Web web Web web web web web web Charlotte’s Web web web web web web webby web web web we. we. web. web. web… web web web web web web. spiderweb spiderweb. world wide web world wide web web world wide web web web web web.
Blog blog blog blog blog blog blog blog blog blog blog blog blog blog blog blog blog blog blog blog blog blog blog, blog, blog blog blog blog blog LOG (whale) log log blog blog blog blog BLOG blog blog blog blog blog blog blog. blog.
weblog.
oh. i get it.
I have decided that I do not write enough about my work on my blog. This is a semi-complicated issue, because as with most work, other people also hold stake in it, and it is good to keep certain things close to the chest – even in research there is competition! However, these are just excuses I make for being lazy, and with all good problems once the conditions and limitations are defined there are good solutions.
So, starting next Friday, I will begin posting once a week on topics at least related to Computer Science, Design, User Experience, Privacy, Human Computer Interaction generally, or at least something some what science-related and interesting, and occasionally,
So … look forward to that! (up first a Microsoft Report on the future of HCI)
A light humorous post because I am behind in my writings on very stern and serious topics that must not be laughed at. Much of my site(s) traffic these days comes from search engines and sometimes people say funny things in search engines. Collected below are the strange ways people have come upon me in 2007 (all of these are printed as is from the search engine, spelling mistakes, grammatical adventures, and ridiculousness as authored).
First off some strange searches that got people to various parts of patrickgage.com (some of these ending up here I seriously question):
Other common searches involved icelandic weddings, which I am now seemingly an expert on, people looking to steal license plates, and an awful lot of people wanting to not get rejected to CMU.
But much funnier this year were searches that came into Reading to the Rain including:
And also a number of questions that people ask that bring them to a site full of book reviews:
Also, big hits this year were “naked pictures” of just about every author on the site due to Heather’s posting of Naked Pictures of Famous People by Jon Stewart. Furthermore every combination you can think of of “naked pictures” and “rain” also came up, leading me to believe there is a huge market for pictures of naked people in downpours that really seriously needs to be explored.
Saw No Country For Old Men, today, at the Waterfront. I enjoyed it a lot, it wasn’t over pretty, or over dramatic, or at all sympathetic. It was also very strict to the novel, including the organization of the scenes and nearly all the dialogue. The only real difference was that bits of the novel were cut, though these were mostly unnecessary. Also, it was funny and no one was laughing, I think that likely takes a second viewing.
As for the content, Llewellyn Moss, you found a bag of money (which should have been twelve across-twenty deep, but was only six across and of unknown depth) and just did not realize what this would mean for your life. But then, what I am sure would have been most shattering, had you realized, is that you were not the main character of your own movie.
I offer you only a few thoughts as my evening tonight is filled with privacy homework and a statistics project. Only two more days of school and then I can escape to Buffalo for a bit of relaxation and reading before concluding the semester.
Thus this is very short as I am about to return to writing summaries of court cases related to privacy (which there are an awful lot of). But before I go, I leave you with this question:
Let us say I send an email to you. Now before you have read the email it exists, somewhere, on some server, in storage. However you have not yet received it so you could also say it is in transmission. Yet, there are two laws that apply here, one to stored communications, one to communications in transmission.
So is the email stored or in transmission?
I believe the answer is Heisenbergian.
(image by Living The American Dream via flickr)
Winter is a good time to clean your house plants of dust that may have accumulated on the leaves.
This is what we learn from Miss Living The American Dream. Winter, which we seem to have entered is the time for removing the dust of the year off the leaves of our houseplants. Is houseplants one word or two? Are houseplants flora that reside in one’s home or factories for the creation of residences? Have you ever felt more alive yesterday than you do right now?
Relevancy is being determined by the social or by the machine; I can only be a servant to the choices of either machination. And as forces are driving me in directions diluted less by space than by xxxx, abstraction is all you can recieve today. That and a blown out photo of the future of distraction.
Though to be honest–which is said when one is normally a liar, and is trying to separate this lie from the more mundane lies across the career of a liar–the whole point is clearly drawn in the title.
Today I announced that I am officially a candidate for the Graduate Student Association Presidency, at Carnegie Mellon. GSA does have a website which can be accessed here though it is presently down, which is fine since it is really bad (and thus one of the first things that needs to get fixed).
But then an announcement is nothing.
This week Google announced Android, “a Linux-based mobile software stack,” read: phone software that is open and anyone can build stuff for. Now if this is the GooglePhone that everyone has been hoping for to come dominate the cell phone market (and kill the iPhone) I think it is a failure, but if this is some long-term plan to make cellphones better devices for software developers maybe it will work.
Sure they have said they will have a development kit for programmers to hack at out within the week, but people say it is unlikely we will see any phones that will run this until late next year.
I think the most interesting thing we can learn from this is if a truly “open” platform can really take over a market. Everyone admits that cell phones suck, that is the reason the iPhone is doing well, the market was full of products so repulsively bad that anything looks comparitively amazing, but this is a real chance for open source to fight and secure a lot of ground (faster than in the OS world anyway).
And while some say that Google will teach Apple the lesson they should have learned from Microsoft about being too closed (aren’t they already opening up…) I am currently much more inclined to agree with those who think Google is suddenly in the vaporware business (even though i am not a powazek fan these days after the whole jpg thing). I am even about ready to think this is a giant mistake and the market doesn’t want tons of open software on their phone, “they want a phone that just works,” and Google and its 33 friends can go startup a poorly run deli
Maybe I have just been reading too much 37signals but it seems like this small team, get it done mentality is even more powerful than a giant company and likely more powerful than a completely collaborative environment. Or maybe I just refuse to admit that the author is dead.
In a month I will hopefully be at the helm of a reasonably large student populous (approximately 4500 graduate students) and there are a number of projects I would like to get done. Politics at this level is largely a mangement and organization task and I think it is important I have more actual progress than announcements. I am excited.
Before I begin, I think you will need to read this post at things magazine. (Note that although that has tomorrow’s date I promise I am not backposting this, it just has to do with timezones and seeing into the future.)
Now while I normally do not require background reading before my posts can be understood I think here it is necessary. This past month my book group, here at Carnegie Mellon, read Middlemarch by George Eliot. This nearly eight hundred page novel was too much for many of us to read. I found myself skipping ahead lines in the longer townsfolk dialogue passages and after finishing proclaimed she needed a stronger editorial hand.
And while I do think that some editing could have been helpful in that case I am now entrenched in an academic world where we are packing as much content as we can into an eight page paper, some thirty slides, a twenty minute lecture over lunch, or a three story elevator ride. Eight hundred pages of victorian literature simply can’t be made to fit without significant efforts.
“We are sliding towards an irreversible obsession with totally visual communication.”
Visual communication is ridiculously attractive because it is fast and I am convinced we are moving in this direction solely because of time constraints; I don’t think there are complete advantages to the replacement of text for visuals, in many cases they are worse (in fact my research is possibly helping to prove that, stay tuned).
I strongly dislike FFFFOUND! because even if I want to browse a repository of images I want to be able to read the context, I want to understand the narrative, the creation, the people, the process. (There are a ton of images on ffffound that are totally unlabeled and impossible to trace back to any reference point and I still can’t google search starting from an image)
“The vast majority of weblogs act like sluice gates, simply helping the flow of culture along without adding to the volume of water in any way.”
And maybe I am just adding to the landfill, but I would like to hope I am actually adding something relevant. At least I have the awareness that if I am solely an internet filter there will always be a better filter–almost certainly a collaborative one–and so I have to strive to be more than that.
And now I want to disagree with his reading of Chris Cobb’s piece There is Nothing Wrong in the Whole Wide World because 1. I have my books in order by color and as anyone who has challenged me on this point I can find any of them, without looking; and 2. while the colorsort provides an aesthetic background for the apartment I think it shows how attached in memory I am to these books.
There are many that I can recall the color of much more readily than the author. The experience of holding the book, carrying it around with me for a week or more, has left with me that moment in time where I lugged around the large burnt-orange Cantos of Ezra Pound, or when I classily would slide out my slim bright orange classic copy of Barthes’ Mythologies. While the arrangement might provide visual skimming, it is at the same time pulling out those exact hues which have been forever tucked into my mind along with the memory of a particular story.
I don’t have a solution, and maybe we just aren’t ready for one yet. We have just given millions of people access to technology that allows them to be rapidly visually stimulated, that can and does display thousands of images at them everyday. I know that I want to see less and know more about the less I do interact with. I am not absorbing enough and a youtube video I saw today will be a vague memory in three months, if not entirely obliterated. We are not yet intelligent enough in our ways of interacting with this type of information onslaught and so the memories I retain best are encoded into the hex values of the spines of the now nearly obsolete paper bound information receptacles that line my apartment’s walls.
Only out of the closet for four days and one can already pick up a variety of Dumbledore Pride merchandise & advertisements.
There are some ugly pins up for sale on e-bay for Dumbledore’s Gay Army & I Always Knew…
Also there are some pretty nice t-shirts here
For those of you wishing to advertise Dumbledore’s gayness on your website there are some pretty ugly badges here. Or possibly you are dissenting from the decision and would have preferred if she had made a different character gay, if so here are some badges for your perusal
While recently reading Inhaling 9/11, I realized that there are only a small number (less than twelve) blogs that manage to stay consistently up-to-date with. When things get busy with school/research/life the feed reader tends to get behind, but there are some that I need to keep up with to remain sane. 
[from BldgBlog photostream // photographer unknown // south tower collapse]
BldgBlog is one of these, and I have decided that I should better pay tribute to the writers/communities that I really enjoy–which here means more than putting them on some links page.
Geoff Manaugh has a wonderful imagination and an astute ability to tie current events into possible futures and interesting speculation, as well as larger debates. As with Inhaling 9/11 and the recent studies that the destruction of buildings may be a significant public health risk, he posits a future where we fill our buildings with materials that are beneficial (vitamins & minerals we can breath in). This relates back to the topic of designing buildings that degrade gracefully, so that they will be beautiful ruins, an idea mentioned back in 2005 in a post called Urban Fossil Value.
So I now compile below a few of my favorite recent posts (this is list is by no means comprehensive) as we all patiently wait for the BldgBlog Book
I am clearly far behind with the internet, but this semester is looking mostly together, so a few things. I have some posts coming up which are half written, which is really a new thing for me.
I have a new apartment, which is pretty nice and someday I will have unpacked. For now, I am just trying to make it habitable for my upcoming spree of visitors. That is it above, or the living room at least. I am also still acclimating to living alone, I think I really like it, but I don’t think I have the experience totally figured out.
Today I learned Madeleine L’Engle died, which is pretty sad, though she did live a long and wonderful life, for that I am proud of her. Now I have even more reason to read through the entire Time Quartet, which I had been meaning to do anyway (brought it back with me last time I was home, post road-trip).
Also still decompressing from the road-trip, I have gone through about a third of the photos so far, so that I can print them all out and put together something here on the internets, with other stuff as well.
Semester has started, looks like I have some good classes, and hopefully some good research coming up? Also expect some sort of all info-vis all the time page on the horizon.
There are things that are given in this universe that do not fit together. For instance we must discuss the square peg (side length = L) and the circular hole (hole radius = .5L), which specifically lends us a peg that will not fit into its hole. The peg is not going in. There is nothing we can do about this. Possibly we must find another piece that will fit. Perhaps we could find another socket that will match our current rectangular prism.
But really this is a problem of expectations. Why did we think that these two should go together. We are intrinisically looking for combinations, for pairs, for matchings. We want order. We want regimented logic and discipline and it doesn’t always exist.
What if the puzzle has no solution?
There are puzzles across the internet that have levels, one web page leads to the next, each with a question, each with an answer. They are linear and logical, there are sites that provide cheats for those stuck on certain levels. There is no progressional evolution, there is no chance that one portion may be incorrect, there is no uncertainty in the results. Everything is binary, nothing is probabilistic.
I encourage you to be more open, to question why you think the block and the corridor should be related. I encourage you to question the boundaries of the questions and their answers, did you learn everything you were meant to, could you have pushed the question further, to an answer that meant more than a string of characters in a password field?
I invite you to imagine the possibilites, and to check back for my answer, in one week.
Lots of quick little things because my head is not in place to give you anything more.
