Make a website that hosts videos created through an app that shows one
of those videos that scare you after you stare at them for a while.
The person pulling the prank sets the web cam up automatically through
the the app to record the viewers reaction.
Monday, March 30, 2009
How did I know...
When I jumped ahead on a video that the cheeseburger that I saw on the
screen was a comercial and not Americas funniest home video?
screen was a comercial and not Americas funniest home video?
1. I identified the object - a hamburger
2. I thought of the context - I'm watching tv (explains the fact that
there are any pictures at all) which has a show that plays home videos
(this features a series of pictures that share many of the same
characteristics)
3. Begin to pattern match to determine a degree of similarity (which I
have judged to be an effective measure for answering the question, is
this the show) - production quality (home videos versus commercial-
grad production, humor (Im watching a generally funny show, is the
cheeseburger funny), familiar narration, etc.
4. Conclude in a fraction of a second that I need to continue my
skipping.
5. Start making commercials that are tailored to take longer to assess
in that scenario to get me to process longer looking at the marketing
(propaganda)
Friday, March 27, 2009
Thursday, March 26, 2009
Monday, March 23, 2009
Saturday, March 21, 2009
The medium is the message and the user is the medium.
The medium is the message and the user is the medium.
Friday, March 20, 2009
hey there!
Hey Buffy.
Sorry for the delay in responding. I just started a new job and it's been pretty hectic. I'm working for the College of Health and Human Services at San Francisco State University. It's a really great job though. I'm designing an information system to track all of their scheduling and financials. I've never worked on putting together anything this large before and there are a bunch of puzzles to unravel. It's great but it makes my brain hurt sometimes (and challenges my somewhat ever-taxed attention span as well).
My girlfriend's name is Michelle. We met in grad school in Wisconsin. She is finishing her dissertation on rhetoric and dance. She danced ballet professionally for a long time before going back to school so she likes to incorporate that life with this. She's currently teaching rhetoric and composition at the University of San Francisco. We've been together since 2006.
I left Denver in 1998 and moved back to dc where I eventually started working for another non-profit doing admin stuff. They needed a database to track participants in their economic development projects, so I told them I could do that. in a couple months I had the db done and they sent me to Siberia for four months to install it at the field offices all over. It was winter. brrr. i mean...f*ing brrr. That was a great time. That was 1999-2000 over the new year.
I was back in dc for a while building a larger version of the database and then went to Azerbaijan to install it there. On the way back, I hopped off the plane in Vienna and decided to move to prague. They were going to cut my hours back to 20 a week, so I said fine, but i can't live in DC on that salary. I was in prague for almost a year. That place was very hard on my system. I actually ended up screwing up a relationship that I was fostering long distance with someone that I'd been seeing before I left. I was going to come back from Prague and we were going to move to New York City together.
I got swept off my feet a couple weeks before I came back by this amazing Swedish (musician, chef, bohemian) woman and, based on the plan that she and I had made, was coming back to the US to say goodbye and then move to sweden. I broke up with Gina and then the Swedish woman (Molly) broke up with me. Justice indeed.
I did end up moving to NYC from DC (after a brief relationship in Chevy Chase which grew largely out of the fact that I needed a place to live...that was the third and final time I had a rent-relationship) in november 2001. Not a great time to be moving to new york.
I moved onto the couch of some guy i knew through my then girlfriend and who had told me that if i needed a place to stay I could crash on his couch (in his one bedroom apartment) until i got set up. Well, I was there for a year and half. We turned out to be really good friends...though I think he appreciated it also when we were friends and not roommates :)
I eventually got a temp job working for the National Basketball Association. I started out as a temp exec assistant to a VP there, and when the real assistant came back, the VP asked me to stay on. Of course, by that time I'd already made them a gob of database apps that they couldn't live without. It turns out i'm insidious like that.
I move to France in 2004. I lived and studied French in southwest france near Bayonne/Biarritz. I spent the summer there lazing through classes (I was nominally enrolled at Brooklyn College and this was my study abroad) and spending the afternoons hanging out with friends at the beach. good times.
I was supposed to study in Paris for the year, but, just before I'd gone to france, I ran into Gina (the one i broke up with, and with whom I had off and on tried to maintain a friendship, though at this point, we hadn't spoken in a while) on the street and we'd struck up a conversation. That turned into dating a bit before I left. While i was gone, I thought, hm. I screwed this up last time by not coming home. This time I'll come back and it should work then right? well, not so much.
I left france and came back to NYC. Gina and I moved in together and after about a year, a bad year, we busted up. Friends again. This was the beginning of the end of my Gina orbit. After another year in New York I had finished my degree (transferred the credits back to UMD). I decided to move out of New York and start fresh.
I moved to Madison with the intention of slowing down a bit and going to grad school. A couple months later applied to the school of Journalism and Mass Communication. I spent the first six months in Madison by myself. I did a bit of the monastic thing. I slept on the floor, contemplated, didnt cut my hair and I didnt work (thanks to the dramatic disparity between cost of living in Madison and NYC). It was a great decompression and it was the final exit from the mess I'd made of my life starting long before, but accelerated by my time in Prague.
I started grad school a year after moving there (yay in-state tuition!).
I really liked school. I met some great people and learned a lot. I went to Africa with a friend of mine and spent a month in Zanzibar (where I picked up a little work with another nonprofit doing database stuff...these things are everywhere!) which paid for week-long safari near Mt. Kilimanjaro.
Other than school in the last couple years, I've been involved with this thing called Burning Man. It's this great desert thing were 50 thousand people come together out in the desert of Nevada and make art and community together. I first went out in 2006. I contacted some people online who were looking to gather a collective to drive to the event together, share costs and shelter. I flew from Madison to Portland to meet people I didn't know and to drive from there to Nevada. It was a really fantastic trip, though we almost died several times on the way there. It was a death trap of a delivery van. I went out before Michelle and I started dating. But it turns out that we are both burners so it's one of the wonderful things we have in common.
I was out there for three weeks last year. Michelle and I went out there two weeks before the event started, when there were only a few hundred people out there building a massive city. We helped build a three-story, steel sculpture (we unloaded 12,000 pounds of steel mostly by hand from the back of a semi) fighting the heat and dust storms that lasted for days. It's challenging and paradigm altering. And then it's a week-long bohemian party.
Not sure if i'll make it out there this year. I prefer to go out there before it starts and help build art, but my artist is not going to be making something out there this year. we'll see.
So that's the brief catchup. Michelle and I are having a really great time out here. She is a good partner and, most importantly, seems to not only put up with me, but somehow manages to enjoy it.
I knew i was perhaps going to be in trouble on our third date. We had a good dinner and then we were heading back to her place (international third-date rules being what they are). We were walking up the stairs in her building and I laughed to myself. She asked me what I was laughing about, and I said that I had never been out with a date who even knew Star Wars, Indiana Jones, and Battlestar Galactica, let alone bring all three of them up over the course of a conversation. Without missing a beat, or even turning around to look at me, she tossed out, "Well, that's bound to happen when you start dating women your own age."
Classic.
well, I think that's about everything. Man, i don't think i've written it all down like that before.
Most of it is documented, as you may have noticed, on my picassa site with photos from all the places i've been since college. You can see it at: http://picasaweb.google.com/rcatuw
Hope you're having a good day!
Rich
Sorry for the delay in responding. I just started a new job and it's been pretty hectic. I'm working for the College of Health and Human Services at San Francisco State University. It's a really great job though. I'm designing an information system to track all of their scheduling and financials. I've never worked on putting together anything this large before and there are a bunch of puzzles to unravel. It's great but it makes my brain hurt sometimes (and challenges my somewhat ever-taxed attention span as well).
My girlfriend's name is Michelle. We met in grad school in Wisconsin. She is finishing her dissertation on rhetoric and dance. She danced ballet professionally for a long time before going back to school so she likes to incorporate that life with this. She's currently teaching rhetoric and composition at the University of San Francisco. We've been together since 2006.
I left Denver in 1998 and moved back to dc where I eventually started working for another non-profit doing admin stuff. They needed a database to track participants in their economic development projects, so I told them I could do that. in a couple months I had the db done and they sent me to Siberia for four months to install it at the field offices all over. It was winter. brrr. i mean...f*ing brrr. That was a great time. That was 1999-2000 over the new year.
I was back in dc for a while building a larger version of the database and then went to Azerbaijan to install it there. On the way back, I hopped off the plane in Vienna and decided to move to prague. They were going to cut my hours back to 20 a week, so I said fine, but i can't live in DC on that salary. I was in prague for almost a year. That place was very hard on my system. I actually ended up screwing up a relationship that I was fostering long distance with someone that I'd been seeing before I left. I was going to come back from Prague and we were going to move to New York City together.
I got swept off my feet a couple weeks before I came back by this amazing Swedish (musician, chef, bohemian) woman and, based on the plan that she and I had made, was coming back to the US to say goodbye and then move to sweden. I broke up with Gina and then the Swedish woman (Molly) broke up with me. Justice indeed.
I did end up moving to NYC from DC (after a brief relationship in Chevy Chase which grew largely out of the fact that I needed a place to live...that was the third and final time I had a rent-relationship) in november 2001. Not a great time to be moving to new york.
I moved onto the couch of some guy i knew through my then girlfriend and who had told me that if i needed a place to stay I could crash on his couch (in his one bedroom apartment) until i got set up. Well, I was there for a year and half. We turned out to be really good friends...though I think he appreciated it also when we were friends and not roommates :)
I eventually got a temp job working for the National Basketball Association. I started out as a temp exec assistant to a VP there, and when the real assistant came back, the VP asked me to stay on. Of course, by that time I'd already made them a gob of database apps that they couldn't live without. It turns out i'm insidious like that.
I move to France in 2004. I lived and studied French in southwest france near Bayonne/Biarritz. I spent the summer there lazing through classes (I was nominally enrolled at Brooklyn College and this was my study abroad) and spending the afternoons hanging out with friends at the beach. good times.
I was supposed to study in Paris for the year, but, just before I'd gone to france, I ran into Gina (the one i broke up with, and with whom I had off and on tried to maintain a friendship, though at this point, we hadn't spoken in a while) on the street and we'd struck up a conversation. That turned into dating a bit before I left. While i was gone, I thought, hm. I screwed this up last time by not coming home. This time I'll come back and it should work then right? well, not so much.
I left france and came back to NYC. Gina and I moved in together and after about a year, a bad year, we busted up. Friends again. This was the beginning of the end of my Gina orbit. After another year in New York I had finished my degree (transferred the credits back to UMD). I decided to move out of New York and start fresh.
I moved to Madison with the intention of slowing down a bit and going to grad school. A couple months later applied to the school of Journalism and Mass Communication. I spent the first six months in Madison by myself. I did a bit of the monastic thing. I slept on the floor, contemplated, didnt cut my hair and I didnt work (thanks to the dramatic disparity between cost of living in Madison and NYC). It was a great decompression and it was the final exit from the mess I'd made of my life starting long before, but accelerated by my time in Prague.
I started grad school a year after moving there (yay in-state tuition!).
I really liked school. I met some great people and learned a lot. I went to Africa with a friend of mine and spent a month in Zanzibar (where I picked up a little work with another nonprofit doing database stuff...these things are everywhere!) which paid for week-long safari near Mt. Kilimanjaro.
Other than school in the last couple years, I've been involved with this thing called Burning Man. It's this great desert thing were 50 thousand people come together out in the desert of Nevada and make art and community together. I first went out in 2006. I contacted some people online who were looking to gather a collective to drive to the event together, share costs and shelter. I flew from Madison to Portland to meet people I didn't know and to drive from there to Nevada. It was a really fantastic trip, though we almost died several times on the way there. It was a death trap of a delivery van. I went out before Michelle and I started dating. But it turns out that we are both burners so it's one of the wonderful things we have in common.
I was out there for three weeks last year. Michelle and I went out there two weeks before the event started, when there were only a few hundred people out there building a massive city. We helped build a three-story, steel sculpture (we unloaded 12,000 pounds of steel mostly by hand from the back of a semi) fighting the heat and dust storms that lasted for days. It's challenging and paradigm altering. And then it's a week-long bohemian party.
Not sure if i'll make it out there this year. I prefer to go out there before it starts and help build art, but my artist is not going to be making something out there this year. we'll see.
So that's the brief catchup. Michelle and I are having a really great time out here. She is a good partner and, most importantly, seems to not only put up with me, but somehow manages to enjoy it.
I knew i was perhaps going to be in trouble on our third date. We had a good dinner and then we were heading back to her place (international third-date rules being what they are). We were walking up the stairs in her building and I laughed to myself. She asked me what I was laughing about, and I said that I had never been out with a date who even knew Star Wars, Indiana Jones, and Battlestar Galactica, let alone bring all three of them up over the course of a conversation. Without missing a beat, or even turning around to look at me, she tossed out, "Well, that's bound to happen when you start dating women your own age."
Classic.
well, I think that's about everything. Man, i don't think i've written it all down like that before.
Most of it is documented, as you may have noticed, on my picassa site with photos from all the places i've been since college. You can see it at: http://picasaweb.google.com/rcatuw
Hope you're having a good day!
Rich
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
The real wireless appliances are so because they are rechargeable.
The real wireless appliances are so because they are rechargeable.
Here's how I would do it. You turn over space in the cabinet to an
appliance center with an articulating arm and an elevator to the
counter top.
When the person calls for an appliance, or a pan, the arm retrieves
the device and places it on the lift.
When the item is ready to be put back, the user places it back on the
lift and hits the return button. The arm reaches out to the device
once it is lowered and docks with it. This docking station may use
probe and drogue or laser sighting or visual image or something.
When the item passes down from the counter, it goes through an RFID
sensor field which tells the arm what the object is and where it goes.
The program may even evaluate the best storage plan or optimize the
current order based on evaluating usage data over time. It would email
proposed changes to the administrator.
The active RFID on the devices would broadcast battery life
information. A central house server would at intervals ping the tags
to check levels. It could also submit regular reports of battery
performance to be compiled into the household data management (TPS)
reports.
When the house server senses that an appliance is ready to recharge,
it instructs the arm to place it onto a charger sled. The cabinet door
opens and the ramp falls down, or the bottom of the cabinet is the
floor (since things will be on shelves and hooks). The the sled rolls
out with the device and takes it to the sunny spot and deploys its
array. The server knows where the sunny spots are because it has
sensors and knows the track of the sun.
Meal prep procedures can be saved. If you want to make pasta, the
computer remembers you need the big pot (first) and then delivers the
smaller pot for boiling the pasta. Maybe the elevator is next to the
sink and the faucet swings over and puts just the right amount of
water into the pan. This progam can be easily pieced together using a
rudementary task-list command builder.
The sink is activated by a sensor located directly under the faucet
head. When an object trips the sensor, the water turns on. The rate
and temp is determined by presets. One default setting would govern in
the absence of an overriding protocol. However, if you said I'm going
to be washing the dishes, a preset would take over changing the volume
and temp of the water flow. Foot controls allow the user to apply
manual adjustments. After setting it to wash, the computer would reset
it to default flow after a period of inactivity.
Upper cabinets that come straight down for total 360 or at least 270
access. Goods stored in upper cabinets would be lowered to allow easy
access for everyone regardless of height. The doors would also still
work.
Computers don't have culture, that's why they can't make choices. The don't have the rules of judgment that come from common culture.
Computers don't have culture, that's why they can't make choices. The
don't have the rules of judgment that come from common culture.
don't have the rules of judgment that come from common culture.
But they do share quite a bit in common. They share "protocols" that
help them communicate. Why is that not sufficient to add the value
systems? Or is it?
Does this mean that culture is more than the common tools that allow
units to communicate like a common dictionary?
Maybe culture isn't the key to choicing.
Sunday, March 15, 2009
Re: fuck yeah awesome
It's similar but different. Here's why:
"America, Fuck Yeah!" makes an explicit declaration of "American" culture (read:"glug, glug, flailing arms, flailing arms, glug"). "Fuck yeah, Awesome!" makes that same cultural call (albeit implicity) drawing its identity from its simple, vulgar and intellectually meager construction. So. Officially. "FUCK YEAH, AWSUM!" is more subtle. :P
"America, Fuck Yeah!" makes an explicit declaration of "American" culture (read:"glug, glug, flailing arms, flailing arms, glug"). "Fuck yeah, Awesome!" makes that same cultural call (albeit implicity) drawing its identity from its simple, vulgar and intellectually meager construction. So. Officially. "FUCK YEAH, AWSUM!" is more subtle. :P
From: Jay Clark <clarkglobal@gmail.com>
To: Rich Cleland <rcatuw@yahoo.com>
Sent: Sunday, March 15, 2009 6:17:59 PM
Subject: fuck yeah awesome
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/America,_Fuck_Yeah
--
Deep Breaths
Saturday, March 14, 2009
Thursday, March 12, 2009
You peed on zombies?
You peed on zombies?
Sure. The first time was curiosity, the second time was just good
scientific method, the last three years was sheer boredom.
Sure. The first time was curiosity, the second time was just good
scientific method, the last three years was sheer boredom.
She didn't know very much, which meant she was easily startled.
She didn't know very much, which meant she was easily startled.
Tuesday, March 10, 2009
The makers
The makers
Create a simulation where maker agents introduce artifacts into an
environment. The quality of the artifact is determined by the
abilities of the maker agent.
Create a simulation where maker agents introduce artifacts into an
environment. The quality of the artifact is determined by the
abilities of the maker agent.
The abilities of the agents are comprised of various factors such as
artistic skill, access to making technology, exposure to various
levels of quality artifacts, etc.
The maker agents can develop in ability by doing things like making,
learning to improve skill, accessing more powerful technology, seeing
the makes of others.
Saturday, March 7, 2009
"You're warm," she said disapprovingly.
"You're warm," she said disapprovingly.
"You're cold," was his only reply.
"You're cold," was his only reply.
Thursday, March 5, 2009
Monday, March 2, 2009
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