reading my thesis over and over, trying to catch stray implications and anticipate the directions in which the examiners' analysis would proceed. (I ended up with Hugh Mellor and Edward Craig who were more than capable of ripping me to shreds, oral examination-style.) Slightly early (as you know, very unusual for me) I loitered on the corner, breathed deeply, smoked, fidgeted. Then marched up and rang the bell.

From about the second question, I knew everything would be okay. Coffee was served. I squirmed once or twice, but all in all it was actually pleasant. God, the relief was palpable. Delicious. I walked out as light as a cloud. (Hey! ...)




Tuesday, August 1

  Highly recommended: Wonderland (1997). A documentary, ostensibly about Levittown, but really concerned with the humorous eccentricities of a gaggle of people found there (well-edited, which is just about the nicest thing I can say about a film). I would be happy to watch it again.

Here are some of the other things on this site:

The 5k contest
This year's contest is now open for entries. Help collectively correct for my laziness by telling everyone you know.

Stephen Toulmin's 1979 Ryerson Lecture at the University of Chicago, The Inwardness of Mental Life, reprinted with the kind permission of the Author & the University.

An excerpt from an interview with philosopher Donald Davidson, which I find complements the former.

A motion study where you can see all the frames of an animation at once, but also still see the animation.

Some pictures of my friend Paul spinning around in some art, which is really a machine.

Some pictures of Illuminares, Vancouver's annual latern festival.

Some pictures of The Symphony of Fire, Vancouver's annual fireworks competition.

A video from my second trip to Vegas in the year 2000. Sad, that.

And more, to be dusted off.