cheesebikini?

[ UPDATE: Our launch period at A’Cuppa Tea is over. Keep an eye on placesite.com for news of upcoming launches. ]

We’ll launch Project PlaceSite this Tuesday
at A’Cuppa Tea cafe and teahouse in Berkeley.

Full details: PlaceSite.com.

Come out and join in!

UPDATE: A NIST employee has explained the service described below.

This just in from fellow SIMian Matthew Rothenberg:]

Here’s something strange to explore. A guy I know recently stumbled across this. time.nist.gov is a standard NTP server, used to syncrhonize clocks on your computer to the govt’s atomic clock.
However, it also seems to have another strange service running in port 78 and 79. Telnet in, and hit enter after connection is established, and you get this:

——————————————————-
dream% telnet time.nist.gov 78
Trying 192.43.244.18…
Connected to time.nist.gov.
Escape character is ‘^]’.

P: P: My name is Patsy: and my husband’s name is Paul:
We come from Pittsburgh: and we sell Peaches::
880-223-821-266-590-908-785
$ 0 875 3000 8 1 0 0
Connection closed by foreign host.
——————————————————-

The names, city, and food change each time, but they always start with the same letter. The numbers on the bottom appear to be doing some incrementing based on time, but the pattern hasnt been figured out yet.
They are not synchronized across ports.

Secret government broadcasts about the JFK conspiracy? The first step of SkyNET becoming self-aware? An equivalent to a Numbers Station? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numbers_station) WHO KNOWS! Let’s get some smart SIMS minds working on deciphering this, or at least propose some wacky theories.

-mroth

Help supercharge wi-fi public places in the San Francisco Bay Area!

For my final Masters project at U.C. Berkeley I’m exploring new ways in which online social interaction can move into the offline (“real”) world — and learning what online services can add to face-to-face conversation.

An important part of our research is to learn how people here interact and use wi-fi (wireless Internet) in public and semi-public places.

If you’re 18 or older, live or work in the Bay Area and use wi-fi, you can help us immensely by taking a few minutes to answer the following brief survey. Your responses will be kept completely anonymous.

Here’s the survey: http://www.seansavage.com/survey

We need all the responses we can get, so it would be great if you could spread the word by pointing your Bay Area friends to the survey.

This summer we’ll post a report about what we learn; I’ll link to the report from here when it’s available.

Thanks!

People who attended the 2005 O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference: Here are transcripts of IRC chatroom conversation that took place during the conference, in raw Colloquy format. (These are partial transcripts, but the chatter that accompanied your talk might just be here.)

3/15:     #etech channel (490K)     #joiito channel (300K)

3/16 to end:     #etech channel (1 Mb)     #joiito channel (340K)

Imagine opening your laptop computer in a neighborhood wireless Internet caf� and firing up a Web browser. Instead of your usual startup page, imagine this on your screen:

That’s the core of Project PlaceSite. It introduces a new way of using wireless networks — to create a local information service by, for and about people who are in the same caf� together.

We’re rolling it out in Berkeley in a few weeks. Details: www.placesite.com.

Please let us know what you think. And come out and take part!

Most of the buzz about mobile phone video strikes me as pathetic. Who wants to watch a feature-length movie on a 1-inch screen? This is yet another example of giant corporations losing touch with their customers and trying to force old media paradigms onto new media.

My classmate Patrick Riley is building an application for video on mobile phones that actually makes sense. Why not let fans view instant replays on demand as they watch a sporting event live, in the stadium?

Bravo Patrick, mREPLAY is a great idea. It uses mobile phone video to do something suited to mobile phones, something useful that other forms of video can’t do.

At least 300 people showed up tonight to see David Byrne give a Powerpoint presentation about Powerpoint. [Free video of the talk may be available soon.]

What luck it was to happen upon one of the best seats in the front row. As Byrne was introduced he sat on the stage, about 5 feet away. The only camera I had was the crappy one on my mobile phone but I couldn’t resist a few shots.

Along with David Bowie and a few others, Byrne got me through my childhood during the 1980s. As a kid I loved his otherworldly tunes and that deeper, darker, subtler vibe that set him apart from the shrill, candy-colored MTV culture that overtook pop music in those days.

I can’t agree with all his Powerpoint points, but it’s fascinating to consider how he views this tool. The user interface geek in me is dying to watch him work with it firsthand in his natural habitat.

I wanted to step up and hug him when he said that a Powerpoint presentation is just part of a larger “performance” which includes not just the person speaking but the audience, the room, the surroundings. Software designers, even self-professed user interface and needs analysis experts, can learn a lot from Byrne. The point seems like an obvious one, but we’re still stuck in “user-centered” tunnel vision: we design for a prototypical single person staring at a single computer, as if that person and computer operate in a vacuum. This approach can be worse than meaningless if you ignore the surrounding context. This tunnel vision can be downright dangerous as we design software that moves beyond the desktop and into public spaces.

Byrne presented another intriguing argument: that Powerpoint’s constraints, particularly its “low resolution,” can be a benefit. (He meant “resolution” in the way the Powerpoint-loathing Edward Tufte uses the word: in terms of graphics quality but also in more general terms of how much information standard Powerpoint templates allow you to convey to an audience at a time). Simpler, lower-resolution images force the audience to become involved more in the presentation because they have to actively connect the dots.

This brought to mind a couple of analogies. Think of how books and radio can seem richer than television — the lack of visuals forces the audience to actively imagine the action, to envision many details that aren’t explicitly described.

Scott McCloud pointed out in his book Understanding Comics that many protagonists in popular comics are drawn in a simpler, less detailed style than other characters and their surroundings. Think of Tintin or Orphan Annie. McCloud theorizes that readers can more easily sympathize with minimally-drawn heroes because they can more easily project themselves into those characters. The more details you give a character, the less that character shares in common with a given reader. On the other hand, the story can be more compelling if faraway lands that the character visits, and other characters that the character encounters, especially bad guys, are drawn in a detailed manner — because intricate detail in itself can make those thing seem more foreign, interesting or even frightening.

Does this apply to Powerpoint? I don’t think so… I still hate Powerpoint and the agonizingly dull, ubiquitously unimaginative corporate communication style that its use has embodied and encouraged since Microsoft purchased the software and took over its development and marketing. The world needs more elegant and customizable presentation tools, which can be made just as easy to use for non-techies as Powerpoint. Constraints can be a blessing, but the wrong sorts of constraints can be a curse.

Anyway, it’s fun to watch Byrne turn the Powerpoint tradition on its head.

Congratulations to my classmate Carolyn Cracraft for making it to the Jeopardy! Tournament of Champions.

She won the national Jeopardy! College Tournament a few years ago and tomorrow night she will kick ass again in some L.A. studio. Unfortunately the show won’t air for a couple of months, but we’ll still be rooting for you Carolyn.

(As far as I know, she’s my only friend who can read hieroglyphics, and I wouldn’t dare play her at Trivial Pursuit.)

Lars Holmquist spoke of “PacMan Must Die” at Intel’s Berkeley research lablet Friday.

This is an innovative game developed by Holmquist’s students at the Viktoria Institute’s Future Applications Lab in G–teborg, Sweden. It’s a tweaked-out multi-player version of the classic game Pac Man, with two major twists.

The first twist: characters’ roles are switched. Players control ghosts invading Pac Man’s home turf, trying to recover the dots stolen by Pac Man in the original game.

The second twist: the playing field is distributed across two or more devices held by multiple players.

       

To finish a level, a player must eat dots not just on her own screen, but on the other players’ screens as well. If you send your ghost through a doorway on the bottom of your screen, the ghost disappears from your device. It enters another player’s screen through a corresponding doorway. The game allows up to five players to join in on the distributed fun.

Players have to look over at one another’s screens to see where to guide their characters. Physical strategy and cooperation become central to this virtual game. Opportunities for new sorts of pranks arise — for instance, you can physically run off with your friend’s ghost.

I love this; it’s another way of combining video game fun with the fun of play in real-world places.

This is the sort of rich, simple innovation that I hoped would emerge with the wi-fi enabled Nintendo DS portable video game system. But Nintendo seems to have locked down DS development, limiting it to internal and professional developers. Such professionals have years of experience and training in building traditional games. This background cripples their ability to innovate, to see beyond the constraints of traditional game platforms.

Nintendo, learn from eBay and Google and Amazon: let customers and outsiders build value for you. Open your platform and let it thrive.

One of my favorite classes this semester is Larry Downes’ “Strategic Planning During Technology Revolutions.”

Among other things, Professor Downes teaches us to apply lessons from the psychology of death to firms and industries that face dramatic change.

In her 1969 book On Death and Dying, psychiatrist Elizabeth Kubler-Ross introduced the “five stages of grief” model to explain the emotions that dying people and their families often experience: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Patients diagnosed with terminal diseases often find transition between these stages quite painful, and many never reach the acceptance stage.

The behavior of corporations that face disruptive change often seems to fit this model. (For more details and great examples of this, see chapter 8 of Downes’ The Strategy Machine). Too many of these organizations have tremendous difficulty accepting the fact that “business as usual” is no longer possible. Too many executives find acceptance of change excruciating and avoid facing it for as long as they can.

I’ve been thinking that nowadays, when so many industries are grappling with disruptive change, there might be a good bit of money to be made by selling morphine to megacorporate malingerers. This morphine can take the form of products and services that don’t have any real promise of profitability, but that provide some comfort to frustrated executives in the form of soothing illusions. Indulgence in such fiction can make it easier to languish in the stages of denial and bargaining.

Napster founder Shawn Kevorkian Fanning is way ahead of me on this; his new business venture makes him the music industry’s primary Morphine supplier. And its name even sounds like a drug: SNOCAP!

The SNOCAP recipe: