Twitter, however, seems to be the perfect place for those one-liners that people feel free to ignore if they’re busy.

You can follow my “look at it if you’re bored” stream at allartburns.

Technorati Tags: quickie, surfing, twitter

Art That Learns, a class on machine learning and art installations taught by Osman Khan and Carlos Guestrin

Interactive Technologies and Live Performance, a class on technology and performance taught by Golan Levin and Matt Grey.

mTID research, wherein I reveal the invisible.

My fourth studio is an independent study on drawing, I’ll probably scan/post some stuff from that here.

More soon.

Technorati Tags: design, mtid, school

I switched to feedburner for my RSS feed since it can do things like include my del. bookmarks and the like.

Initially, I just have it set to pull my del tags once a day.

If it you notice any problems, please let me know.

Technorati Tags: feedburner

I’m the first to admit that I have a problem with constructive criticism. I’ve never been terribly good at gently nudging someone onto the right path with kind words; I’m much better at beating them with a stick when they go down the wrong path. I apologize in advance if this comes off as harsh, it’s really not my intent. I want us to be brilliant, I don’t want to score points by pointing out where people are screwing up.

I recently started reading RISD’s latest blog (yes, they have more than one), “RISD by Design” and my response was something like

“Oh yeah? Well we just updated our website design after 10 years! So there! Ok, well, we updated some of it, like the main page and a couple other things and a lot of the departments and the search engine still have the old style and there’s not much visual coherence across the campus other than.. uh… so, how about those Stillers?”

That’s not much of a response. As a matter of fact, it made me angry thinking about it.

How is it that a university doing leading-edge research in pretty much every domain including Internet technology (ex: CAPCHA) doesn’t have any sort of, “Hey, look at us!” blog or journal at the university level?

Sure, there are some people working on departmental and project blogging, but that’s a local level. Peter Lee has CSDiary that covers the activities of the CS department and Golan Levin has a personal blog where he talks about issues related to teaching and being a good student. CMU Design has a Twitter feed, which is really great for students in Design, and a couple of classes have had per-class blogs.

But where’s our flagship blog, authored by someone from the President’s Office or at least someone in PR? Why were we not one of the first universities to have a major public blog/journal?

Thinking about past organizations I’ve been in, some possible answers that come to mind:

• We don’t have to. Admission to Carnegie Mellon is highly competitive, anyone we want as a student or donor already knows who we are. There’s simply nothing to be gained from investing in some sort of Maeda-like showcase blog.
• It’s not a high enough priority. Various senior people think it’s important, but we have limited resources and can’t do everything we want to do.
• It’s a bad idea. For whatever reason, enough people at senior levels are simply opposed to the idea of having a presence in blog-space that they can block anyone else who wants to make progress in this area.
• We don’t think the contemporary online world is relevant to the education process.

I’d like to think it’s the first reason (“we’re so great we don’t need to advertise”) but on my grumpy days I suspect that it’s one of the latter.

Here’s why.

Last semester I helped with a class called Making Things Interactive. If you go look at the class blog, you might notice that it’s hosted at wordpress.com, not at cmu.edu.

Why? Well, we don’t have any blogging infrastructure at CMU. Nada. Zip.

Individual people have individual accounts on the campus network and some folk have installed blogging software on their accounts. However, the bandwidth limitations are pretty tight as my fellow student Jennifer Gooch found out the hard way. When her project One Cold Hand got national press, her site got hammered and was quickly shut down by IT because it was using too much bandwidth. It took several days to convince people within the system to change her bandwidth limits, during which she ended up moving her site to another hosting facility.

Think about that a second or two: We were getting really good PR on a national level for a student’s work and that student’s account got locked down because too many people found her work interesting.

Of course, many groups/departments have their own computing resources and self-host their servers, but by doing this they’re duplicating effort and wasting resources. In my program there’s a tiny little *nix box sitting in someone’s office running yet-another install of gentoo/apache and some custom CMS software. Why can’t we just fill out some sort of web requisition form and get a wordpress install up and running on a hosted campus facility? I host several sites (including this one) at dreamhost, so I can honestly say that it’s pretty trivial to set up a domain and get blogging software up and running if the basic infrastructure is in place.

In the short term, what we need is a blogfarm running WordPress. We don’t need CS to go into NIH mode and create yet another parallel-but-different-solution, we just need a bunch of blades in racks running wordpress and some support from IT in the keeping-it-running-and-updated department. Even if the Powers That Be don’t get blogging, at least give those of us who do the infrastructure we need to set up and run blogs on local, supported servers.

Once the infrastructure is up and running and people are using it and we start getting attention, we can more easily convince the Powers That Be why blogging/journaling is so important to the future success of our university. If a mere art school like RISD (sorry, cheap shot, I know :-) has a public face in the online world, why doesn’t a cutting edge, interdisciplinary research university like Carnegie Mellon have a public face that’s an order of magnitude better?

I have negative free time to help with this sort of thing, but my program could really use a locally hosted blog/website where we could show off all of our work. Right now I’m looking at setting up something on ning to promote our program and asking my advisor to spend a few $ to make the ads go away; I’m more than happy to help someone who has the time/energy to lead this charge.

So. Time to “shut up and skate”, as we said back in the day. I don’t have time to help build a ramp, but I’m happy to help sweep leaves out of an empty pool.

Technorati Tags: blogs, cmu, risd

Technorati Tags: physical computing

Yes, that John Maeda and that RISD.

So, pretty cool, huh?

What’s even cooler, is that Maeda is blogging regularly about RISD-related stuff at “Our RISD“.

I’ve never met Maeda and I’ve little desire to go to RISD at the moment, but I appreciate the opportunity to reading the thoughts of someone whose work I respect and admire and get a behind-the-scenes look at a major design school.

Technorati Tags: academia, blogging, maeda, risd

Visually, this is a pretty boring journal. But journals are about words, and because I stay focused on words, it’s easy to read this journal on just about any device, from my XV6800 phone to a high-end PC. (Just checked and it looks pretty good in lynx as well.) I spent very little time making it simple, I just started ripping things out if I couldn’t justify their existence. So, there’s no autobiographical photo, no fancy widgets showing what music I’m listening to right now, no countdown-until-W-is-gone clock, do dynamic code generation, Flash animations, or any of that. True, if I were a freelance graphic — sorry, “communication” — designer I’d probably put a lot of effort into having a rockin’ web site that shows off my chops. But I’m not, so I don’t.

So, back to simple. If you’ve ever ordered anything from a supplier like Grainger or DigiKey, you know what a nightmare it can be to find what you’re looking for. For awhile now, McMaster Carr has gotten more of my business than, say, MSC Direct, simply because the McMaster Carr site is so damn simple and easy to use.

McMaster Carr is great for the hardware I’ve needed for some metalworking probjects, but in the past year or two I’ve also gotten back into tangible computing (aka “making electric things with embedded CPUs”). The work I’m doing now is mostly based on the Arduino, an AVR-based single board computer. The Arudino does for physical computing what high level languages did for programming — open the field up to more people by simplifying the interface and the programming environment. Yea for simplicity!

Getting back into tangible computing also means dealing with the dreaded mail order supply titans like DigiKey, Newark, Mouser, Allied, etc. Typically when you’re ordering parts, you make a list of what you need, then try and find each part in each catalog, get the price, sum everything up, figure out shipping, then go find out if the parts are actually in stock. It’s an hour or two with a spreadsheet and often both the online search engine and the printed catalog.

Octopart changes everything. It’s a search engine for electronics, but more importantly, it pulls data from all the major vendors and shows you — in real time — pricing and availability. You can make a parts list, then easily compare prices and availability across most major vendors then build individual shopping carts and place orders.

It’s an amazingly useful resource, but most importantly, it’s simple. Simple, simple, simple. There are no garish colors, no image maps, no egregious animations, no masses of corporate logos showing everyone they are affiliated with. Just plain text, thumbnails for search results to help identify parts, and navigation that doesn’t require FPS-developed reflexes.

Go play with it — even if you don’t know anything about electronics — and see what you think. If you think you’re ignorant of things electronic, then search for something you’ve used or heard of, like “9v battery” or “transistor” and just poke around a bit. By keeping things simple, they’ve taken something very complex — component selection and ordering — and made it a much easier task.

Technorati Tags: design, octopart, simplicity

Ishkur’s Guide to Electronic Music. A collection of graphs showing the history and interconnections between various genres of electronic music. Lots of samples and written descriptions to go along with the graphs.

Processing, a new environment from Ben Fry and Casey Reas. Processing makes it easy for non-programmer types to do simple visualizations of data. Processing built on Java, and programmer types can easily take advantage of the full Java environment if they wish.

A Timeline of Timelines, from Cabinet Magazine.

James Victore will speak at Carnegie Mellon on Monday, March 19 @ 7:00 pm. His topic:
“Graphic Design Just Isn’t That Interesting: A discussion of the role of the designer in relation to ethics, morals and selling crap to people who don’t need it.” Margaret Morrison Breed Hall, Carnegie Mellon, Pittsburgh, PA.

Visual Complexity, a blog about complex visualizations of data.

Technorati Tags: cartography, design, idm, visualization

(school update coming soon, I promise.)

Technorati Tags: sake

“Considering that a fully sorted nationally-competitive DSR car, whether from Stohr, Radical, Merloy or someone else, would set me back around $60-65K I’m certainly not saving any money by building my own. To me this project is a form of self-expression and a way to learn things that can only be learned by doing. I look at it as an alternative to getting a Masters degree in vehicle design – about the same time, about the same money but a whole lot more fun and I get a car for graduation :)”

In short, he’s building a ultra-light AWD race car of his own design from scratch — think 4/3 scale shifter cart or D Sports Racing car if you follow those. More importantly, he’s documenting his project along the way, including sketches, plans, decision making process, the cost of parts and so on. I’m impressed when someone tries something very difficult and documents it along the way, showing their thinking, their mistakes, their fixes and how they got to the end result.

He’s in the construction phase now but first check out
three years of designing the DP1.

Technorati Tags: design, journal, fabrication, shifter cart, d sports

An invasive species blog. What more do you need to know?

Not just a crayon sharpener, not just an electric crayon sharpener, but a X-Acto brand electric crayon sharpener.

Do-it-yourself 3D printer made from a glue gun and Meccanno.

Twenty-Five Years of Post-It Notes

Technorati: DIY | industrial design | pizza | weird

For years now I’ve worked at a series of businesses that had great products or great ideas for products that “burned down, fell over and sank into the swamp”. I’ve seen a lot of mistakes made that I hope to avoid when i start my business, but I haven’t had much in the way of positive role models, if you know what I mean.

Thanks to Laura Lemay I stumbled upon this idea of Smarter Conversations which got me interested enough to go read about the Hughtrain.

Unfortunately, I really need to be either doing homework or sleeping off the flu, not reading business theory.

I’m only taking two classes this semester but I seem to have very little free time compared to last semester when I also took two classes. I have “Intro to Drawing” to thank — it’s a studio class and I’m starting to remember how much of my first stint in college was spent in studio classes instead of, say, sleeping.

Studio classes are huge time sinks for a number of reasons: in-class hours are usually twice that of a lecture class (six hours a week instead of three), attendence is mandantory (miss two classes and you fail), and there’s a homework assignment every week (between three and six hours of work). That’s 9-12 hours a week for a single class before the 2-3 hours a week I spend getting to/from class and finding parking. Oh, and I suck at drawing, so I actually have to focus during class and do a rough draft of the homework assignment before doing it for real. My other class is a once-a-week Japanese class. It’s not for a grade, but I do want to learn to speak, read, and write Japanese, so I have to put in a few minutes every day on this just to keep up.

As if all this isn’t enough, I’m also putting together a portfolio for my application to the Industrial Design school of a Big Name Private University with a reputation for turning out multidisciplinary designers. They get hundreds of applicants every year but only admit ~35 students. Because I already have a degree, they’re allowing me to apply as a transfer student and possibly skip some classes, but I have to present a portfolio to show what I can do. I managed to get a brief interview with the head of the program a few months ago who encouraged me to apply, so I figure I have at least have a slim chance of getting in.

Paying for school is an entirely different issue. I can work at my current job and go part-time at the local public school and get a degree at night, but most private schools I’ve looked at frown upon part-time students. I didn’t do well in the boom, so I don’t have the cash lying about to take a few years off work and go to school full-time while paying $30K or so a year for tuition. (A full four years will cost as much as a nice house in most parts of the country. There’s something to make your head hurt.) Working and going to school, it’ll take me four to six years to get the degree, longer than I’d like, but better than not getting it at all. If I get into the private university I’m applying to, I guess it’s time to look at $120K in student loans and sponging off my wife for a few years.

For now it’s back to the portfolio preparation, the drawing exercises, and the not sleeping as much as I’d like. Until I get a chance to catch up on all sorts of things (like the experience of buying a Harley, fountain pen fetishism, dorking around with pencils, being way too concerned about my new leather jacket, trying to get proper luggage on my bike, and a bunch of other things I want to write up), you might find some of these interesting:

Worldchanging, http://www.worldchanging.com, an excellent site collecting information and thoughts about the future and how we can survive long enough to enjoy the future.

IDFuel, http://www.idfuel.com, lots of good words on industrial design that get my mind working.

Extraordinary Ordinary Guy in Japan, http://xogij.blogs.com/xogij, a Japanese guy’s thoughts on life in Japan with lots of great photography.

Core77, http://www.core77.com, probably the best all-around industrial design website and news source.

Technorati: college | industrial design | Japan