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November 14, 2005
Break Fever?
It's been a slightly less than stellar morale week. I think it's the dip between my running the marathon and the anticipation of leaving town for the thanksgiving break. It helps to hang out on the floor more so that even if I don't feel like doing much, everybody else's collective enthusiasm rubs off on me. I want to say that last week was a quiet week but if I think back, as always, a lot happened.
This past week we were editing our communications lab movie which we were supposed to shoot the week before but actually shot late last week and started editing mid week. It was supposed to be a couple, breaking up, chatting online but the script was completely rewritten. I was in pcomp at the time but was hardly attached to the old script. The new one is a sort of disjointed telephone game played with cell phone. Lots of jump cuts and hilarity. Today is Monday and the whole movie is due tomorrow. We have to do some cleanup editing and still shoot the last scene but Gabe, the film making pro is in our group so we should be fine. He has been very helpful and has a fancy 3 chip camera so our footage looks much nicer than it would if our footage came from the equipment room cameras.
Clay Shirky, my adviser, spoke in front of our class from Red's Applications on tuesday. It was a great talk. I've heard it before online when I found out he was going to be my advisor. Ontology is Overrated. Even though I knew the content of the talk, he was still spectacular to see. It's a delight to see people so articulate about technology and new media, to cut through all the noise and make a distinct, interesting and enlightening point.
Last thursday, after I punched out from the Q, I decided to sit down and write Red's M5 bus paper. I was running out of time. I had been holding out for something amazing, the history of garbage, the path of a craigslist advertisement, people who died in accidents along the bus route, but nothing was jumping out as practical or concrete. My rough cut of the paper worked out pretty well, the thesis being that older people who are more likely to ride the bus and are more threatened by technology, they also have stories to tell. Anna marked it up and I should give it another go later this week but i'm glad I got something down. I do have a hard time going back on something I wrote. I can't tell what's important and what I wrote just to write. What holds the piece together and what can be discarded.
In physical computing, Alice, Min and I have been building breath collection prototypes. We've been holding focus groups (that documentation needs to be posted) to collect breath, settling on pinwheels last week and building more breath collection prototypes this week. We've settled on a light box with pinwheel structures on each side. As a participant breathes into the box, lights turn on at different intensities using PWM. The box will have four sides accessible but the pinwheels will only be on two of the sides. Individuals can interact by blowing or just by looking at the lights. Participants can have a conversation, an interaction with breath and lights.
Posted by mb2811 at November 14, 2005 06:10 PM