The most ridiculous part about this, is that this will almost certainly be up days into June and I will look like a fool. Welcome to the summer.

The website “glitch” is over.
Also, I have a confession to make – it wasn’t a real glitch! Nothing was even broken, I was just hiding the website from you because I wanted to make it whiter. You know?

Alright, so here is a simple white version of the website. It is kinda boring and I am not done, but you see I told you there would be a post everyday in April, and now you can actually read them. So, do that.

I was just thinking, hey maybe a visualization of data on a hard disk would be nice after learning of a bit of a RAID issue that may have occurred with someone’s disks. So then I wondered what these different disk patterns would look like, different configurations of RAID, different volume formats, drobo likely has some crazy pattern. Though when I pictured them, all I could think of was Disk Defragmenter.

And as I installed Vista on the new desktop, I thought I would get Mr. Defrag up and running. Which is when I found this:

Vista Defragmenter seems to have taken all the fun (and intelligence, and usefulness) out of XP Defragmenter. Not only have they taken away the ability to see actual block use on the disk in a visual way, they have also taken away any sort of user control, including the ability to specify which drives it defrags (it seems to do them all).

Worst of all they even dumbed down the progress meter, which is now (as shown) a spinning circle, and a comment saying “This may take from a few minutes to a few hours.” No sense of progress is shown at all, which is weird because Windows loves progress bars that are horribly inaccurate (the installation progress bar for XP strikes me as the best example of awful) and Disk Defragmenter is a place they can acheive perfect accuracy, at least with percentage complete (if not time), and they give the user … nothing. How Microsoft.

Microsoft, while I might rag on them, does occasionally put together good or at least interesting work. One example of this is a document created by Microsoft Research called Being Human (download here)   Being Human is the final report based on a forum Microsoft Research hosted a year ago on what HCI (Human Computer Interaction) would be like in the year 2020. The report came out April 2nd, 2008 and has four parts, a brief history, a categorization of how HCI is changing, how the field should move forward, and recommendations for how the field should change.

I will only focus on the second part of the report today, as the history of computing and interaction with computing is pretty silly and not that interesting. Part 2, titled “Transformations in Interaction” deals with five main changes and I will mention each one (long post!) by their deep and frequently foreboding names.

The End of Interface Stability

We can no longer tell if the computers are touching us or we are touching them.

This, one of their better points, strikes close to home as it firmly deals with issues of privacy. Ubiquitous computing is meant to lead to people interacting with thousands of computers by 2020, and while this seems ridiculous, it is only ridiculous for traditional definitions of computer. We can start to take into account intelligent surveillance cameras, RFID readers and tags in our clothing, groceries, physical access devices, cell phones, vending machines, cars, parking meters, music devices, our shoes, our glasses, our jewelry, let alone traditional computers. And the further we push towards injecting technology into our bodies and having better remote sensing capabilities, the more we lose the once clearly defined interface of keyboard, monitor, mouse. Now our fingertips, our movements, our heartbeat, our glances all become inputs to the myriad computers in the room. And better, they all communicate. The question is how much control do we want, should we have, will we be given?

The Growth of Techno-Dependency

You can’t go back.

While I suppose this is in some ways a change, “technology” as a scary pervasive force has been pretty constant for a good two hundred years. And while there are some interesting policy questions brought up here, like what will happen when computers take over all the human jobs, the implications for HCI here seem to be less about developing new technologies, but more on mitigating the damage caused by the crazy-evil robots. (I exaggerate, but when asked “As society grows ever dependent on technology and the interaction underpinning this, who is accountable?” I laugh as if the answer should be: the scientist should never have given us these powers.)

The Growth of Hyper-Connectivity

I am alone in a crowded room, only if the wifi goes down.

My laptop has had a bit of an issue for about three months now, both of the fans have died. This means I simply cannot run certain programs (EVE, Aperture – for very long), and my computer consistently runs at 70degC – CPU temp. But while it is still under warranty that would involve shipping it off to Apple for a week, and I can’t allow that. I need to be with my laptop all the time, because it is connecting me socially to friends around the world, to news, to the tasks and communications that form my workplace, as well as to my source of all media, my photo archives, my music library, my Netflix subscription. Physical boundaries disappear, new social relationships are formed, and it seriously is HCI that is shaping this.

How do you design for global interaction between different languages, cultures, customs, time zones? How do you prove that I am who I say I am when I hide behind my avatar? How do I maintain thousands of digital links but still keep them personal? How long before online dating is seen not only as socially acceptable, but the obvious choice? And seriously, when can all of my friends be digital?

I think twitter has to be the current best example of hyper-connectivity, I read it through a specialized application, but can check it through the web, it ims me my friend’s messages, txts me direct messages. It is on my computer, on the web, on my phone. On my road trip through the middle of nowhere (the central USA) twitter was our reliable source of communication.

The End of the Ephemeral

I thought it was fleeting, but you remembered!

Buckminster Fuller supposedly had the most documented life in the history of history, he wrote down what he was doing every fifteen minutes, for about seventy years. However fifteen minutes is now entire lifetimes of data. Much of what I covered above in the end of interface stability is recorded, and the point here is that the data now exists.

Research I have been working on involves allowing your friends to query your location through a system we have been working on at Carnegie Mellon by the name of PeopleFinder. While it allows my friends to request my current location, one of the side effects of this, is we have a server which is accepting our users locations every minute. Thus as I move around with my phone or laptop running our application, I am building up a relatively precise history of my location. Through twitter, aim logs, blog posts, Facebook statuses, my web history, I add semantic information to these locations. In 2020, with the addition of more RFID readers, more cameras, more sensors, this history becomes even more powerful. Aggregate it all and my whole life story is there, stored on disk, and it is likely I can’t erase it.

The Growth of Creative Engagement

We are all designers, writers, journalists, curators, creators.

My favorite of the changes is this, the intellectual and artistic power that computing has given to every person who touches these technologies. And while sure this has its downsides, reading every Livejournal is a bad idea, listening to every bad techno remix made by a thirteen year old with garageband and some angst is torture, and not everyone is cut out to design a poster, the potential is huge.

Take the huge success of YouTube, millions(?) of actors, directors, scriptwriters, who would never have been able to have an audience or create a film before they could pick up a Flip and post their video five minutes later. And this is a place for HCI researchers to shine: designing tools that people want to use that allow them to access their potential to create. Designing tools that allow scientists to produce science, and the computer can take care of the processing. And speaking of processing giving artists enough tools that they truly hold the creativity and a single suite does not drive the direction of art.

We are just now nearing the precipice of creativity as a species, where more people than ever are taking part in using their ability to think as a way to make something new, something interesting, to discover something yet unknown, to write something not ever dreamt of, and technology needs to support that.

Summary

There are five main ways in which our interactions with computers will be transformed as we approach 2020. How we define and think about our relationships with computers is radically changing. How we use them and rely on them is also being transformed. At the same time, we are becoming hyper-connected and our actions, conversations and interactions are being increasingly etched into our digital landscapes. There is more scope than ever before to solve hard problems and allow new forms of engagement and creativity.

And that is where Microsoft leaves us with the changing aspects of computing. The points raised are interesting and relevant for anyone designing software, designing experience, or contributing to the internet in any way. Together we can be aware of where we are going, you know – post web 2.0.

i.e. expect changes.

I have decided to interrupt your daily posting of movies for this destructive site re-arrangment. I know. Very sad.

Update: And by give me a second. I mean give me at least a day. I wasn’t happy with what I saw and am now going to sleep on it. So until then you get some nice blue and gray.

Today things became brown and red and gold (can I call that gold, I really want to) because it is almost February. In less than a week we will be greeted by the second month of 2008 and that makes me feel brown and red and gold all over.

That is a lie, the real reason this changed is because making websites is a stress reliever for me and I needed some of that tonight. Also the last design had been up since November 5th, 2007, and well eighty-one days is enough.

If you are reading this through a feed reader or facebook you cannot see these new colors. You cannot note how perfectly these colors align both with the There Will Be Blood. post and also with the new spinning background image.

Finally that new kaleidoscoped background image. Identify it and win a really super awesome fun prize. I don’t know what the prize is, I don’t even have it yet. But figure out what that is and comment, or contact me, or something. First person correct wins, maybe everyone with the right answer wins. (hint: it’s gonna be hard)

Portfolio

Unfortunately, it is currently a mostly empty portfolio. But it is coming along. And I am going out for coffee.

(image by Lipo’s Sojourn via flickr)

Above is the Gehry Residence, the only construction of Frank Gehry that I have ever seen and liked. It is really good, it is impressive deconstructivism (seriously, don’t listen to him, it is), it is practical, it is perfect.

Everything I have seen since then, wasteful? shiny-for-no-reason? useless? ugly? uninspired?

Anyway, I don’t really want to get into it too much, I was just really excited since I saw this article today, which basically discusses how MIT is suing him for “flaws in his design” that cost them a lot of money and caused them to hire otehr people, etc, etc.

And this reminded me that long on my list of movies to see has been Sketches of Frank Gehry which I really need to see, because I think I will have a really great time making fun of him as he crinkles paper and form “great architecture” (and then probably feeling a little depressed about the number of people who seem to think he is basically the best architect alive–or the only one they know).

(image by rjdigiacomo via flickr)

So yeah, MIT is pissed, and I hope they win this suit, although really this shouldn’t have been that unexpected because he isn’t really an architect. He doesn’t consider space, he doesn’t consider materials, his buildings cause “possible environmental hazards,” (LATimes: The Disney Center has “roasted the sidewalk to 140 degrees Fahrenheit, enough to melt plastic and cause serious sunburn to people standing on the street”), and they fall apart!

Nels posted that gmail changed and though I have switched back to using gmail since it syncs with the phone now that it has IMAP, I have completely ceased using the web-app. Well it turns out they updated the web app, specifically with URLs that are linkable and also a new contact organizer/viewer. Also it seems they neglected to test on Safari.

While they used to just disable features in Safari (like gchat in the browser – which is now on, too bad, I liked it gone) it seems their new approach is just to just have them looking really funky. I can’t really even explain what kind of layout is going on here (it should look like this – scroll down ), normally when I see problems like this I can identify what they are doing wrong in the style sheets, but here I am pretty much clueless. Since everything is generated on the fly based on the javascript and then added into the DOM, there isnt any real html to go off, but my guess is that it is calculating absolute positions in correctly (it gets even worse on resize ).

Anyway this just made me laugh, I really like the idea of the engineers at google just dropping these random text fields and buttons on the page. It sort of looks like they just threw all the functional components up in the air and this is how they landed.

Actually, quite a few times. According to my profile on last.fm I have listened to 89238 songs since I joined in August of 2004. This means I now have over three years of many of the songs I listen to recorded. I say many, and not all, because sometimes I am listening to songs in the car, or on an ipod, or without an internet connection, or possibly at someone else’s house. But for the most part, I would guess about two-thirds of the music I have listened to in the last three years is recorded here.

Last semester in my Information Visualization course a fellow student, Lee Byron, for one of his projects designed a Last.fm viewer which can be seen here. This is of course very cool and I immediately wanted one of my own.

Enter LastGraph, a web application that if given your last.fm username will generate this “wave graph” for free (and it is pretty fast). All the images in this post are generated from that service. You can read more about it at his website, but there are some major differences as Lee’s work was done in processing this has been converted to python and is using amazonS3 for hosting and a custom graphics library that Andrew Godwin wrote.

So, it has been really interesing to look back at this, and notice trends, like the above shot which is clearly some sort of pretty angsty feminist stage I went through with the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Fiona Apple, Ani DiFranco, and Jewel (ignoring the Kings of Convenience).

Also, it is good at picking out events in my life. You can see the longest gap of no music was this past July, while I was on my trip with Amy, because while there was music on the trip, there was very little internet and also as you remember a lack of ipods.

While I do think Lee’s implementation of this was a lot cleaner (didn’t have the noisy lines, probably dealt with special characters better than simply omitting them) this is pretty fun, and so I encourage any Last.fm user to go try this.

Also hopefully when I have some time, since there is a huge amount of data here (at least for me) I will work through this and maybe come up with some alternative visualization, because I feel like too many artists are being lost in the tiny lines, the little waves that seem to make up the majority of my graph.

Also if anyone is interested in my graph I have put up the “red” version as a pdf here for you to download here-big! 8MBs if you would like to look at it in more detail.

Layer Tennis

Mentioned, done. But no 4srsly people. Have you checked out Layer Tennis? If you have been around any Friday afternoon this fall then it is likely I have messaged you about it across the internet. Layer Tennis, which historically has its roots in Photoshop Tennis, which I will always attribute to Shaun Inman, regardless of whether or not it started before him, works with people simply uploading photoshop files and then someone else building off them and reopening, and so on.

However with the newest Coudal Partners implementation of Layer Tennis the game has become a bit more competitive, more of a spectator’s sport, and much faster paced. There are ten volleys between two generally well-established designers who have fifteen minutes per round to return a competitive blast to their opponent.

At the end of the match (they start at 3 PM eastern each Friday, and end at 6 ish) there is some pretty informal discussion and then a winner is declared. Marian Bantjes who I absolutely love! won! which makes me very happy. Their match was particularly interesting, because they played it in Illustrator (which I feel was a huge assist to her and made it even more of a struggle for Armin).

Also to keep people occupied during the down time, there is a guest announcer who provides wonderful insights into the process (which I expect, and am told, is just as much work as creating something beautiful every fifteen minutes in visuals), as well as some contests and forums for remixing the elements as well as discussing the match as it progresses.

So next weeks should be good, I am routing for Scott Hansen who designs some really awesome posters, don’t forget!

Late Monday night was the Leopard Install. Tuesday was spent shuffling files between harddrives and the old and never-used desktop, and then setting Time Machine up overnight. So now I have been using Leopard for umm, well two days, but I already feel ready to judge it (actually I have been judging it all day).

The Install

The install went smoothly but took about an hour longer than it should have because I didn’t repairdisk first and so it spent about an hour doing that before it got around to installing. The rest of the install went smoothly.

The Immediately Broken

Peer Guardian does not work (and should be totally uninstalled) it was stopping me from playing DOTA. Growl doesn’t seem to be functioning as it was (like in Mail?) but I think that is just because I need new plugins. Quicksilver needed to be upgraded (manually?) to get its icon out of my dock. Aperture does not play well with Time Machine, and I think they actually have it set up so that it turns off automatic backups when it is run (with the 1.5.6 update)

The Later Broken

Aperture has crashed twice, Safari has crashed once (while I was writing the Halloween post), Photoshop has crashed at least three times, and that seems more unstable than on Tiger.

The Actually Better

Everything feels faster. I am not sure it really is but it feels faster and I like that. I like the unified UI, I think it is better than not, and I am adapting to it pretty quickly.

Spaces is really well integrated, and I have never liked virtual desktops really, but the trick is to get it to switch between them for you, by assigning your programs around. (I am currently using three in a row, loosely fun: adium/twitterific/iTunes; frequent: mail/vienna/ical; work: coda/terminal/photoshop; with Safari following me as I move, and everything else as of yet unassigned)

Time Machine is also just really good. It is of course totally useless right now, but it is real pretty, and I believe that at some point it will actually have benefit. Someday.

The Menubar

The Dock really doesn’t bother me as I have it over on the right, and it isn’t too troublesome over there. However, the menubar in its faded barely there new existance bothers me a lot. A whole lot.

The Menubar was once the solid beacon of program actions, it let you knew what was active, where you were, what you could do. It was a rock. The 22 pixels that it holds were never breached by any program, it was the permanent boundary, the one thing that was always on your screen. Now I can see my background through it, my starry galaxy default has crept behind it and is overpowering it. My windows have become much more prominent (by being darker) when active, and toolbars and shortcuts are covering all of its operations. It is now passive, just to hold my status icons. I fear for its longevity.

The Opinion

I needed Leopard, not getting it was simply not an option. I knew what it was, what benefits it had, and am pleased with the overall package, sure it has some problems, but the things it has fixed and improved are by far worth it.

The Setup

Below is my current desk set up, there are notes on the flickr picture if you click. The Europe game is in the background, Viridian is for Time Machine, Caerulean is for photos/music. Also the new keyboard, is really nice, and gives me a bonus USB port.

(p.s. my camera is super broken!)

I am really enjoying the new radiohead cd, however I have not yet given them any money, because I really want to buy an album. But maybe not an entire discbox, is there no in between? The song videotape is pretty much the best one.

This is my way of saying goodbye
Because I can’t do it face to face

No matter what happens now
I won’t be afraid
Because I know today has been the most perfect day I’ve ever seen.

I got six new shoes and also my website looks like bridges. Now finishing fixing things. Enjoy November.

In an effort to remember love, I have redone my photo galleries, here on the site. We are now using Gallery2 and I have migrated all of the important old albums over.

Of note the url is now Photographed.PatrickGage.com or you can click on the image of Katie Hempel taking a picture of me taking a picture of her from when we went to see the Gates in NYC – February 2005. Or you can click where it says Photographed over on the right.

Of note, I have uploaded the “Photographs of 2005” collection, which for some reason never got put together until this past week. Now each year 2003-2005 is represented in a simple 135 picture set, that tends to not be my most favorite pictures, but rather a good comprehensive survey of everything that went on, all the places I went, and all the people that I spent time with.

Finally the new Photographed. allows comments on both individual pictures and albums. So if you want to leave notes all over my photographs, go for it. There should be an Add Comment link near the bottom of every page.

It has been a long October and I am only ten days in, yet already I feel this need to hold tightly onto the time that is passing me by, the places I travel and the way they are changing around me, the people that come and go. Everything keeps speeding up.