Blog Posts

quest for quicksand

sometimes it feels like it’s difficult to keep my head above the quicksand. I can relate to this…

Stranger Danger

TRON ASCII

I always thought TRON (1982) would have been cooler if rendered in ASCII, since that’s what terminals of the era could do. With that, I bring you the light cycle race from TRON, processed as ASCII art:

I rewatched the original the other day. Holy crap, were glasses big in 1982.

Pitfall Web 2.0

I just put together a quick prototype of the old school Pitfall game, as a web app. Haven’t finished debugging the keyboard controls yet…

Mythinformation

>Of course, the same society now said to be undergoing a computer revolution has long since gotten used to “revolutions” in laundry detergents, underarm deodorants, floor waxes, and other consumer products. Exhausted in Madison Avenue advertising slogans, the image had lost much of its punch.

• Langdon Winner. The Whale and the Reactor. 1986.

Reform and revolution

>“Appropriate technologists were unwilling to face squarely the facts of organized social and political power. Fascinated by dreams of a spontaneous, grass-roots revolution, they avoided any deep-seeking analysis of the institutions that control the direction of technological and economic development. In this happy self-confidence they did not bother to devise strategies that might have helped them overcome obvious sources of resistance. The same judgement that Marx and Engels passed on the utopians of the nineteenth century apply just as well to the appropriate technologists of the 1970s: they were lovely visionaries, naive about the forces that contained them.”

next stop

This is going to make those days when I need to take transit so much easier. NEXTSTOP, from MediumRare and Calgary Transit.

Pulls current data from Calgary Transit to list the next several buses at a given stop. Much better than having to rely on snapshots of schedules stored as notes (or printed/scrawled on slips of paper) or with flaky and cluttered web interfaces.

mad man

nobody blogs like the bava. nobody!

bikes in copenhagen

This video, via PlanetBike, of bicycle riders in Copenhagen makes my head spin a little. Sooo many bikes, and no Hummers trying to flatten them.

What strikes me, after the sheer number of cyclists, and how they all move so wonderfully together, is that the people riding the bikes are just regular people. No hardcore spandex mercenary riders on carbon fiber racing bikes. No mountain bikes bopping all over the place. Normal people. Riding utility bikes. And lots of them.

global twittererings

frog design built a really cool realtime twitter geolocation visualizing app, that builds a heatmap of locations for tweets posted as it monitors. Here’s the heatmap after letting it run for an hour, on a Wednesday, around noon MST:

I’d expected Canada to be much more highly represented - my perception of using Twitter is that it’s largely US/Canada/UK centric. Turns out, the US is responsible for about a third of all tweets, followed by the UK, Indonesia (? REALLY! Indonesia. I know!), Netherlands and Mexico. Canada is down in 9th place. Surprising.

I'm with Jim (and a bunch of others)

I’m a serial open course dropout, but Jim’s course on digital storytelling sounds like too much fun to pass up. Is it really a course? Sounds like more of an experience. A festival.

Whatever it is, I’m in. It starts January 10, 2011 (despite the claim on the course website that we must travel back in time to start the course). I really don’t know what to expect as part of this - I’m sure it’s going to be noisy, messy, chaotic, interesting and fun. What more could a person ask for? I know I’m way out of my league - seeing the work that the previous (and current) students have produced. gulp

car crash - peak car culture?

car culture is awesome, and so completely enriching to society as a whole.

via @bikebikeYYC