So there I was hanging out at ITP getting ready to eat my salad Lunch. Elizabeth who is a first year at ITP was having trouble logging into the wireless network, so I went over to help her out.
As we where debugging the wireless issue, unexpectedly out of nowhere, the ceiling collapsed.

At first I was in disbelief at what just had happened. Then once I analyzed the damage made by the collapsed ceiling I realized the seriousness of the situation. Immediately Tim and some of the ER (equipment room) staff began to take action and inform the appropriate people and security at school.

Thankfully the only casualties where a metal chair that was destroyed by the concreate that fell on it and the foosball table which got a good chunk of concrete fall on it.

It was definitely a frightening moment. Specially since there was no indication or warning that there was anything wrong with the ceiling. Before the collapse, it was really quiet around the floor, it did not sound like anyone was jumping around the top floor or any other disturbances that may trigger such an event. It was so sudden, unexpected and random that it felt like someone was playing a joke on us, but it was not a joke. Someone could of got seriously hurt. Someone whose name starts with “O” and ends with “scar.” I guess i’m glad that New York City does not get earthquakes… that often.

• Dan Hillier
  artist, some cthulu-esque prints, plus skull dinnerware

On the Monday morning, I was the first person who arrived the Taiwanese Embassy. After 20 mins waiting, a man who came to open the door, I told him what happened to me, he told me he is from the department of economic, people who should take care of my case will be here soon. He leaded me to the waiting room and told me if I need anything can go for him.

After 2 hours waiting. The woman who should takes care of my case came in. I told her what happened, I said I need to get a new Taiwanese passport, so I can get a new US student visa. She replied me right away. "It is impossible." She said the passport the embassy can provide is very roughly, it's even "hand-made", the US embassy won't accept that. "The best way for you is to go back to Taiwan", she made the conclusion. I was really desperate. There was a moment I think I'm about to cry. "I still wanna give it a try, please give me the new passport." When this not-really-friendly woman went to "make" my passport, I went for the man I met in the morning, he was very kind to allow me to use their computer to check email stuff. While I'm checking my emails, the director of the economic department over heard my story, so he invited me to have lunch with them. It turned out it's a huge Chinese style lunch. They told me, there were many Taiwanese whose passport or baggage got stole, but none of them got a free meal!

After I back to the embassy, the passport is finished. Guess what, the new passport looks exactly like the old one, only the color of the picture is black and white. I'm really glad I didn't give in.

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This is my type of woman!
Do you know anyone that would rescue over one hundred cats from the freezing cold weather, give them a home and feed them? Meet such a lady and someone’s interpretation of what is happening in this little apartment in Russia.

If this was not enough action for you. Maybe this movie clip will change your perspective of nurses.

http://picasaweb.google.com/ChristianBuhl4

• Ultimate Source for tiled background patterns | Design Shard | Web Design Blog
  (tags: tutorials inspiration graphics free)

This Klein bottle at the Science Museum contains three interlaced Klein bottles in one. For a very brief explanation of what a Klein bottle and Möbius loops/strips are, check out Clifford Stoll’s talk on TED at the 4:30 minute mark.

http://br.youtube.com/BurnsLosAngeles

I didn't want to do anything, so I went to bed. In my dream, I found out the US president Bush is a fiend of my friend, so I told him what happen to me, asked him if he could get me back to States. He turned to discuss with his advisors, then told me that, he really wants to help, but it's impossible without a passport. Then I woke up. Suddenly I had a thought, even though the president of United States can't help me, my God will take me back!

There is a Korean girl who heard my story, opened her baggage, handed me some t-shirts and said, "We have the same sizes, take my clothes!"

The only thing I can do in that hostel was keeping checking my emails. Surprisingly, I got reply from NYU. I didn't expect the advisor will check her email on weekend. She gave me her personal phone number, told me to call her as soon as I see it, don't think about the time difference. She sent me all the information that I will need to get back to State in the email, and told me she will have all the documents ready when she backs to work on Monday.

I was really relief to hear the voice that I'm familiar with.

So I know in older to get a new passport, the fast way is to go to Rome where the Taiwanese embassy located. So I got on the train again, this time, to the south.

• The Personal MBA: DIY Business Education & Training for Entrepreneurs and Small Business Owners
  For those of us who didn't get into the Stern classes we wanted to.
  (tags: toread tools reference productivity marketing management ideas)
• Diaroogle.com
  The Premier Toilet Search Engine
  (tags: web2.0 tools nyc mashup)
• New York Neighborhood Maps | MondoMap.com
  (tags: nyc tools web2.0)
  --> Read more...

Effi Briest performing live at Secret Project Robot, Brooklyn, on April 7, 2007.

Words are not enough to describe it all.

Back in NYC? Check.
Moved in to new apartment? Check.
Started new semester? Check.

Shiffman’s new book Learning Processing: A Beginner’s Guide to Programming Images, Animation, and Interaction is now available for purchase. We used a pre-release copy last year in ICM and it’s a great intro to the Processing language.

Check it out (and the site when it becomes available).

Shiffman’s new book Learning Processing: A Beginner’s Guide to Programming Images, Animation, and Interaction is now available for purchase. We used a pre-release copy last year in ICM and it’s a great intro to the Processing language.

Check it out (and the site when it becomes available).

After one month summer school in Germany, I had a chance to travel to Italy. I went to Venice and Sorrento. I stayed at Sorrento for the most of the time. It is a small town near Napoli by the beach, I went to swimming every mornings, took it easy, went to different town nearby alone the coast in the afternoons. Read a book in the evenings. I am very thankful for having this opportunity to take a relax before school starts.

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• [ timebeat ]
  An interesting meditation on time. Very pretty.
  (tags: design cool inspiration)

The INTERACTIVE SHADE project was started with three objectives in mind for the public square space. The first was to enable citizens to use the space more intimately(when sunny and rainnyday). The second was enabling the space to hold hundreds of different programs efficiently and flexibly. And the last was to reduce the loss of time and finances that occur whenever event programs switch.
I suggested the utilization of intelligent fabric structures, as in combining the preexisting Tent structure with the interactive mechanisms such as the Auto-Folded umbrella structure, the Interactive Pole and the Panel-Link system. This sustainable shelter structure would exceed the limit of simple mechanism from the old tent structure, which is not changeable or flexible. Also, it can make the composition of the plaza space more functional and dynamic.

Designed by Minsoo Lee / 2008.AUG

Hey, remember when I used to blog about what I was doing? Man, that was a fun time.

A lot has happened since Stern, including finishing my thesis, graduating, and turning Socialbomb into a real company. I’ll be writing about all that relatively soon, so expect updates (finally).

Meantime, I should mention that Socialbomb now has offices on 23rd St. in NYC (overlooking the Shake Shack line!), which makes us like 57% more believable as a company.

Also, I’m super-stoked to say I’ll be coming back to ITP as a Resident Researcher this year. I’m planning on working on a pile of urban-, music- and sustainability-focused projects, so hopefully I’ll have lots more to say in a bit.

So, many good things in the works, very little time to talk about it, and more entries coming soon.

Back in NYC!

After three months in Tokyo, it is time to dig in and get to work...

-- Fri, 29 Aug 2008 09:13 -0400

Just a quick note to let you know that my book, Learning Processing, is now available for purchase. If you are local to NYC, you can buy the book at the NYU bookstore.

<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Learning-Processing-Beginners-Programming-Interaction/dp/0123736021/
">Amazon says “out of stock”, but I’m told by the publisher that this is an error and they do, in fact, have copies. Also, at $37.00, this seems to be the cheapest option online that I can find.

All the example code will be available live online at learningprocessing.com by early next week. Feel free to contact me with comments, questions, feedback!

Who is this book for? Check out my earlier post.

sonus_sketches

Vivien Muller came up with a tree design to harvest the sun just like my tree concept, Helios: The Power tree.

PhotonSynthese is a small little tree that can charge your gadgets just like the Helios. But thats about all it does. It is built of 52 mini PV solar cells, so it should get around a quarter of a watt of electricity.

This is a good wake up call to put the Helios production on high gear!
Here is the article that Mike Rosenthal sent me about the tree: Photosynthesis Solar Tree Concept Is the World’s Best Looking Solar Gadget Charger

I have received an Manhattan Community Arts Fund grant from the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council to finish my concept work REDACTED. Check out the beta version here: http://pravinsathe.com/redacted

The project will launch in December '08!

The website of ACD/Art Director Mike Anderson has launched. Built with a mySQL backend and with standards compliant CSS, it showcases the video and print work of Mike. Check it out at http://mikesbookandreel.com.

Cuba to put anti-Castro punk rocker Gorki Aguila on trial

Miami Herald, August 27, 2008 

By Frances Robles

 

Cuba to put anti-Castro punk rocker Gorki Aguila on trial

Miami Herald, August 27, 2008 

By Frances Robles

 

So I heard from Simplify Media, and their response was informative:

A port scan is a ping from a specific location to a range of ports probing for an opening.  The logs you posted actually show the opposite.  These are pings from to range of ports to one specific port:

Aug 22 02:59:45 crackbook kernel[0]: Connection attempt to TCP 127.0.0.1:59008 from 127.0.0.1:62838
Aug 22 02:59:45 crackbook kernel[0]: Connection attempt to TCP 127.0.0.1:59008 from 127.0.0.1:62839
Aug 22 02:59:45 crackbook kernel[0]: Connection attempt to TCP 127.0.0.1:59008 from 127.0.0.1:62840
Aug 22 02:59:45 crackbook kernel[0]: Connection attempt to TCP 127.0.0.1:59008 from 127.0.0.1:62841

Note that the connection attempts are all to 127.0.0.1:59008 (in your case), and, as you mention, these are on the loopback interface and have no impact on security.

What you observed is standard behavior on startup.  Our UI launches, and for the first 15 or 30 seconds while everything is coming up, it tries to communicate with our networking stack.  Retry attempts are not from 0 to 65535 but rather from the “upper range of ephemeral ports” that are dynamically allocated to client TCP/IP socket connections (49152 through 65535).  Once the application is started, internal communication should be flowing over the designated port and no more retry attempts are necessary, unless the peer process terminates for some reason.

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Simplify Media, the iTunes library sharing application, has been flooding the loopback ethernet interface and scanning all 65,535 ports of my machine.

My Macbook Pro’s networking has been a bit sluggish lately, so I looked in the system.log and found thousands of entries like this:

Aug 22 00:07:37 crackbook kernel[0]: Limiting closed port RST response from 261 to 250 packets per second
Aug 22 00:07:39 crackbook kernel[0]: Limiting closed port RST response from 252 to 250 packets per second
Aug 22 00:07:47: --- last message repeated 3 times ---
Aug 22 00:07:47 crackbook kernel[0]: Limiting closed port RST response from 255 to 250 packets per second
Aug 22 00:07:49 crackbook kernel[0]: Limiting closed port RST response from 252 to 250 packets per second

I did some research and found this type of log entry to be indicative of a DDoS attack, or at least a port scan.  So, in Terminal I changed the sysctl param to display failed network attempts (“sudo sysctl -w net.inet.tcp.log_in_vain=1”) and started logging these types of entries:

Aug 22 02:59:45 crackbook kernel[0]: Connection attempt to TCP 127.0.0.1:59008 from 127.0.0.1:62838
Aug 22 02:59:45 crackbook kernel[0]: Connection attempt to TCP 127.0.0.1:59008 from 127.0.0.1:62839
Aug 22 02:59:45 crackbook kernel[0]: Connection attempt to TCP 127.0.0.1:59008 from 127.0.0.1:62840
Aug 22 02:59:45 crackbook kernel[0]: Connection attempt to TCP 127.0.0.1:59008 from 127.0.0.1:62841
Aug 22 02:59:45 crackbook kernel[0]: Connection attempt to TCP 127.0.0.1:59008 from 127.0.0.1:62842
Aug 22 02:59:45 crackbook kernel[0]: Connection attempt to TCP 127.0.0.1:59008 from 127.0.0.1:62843
Aug 22 02:59:45 crackbook kernel[0]: Connection attempt to TCP 127.0.0.1:59008 from 127.0.0.1:62844
Aug 22 02:59:45 crackbook kernel[0]: Connection attempt to TCP 127.0.0.1:59008 from 127.0.0.1:62845


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The “Blue Dog” Democrats were thrown a lavish party on AT&T’s dime at the DNC:

Amazingly, not a single one of the 25-30 people we tried to interview would speak to us about who they were, how they got invited, what the party’s purpose was, why they were attending, etc. One attendee said he was with an “energy company,” and the other confessed she was affiliated with a “trade association,” but that was the full extent of their willingness to describe themselves or this event. It was as though they knew they’re part of a filthy and deeply corrupt process and were ashamed of — or at least eager to conceal — their involvement in it.

Yay democrazy. *sigh*

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/08/25/blue_dogs/

I was hanging out in D.U.M.B.O. Brooklyn yesterday. While looking around for a place to seat in the grass, I found a four leaf clover. Now It is believed that this is good luck in many culture, which is fine. But what about a five leaf clover? what is that? I say that is a sign of bad environment; acid rain and pollution that is mutating the clovers. Below you will see a fine version of such a clover which I found at The Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University. The scary thing is that i keep finding four and five leaf clovers by chance.

On a positive note, on my way back home. I had a plastic bottle left over from my vitamin water. I was thinking to my self, would it not be nice to have public recycling cans on every corner of the street to help people recycle? As I was pondering on the effect of this I turned the corner of the street and guess what. My wish came true.

Now I wish all the earths problems would be solved with wishful thinking…

oh well.

I bought two bike locks a couple of months back to protect my bike from evil thieves. One was a Kryptonite bike lock and the other was a no name lock. A week ago I tried opening the lock with the key and it would not open. After a few days of trying and trying, I gave up and decided to find a way to cut the cable; which I thought would be a hard task. I borrowed some bolt cutters from school in hopes it would do the trick. To my surprise, cutting the cable was like biting through a twizzler. And from that moment on I trusted cable chains no more.

“The non-Kryptonite locks cracked in seconds, but all methods failed on the New York Lock, even the monstrous bolt cutter, which ended up useless with large dents in its jaws.”
-kryptonite web site

I got a second cable for my bike but this time with out a lock since I use the Kryptonite lock with the cable as well as the Kryptonite chain. The cable I know is useless against thieves who really want to cut it. that’s why I only use the cable to secure my helmet and bike seat. Two things a bike thieve may not be worth the trouble of taking out his bolt cutters. But who knows, maybe my next post will be of my missing bike seat and helmet.

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Logged into facebook and saw a really bad condom ad. This instantly triggered a memory to really cool TV ads I saw a few years back. Now that we have youtube, we can look back into the past. Why cartoons? because we are all children trapped in grown up bodies.

Girl Looking for love:

Boy looking for Love:

Gay Boy looking for love: