This semester I am TAing Privacy Policy, Law & Technology taught by Lorrie Cranor (my advisor). If you have some free time or are looking for a class to take and you want to explore the depths of privacy law, the philosophical roots of privacy, and the way technology can and should shape privacy in the information age, then I expect to see you this afternoon.

Sidenote: I am really excited to be TAing, it has been a while (haven’t done this since City as Text with Jessica) and since I basically love teaching, it has been way too long. I will likely post more about this as interesting things come up, the semester progresses, and the students start working on – hopefully impressive – projects.

Rick’s Wedding – Set One.

Katie’s Wedding – Set Two.

Words will supervene soon as scheduling sanctions constructing constructive commentary.

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weblog.

oh. i get it.

The Symposium on Usable Privacy & Security which is hosted by the Carnegie Mellon Usable Privacy & Security Lab, which I am a member of and which my advisor Lorrie is the director of, is occurring right now.

This year we are also currently hosting our own blog, documenting the sessions, discussions, and events at the conference. It can be viewed here so you can go take a look at how I have been spending my week. Tomorrow I will put up the poster we presented, till then you will have to live with the blog and some photos here.

I am giving this movie a 3.5 because it wasn’t bad, and I have of late been on a streak of really bad documentaries. Or it seems that way. Or I don’t like documentaries. I don’t know.

This movie is about four people who work as superheroes on the hollywood walk of fame. They stand there all day, all year round, and take photographs with tourists. They do accept tips, sometimes more forcefully than the tourists would prefer. Superman is absolutely obsessed; Wonder Woman actually seemed sort of normal, but can’t quite pull off being an actress; Batman was old, did sort of look like George Clooney, and had rage issues; The Hulk used to be homeless, but actually does pretty well for himself now. It is interesting enough to watch, and done well, a bit artsy, that was nice.

There is another movie coming out, supposedly this year, called The Reinactors, it is the same movie, again. The same Superman & Batman are in it, so that is pretty exciting. It is like a sequel to a documentary, except made by different people, and really isn’t that much further along in time, so it will likely be the exact same thing again. So maybe I shouldn’t watch it. Or maybe I should, and then tell you all which one is better.

Each year the IEEE holds VisWeek 2008, a series of three co-located conferences: Visualization, InfoVis, and VAST (Visual Analytics in Science & Technology), this year in Columbus, Ohio; October 19th – 24th. Also each year all three of these conferences host visualization conferences, which I of course always think about entering but then never actually do.

Except this year. This past spring Peter Landwehr started up a reading group on Large Scale Visualizations, which slowly shifted – I expect mostly because of me, to a group more on information visualization generally, and at some point we decided to form a group to create an entry for the VAST contest (more on this later). And at the same time as that progressed I convinced Danny that he wanted to spend some time on the InfoVis contest.

The InfoVis contest this year (details here,) focused around over a year’s worth of data from the Mitsubishi Electric Research Lab. They released all this data to the public to allow them to mine and visualize whatever they so chose; and the dataset was also chosen for the 2008 contest.

Danny and I eventually got ourselves together and over the last few weeks put together the following poster. (For a higher resolution version, see my portfolio which has been updated additionally this exists on flickr. )

I expect this is a very different direction than most of the people who entered the contest went in, which may or may not be good, and I have no idea how it will be judged. Either way though, for the amount of time we had, I am quite satisfied with our solution. They contest pages infer they are looking for stories from the data and I think as an overall story, to someone who has never seen this dataset, or worked with sensor data before, it is a nice introduction.

The poster and all of its charts and tables were created in some combination of Apple’s iWork suite and Processing ( processing.org ), the data was mined and refined using some Python and mostly Java.

Now though, the information visualization time of the year is over and it is time to get back to real work. Cell phones and privacy and student organization websites and swappable policy interfaces and paper reading and user testing and rule specification interfaces and other secret and exciting things.

I don’t mean Pittsburgh. Though maybe in some very indirect way I am benefiting the Pittsburgh community by reviewing its fine dining (and other) establishments. (Like maybe as a city becomes more popular on Yelp, the internet elite will flock here, naming it a technologically savvy mecca for the young thus infusing the city with fresh new yuppie-hipster blood) I have used Yelp for quite a while, probably a few years, to help me find places to go, especially while traveling. On the roadtrip last summer Yelp decided most of our food choices and even occasionally how we should spend our evenings.

Two weeks ago while I was in Houston visiting Amy and for Kelli’s wedding I actually broke down and (finally!) created myself a Yelp account. I then proceeded to review a number of the places Amy & I liked on the road trip, as well as a bunch of the places I commonly eat around Pittsburgh.

So, head over to http://pgage.yelp.com and read about what I like to eat, or even better become an active web citizen and sign up for your own account. I am sure you have opinions about food; and what better way is there to force your own tastes onto others than by participating in content creation on the internet.

Someone over at Nintendo Wii-land decided that it would be a good idea to have each console have a sixteen digit unique ID. So my Wii can meet your Wii and they can become lovely little friends and play all their games together. Oh wait. No, such a system is sadly not to be. Each game also has its own twelve digit code which must be input to play that game with your friend. And not only that but it seems most (all?) games require it to be done by both parties, so I need your code and you need mine, a one-directional code entry does not seem to prompt any sort of confirmation ability.

Getting past all of the inanity of the system however (when a perfectly good console ID exists), it seems it will be a necessity to share each individual game code with everyone and the best way to do that is to copy Patrick Wagstrom’s method of posting all his Wii codes on a page dedicated to … all his Wii codes. Thus, in my copy a great idea way, I have created my own list of Wii codes for those of you with Wii’s to friend me up.

I spent the last (several) days in Houston, and Katy, Texas. First visiting Amy, really down in Webster/Clear Lake by NASA, hanging out at her apartment and the pool; down to Galveston for a day; viewing The Incredible Hulk at a theater where a waitress (actually like three waitresses and a waiter) served us dinner during the movie; shopping for a wedding present, some legos at the newly opened Baybrook Mall Store, a tie, and of course I bought a few books, before we drove up to Katy, TX. It is there that my eldest paternal cousin, Kelli Johnson, married Justin Davis. (The photo above can be clicked to see a bunch of photographs from the wedding, or just click here for the full set. ) It is also there that Amy, Katie, and I saw Wall•E, and I got to see much of my family and other such things.

However, I am glad to be back in Pittsburgh, catching up on e-mails and meetings and work related things, as well as friends here. Now I just need to get some sort of functioning version of Reading to the Rain up so that I can post the seven books I read on the trip.

This is the best one.

The image you see above is “Professor” Scotty talking to an original Macintosh Mouse. Because the mouse is where you talk to the computer so it can hear you, like a microphone. It really is a logical assumption when you are used to computers that are sort of voice activated (I say sort of because they do pretty much always need like fifteen people touching those touch screens with the crazy honeycomb visualizations).

People who don’t really care about Star Trek can enjoy this movie. They will enjoy this movie. There are real humans in it. Not the kind in silly starfleet-tight uniforms, but real people who you can tell are straight out of the 80s. It’s fun and exciting and there are whales! You couldn’t ask for more (except maybe you might ask for them to build the Enterprise on Earth, if you ask for that, if you say that will be there best – that movie will beat the whales – then you need only wait till 2009 my friend).

Update: Forgot I wrote this earlier, the short version of the post, wanted to add it: Whales! This movie is really good. Like actually genuinely good. It’s funny and occasionally clever and it only has a few places with bad special effects like when Kirk “dreams” of everyone on his crew as badly rendered 3D heads floating in milk. It has the mom from seventh heaven and some interesting interface choices like the test machine that quizzes Spock and also the giant and quite pixelated display screens at Starfleet headquarters.

Spock! Where are you? Quick snap! I will check my lifeform detector. Oh there you are, you metallic mass 2 meters long. There you are all cylindrical in shape. There you are, not just metallic but made of Terminium which I am told is what they case photon torpedoes with. Silly computer, just saying “metallic mass” when you really know what metal it is! I bet you even know the mass.

But Spock, there you are, in a pile of giant slug snakes. No wait, that is not you – there you are a few feet away in the middle of a snowy desert place. Oh and you are a little boy, and the young grow so quickly these days. Spock to find you, I sacrificed my son, and blew up my starship, but now you are back and the movie is over.

Also can anyone name three real-world devices that actually have a self-destruct? And I am talking serious explosion, not just a stop working permanently button.

There was a time when I told everyone I knew (who used Windows) that they needed to switch to Firefox. Needed. Those days have been over for a while, though I still tend to include it when helping people set up their windows boxes, it is just no longer such a necessity. Internet Explorer though I may be reluctant to admit it has become a much stronger browser. There were the days, back when Fire*bird* & Mozilla existed as two distinct products, when I would use both and thought the dinosaur was silly, when some days I would switch to Opera just to check it out play with the zooming and switch back, and when IE was simply intolerable.

Then Safari happened. And I was really excited and life was great except Safari wasn’t. I mean, it was alright, tolerable, it had tabs – right? But it needed some time. Safari 2 was better. Safari 3 is pretty amazing. I have used it consistently since the first beta I could get, and haven’t even thought about switching. Which is what I did back in the Safari 1 & 2 days, every few months, Safari, Camino, Opera, Firefox, it was a carousel of browsers that changed like the seasons, except faster.

Well the carousel is still spinning and Firefox 3 came out at 1pm Tuesday. And for the next 24 hours they promoted Download Day — and as part of the new hype published this chart (which can be viewed at firefox.com with safari):

And so this made me mad. Real mad actually so this is where the hate comes on. The thing is though, it made other people mad too, and some of them say it better than I can. The short version here, is that this chart is … well a lie, or huge slant at best. I know that this was probably put together by some marketing people to make the browser look amazing (infact they really only made one chart – the only difference between the v. safari chart with the v. internet explorer chart is “Battle-tested …” is changed to simply “Superior speed and performance”) but could they not have filled the obviously one-sided chart with things that Firefox is actually better at … like sean here did.

And the features I actually care about, such as maybe say web standards, maybe CSS3 functionality. How are they doing with that? Not well. (again said better – and this is really worth the read) (for those of you who aren’t going to read that whole link Safari & Opera both passed the Acid3 test – web standards – almost immediately, racing to finish, while Mozilla complained they were too busy with their product cycle(!) to deal with … web standards).

Well, when I start choosing my browser based on the number of downloads it gets (which PS is not a measure of usage, if I was a cult follower I would dl it fifty times too) and certainly not by if it has an entry in the guinness book of world records (doesn’t that pair it with some sort of deformed child and some extremely obese man) but possibly by the features and support it has. Firefox, I had thought was at one point about making the best web browser (or at least taking on the monopoly … Safari with its no more than five percent marketshare really a glowing target now?) and it just seems like they have left that behind and are now all about the publicity. Then again, maybe if they make the back button a little bigger, I will be won over.

Jean-Luc Godard!

Everybody was all like “Yo Patrick you gotta see this movie man dog” and I was all “?” and they were all “It’s like the best animated movie and you gotta watch watch watch” and I was all “…”

But then I saw it and got even more confused. I mean it is alright, it has some interesting metaphors and exciting scenes, but I was pretty underwhelmed. To me the best animation is done when the story works well and uses the animation as a tool. The Howl’s Moving Castle and Paprika and others that I find wonderful push the limits of the animation, creating dream-like and fantastic things, and it just wasn’t here for me.

This is a nice example of a movie with heart. It has a short and straight-forward story to tell, which is what it does. No special effects, no overly dramatic scenes, just people and their actions and the repercussions of those actions. Yeah short review, sorry all the words are sucked from me when working on a PC.

Well considering how easy my standards were set after that first movie well Mr. Wrath of Khan you had it easy. Sure, you had the benefit of a better script and better effects. Sure, you had some experience under your belt, and by experience I mean you ripped scenes frame for frame from your predecessor. And aren’t you a strange bird, the only Star Trek movie where the “bad guys” aren’t aliens, assuming you don’t count genetically modified super humans as aliens, which you shouldn’t. So Mr. Wrath of Khan, I applaud you for setting Star Trek right, even with your silly life giving biblical rocket proto-energy-cheating machine and that wonderful flare-y planet graphic which we get to keep seeing that looks like stereo volume projected on a sphere.

So basically I took a bunch of pictures many of which are of these four sculptures. The sculptures are separated into two pairs. “The Arts of War” are “Valor” and “Sacrifice” and they each guard one side of Arlington Memorial Bridge, which leads from the Lincoln Memorial to Arlington Cemetery, and “The Arts of Peace” which are “Music & Harvest” and “Aspiration & Literature” which are situated on each side of Rock Creek Parkway, just north of Arlington Memorial Bridge.

This includes the picture above, that is Sacrifice in the foreground and Valor in the background. Anyway I guess I had never been back around there (they are basically behind Lincoln) and so many of the pictures feature them, and you can read more about them here.

From some of the worst movie special effects I have seen to the absolute best comic book to film translation I have seen, beating out even my personal X-Men love, with an overdose of attitude, a decent story, amazing graphics, well thought out future interfaces (OK, some), and the promise for this to just be the first in the series. This is a movie that I found tolerable enough to see two weekends in a row (I know, I never do it, but Ben & Allison & Elliot wanted to go, and so as they say: when in Chicago, go see a movie … again).

Gosh but if you haven’t seen this movie, you probably should. I mean what else are you really doing with your time that is so important that you can’t go see Iron Man, it certainly isn’t Prince Caspian or Indiana Jones, and it better not be Speed Racer, so I expect you will be getting on seeing this. Alright. Good.

Turns out I went to Chicago three and a half weekends ago and well, never got around to mentioning it here. So now I will. My old RIT roommate, no that is silly … two of my absolute best RIT friends (ok), Ben and Allison moved to Chicago after they both graduated from RIT last summer, and while I thought I would make it out there to visit in January things were too busy and finally got out there this May.

Elliot and I drove out there, conveniently with Elliot using the no-gas lever in his car, causing it to require no gas while still going – I know, ask him about it – and got in Friday night. We went out to eat Mellow Yellow one of the fine Hyde Park Dining Establishments (I mock but it had good food).

Saturday morning we went to the Museum of Contemporary Photography, which had some really interesting stuff, and was totally free – so go do that other Chicago people, though today is the opening of Talkin’ Back 5: Chicago Youth Respond. We were there for their last exhibition and I think we all agreed on most enjoying the work of Dionisio Gonzalez one of his pieces, though not one we saw – those don’t seem to have found the internet, pictured below.

After the MOCP we wandered, had a snack at the Corner Bakery, Ben rushed us around while taking pictures, we saw Iron Man (review forthcoming… that is how far behind in film reviews I am) for the second time, met up with Ben’s law school friends and ate Thai downtown, and played a bunch of Mario Kart. Oh also I forced everyone to go to Noodles & Co. because I miss that restaurant so much in Pittsburgh. If I could wave my non-existent magic wand and make one chain decide to set up shop in Pittsburgh it would easily be Noodles & Co., easily.

But enough about noodles, let’s talk about cats. Ben & Allison got a cat, her name is Izzy, like Isabella, but not like The Fountain (look Austin commented!) also, she doesn’t like to come out and play until you turn off all the lights and pretend you are going to sleep. Then she will let you pet her and even take bad pictures of her in the dark. Like this one:

Anyway great times were had by all, and I already miss Ben & Allison terribly, and am excited to go back. And yes, it was my last fun trip (alright, and first) with Elliot before he heads back to Seattle. Both his pictures and my pictures are up on flickr.

David thought it would be a good idea to watch all of the Star Trek movies, I consented – watching through a set of films that are certainly part of the backbone of American-dork-sci-fi-culture seemed prudent, especially with the release of the new J.J. Abrams: “Hey Look We Are Building The Enterprise On Earth Because We Can Even Though It Is Clearly Non Canon,” sometime next year. As the movies go, I have firm memories of all the The Next Generation films, and then some brief memories of whales and caves, also knowing that I certainly had not seen all of the older movies. But while this seemed like such a good idea at the time, within about ten minutes of the first movie I was seriously questioning what I got myself into.

The first installment of Star Trek on the silver screen is not good. At all. It does all the things that are frequently complained about of bad science fiction movies of the last few years: it has a poor script, no character development, an unrealistic (OK, maybe they all are) story, and most severly puts all of its marbles into special effects. Unfortunately special effects, and definitely 70s era special effects look so childish forty years out that this is painful to watch. The music visualizations in Windows Media Player outshine these scenes which just drag, and drag, and drag you down into the heart of an early voyager probe which has transformed into a monster killing, Milkdrop cloaked, machine that just wants to hang with the creator.