About a month or so back, I was rummaging through my kitchen cabinets trying to reorganized our cookbooks to fit better. When I shifted one particular book, I uncovered a few smaller books which had been hidden for the past year or two behind the the wooden lip of the cabinet. A curious discover, as it was a book called “Pluck the Fleeting Instant: Recipes and Recollections from Italy”. I didn’t remember ever buying it, but one look underneath the cover revealed that this was a wedding present from family friends of my husband. A few more pages deep uncovered that this wasn’t just any recipe book they had bought for us, this was a book they had written and gotten published containing their recipes and journal entries about a trip they had taken to Tuscany back in 2001.
I spent the entire morning that day reading the book cover to cover and excitedly sharing bits and pieces with my husband. It made us feel closer to this couple, who had documented their trip in such an intimate and expressive way. It fit who they are as people, energetic people who enjoy experimenting in art and cooking. It got us excited for our trip, but more importantly, it got me thinking hard about how I wanted to document this trip upon our return.
As much as I love the scrapbook I made for our honeymoon and all the glue sticks, artsy paper, and fun stickers of wine bottles and hearts that went into it, there is nothing in the physical medium of scrapbooking that really ties back to myself as a person. I am an interactive strategist reading and writing about web trends and new internet technologies on a daily basis. So, I decided it was about time to push my scrapbooking pursuits into the 21st century.
Instead of journals and recipes, it needs to be blogging and del.icio.us links. Instead of photos and mix tapes, it needs to be Flickr feeds and podcasts. Instead of notes jotted down on napkins in cafes, it needs to be text messages to Twitter. While that might seem colder and less personal to some, it fits in more with the way we interact with the world on a daily basis and the technologies I am finding myself more and more passionate about. In 10 years, documenting trips in this fashion won’t seem so odd, and I feel I almost have a duty to push myself forward and create a fun futuristic scrapbook that shows how personal it really can be.
So upon returning from Europe, I am going to put together a mini-site that brings together a timeline of our trip via blogs, twitters, photos, and google maps of the paths we took. During the trip, I might collect some of my initial thoughts here in blogs entries when I get a chance, and our eurotrip twitter feed will be constantly updated along the side and available via RSS.
So this is my blog farewell. Off to the world of vino and cafes. Until next time….
ambient device: nabaztag
For those of you kinda looking at me funny through the computer screen when I wrote “ambient devices”, I did not make it up. This is what Wikipedia has to say:
Ambient devices are new genre of consumer electronics, characterized by their ability to be perceived at-a-glance (also called “glanceable”). Tie this at-a-glance technology into an internet enabled device and you get something like the Ambient Orb, “a glass lamp that uses color to show weather forecasts, trends in the stock market, or the traffic on your homeward commute”.
I’ve never had an ambient device, but this Nabaztag (aka WiFi enabled rabbit) is cute enough to kinda make me want one. Thanks to my mom for sending me a link about it. According to this Yahoo! Tech review, if you speak into its belly, it will tell you about the weather. If he smells your car keys, he’ll excitedly tell all your friends that you are home. And he can teach your other iAnimals how to talk back to you.
I posted a larger article about the Nabaztag and other ambient devices (like the Chumby and AmbientUmbrella) on ThreeMinds. When I asked through the network if anyone had had experience with a device, it turned out that someone actually had a Nabaztag that they were bored of playing with. So, they volunteered to send it to me to watch over for a little while.
Looks like Roxy is going to have to house sit for my ambient bunny too 
technorati tags: ambient devices, nabaztag
life, the universe & everything
I haven’t blogged in a quite a long time (20 days) due to being overwhelmed with life. And funny enough, I just recently found out that my desire to multitask in order to combat the overflow of life activities might actually make me less efficient. I’m not sure that I believe that entirely, but it is something to think about (and apparently think about alone, not in conjunction with driving or blogging or anything like that).
So here is a short list of what life activities have been juggling in the past 20 days:
1. Halloween
Upon returning from my Organic trip to LA, we had to plunge head first into decorating the house and building our costumes for our Strickland 2nd Annual Halloween Bash. Many many hours and a few days later, our house was transformed (pictures here). We built a serial killer clown complete with wanted photos and two crime scenes in our showers (victims strangled via balloon animal). I tackled double the amount of tombstones this year so that we could have a proper graveyard. Lon built the most terrifying demon baby and seance room imaginable. All in all a success.
2. Eurotrip
Tom and I are living in about a week for an 18 day Eurotrip. We are going to be doing some high tech documentation of the trip that I will explain in a farewell post before I go (notice the Twitter feed I’ve added to the side of the page). In addition, we’ve been figuring out new ways to make our trip itself be more tech enhanced. This includes using Google My Maps in combination with a GPX export tool and a GPX editing tool to upload wineries, restaurants, and attractions I’ve researched to our Garmin device, complete with descriptions and photos I collected from the internet. Fun!!
3. Web 3.0
Upon returning from LA, I gave a presentation of my Web 3.0 deck to the Organic Detroit creative team. I was then asked by Chad Stoller, Executive Director of Emerging Platforms, to go on a road show with my presentation to the other Organic offices in December. Since I’m going to be out for a good chunk of November, I’ve been trying to polish my deck, via his great recommendations, to include some more tangible and easy to imagine examples of what Web 3.0 could be. I’ve been having a lot of fun with Photoshop as of late to create the following fancier interfaces to some already prominent Web 3.0 front runners:
Things are moving quickly. I probably will only have time to post one more blog before I leave. But when I return (refreshed and reinvigorated), I will have a whole slew of experiences, thoughts, and consumptions that I will be itching to share. More on how I plan on sharing those next post…
technorati tags: garmin nuvi, social search, web 3.0, joost, wink
web concept: Web 3.0
Somehow, I’ve found myself reading a lot lately on many different forms of evolution. There is the RNA-first theory of biological evolution, where the gene is the basic building block of all life. Its a truly remarkable theory, which I hope to learn all about next week on my plane ride to LA where I will bury myself in Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene. This return for me back to burying my nose in scientific reading was inspired by both a fascinating chapter in Carl Sagan’s Shadow of Forgotten Ancestors on evolution of the cell and by Douglas Adams’ quote in Salmon of Doubt citing Richard Dawkins as one of his greatest inspirations of all time.
Besides biological evolution, I have found myself researching cultural evolution. It was after reading an awesome article on Web 3.0 that didn’t hesitate to use the (previously foreign) concept of the meme all over the place that I decided to do some Wikipediing on the topic. The idea is that while a gene is the basic unit of biological evolution, the meme (an idea, a fad, a belief) is the unit of cultural evolution. This meme is passed along, replicated, and mutated until it either dies or becomes an part of the social fabric.
Thinking about both cultural evolution and biological evolution together in the context of what I do everyday, it struck me the similarities in the origin of our biological universe and the way the web evolves. The idea that stuck in my head was that the social nature of the internet allows memes to roam freely, information passing with ease from person to person in a way that builds upon itself. This is highly comparable to the “primordial soup“, wherein genetic units muddled about until forming symbiotic relationships that lead to greater organisms than possible before.
I will be giving a presentation to the strategy team at Organic on the definition of Web 3.0 and the current frontrunners present on the web today. But, in the meantime, I thought I would toss out a little science and a little web onto the blog page here, just to get the ideas out of my brain, so that I don’t get too nerdy when presenting to my fellow Organics.
In the beginning…
the evolution of the cell
- Free form DNA swam in the primordial ooze
- Membranes grew in order to house and protect the DNA
- DNA mutated slowly
- Useful DNA was passed along to future generations before the benefit of this information was even known
- Specialized biological tools (i.e. chlorophyll eating, protection from sickness) were incorporated into greater multi-cell organisms
the evolution of the web
- Free form HTML code swam in the primordial ooze of the web
- Web pages and sites grew housing and protecting the code
- Every information unit that was passed along to the next was an opportunity for mutation of that idea
- Seemingly good ideas (such as RSS) would pass form web site to web site even before it was know what the ideas could be used for
- Specialized internet tools (Google Maps) are incorporated into greater organisms
technorati tags: memetics, web 3.0, internet evolution, primordial soup,
technology: the human brain
I actually didn’t recently consume the human brain, but I thought that would be fun to say. What I have recently consumed was a great DISCOVER article “10 Unsolved Mysteries of the Brain”.
The human brain is one of the subjects that never fails to fascinate me. I remember walking around Body Worlds for the first time, looking at human muscle, organs, and bones. They all made sense… plumbing, joints, reinforcement, filters, pumps. As complex as our human system is, the functions that each of the individual pieces play is relatively simple. That is, until you get to the human brain. Seeing it in the display cases sliced into thin strips revealed nothing. Here was the most complex object in the entire universe, trillions of times more complex than the smartest computer ever built, and it was an indistinguishable bit of lumpy gray mass.
The reason that I felt the need to blog about the brain is based on a dream that I had recently. I was in the car with my husband, driving between apartments (we were staying in a different one while our main one was being worked on). We were having normal conversations about work and what not, it was one of the most real and mundane dreams I’ve ever had. All of the sudden, something snapped for me, and I said “Tom… I can’t remember the last time I cooked a meal. I can’t remember the last time I’ve looked in our fridge. I don’t think I’ve ever felt so homeless.” By that I meant ‘between homes’ or ‘without a place to call home’. And it was as I concentrated on my inability to recall the normal mundane details of life that it dawned on me, “I can’t even remember getting up this morning, this has to be a dream.”
I woke up with a rush of adrenaline. It isn’t a particularly reassuring feeling to accept a scenario as complete reality only to awake yourself to its falsity. And while I should have found myself relieved to wake up in the bedroom of my actual home, I found myself looking for flaws in my surroundings, just in case reality was still not in true “reality”. Of course I could go on about what is “reality”, especially since all our senses are filtered through this complicated gray mass in our head, open for interpretation, but that is huge bag of metaphysical worms.
Instead it just had me thinking about the purpose of dreams, which the DISCOVER article theorizes is a way for our brain to process “scenarios”, digest and sort through its daily input, and test out hypotheses before we attempt them in the real world. This theory was based on various research, including testing human retention for memorization between same day studies (test in the morning, test in the evening) vs different day studies (test one day, again the next). People that had the night for their brain to place learnings from the mind’s equivalent of RAM to long-term storage did far better on the follow up testing.
I wonder what sort of scenario my brain was trying to run in my head. Perhaps it was a way of trying to make me appreciate the home I have, and feel more positive about the recent work we’ve been doing on it. Or to appreciate the small pleasures I have in life, that despite how busy my schedule is I still find time to cook a meal most nights.
There really isn’t an epiphany here. But, I think that the human brain is often a forgotten mystery of our everyday universe. I think it is important to take a step back and consider some of these mysteries. After all, that self-aware pondering of our own instrument of pondering is yet another reward of that big pile of gray spaghetti in our heads.
technorati tags: human brain
food: bolting spinach
So, our garden is not doing so hot this year. The bunnies are devouring our beans. The zucchini doth not flowereth the way it did last year (when at this time we were trying to give our zucchini crop away to whoever would take it). It must just be a weird year.
The weirdest of all was our so called “spinach”. As it poked through the surface in perfectly formed little rows, I knew there was no way it could be weeds. But, the more it grew the stranger it looked. I guess I had assumed the plants would eventually start to look like spinach, but to my dismay… they just kept growing until they grew to be about 2 feet tall, turned yellow, and died. They had no smell, no flowers. I think I’ve finally admitted to myself that these plants were probably not, never were, and never will be spinach.
I’ve been looking all over the internet for some sort of “identify my mystery plant” web site. The only sites I could find have you start off by entering in a species name. If I knew what the species name was, then why would I need help “identifying” it?
So add this to my list of useful Flickr mashups. I want a web site that will pull up photos of plants via tags (broad leaf, prickly, tall, yellow). Only then would I be able to discover if my mystery plant was bolting spinach, a particularly boring herb, weeds, or something else entirely.
technorati tags: bolting spinach
technology: Motorola Q
Me and my Q…
I’ve only recently discovered the magic of having a fully enabled phone. It’s one of those situations where you live your life without a piece of technology, and then life after said technology becomes so brilliant that it is hard to imagine what you did before.
Ways I have used my Q in the past 24 hours to make my life better:
The supposed “park”, which really meant a bike path around a fenced in “pond”, which really meant the Cambridge public water supply.
Fun at a strip mall Newbury Comics. Tom, you have a present coming.
technorati tags: Motorola Q, Google Maps Mobile
web concept: innovative digital surfaces
There has been quite a bit of development recently with innovative digital surfaces. There is the overly hyped iPhone which promises a new take on the interface of the mobile device. You have Microsoft Surface which excites me more, although the consumer grade application seems years off. But who couldn’t get excited about the idea of sitting in a chic martini lounge and dividing up those complicated bar tabs so easily? Then there is the Sony OLED screen, which just get your brain juices working on all sorts of applications from video ads in magazines to traffic information delivered to your windshield.
The future is moving toward sleek and flat, less buttons and more touch. With more and more information flowing through the air and with the move toward flexible interfacing, the device itself is becoming less and less important. The device is just a receptor of information, and the more flexible the device, the more integrated into daily life it becomes, the more success it will have. The revolution lies in surfaces.
Microsoft is taking the idea of the computing surface as part of the environment to a whole new level. However, the idea certainly isn’t new. When visiting SIGGRAPH last year, I saw computer games played using a powder screen within a sandbox. There are Reactrix screens in the floors of local theaters, and then there is the Fog Screen for your smoky clubs and concert events. How long will it be before there are ads running on our sidewalks, in the skies, on window panes, on the sand at the beach?
I personally think that the Phillip K Dick/Steven Spielberg vision of the future in Minority Report nailed it in many ways: the touch screen flexi-glass computing surfaces, video ads on the city walls and sidewalk, videos ads on the back of cereal boxes, personalized video messages based on previous purchases when you enter stores, electronic newspapers. The film supposedly takes place in the year 2054. It’s amazing how a film like that put some technologies so far into the future (flying cars, retina ID-ing robo-spiders), yet other things are only a few years down the road from where we are now. I wonder what other Phillip Dick predictions are in our near future.
technorati tags: Minority Report, Microsoft Surface, SIGGRAPH
RECENT WINES
