Stumbling into BodyHackingCon on the last day

You walk into the BodyHackingCon on an early Sunday afternoon, and you are not sure if it's really still going on. You expect it to have a bigger, or at least flashier presence: shouldn't there be people with highly visible body modifications milling about? Instead, you see people in business casual whose name tags say "superintendent", and the hallways are plastered with signs for Texas School Boards convention. But you persist and walk around a corner, and then down a city-block-long corridor around another corner (that's Austin Convention Center for you), and you are finally rewarded by a hand-scrawled sign pointing towards an open door of a huge, warehouse-style expo room. But this is the last day of a 3-day convention, so naturally most of the vendors are gone.

Neosensory vest that is supposed to let you perceive words as vibrations on your skin

There is still a thing or two happening; at one of the booths a visitor is trying to pull together the edges of a peculiar-looking vest around his torso; it clearly is not going to happen, since the vest is 3-4 sizes too small. "I'm sorry. We are planning to have larger sizes in the future," says a vendor at the booth, even though the guy is merely average size. But apparently the vest does not need to close to work. It is studded with small metal circles that make up some kind of haptic language interface. That's only my guess based on what I could glean from the snippets of conversation. Because who needs to ask how it works when you can speculate?

"Whip. Angle," says the booth guy. "Whip. Angle." Then he turns a phone screen to the guy who's trying out the vest. There are two circles on it, and he asks the guy to pick one to tap on. Apparently the booth guy made the dots convey some kind of haptic stimulation (e.g. buzzing?) -- and asked the wearer to recognize the word encoded in it. He praises the wearer for answering correctly. "So you see, it's not just the length of the word," he says. I guess he was saying that the vest made it possible, with some minimal training, to distinguish the actual word pattern, not just a longer word from a shorter word?

A jacket with a ribcage headpiece? This would make a splash at a science fiction convention.

Then you look around some more, and even with most vendors gone and large patches of the expo hall square footage reverting to its post-convention beige bleakness, you still see something unusual. At another exhibitor's booth, flanking it on both sides, two women are lying on the tables, looking for all the world like wax statues. Their eyes are covered with something that could be a sleep mask or a VR headset. You glance at the vendor's name -- bio- or healing-something -- and think it's more likely to be a mask. By the way, the name matches a definite pattern: half of the exhibitors' names here have "bio", or "quantum", or something vaguely medical in a New Agey way. Which is fitting, given that half of them sell nothing more than nutrition drinks and supplements.

You stumble upon exhibits of clothes that wouldn't be out of place a goth or punk store, except they have patches with wires sticking out, like something that's placed on you right before a surgery. Some also light up. Many would make a stunning costume at a science fiction convention, if you could spawn off a third or fourth alter ego to explore your mild interest in costuming. Overall, this is the bodyhacking you could get behind -- the kind that stays entirely outside the body.

Most of those clothes are art projects. One dress claims to simulate dark matter: "Dark Matter inflates and deflates against your body to simulate the universe expanding against you, and the buzzing sculptural universal necklace, "Dark Energy", buzzes against your skin to simulate movement through the universe in time in accordance with events happening in VR". But you have read enough science fiction and imagined the vast cosmic space enough times that you know if you put on that dress (not that it's an option) the experience would fall very short of feeling at the center of the expanding universe.

A cape that goes over some sensor with wires that's placed on your chest, resembling uncannily of surgical preparations.

Some of the clothes have VR content associated with it accessible through your phone; and perhaps you could spend some interesting minutes with it, but just downloading the app would take some time, and the WiFi connection in this building is iffy, and the event is winding down and you are sure vendors are anxious to pack up and leave.

Finally on the way out you get a glimpse of a more radical kind of bodyhacking: a guy you pass in the hallway has small, but prominent devil's horns under the skin of his bald forehead.

SheHacksATX: a hackathon done right

Hackathons can be a good change of pace for us developers because they force us to experience software development in a different way. At our day jobs we often work on a feature for weeks, because it needs to meet complex requirements that are often subject to many unknowns and last minute changes. But a hackathon can make it possible to implement not just one feature, but an entire prototype, or minimal viable product, in a day. It depends on how the hackathon is run, and just as much on preparation of the teams.

If your team has the right skills, or at least has researched in advance how to implement various moving pieces (for example, OAuth authentication using your chosen programming language), then a hackathon can give you a concentrated dose of accomplishment you often don't get at work. But if you approach a hackathon unprepared, and have to research those technologies as you're trying to use them, you will just spin your wheels. You might waste that day just scratching the surface of technologies you may or may not ever use. (I doubt that most projects started at hackathons ever get worked on again.)

Developers socialize in the morning before the coding starts. Left to right: Kathy, Stephanie, Ruby, Dallas, Nari. More pictures from SheHacksATX are in my photo gallery.

At SheHackATX, a women-only hackathon that took place on April 26, 2014, teams had not been formed upfront. Developers were matched with projects at the beginning of the hackathon. Each project was a woman-run startup (most of them local to Austin) that needed programming help, such as to add some features to their app or website. In the morning, developers wrote down their preferences of apps to work on, and the owners picked programmers they wanted on their team. Hopefully everybody got at least their 2nd or 3rd wish.

Since the teams were formed on the spot, they could not coordinate and learn complementary skills in advance. So it was all the more impressive that half of the teams were able to accomplish the tasks that startup founders wanted in the the time provided (from around 12 to 7 pm of one day). Those startups were Girls Guild, Groove, Yoga Recipe, and Bound Round. In my opinion, they were successful because their founders were able to correctly estimate tasks that might take about a day, and went with small'ish, manageable enhancements for their applications; nothing grandiose.

An example of that would be Girls Guild, a website that matches girls who want to learn hands-on skills (e.g. chocolate making, jewelry making, leather working or photography) via apprenticeship, with "makers", i.e. experts in that area. Both the makers and the apprentices are girls or women. One of the features Girls Guild founders wanted to have added to their app had something to do with being able to delay a payment until another event occurs (the details escape me). They also wanted ability for a maker to schedule interviews with a prospective apprentice through the website, as opposed to a manually emailing back-and-forth. The Girls Guild team succeeded in implementing both features.

Girls Guild and Hearth teams at work. Sitting at the table, left-to-right: Bethany (developer), Diana and Cheyenne (Girls Guild founders). Standing behind them, the Hearth team: Nari and Monisha (developers) and Florence (founder). More pictures from SheHacksATX are in my photo gallery.

Bound Round coders didn't have time to implement a 3D spinning globe (in Javascript, I guess) that the owner wanted, but they implemented a zoomable map that shows different levels of info depending on the level of zoom. Quite impressive for such a short time. Yoga Recipe wanted to integrate their website with Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram; "integration" meant ability for yoga instructors to share the "recipes" (sets of instructions for yoga classes) on social media. They succeeded with Facebook and Twitter. They also implemented ability for yoga teachers to put together playlists for their classes using Spotify.

My team also did well with our application, Groove. More about it in the next blog post, where I'll talk about what we did and how we did it, highlighting the obstacles that a programmer might experience during a hackathon.

Some other startups set their deliverable for this hackathon to be not code, but ideas. The founders of Our Desired Future and Hearth came here with just some ideas for their websites -- some better hashed-out than others -- and asked for technical advice on how to best implement them. Our Desired Future wanted to put together a series of multimedia presentations to tell interactive stories about water usage and water resources of Texas; in case of Hearth, what the owner really needed was to winnow down a number of her eclectic ideas about promoting volunteering through gamification, to something that could serve as minimum viable product. The result of her brainstorming with her team was a landing page for the website. In the process, one of the people on her team concluded that her calling in life was product management. So in these two last cases the product wasn't tangible; the real product was refinement of initial notions into more concrete ideas.

SXSW 2013: blending bendy materials and bendy life

A talk by Ping Fu at SXSW 2013 blended, in an odd way, self-help advice and 3D-printing technology. The only thing in common between the two may be her own personality, which, like those raw materials shaped into an infinite collection of shapes, succeeded by flexibility and adaptability.

The title of her speech, "Digital Reality: Life in Two Worlds" ostensibly refers to the merge of physical and digital reality. She reviewed exciting things happening in three-dimensional scanning and printing technologies -- and her company, Geomagic, is among the players in the field. Standing on the stage in 3D-printed platform wedge shoes, she said you may be able to walk into a Nike store tomorrow, have their feet scanned, and pick up custom-made shoes tomorrow. You may also have custom-made prosthetics that would let artificial limbs look like real ones, "because currently they look like airplane landing gear". You just have to scan a soccer player's "good" leg, and print an artificial one based on that model. 3D-printing can produce filling for dental cavities, and repair tiles on NASA space shuttle -- two technologies that surprisingly (or not), are related. Preservation of historical artifacts is also a big application for 3D-scanning. Mount Rushmore took a hell of a long time to scan, but it was eventually done, and US Parks and Wildlife has a scan, said Ping Fu.

Ping Fu's 3D-printed shoes she wore at her SXSW 2013 speech 'Digital Reality: Life in Two Worlds'. More pictures from this speech and overall SXSW 2013 are in my photo gallery.

On the other hand, life in two worlds can be a metaphor for Ping Fu's own life, that has certainly spanned two vastly different worlds. As a young child she was taken from her loving family in Shanghai during the Cultural Revolution, and raised in a camp. She was put through communist brainwashing, being forced to go up on stage and scream "I am nobody!" So she has no stage fright, she jokes. If anything saved her, it was her father's advice to be like a bamboo, that bends but does not break in the wind. She even made it the title of her book, "Bend, not Break".

A soccer player's 3D-printed prostethic leg. More pictures from this speech and overall SXSW 2013 are in my photo gallery.

Looking up this book on amazon.com, I saw that many reviewers accuse her of fabricating her life story. They claim her actual life was not nearly as horrible as described in the book, and that she might not have lived in a labor camp. I have no way to verify the claims of either side, though there is no doubt that the horrors of Chinese labor camps, where middle class children were sent for "re-education", actually existed. There is also no doubt that Ping Fu at some point immigrated into the US, and went from a person who knew just 3 English words, to a tech entrepreneur. And though she chose a technical field, she credits her love of language for her design skills. She may have known little of English, but she had a love of language all her life.

In China, she went to graduate school for journalism around the time when China's one-child policy started. It made not just subsequent-child births, but also pregnancies, illegal. When Ping Fu heard rumors that baby girls were being killed in the countryside, she went there as a journalist to investigate. There she witnessed "abortions" done via C-section in 8th or 9th month of pregnancy. For writing publicly about these atrocities she was put in jail, and was certain she would die there. Luckily, Cultural Revolution soon ended -- this was a few years before the Tiananmen Square -- and Ping Fu was released. (Again, I have no way of verifying how much of it is true.) Then the government gave her a choice: quietly leave the country, or be exiled to a remote corner of China. She chose to go to America, and took a crash course in English on the plane. By the time she landed in San Francisco, en route to the University of New Mexico, she already knew a few English words. Not enough to be accepted into comparative literature program, which was her first choice, but enough for computer science.

Mobile 3D-printer. This guy and another one with a similar printer walked up and down the aisles to let the audience take a look at the printers. They, however, did not demonstrate how it works. More pictures from this speech and overall SXSW 2013 are in my photo gallery.

Myself, as someone who had a love for languages all my life, but didn't go into linguistics because I didn't think there were any jobs in it beyond school teacher, felt vindicated. There are not many people (or perhaps we're just not visible) who come into computer science not because of fascination with technology, but because we enjoy teasing out complex logical structures from the code as we do from human languages. And so when Ping Fu said that somebody back in the day suggested to her that she check out this new field, computer science, because it's a "language" that lets you make stuff, I thought that it was the same kind of thing that attracted me to the field of computing. Her life tale of a foreign student turned tech entrepreneur also has a special resonance to me because I, too, initially came to the US to go to graduate school. She, however, did not think she was a good programmer, because she lacked a science background, so she became a designer and project manager. Her secret to working with programmers is to ply them with Coke to keep their juices flowing. It must have worked, because at some point she hired Marc Andreesen, who developed Mosaic, and eventually licensed it to Microsoft to become Internet Explorer.

For a long time she didn't consider becoming entrepreneur, and when she finally started her company, Geomagic, people were still skeptical. Of the first seven employees all but her had PhDs, and 4 of them were mathematicians. People said you can't start a company with a bunch of mathematicians, as math doesn't make money. But Ping Fu replied that she liked to do impossible things, so she did it. A win for language nerds and foreign students everywhere!

Making sense of criteria for making sense of Javascript frameworks

How do you select the right parts from a talk about how to select the right technology? Especially if you haven't spent a whole lot of time working with any of the development tools that are being compared? Perhaps you just listen to what resonates. And so I did at the All Girl Hack Night presentation on how to select a Javascript framework that's right for you, by Justin Lowery from Cerebral Ideas. Justin compared Angular JS, his team's favorite, with two other popular Javascript frameworks, Backbone and Ember. So while an experienced web developer might be nodding their head sagely at the criteria Justin gave (which I put at the bottom of the page), I just pondered how web development today is still oddly plagued by the same problems as when I did it in 1999.

When you just can't separate presentation from business layer...

Justin Lowery (the presenter).

Back in 1999, when we wrote cutting edge web applications with (ahem) CGI and Perl, separating business logic from presentation seemed a distant dream, which my team at the time quickly gave up on. We wrote spagetti code where HTML was generated in a deeply nested tangle of Perl's ifs and fors. It's 2013, and it sounds like HTML still can't be made completely independent of business logic. And some people say you might as well embrace that, and pick a Javascript framework that lets you hook up Javascript to backend-generated HTML easily. According to Justin, that's one of big advantages of AngularJS.

Those Javascript-hating backend developers

This will let backend developers generate chunks HTML without ever touching Javascript. In Justin's observation, backend developers hate Javascript, but are much more friendly with HTML. Why they hate Javascript more than HTML is anyone's guess. Perhaps it's because backend developers are used to "proper" object-oriented languages, whereas Javascript kind of has objects without actually being object-oriented. It has this strange prototype inheritance, which is not like the "classical" inheritance that backend developers are used to. But I have been a backend developer for a long time, and I'm not averse to Javascript: I've been learning it eagerly in recent months, and I'm fascinated by some of its features like closures.

Freeform HTML versus generating the whole page from Javascript

Then again, there exist Javascript frameworks that not just let, but force you separate presentation from business logic; it's another question if those solutions cause bigger problems than they solve. I am talking specifically about ExtJS. ExtJS expects all the data from the backend to be returned as JSON objects via service calls. I'm not sure you could make it accept custom HTML even if you tried. At least that would be very hard, and it would violate another of framework selection commandments: "Choose a framework designed by someone who thinks like you, otherwise you'd be fighting it all the way". It would be hard to stick any custom HTML into an ExtJS application, because ExtJS does not "hook" into your existing HTML: it generates it all from scratch, from Javascript alone. Some pople don't like that. I suspect our presenter didn't either, because he considers it an advantage if a framework lets you write free-form HTML, like Angular does.

This ties into our next criterion.

Page load time: the "no blank page" criterion

Left to right: All Girl Hack Night members Annine, Yim, Angelina, and Kate at the Angular JS presentation.

Allowing static HTML versus generating it all from Javascript is tied to another criterion: how fast the framework is. Mainly it means page loading time. Justin observed that a perception of loading time is not the same as the loading time itself. This criterion can also be summed up as "No blank page prior to JS parsing". If your application renders some HTML elements before it executes all the Javascript and populates fields with data, some HTML elements are already on the page even though some fields are initially blank. Even if loading the data into those fields takes 2 seconds, the user will still perceive this page as loading faster than a page that stays blank until it generates all the content, though that might take 1 second. In this case Angular obeys "no blank page" rule, whereas ExtJS -- you guessed it -- doesn't.

Opinionatedness: what does it mean?

The most mysterious criterion is probably "opinionatedness" of the framework. Perhaps you have to be an experienced front end developer to fully understand this concept, and I'm not. A Google search did not give me a crystal-clear understanding of what it means. Apparently, opinionated APIs are on the opposite end of a "scale" than REST APIs. Unlike REST, opinionated APIs don't treat URLs as resources. They are more like function calls that URLs: save(collection, key, value) versus http:///collection/{collection}/variable/{key} (this example is from an article Opinionated (RPC) APIs vs RESTful APIs). But from what I read, experts seemed to think that REST APIs are more intuitive than opinionated ones.

Clockwise from the left: Bridget, Patty, Ashley, Maryam, Simi, an IT guy from the company that hosts All Girl Hack Night; Justin Lowery (the presenter), Neelima, unidentified woman, Annine, and Yim.

Opinionatedness of the framework figures into its learning curve. Justin said that Angular JS becomes harder to learn as the API becomes less opinionated. This seemed counterintuitive to me. Why would it be harder to program using RESTful API than one that consists of commands? Googling more about it, I found that AngularJS is called opinionated because it forces you to give your application a certain structure. If so, that can influence the learning curve in two ways.

Again, let's take ExtJS as an example. If you are writing an application that resembles the "Hello World" tutorial, it's easy to use this framework. You follow the steps, and the widgets on the page magically materialize and get populated by the data from the backend. So the learning curve does not seem too steep. But then you find out that a real-world application does not match the confines of the tutorial, and its logic often does not conform to the structure the framework imposes on you. That's when the learning curve becomes steep, as you have to find various backdoors and workarounds around the framework's assumptions. From that perspective, I'd say ExtJS is very opinionated, and this can make it hard to write real-world applications. This framework gives you prefabricated houses instead of individual bricks. But if it gave you just the bricks, a beginner wouldn't know how to stack them into an architecturally sound house.

A meta lesson is that it may be hard to know what concepts are and are not too vague for an overview talk (assuming that overview talks are introductory in nature). All Girl Hack Night has developers from all walks of life, from device driver writers to front-end, and I don't know that many non-front-end developers are familiar with the concept of opinionatedness. I will have to keep that in mind when creating my own presentations.

What kind of philosophy / methodology does the framework use to solve problems?

• How is it architected?
• Is the framework authoritarian or egalitarian?
• Are all problems solved with Javascript?
• Are problems solved with a bigger, more aggressive API?

How does the framework solve common problems of development?

• Templating?
• Data binding?
• Routing?
• Bootstrapping?
• Data management?

How active are the creators in the community?

• Do they have an active forum with many users?
• Do they have stale pull requests or issues list?
• Are they active in the community?

HTML-centric philosophy

• HTML is intuitive for those that are non-Javascripters.
• Strong separation of concerns.
• Event binding is much easier.
• Backend devs that hate JS have limited exposure to it.
• Views are compatible with other frameworks, especially backend technologies.

Am I the only one to want this? Linking to any part of an HTML page

Here is a pipe dream. I would like HTML to have ability to link to any paragraph in any web page. I would like to make it so that when the user clicks the link, the page would open with the paragraph of interest at the top of the browser window.

I only know how to do it if some section of a web page has an <a name="xxxxxx"> in it. And if the page I'm linking to isn't created by me, I have no control over placement of <a name>'s in it. But is it possible to link to any element of a page? If not with HTML, then with Javascript or CSS? Can one write a Javascript that, when a user clicks on a link, will bring up the desired element of the page that has loaded? I kind of doubt it, because once a page has loaded in a browser, the scripts of the previous page stop executing, correct?

And I'm pretty sure there is no way to do this if the desired paragraph is not in any uniquely-identifiable HMTL element -- for example, if it only separated from other paragraphs with <br/>

If there is really no way to do this, I wonder if such functionality was never considered by They Who Design HTML? Has nobody ever wanted it? I wish for it when an explanation or example of something I'm writing about is buried deep in some other web page, and I know that my reader, if he/she clicks on the link, is not likely to find it quickly, or to spend much time searching for it.

I suppose one can write a third-party application that would let you mark up snippets of web pages and save them; then you could link to the paragraph on the third party website. It could provide a link to the original article, for those interested in the context. But that's an additional layer of complexity. There may even have been such a service, called iLighter; it allowed you to highlight web pages and save those highlighted snippets on its servers. I know I installed it in one of my web browsers a couple of years ago, but didn't do much with it. I had app fatigue even then (too many new web applications to try), which only got worse since. And iLighter doesn't seem to be around anymore -- I guess not too many people found it useful.

I know, I could write a Javascript that would pop up just the paragraph I want to link to, when the user's mouse hovers over the link to the article. So the user could get just the quote, but read the article for context if they'd like. Of course, this is inefficient, because the quote may change some time in the future, and somehow I would have to become aware of the change (which won't happen unless I monitor that web page every day), and modify my script. So, it's not a real solution.

ArmadilloCon 2011: Imagining a future without fossil fuels

Defining the peak oil is not simple

As we may have already reached peak oil, the point in time when the maximum rate of global petroleum extraction is reached, it is timely to have a panel like "Imagining a future without fossil fuels". But before we can ask science fiction writers what will happen once oil production enters inevitable decline, we have to take into account that the definition of peak oil in itself, err, slippery. The question of whether there is a peak oil should be, "peak oil at what price", says Paolo Bacigalupi, whose novel "The Windup Girl" is set in post-fossil-fuel future. At $90/barrel, it becomes profitable to convert shale into oil. So when cheap oil becomes unavailable, people start extracting oil from reserves that were harder to reach. Since petroleum is used for much more than fuel, but also for plastic, fertilizers, and many other things, at some point oil will become too valuable to burn as fuel. We'll have to prioritize what we'll use fossil fuels for -- driving versus plastics, food, or fertilizers.

Matt Cardin, Paolo Bacigalupi, Jayme Lynn Blaschke, and David Chang. More pictures from ArmadilloCon 2011 are in my photo gallery.

With the tendrils of fossil fuels going into so many things, we should not imagine that a world with a different energy mix will look just like this one, says Matt Cardin. Our supply chains won't look the same. For example, industrial farming will change, because Dow Chemical produceds a lot of fertilizers from petrochemicals, and it will be too expensive to do that.

The question is, does the future have to go apocalyptic?

Will it look like the Little House of the Prairie?

The panelists sure hope the technological society won't go away completely, and we won't have to return to a lifestyle of 19th century farmers. Katy Stauber's mixed visions of the future do include farmhouses, albeit still connected to the internet. That way we could still play World of Warcraft while riding our bikes to power our computers. It seems she doesn't mind returning to pre-technological civilization, as long as enough technology is preserved for us to have some fun.

David Chang, Katy Stauber, and Matthew Bey. More pictures from ArmadilloCon 2011 are in my photo gallery.

David Chang and Paolo Bacigalupi hope that the tools and technology we have these days will make it possible for ordinary people to innovate solutions for post-fossil-fuel future. Bacigalupi has faith in people like a guy down the street from him, who is working on a biogas composter in his garage.

We could save lots of energy just by wasting it less, the audience points out. House builders used to (or still do) put the air conditioning unit in the attic, where it gets 150 degrees in summer. With energy costs rising, they might soon become smarter about that.

What is the next promising power source?

It is solar? Though it's commonly viewed as being cost-ineffective compared to coal, solar power costs about the same as coal, says Jayme Lynn Blaschke. The reason for discrepancy is that when those comparisons are made, commercial solar panels are lumped in with retail, and that drives their cost up. But there isn't such a thing as "retail" coal power.

Is it wind? Jayme was driving on Texas coast and saw four times as many wind turbines as last year. Matthew Bey said he knows a wind power entrepreneur -- a wind wildcatter, as it were -- who invests in this form of energy, and he's not doing it to make the planet green. This investor had a Whataburger franchise before he decided to make money off wind power. So anecdotal evidence shows that the good old free market is starting to see alternative energy as viable.

What are the promising modes of post-fossil-fuel transportation?

Could it be Shweeb, which David Chang describes as a human powered transportation system resembling a bicycle on tracks. You can go long distances on it, because there is little friction.

Could it be buses on stilts, or straddling buses, the kind that have been developed in China? (Here's a New York Times article on that.) While the buses don't do away with fossil-fuel (they are only partially solar-powered), their capacity to carry 40 times as many people as a regular bus should present significant energy savings.

Tangled up in cords (not umbilical)

Labor and delivery in a modern hospital exposes you to some amusing tech gadgets. There is a computer on wheels by your bed that displays a graph of your baby's (OK, fetus's) heart rate, and a graph of your contractions. Sometimes a nurse comes in to check on you, and pulls up another patient's graphs besides yours -- multitasking, I guess. So you can see how strong or frequent are this other, anonymous patient's contractions, and play an imaginary race against her. Faster! Stronger! Who's going to deliver a baby first?

(And here's a bit of trivia. Semi-reclining in bed is called semi-fowlers in nurse parlance. Sitting up straight in bed is called high fowlers. I know this because the nurse, whenever she came in to check on me, made notes of my position in the computer by the bed. I finally asked her what that meant.)

Baby heart rate and contraction monitors were by far the most annoying aspect of hospital birth. They made my first, pre-induction night the most uncomfortable -- more so than the two postpartum nights. I had to sleep in a hospital gown, on a bed that is designed for delivering babies, not sleep. The whole time I was tethered to the monitors that were placed on my belly and had cables going from them to the computer stand. Whenever I shifted, let alone rolled over on the other side, the monitors slipped off. Then the nurse would come in and mess with them for 10 minutes at a time to reposition them. This happened at least once an hour. I'm surprised I got even one hour of sleep. I finally drifted off early in the morning, and was woken up by the nurse at 6 a.m., who came in to start the induction. Oh, and the evening before I barely talked the nurses into unplugging my IV port from the IV line, to which they had me hooked up most of the evening. The reason? The baby's heart rate seemed too high, so they were giving me fluids. (I don't see a connection here, but I'm not a doctor.)

Going to the bathroom is an ordeal. You have to unplug the cords of the two monitors' and automatic blood pressure cuff, sling them over your shoulder and take them with you to the bathroom. The exercise is pointless -- the monitors will slip off of their fine-tuned positions on your belly, and will have to be readjusted. You might as well take them off, but instead you do as the nurse said, and drag them and the cords with you. You ask for cordless monitors, and the hospital staff brings them to you as soon as they can find some (they only have two cordless monitors on this floor, and they are in use all the time), but that still doesn't do you much good, because you also have to drag the damn IV stand with you to the bathroom! It makes the whole trip only marginally less cumbersome.

The next most annoying thing was a self-adjusting bed in the postpartum room. It makes tiny adjustments to its elevation and angle the whole time you are in it. As soon as you sit down, the bed slightly inflates or elevates the part you're sitting on; sometimes even when you are lying still, the bed will inflate or deflate under you. Those shifts are minuscule, and your position hardly changes at all; only the low whirr of a motor and vibration informs you that the bed is doing something. A nurse explained to me that this is to prevent bed sores -- not that postpartum patients are in much danger of those, but the hospital has just one type of bed, and this is it. And no, these self-adjustments can't be turned off. In two days I still didn't get used to them enough to ignore them. It's as if this inanimate thing is constantly annoyed by your presence and squirms to get out from under you. :-) It's hard not to take it personally. It makes you wonder if we really want "smart houses" in our future. Maybe I'll be just as happy with "dumb" furniture that's not aware of my presence.

How wishlists are like orthodox rituals

First, I'll grumble about Amazon.com wishlists a bit. There should be a way to group items with AND, OR, and NOT operators. For example, I want bag A, or bag B, or bag C, all of which look very similar, but not all three. But in addition to those bags I also might like a wallet, which is assigned an equally high priority in my list. So my wishlist clause would be (Bag A OR Bag B OR Bag C) AND (Wallet D OR Wallet E).

Overthinking much? Maybe that's why I'm the least fun person to get gifts for. Knowing how to want the right kind of presents is an art I have never mastered. By right kind I mean the kind that easily lend themselves to dropping hints. Isn't that how Miss Manners claims it should be done? A lady gushes about the beauty of a particular object, and her significant other, family or friends are make note of that. That's how they get ideas for what to get her for birthdays and holidays.

And of course, the items should be in the right price range for the significant other, family, etc.

But what if the items you truly crave are so specific that a mere hint would not suffice -- the exact make and model is needed? What if, indeed, dropping a mere hint could lead to a gift-giving disaster, where the giver spends a chunk of cash on a product that differs from your object of desire in small, crucial detail? What if it's an iPad when you wanted an Android tablet? Or it has a touchscreen keyboard when you need a physical one?

In a world of increasing customization, where advertising industry pushes products "as unique as you are", it's getting harder to be satisfied by things that were supposed to please everyone in a certain demographic category: perfume, a journal with handcrafted covers, a DVD of a popular movie. I myself have been guilty of wanting rather idiosyncratic products: a wallet that would double as a handbag and a waistpack; an MP3 player that would record radio programs AND play audiobooks. Those things do exist but they are not easy to find. And if they lack one of these functions, I'd rather not have them at all than let them rot in the back of the closet.

So I made up a wishlist. Amazon.com makes it so easy. Not only it sells everything under the Sun, but if another online store has an item Amazon doesn't sell, you can still add it to your Amazon wishlist via a Firefox extension. (I haven't installed it and can't vouch for how it works.) Great -- you made it easy on your nearest-and-dearest. But how is it different from them handing you a wad of cash and telling you to go buy what you want? There is no surprise in it -- and in my old-fashioned notions, surprise is a key element of gift-giving. Perhaps technology that lets you have your wishes fulfilled so precisely could also help you restore the element of surprise. Maybe wishlists could have some kind of "random" feature, that would let the gift-giver pick a random element from category A, B, or C. But isn't this just building a layer of meaningless ritual to soften the ruthless practicality of the transaction? Isn't it akin to Orthodox Jews keeping hallway lights on all night on Sabbath, because they're not allowed to operate light switches? Or programming elevators to stop on every floor, because they're not allowed to push buttons? Or connecting two houses with a string so they could bring something to a neighbor's house, because then the two houses are considered to be "under one roof? (Is carrying stuff on Sabbath permitted under the same roof, but not outside? It boggles the mind too much to even seek logic in this.) Similarly with wishlists -- once they destroy the spirit of gift-giving, trying to reintroduce it would be just as artificial.

As they say on Twitter, #firstworldproblems.

Smartphone dilemmas

I often feel a need, even an urgency, for a smart phone. Usually it comes up in situations when it would be impolite, impractical or too conspicuous to break out a laptop (such as standing in line in a store -- can't type very well cradling the laptop with one arm, plus there's no WiFi), but a smartphone would be socially acceptable, especially as everyone else is playing with them. Those 5-10 minute snippets would be enough for me to write another paragraph of a story, a blog post, or a Facebook comment. But that would depend on a good keyboard. The matter of keyboard is what kept me in analysis-paralysis stage about a smart phone purchase. Ever since my AT&T Tilt, a Windows phone, died 2-3 years ago, I've been at loss of what to get next. Not because I miss it, but because I saw how unsatisfying a phone can be even when it looks great "on paper". It had a slide-out keyboard, but the keys were so tiny and what's worse, so closely spaced (there were no gaps between them), that typing was near impossible. If the keys are further apart (even if they are tiny), it is easier to type. Such is the keyboard on G2 (a.k.a the Google phone), which is high on my candidates list. But lately I also tried some touch screen keyboards, and they are not so bad, especially on phones with larger screens. But how would I know which of them is best for my purposes? Unlike most smart phone users, I intend to do quite a bit of writing on those keyboards. "Playing around" with a device does not give you a good idea what it's like to type on it for longer periods of time. So what is the solution? To buy one and discover that it doesn't work for me? Physical-vs-onscreen-keyboard is one of my dilemmas.

Another issue is, should I wait until mid-July when I'll be eligible for an upgrade at AT&T, my current carrier, which will enable me to buy a smartphone for a fraction of a price? Or should I buy a phone at full price? They can be damn expensive. Or should I switch to another carrier, such as T-Mobile, which is the only one that has G2? Then I could buy a G2 at a discount with a 2-year contract. But my monthly data plan would cost more than if I bought it at full price, without a contract. So after 2 years, buying it at full price would have paid off. And if I stay with AT&T, will it turn out that the only kind of phone I can get cheaply is a refurbished one? My Tilt was refurbished, and it died after 10 months, long past its warranty. So if another refurbished phone dies on me, I will need a new phone again, and won't qualify for an upgrade.

All of this gives me so much headache that I throw up my hands and give up.

Ambivalent towards Google Wave

Apropos my previous post): I got a Google Wave invite, but after logging in I haven't done anything with it. I don't know anyone I could "wave" at, and am not very motivated to find such people -- or to wave at them. It's hard enough just to keep up with email, Facebook and Twitter. I communicate with most of my real-life friends over Facebook, so Wave would be duplication of that functionality. If, however, I started "waving" at a completely different set of people, that would double the time I spend on my virtual social life, and I can't afford that. So I haven't been doing anything with Google Wave.

But I saw this great article, What problems does Google Wave solve? by Daniel Tenner, where he argues Google Wave is not so much an enhancement of your social life, as a corporate collaboration tool. This ties back to what Tristan Slominski said in his Innotech presentation (see my previous post). I can see how a Wave-like IDE plugin might enable programmers to work on shared pieces of code. Then again, many if not most companies would not let their code past corporate walls and firewalls. To route confidential information, or even source code, through third-party servers is considered unthinkable in most companies.

But if Google Wave is so great for collaboration, I can think of some uses for it. Perhaps it could help me and my friends to work on our fanzine more efficiently. (I spoke about our fanzine in this post.) Preparing each issue of the fanzine involves bouncing documents back-and-forth multiple times between authors, translators, copyeditors, and illustrators. So if Google Wave really works as advertised in Daniel Tenner's article, it could be useful for that. The only problem is I would have to convince my friends to use it. For all I know, they might feel the same kind of resistance to it as I do.

Innotech, or a digression about parking spots in downtown Austin

Innotech is an annual one-day technology conference in Austin, TX. This year it took place on October 29. Before I can speak about it, I should talk about getting there, and the most complicated part of getting there is finding a parking spot in downtown Austin. The process of searching for one also provides the greatest thrill you are likely to have at Innotech, if by thrill we mean a nervous rush. I used to think of it as my personal deficiency that finding parking in downtown Austin (or most other cities, for that matter) stresses me out so much. But here's an article "Why Speakers Earn $30,000 an Hour - Confessions of a Public Speaker"> by Scott Berkun, where he says finding the right address and parking in unfamiliar places is stressful! Ah, I feel so validated.

The parking garage at the Austin Convention Center was full at last year's Innotech; this year I didn't even bother to check it. And street parking often has 3 hour limit, and costs $1 an hour. A bit steep for the whole day. I thought I'd park in a public parking garage, but they seem to be on every corner when you're NOT looking for one, and damn hard to find when you are. Every garage appears to be reserved for employees of that particular office building, or if they are open to the public, they charge thereabouts of $20 a day. Steep.

Downtown Austin also has a scattering of paid parking lots; it's been a bit of a mystery to me why those parking lots aren't used by offices or restaurants attached to it. Maybe I haven't been paying attention, and there is nothing attached to them, or whatever it was has closed or was torn down. Often those parking lots don't have attendants. What they have instead are kind of vertical boxes with slots you should stuff money into. They take coins and bills. There is also a piece of metal hanging from a string that you should use to stuff coins and bills into the slot, should they get stuck just inside the slot.

Fortunately, parking at one of those lots costs only $5 a day, so it's a good deal. This year I stuffed my $5 bill into my slot without difficulty, but last year was a different matter. I didn't have enough bills, but I had a purse full of quarters back from the days when I used a paid laundromat at an apartment complex. I don't have much use for those quarters, so I stuffed 20 of them, one after another, into the slot, and I had to wiggle that metallic stuffer really hard. A guy who parked in the same lot at the same time, asked if I was going to Innotech. He was going there too. However, he didn't have enough $1-$5 bills or coins. So I fed quarters into his slot too (as I said, I don't have much use for them). He was thankful and said it must be true what they say about people being friendly in Austin. (He had moved here from California.)

Just as last year, I wondered how ironic it was that I had to use such an outmoded, awkward way to pay for parking before I could get to a conference on all things high-tech. Besides established tech companies, this conference also features selected Austin startups. I wished any of those startups that gave 8-minute talks on the Beta Summit panel had poured its energies into technologies that would let you pay for parking with your cell phone. That has to be possible, right? I've heard it's already possible in some parts of the world. And you don't necessarily have to install fancy, expensive parking meters that would interface with your phone directly. You could simply pay by a text-messaging the company that owns the parking lot.

But now that I thought about it, I'm not sure companies who own parking lots would want such a thing. They don't have to care about convenience for customers, because they don't have to compete for customers. Parking is very hard to find downtown. Space is limited and it won't grow magically. People will put up with inconvenience just to get a parking spot, because what choice do they have? So probably nothing will happen, unless it could be somehow demonstrated that companies would save expenses by adopting a more efficient way of collecting payments for parking.

From here I can seque to Innotech. That will be my next blog post.

SXSW: Dorkbot

You would think that everyone at an event with a name like Dorkbot would be fond of technology. Certainly the presence of the Robot Group could lead you to think that. Almost fooled me! I saw an interesting sculpture, and assumed it was interactive, like everything else there, only at that time it wasn't interacting with anything. I would have never found out what it signified, if I hadn't run into Silona, who was standing next to it and chatting with its creator, a guy of mediterranean looks and vaguely european accent. So I stopped to chat with the artist as well. He said he was actually against "these guys", meaning the robo-geeks. Not only his sculpture didn't have a techno-element, its whole point was to illustrate a thesis that "technology is a virus". Now that I've been told, I saw it really resembled a virus. The body of the sculpture was made out of wood, perhaps a tree branch. The head was studded with various spiky techno junk -- old light bulbs, thingamabobs and such. They were very definitely not going to blink. I wonder if this artist felt like a sole fundamentalist Christian protester at a gay parade, or what. :-)

Then I saw people doing something I've previously heard about, but haven't seen with my own eyes: playing iPhone like a flute. Here's a short video of an iPhone duet.



Overall, though, I didn't see many new exhibits at Dorkbot. By "new" I mean something I haven't seen at every event where Robot Group is present. That includes local science fiction conventions (e.g. ArmadilloCon), Maker Faire, and some SXSW events, such as Plutopia party. I even wondered if it will make any sense to go Maker Faire this year -- will I really see anything new? Not that I blame the Robot Group for not coming up with new things several times a month. Their interactive art pieces are still amazing when you see them for the first time, as I'm sure many out-of-town visitors to SXSW did. I just have a mixed blessing of living in a town where they frequently exhibit their creations.

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SXSW: prelude

I can finally summon some energy and time to blog, not just tweet, about South by Southwest. First of all, I didn't even go to SXSW, only to public events. That alone was enough to keep me very busy.

My SXSW experience started out with Austin Tech Happy Hour on Thursday. One of the startups featured at ATHH was Other Inbox. (I didn't find out what the other 2 were -- either there weren't any, or they were well hidden.) A woman at the Other Inbox table approached me with a pitch: "Do you need a cure for email overload?" I decided to play a devil's advocate for a while. I said I didn't really have email overload. That's not quite true -- I would feel very overloaded if I had to read the posts from all the email lists I am on, but I didn't go into detail. She replied that I am a lucky person. I said it's not a matter of luck: the only real cure for email overload is real-life management, not email management. In my opinion, the email you get is merely a reflection of responsibilities you take on. Don't take too many responsibilities, commit to only what you can accomplish, say "no" more often, unsubscribe from mailing lists that don't add much value to your life, and you won't be overwhelmed with email

I asked how can Other Inbox technology do all that to a person. They admitted it can't, but it can recognize which emails in your inbox come from real people versus mailing lists and such. Hmm. I was quite surprised one needs an application to do that -- I never had trouble telling real people's messages from mailing list messages. But you never know what kind of interesting difficulties some folks might have! :-)

I still think that no matter how you organize your inbox, if you have an average of x emails to read every day, it will take you the same amount of time. That's not to say that certain approaches to email don't help. Some people read it all first thing in the morning, others last thing at night, and so on -- to avoid being constantly interrupted by new emails. That's all good. But ultimately I think a cure for email overload is simply not to get too much of it.

Then I inadvertently crashed Austin Interactive Marketing Association meetup. I was told about it by one guy from Austin Linux Group, who said it was a "welcome out-of-towners to SXSW" happy hour. AIMA people at the registration desk have not heard of such a thing, though sure enough they took me for an out-of-towner. With my accent it was almost guaranteed. :-) (They asked me if I was from Sweden.) Anyway, I met with two people from Austin Linux Group, and we chatted for a bit. In their experience, Linux user groups are dying, at least in Austin. Or if not dying, they are going virtual. Some of them, including ALG, have strong email lists, but they don't feel much need to meet in person. Some people think it's a matter of there being so much good info about Linux on the internet, you can google anything, so you don't have to meet in person to ask for advice or help with hands-on installations, etc. But that's not what these two ALG people thought. The high likelihood that a typical newbie will run into serious problems with WiFi and thus lose interest in Linux, is one reason that Linux desktop is not gaining popularity. But there's also a more interesting reason. For many young people Linux is not in the running if they're considering an alternative to Windows. And not because they are Mac afficionados. A smartphone is a more likely competitor. Many people these days no longer want to carry around laptops when a smartphone is enough for their daily computing tasks. Thus, a phone becomes their primary computer.

Pictures from this Austin Tech Happy Hour and other SXSW events can be found in my photo gallery.

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Blellow beta review

I joined Blellow -- a web service that enables people to collaborate and share knowledge -- in its beta stage. So far I've only been on it one day and haven't done much. I've only tested its basic features. I'm writing this review so as to enter a drawing for an SXSW badge. :-)

Here are my notes on some of Blellow's features.

Meetups. I already have a suggestion for Meetups pages (though I realize meetups are probably not the most important feature of this site). I wish each event page had a message board so we could post questions to other members or the organizer. It would also be good to be able to contact the organizer of the event with a click of a button (or in any way at all, really. Right now there is no way.)

The "follow" thing. I clicked a "Follow" button under a person's name, but did not understand whether that meant I now was following her on Twitter, or if it was a special Blellow-specific "follow". I looked for help pages, but couldn't find any (another very important feature that's missing). My Twitter account (@elze) does not show I'm following her, so I guess a Blellow-follow is different from a Twitter-follow.

Groups. I was able to join groups without a problem.

Projects. I saw a list of other people's projects, but clicking on any of them produced the standard Ruby on Rails error "We're sorry, but something went wrong". Oh well -- it's beta.

How do I login? One thing that really baffled me: when I went to blellow.com home page on another computer, I could not find a "Log in" link. It was embarrassing. Made me feel really stupid. Yet there was truly no link. I eventually logged in again by following a beta invitation link that was emailed to me. I can only assume that the login is deliberately hidden from the general public, and will appear when Blellow is out of beta.

So far it seems the main activity one would do on this site is answer "What are you working on?" question. There is a lot more to do, such as participate in group discussions, but the "What are you working on?" page is the one you get immediately upon logging in. Well, this question certainly makes more sense to me than Twitter's "what are you doing?". It's good that the status area (which, at 300 characters, is much more roomy than Twitter's 140) allows you to attach a file and to check "I feel like sharing this" or "I'm looking for help" radio boxes. Obviously, though, you can't share your company's code in a public forum, so this is at best good for hobby or side projects. But, since I often get stuck on some Ruby on Rails problem (new as I am to this technology), I could see myself asking for help in this manner. It's good to have a framework where asking for help is built into the system, thus doesn't feel awkward.

One more thing -- maybe I'm just not thinking creatively, but I can't "unpack" Blellow's name. What exactly does it stand for? Blue and yellow? That's a stretch even considering the prevalence of green on its website. Does the "ellow" part signify it's kind of like yellow pages for freelancers? That would make some sense, though I think yellow pages is an outdated metaphor for a site whose goal is to promote collaboration and interactivity (as opposed to browsing a static list of people available for hire). In any case, I'm sorry to be blunt, but the name is a bit offputting. The "ble" part immediately evokes such associations as blech, bleary, or bleat. I think this site deserves better than that.

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Some specific uses of Evernote

I've been using Evernote for a while now, but mostly as an experiment to see if it really helps me remember things I would otherwise have hard time remembering, or organize loose, unstructured pieces of information I had hard time organizing and finding. In the last few months I've found two clear uses for it.

1. I take pictures of people's business cards and store them in Evernote. This lets me throw away the paper copy of the card. In the past I felt uncomfortable throwing away business cards, because "you never know when you'll need this person's info again". I tried storing those cards in business card holders, but those (a) fill up very quickly, (b) take up space, (c) it's not practical to carry them with you, which means if in the middle of your workday you suddenly thought you'd need someone's contact information, you'll have to wait until you get home to look it up, and then remember that you meant to do it. Most importantly, (d) paper cards are not really searchable the way computer information is. Since Evernote indexes the text in images, and your notes are accessible from anywhere via a web browser, storing them in Evernote is definitely a win.

At least in theory. In practice, I never needed to retrieve the info in 99% of business cards I collected over the years. So I can't really say Evernote made things easier for me in that respect. What it did is eliminated my pangs of guilt when throwing away the cards.

2. Looking up calorie content of restaurant dishes. When I eat out, calories are an important consideration in my choice of food. Most restaurants don't list the nutrition content of their dishes on their menu (one can only hope Austin will become like New York in that respect one day), but they often list it on their websites. I go to websites of eateries that appeal to me, and clip their nutritional information into Evernote. When I get to the restaurant, I can access it either through the web (if the restaurant has WiFi) or locally on my laptop in the Evernote for Windows application.

As always when I evaluate any kind of technology, I compare the ways I do things with it with the ways I would do them without it. Without Evernote, I would have to manually save those web pages to disk. That can get complicated if the information in a web page is contained in images (nutrition information is often presented as an image, like a label on packaged food). Also, without Evernote my notes would not get automatically synchronized, hence wouldn't be accessible from any computer I am at, including my smartphone.

Accessing the notes is not always convenient, though. If I want to look them up on my computer when I walk into a restaurant, I have to wait for the laptop to come out of hibernation. That takes a few minutes. Alternatively, I could access them from my mobile phone over a web browser. The mobile version of Evernote website is rather limited in its functionality. It doesn't show the notebook structure, it only shows the notes in the reverse chronological order. That's not very convenient, but the search function helps a lot, making it a decent, though imperfect, way to access the notes.

Large file uploads: frustrations and improvement ideas

I spent a futile day yesterday trying to upload videos to Facebook. Those videos were 200-300 MB in size, some as big as 500 MB. Uploading files this big over my home internet connection (we have cable from RoadRunner) takes 2-2.5 hours. It is rare for my internet connection to stay up this long without "burping" at least once. When that happens, the upload stalls. Facebook (or YouTube, for that matter) does not have functionality to let you resume a stalled download. You have to start over. And so it becomes a Sisyphean task, because the connection hardly ever stays up uninterrupted this long.

However, I had been able to upload those videos to my web site, because I used an FTP client that allows to resume interrupted uploads at the point of interruption. I really wish Facebook and YouTube had this capability.

If that's not possible, perhaps they could consider a functionality to let users pull videos from another website, instead of from their home computer. Since my videos are already stored on my website, I would like to be able to point Facebook to my website and "slurp" up the videos from there. That way the upload would not rely on my home internet connection.

I don't know if this presents any legal problems. Obviously it would be possible to upload copyrighted videos, but people already do that from their home computers, so this shouldn't be an objection.

Implementation ideas

Hmm, I gave some thought of what would be the best way to implement this idea. One way would be for me to write a script I would run in my account on my web host. It could login into Facebook or YouTube as me and post videos directly from my web host account, where I keep them. I have no idea if Facebook has an API for this (but it has some kind of API zillions third party applications use), so that's not beyond the realm of possibility. YouTube, of course, has not opened its API for applications (that I know of), so my program would have to be a screenscraper. That's not very reliable, since the HTML formatting any website site emits can change any time without notice. Besides, such an application could only push videos from my website, not from any other third-party websites. Anyone else who would want to use this application would have to install it in their own web hosting account (assuming they have one) and customize it for themselves. That's way too much hassle.

The there is the reverse approach: not to push videos from a third-party website to Facebook / Youtube, but to make those sites pull videos from other websites. As far as I can tell, Facebook's Post or Share function can only let me post a link to a video (or any other item), not to pull that video itself into Facebook. The problem with it is that my video is in a format (e.g. MOV) that's not necessarily accessible to all viewers if they don't have the right plug-ins, and it plays only in a special application, not in the browser itself. For that it would have to be converted into Flash, which is what Facebook, YouTube, and probably all video sharing websites do with the uploaded videos.

But Facebook API may be suitable for writing an application that would pull videos from third-party websites. I haven't looked into the Facebook API at all, but seeing how millions of people have used it for all imaginable applications, this may not be out of question. Of course, this does not begin to address the problem how to make YouTube (or any other video-sharing website) do the same.

I have to wonder if no one else has ever encountered a problem like mine.

Highlights from Maker Faire 2008 (October 18-19, Austin, Texas)

I won't blog much about Maker Faire this year, because the most interesting exhibits were the same as last year. This includes art cars and bicycles, and pedal-powered merry-go-rounds by Cyclecide. You can read about those wonders by accessing all posts with the label "Maker Faire".

I took two new pictures of the Cyclecide devices that weren't here last year (or at least I missed them): a merry-go-round of two hanging bicycles that may or may not be known by a more elegant name Bike Rodeo, and Axe Grinder that plays sounds resembling an electric guitar when a rider pedals it. I guess you can play some rudimentary music this way. For some reason there was a written sign forbidding Stairway to Heaven. ;-)

Last year I somehow also managed to miss the Life Size Mousetrap. It is a giant Rube Goldberg-style chain of devices inspired by the desktop Mousetrap game.

Here are some images of Life Size Mousetrap: 1: the mousetrap rests between demonstrations, 2: the curiously dressed people who run the mousetrap, 3: a one-woman band Esmeralda Strange, 4: the guy bring in the "cheese" for the mousetrap, 5: the World's Sexiest Mice come in, 6: the World's Sexiest Mice are bound with ropes, 7: volunteers hoist the 4000-pound black cube, 8: the 4000-pound black cube has been hoisted into the air, 9: a "mouse" collects donations after the show, 10: collection of donations, 11: a World's Sexiest Mouse and a Lizard Boy make a victory tour, 12: the desktop Mousetrap game that inspired the life-size one.

Here is my YouTube video of the Life Size Mousetrap in action.

A low-tech but cute gift for a science fiction fan in your life: journals with covers made of vintage science fiction paperbacks.

Technical and cute: Armadillo-shaped car.

Among the more offbeat: knit plarn bags. Plarn is "plastic yarn", made by cutting up plastic grocery bags into long strips.

There were robots and robot competitions too numerous to name. And microcontrolled devices were really popular at Maker Faire. In addition to homegrown makers making toys with microcontrollers, Microsoft had an entire pavillion devoted to promotion of their .NET Micro Framework. It gave people an opportunity to create their own applications right there at the Maker Faire. One could also enter a Microsoft contest that starts later this year. A Microsoft guy attending the booth told me that people like me, who have only developed web applications in .NET, are a prime audience for .NET Micro Framework. But... doesn't programming embedded devices requires knowledge of hardware? I asked, puzzled. No, said the guy, .NET Micro Framework abstracts it all away. According to him, all you need to do is to read the manufacturer's specifications that came with your microcontroller, so that you would know how its pins are numbered, and then you can write code directly to the pins. He encouraged me to enter the contest. Yet, as an application programmer, this is hardly my idea of fun. The conversation wasn't in vain, though: he gave me a Microsoft t-shirt. Now, would I dare to wear it, given how much I associate with free software people? What a conundrum.

A note on Evernote

This is just something I thought I'd share with Teh Wild Interwebs out there.

The short version: Evernote for Windows synchronization works only if Internet Explorer can access the web.

The long version

I use a pretty cool web service called Evernote. It has a desktop version too, for Windows and for Mac. To upload "notes" into it (such as images or text documents), I drag-and-drop them to the Evernote For Windows (the desktop application). At regular intervals Evernote synchronizes the local versions of those notes with the versions stored on Evernote Web. That way those notes are accessible to me anywhere over the web browser.

Sometime in the future I may blog about Evernote some more, once I figure out how to use it in ways that would totally enhance my life and scrub my kitchen sink. I've been doing that for the last few months a bit too sporadically, so I still haven't reached definite conclusions.

A couple of months ago for no good reason the Evernote desktop application stopped synchronizing with the web. Whenever I pressed the Synchronize button, I would get a message "Syncronization Failed". Not informative at all. Evernote.com support pages didn't reveal any clues, so I contacted their tech support. After a couple of back-and-forth emails they suggested I check whether I can access Evernote URL from Internet Explorer. Specifically from IE, not Firefox. So I did. And sure enough, IE said it was in Offline Mode. Once I unchecked the Offline Mode, Evernote synchronization started to work. So it turns out Evernote for Windows is dependent on IE. Who woulda thunk?

It should be mentioned that their tech support was fast and efficient in solving my problem. Very nice of them, considering that they are not making any money off of me (Evernote's basic service is free).

Another gadget snafu

This morning was wasted by my hare-brained last minute initiative to get an audiobook to listen to during my trip to Fencon. Not long ago I bought an iVO Sound MP3 player. No, I haven't heard of this brand either. As it turned out, this proved to be the problem.

I bought an download of an audio recording of Robert Charles Wilson's "Axis" from Audible.com. When you buy a recording from them, it does not come in a clean, neat MP3 file. No, you have to install an Audible Manager software on your computer. Then you use the manager to transfer the recording, which is in a proprietary format, to your MP3 player. Before you begin that process, the Audible Manager asks what kind of MP3 player you have. Lo and behold -- in the list of 20-30 players, there was no iVO Sound! So I called their customer service. After putting me on hold, the guy determined this player was not compatible with Audible format, because it lacks some kind of universal plugin.

I asked him for a refund. (Those audiobooks are not that cheap.) The customer service guy tried to remind me that I have other ways to listen to audiobooks, such as on my computer. I told him I bought this recording specifically for listening on a trip, so playing it on a computer is not an option. After putting me on hold (probably to confer with a manager) he said they'll issue me a refund. It should show up in my account in 24 hours. We'll see if it does or not.

What a waste of time. It all could have been avoided if Audible.com listed the MP3 players they support on their website! How hard can that be?

When I come back from Dallas, I may actually return the iVO Sound to the store and buy a more common brand of MP3 player. The iVO is decent, but not the easiest player to operate. Its user interface is kind of screwy.

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Ambient awareness, digital ESP

There is a great article by Clive Thompson in New York Times magazine:

Brave New World of Digital Intimacy

that explains the appeal of Twitter. Like many people, when I first heard of Twitter, and even long after I signed up for it, I thought it was pretty useless. At the very least it seemed useless for verbose bloggers like me, who don't like to post mere facts or sound-bite opinions without context or analysis (and you can't provide much analysis in 140 characters). But, as Clive Thompson says, the constant stream of friends' tweets provides an "ambient awareness" of daily rhythms of friends' lives. To quote the article, "It is very much like being physically near someone and picking up on his mood through the little things he does -- body language, sighs, stray comments -- out of the corner of your eye."

Each day, Haley logged on to his account, and his friends' updates would appear as a long page of one- or two-line notes. He would check and recheck the account several times a day, or even several times an hour. The updates were indeed pretty banal. One friend would post about starting to feel sick; one posted random thoughts like "I really hate it when people clip their nails on the bus"; another Twittered whenever she made a sandwich -- and she made a sandwich every day. Each so-called tweet was so brief as to be virtually meaningless.

But as the days went by, something changed. Haley discovered that he was beginning to sense the rhythms of his friends' lives in a way he never had before. When one friend got sick with a virulent fever, he could tell by her Twitter updates when she was getting worse and the instant she finally turned the corner. He could see when friends were heading into hellish days at work or when they'd scored a big success. Even the daily catalog of sandwiches became oddly mesmerizing, a sort of metronomic click that he grew accustomed to seeing pop up in the middle of each day.

This is the paradox of ambient awareness. Each little update -- each individual bit of social information -- is insignificant on its own, even supremely mundane. But taken together, over time, the little snippets coalesce into a surprisingly sophisticated portrait of your friends' and family members' lives, like thousands of dots making a pointillist painting. This was never before possible, because in the real world, no friend would bother to call you up and detail the sandwiches she was eating. The ambient information becomes like "a type of E.S.P.," as Haley described it to me, an invisible dimension floating over everyday life.

I'm beginning to feel that way about it too. And it's good for those fleeting observations that are not meaty enough to warrant a blog post. I might even change my mind about whether such observations do not reveal someone's personality better than well-thought-out blog posts. (If anyone wonders, my Twitter ID is elze.)