service notice
Oh, who am I fooling anymore? I am never going to finish this. Better to just start over. Most of it is not broken.
This site is maintained by Stewart Butterfield: stewart@sylloge.com
And it is powered, in part, by Blogger.
most recently
Thursday, November 30
Jiggity-jig-jig. I like home. Lots of crap to post here. But look! I made something for you when I was bored in a hotel without any connection. Have you ever thought: "I need a way to see all the frames of an animation at once, but still have it animated! And I need it like, yesterday!" Well, now you can. And, best of all, for an unlimited time, it's FREE. Click now here for top modern multiview animations!
Then, when you're done with that, 0sil8 like this.
Monday, November 27
Oh London, of course I don't really hate you. I was just a little cranky and I'd forgotten how dirty and inconvenient you are. The fact that you didn't label that railing with a "wet paint" sign in those first few mintues, your lack of consideration in forcing me to spend so much time in finding a hotel (you can't blame it all on Sabre/Amadeus/Pegasus, etc.), your unbelievable pay phones which only work one time out of five, the fact that it costs the same as my monthly long distance bill to call a London-based mobile phone for three minutes, your crappy food and crappy weather, the sausage grease which seems to have coated every surface in the city and permeated the water supply, the throngs of glum-faced people, the 20 minute wait for the tube, the broken elevators and escalators, the incredible heat and humidity inside every building — I can forgive you for all this. There are a lot of interesting people and I had a wonderful weekend, but I am glad to go home and I am not all that sorry to say that I can't live with you.
Keep up the good work with the Museums, the Galleries, and so on (I'm sorry that I was here a week too early for the new Great Court opening at the British Museum) and I'll see you again soon enough. We have our differences, but I remain
your loyal ally and,
humble friend;
devotedly,
Stewart
Thursday, November 23
At the moment, I hate London.
Tuesday, November 21
Interesting thought, appropos of Goethe's dictum "Architecture is frozen music." (I always thought it was Hanslick that said that, but Google indicates otherwise): imagine some audio waveform analysis & transformation software that had been tweaked to produce forms representative of 18th-century architectural forms in response to 18th-century music — is it possible that those same transformations would also produce forms representative of contemporary architectural forms in response to contemporary music?
Tonight I am giving a talk moderating a discussion at the multidisciplinary Viennese design firm Nofrontiere. They call such presentations/discussions "Big Tables", which is a name I particularly like. The topic is "On the Division of Intellectual Labour", which is an essay I have been working on (off-and-on) for at least the last year — hopefully this will cause something to come of it. I was invited after Doors and it was probably the impetus for coming to Vienna (so I am grateful to them).
Some
of the cool pictures I promised (though it turns out I
lost the bulk of my conference pictures somehow): Paul Perry on one
of the spinning mechanical devices at the Dutch
Electronic Arts Festival. A video of the other
spinning mechanical device, with explanatory
photographs, will follow in a few days.
Although expressing it in this way precludes any real insight into what are likely very interesting psycholinguistic underpinnings, I have to say that German, as a language, really creeps me out. It always sounds so angry and severe, bizarre and foreign.
Along those lines, the english "Viennese" brings to mind things luxurious, rich, delicious, wise and far-reaching, exotic but comfortable; on the other hand, "Wiener" really doesn't carry any of those pleasant connotations. If I was in charge of things over here, I'd mandate the use of Viennese (or maybe Wienese?) as the official term. I'd also probably have some pyramids built. Mmm.
Monday, November 20
Oh sweet merciful Lord, oh benevolent and wise Protector, oh great and holy parent of us all, thank you so much for this absolutely incredible fucking hotel. I am blown away. I walk in, put down my bags, boot up, turn AirPort on and boom: low-latency 20k/s connection on my own machine (after nearly two weeks of sluggish, 2-3k/s connections on crappy old PII 200s with 32MB of RAM, it is a godsend).
Plus, it is an enormous room (650 sq. ft. or so) and gorgeous (Terence Conran did the interior; some pictures below). All for the price of a Boston, San Francisco or New York hotel that could best be decribed as "clean". I am rearranging my trip just so I can stay longer here.
Remember kids, that's the Hotel Das Triest in beautiful Vienna (Wiedner Haupstrasse 12; +43 1 589 18 250). Tell 'em the Lord God sent you. (Did I mention that this update comes via their restaurant where I just finished lunch? Wireless LAN, baby. Long live 802.11 and/or its superior sucessors.)
Sunday, November 19
Next: a 48-hour experiment in connectivity conditions, spanning the far edges of European connectivity paradigms, as it were. From a CNL sleeper (hopefully with AC socket) to the (as far as I can tell) only hotel in Europe to have enveloped itself in an 802.11 aether; a place where my Airport card and I can roam freely and I can finally upload some pictures. Recommendations for Vienna must-sees welcome.
Friday, November 17
Counting Backwards
Yesterday, I encountered a biophysicist in a coffeeshop in a meeting so serendipitously delicious that it couldn't have been more perfect had I scripted my day myself (having been in the, "headspace," as it is called, to be considering the physical manfestation of information, the cost of preserving order, the relationship between that cost and the distance the system is from equilibrium, and so on). As it happened, appropriately, our conversation turned to happenstance, and the constraints thereof, leading to that particular kind of metaphysical revelery which is the goal of most intellectual engagement (at least for me).
We decided to adjourn and continue the conversation over pannekoeken, being so close to my favorite pannekoekenhuis. Truly the way a conversation should be; each ceding the floor to the other at the end of some point of enlightenment or other, both as eager to contribute something else along the same lines as to to receive the next installment from our interlocutor. We didn't exchange names until just before parting, but it turned out he was also from Vancouver, though currently researching in Berlin.
The day before yesterday, I went to Rotterdam to visit Paul and see DEAF — I've got some really excellent pictures. I liked Rotterdam a lot (especially as a contrast to Amsterdam); some fantastic contemporary (I don't say
"modernist" anymore) architecture, a nice "working city" feel, like home, and the three most delicious restaurants I've been to in the Nederlands (so good that in these cases, psychotropic augmentation of the gustatory experience was made unncessary by the intrinsic mm-mm-tastiness of the food itself).
Before that was a few days lounging/hanging out and decompressing after Doors. (Also good pictures coming; plus a summary of presentations.) I missed a lot at the conference (both presentation and conversation-wise) but I like working on the fly.
Next: south (either Milan or Vienna, depending on travel pragmatics). Then London from the 23rd to the 28th — let's have lunch.
Tuesday, November 14
It is rare for a company to be cool enough to do something like this (via MetaFilter).
If you are up at 12:30am, PST tonight (9:30am Amsterdam time), you can watch me tell a funny joke here, LIVE:
http://live.doorsofperception.com/ (apologies in advance for the login thing).
It's mostly because I find myself so fucking interesting, but this really is a great conference. It's a wonderful opportunity to get to meet this diverse group of interesting speakers (lots of good group dinners, etc.) and Amstedam is excellent, as usual. If only I wasn't sick ...
Of course, you are probably all watching CNN instead. Viva la revolution!
p.s. i.am/bald rules (I am discussing Milo's Hungry Little Frog tomorrow).
Thursday, November 9
Sitting pretty in Holy Amsterdam, desk space and ethernet courtesy of Mount.nl's studio Airplant courtesy of the incredibly kind Rogério Lira. Delicious jetlagdinner in an unusually spacious A-dam restaurant with Jouke, Paul and the aforementioned Rogério.
CNN is on the background. Hard to believe this is happening. There has never been a better time to be a designer. Revote.
Monday, November 6
Abraham Lincoln is reported to have said:
If I were given eight hours to chop a cord of wood, I would spend six hours sharpening my ax.I have no idea if he actually said that, but I wanted to point out my own strategy: first, I would oversleep and miss the first two hours, then I'd spend three and a half hours surfing ((ax-related trivia)-related) things via Google, then I'd sharpen my ax for half and hour, then I'd go out for an hour and get some coffee and read the paper, then I'd worry for half an hour about how little time I had remaining, then I'd somehow chop the whole cord in half and hour and everything would be OK. At least I hope it would. It usually is.
(Oh shit, I just realized I'm going to be interviewing in the next little while. I meant to say that my strategy would be the same as Lincoln's.)
Saturday, November 4
7. Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.
Friday, November 3
Suck, October 10, 1998: An Oldie but a Goodie
Reports of Ross Perot's sanity may be exaggerated, but he hasn't lost his value as a tribal elder. In the recent colloquy with Larry King on the state of President Clinton's mental health, the feisty Texan and the Brooklyn blowhard got into a phrenological discussion that resembled an aboriginal creation myth:
PEROT: When we smell something we don't smell until in our heart tells what it is.
KING: The heart is pumping. The brain ...
PEROT: The heart, breathing, learning to move. Now, brain learns, when we were very small we couldn't walk. The brain learned how to let us walk. Then if you're an acrobatic, the brain learned how to let you do all kinds of tricks.
KING: But the brain gave us obsessions, and it gave us bad things. It gave us torment, it gave us difficulty, it gave us conflict. All of those things. I don't mean to interrupt you.
PEROT: No, no, no. That's great. That's all part of life, see?
Thursday, November 2
My new favorite optical illusion.
Butterfly World Redux — get it while it lasts (it only lives in Google's cache now).
The Gall!
Just out of nowhere, this one.
OS X Human-Interface Guidelines? Adopting the Aqua Interface. Warning: large PDF file. (via Joe Clark.)
Wednesday, November 1
MasterCard/Maestro/Cirrus ATM Locator: Antarctica: kind of reassuring, kind of disturbing.
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.