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December 21, 2005
Transit Strike
It's on people and it doesn't impact me one bit. But I feel for everyone else. Here's one of the better suggestions:
6. Doug Gordan Hack for walking Brooklyn Bridge: "have George Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue" loaded into my iPod. (You may know it as the song that opens Woody Allen's "Manhattan" or from its use in an American Airlines commercial.) If you are walking from Brooklyn, start the song when you are about fifty feet up the walkway from where you can enter at Tillary Street. The song is just over 16 minutes long and if you walk briskly enough you can make it past the bridge's second tower on the Manhattan side and then a little way down the walkway towards City Hall before it ends. It's the perfect remedy to the transit strike blues and brightened my day."
They are calling these transit hacks, how played out can a word be? soon they will have the 'mashup hacks' burger at Bartley's.
More of these can be found here.
Posted by mb2811 at 08:27 PM
December 10, 2005
Spring '06 Schedule
I got my spring schedule! Here it is:
I got every class I wanted. I was a little up in the air about what to take because i'm still not sure which direction I want to head with my time here but these are all good choices. The goal this semester is to try to combine more of my classes into a unifying theme. Not necessarily to hit a grand slam (one project - four courses) but to try to get move overlap.
Posted by mb2811 at 05:38 PM
December 08, 2005
My Beating Heart haptic relaxation pillow
This was done by Yury Gitman, an ITP alum who created the Magic Bike, one of the first projects I saw that got me thinking about ITP as a graduate school option. This heartbeat pillow is very much like our midterm project for pcomp. His is better designed and doesn't overheat but ours supports bidirectional data transfer. Yury's pillows beats like a heart and it's up to a user's heart to sync up with it. Our plushy listens to your breathing and syncs. So you listen to the plushy and the plushy listens to you.
It's pretty exciting to have concurrently developed something so similar.
Posted by mb2811 at 05:34 AM
City Island Line
This week in communications lab we did a whirlwind tour of iStop motion, flash and after effects. Angela Pablo and I worked in flash to animate a story corps story from Ronald Ruiz. It was a lot of fun and we learned a lot along the way. The animation for the story but it's also documentation for the process of us learning flash. We didn't want anything too visual because the story is itself powerful over the radio, without any visuals.
Here is our movie.
Posted by mb2811 at 05:27 AM
December 03, 2005
Pinwheels
We've been plodding through our final projects both in spatial design and physical computing. In spatial, we're working on sound domes, in pcomp we're converting breath into light. Pcomp has been a struggle with materials, building a working pinwheel that can reliably close a circuit and which doesn't degrade in quality over time. I think we're finally on to something but we are running out of time so the next couple of days are crucial. The new idea behind our project is giving the individual the ability to 'see their breath'. You blow a pinwheel and once it stops the candle begins to blow out. The blowing out is relative to how long the pinwheel is spinning.
Posted by mb2811 at 09:53 PM