Cafe Bucky

For many years, I didn’t believe in doing New Years Resolutions. I figured that it was a good idea to just resolve to change things as one went along. That’s still a good idea, but I do see the symbolism of the clean slate of a New Year.  Doubly so for a new decade.

And I also say Good Riddance to the decade of 2000-2009. There were lots of ups to it (I love you Kimmy, and you have filled our time together with so much love, energy, and grace — I want you in all of our decades to come :). There have also been way too many downs, and I’ve learned and just want to move on.

I’m blogging some of my resolutions, so that I put a little pressure on myself to get them done … I’m only listing things that I think I can really control. Stuff that involves other people or that gets a bit personal doesn’t get penned here.

Ze Resolutions

• Wake Up when the alarm goes off
  (hitting the snooze button on my iPod is way too convenient — I’m going to move it so that I have to get out of bed)
• Lose 20 pounds by June 1st
  (I refuse to go any bigger than 34×30 Levis 550’s — I am drawing my line in the sand!  task #1: buy a scale)
• Throw stuff out so that I dont need a storage area any longer

Tech & Creative Stuff

• Average one creative output per day (such as a picture, video, blog post, tweet)
• Make a list of all of the web sites I am registered with
  (and get rid of ones I am not likely to ever use again)
• Get daniel.org redone as a proper personal domain by February 1st (themed, pages for software and writings)
• actively use my lynda.com and safarionline.com accounts to keep learning (complete at least one video course per month, and read at least one tech book per month)
• Get slide scanner working and scan at least 50 slides per month
• learn final cut express and photoshop
• learn Ruby on Rails
• resurrect FlexiPhoto and implement ThereThen addresses so that photos can be aliased by time and location  — do this by March 1st.
• No more SL scripting unless there is a financial reason to do so
  (I feel like SL has been a huge detour — I am glad that I am very good LSL scripter and have done some innovative work, but I could have been using that time to do things that would have done more to pay the bills)

There are a ton of other things I could write as Resolutions, such as Get A Job or Travel To Europe, but anything that involves other people isn’t something I can completely control.   (I do think I will be working and traveling, but it’s not like 2000, where I had the resources to just grab tickets and friends and take off)

[update -- January 14, 2010]

So far, I am paying attention to some resolutions pretty well …

Kimmy – We’re not together any more.  I do wish her the best.

Waking up – Am doing much better at this!

Weight – have ordered a scale so that I know where I am at.  Lots of little tweaks, such as making 2 scrambled eggs instead of 3.

Creative output – yep!  Doing it.

Lynda.com and Safarionline – yep! Doing it.

Second Life – yep!  I have really pulled back and I dont script there any more.

The thought that sums up my mood lately is:

“I cant get the last few years back, but I can sure make the next few count.”

[update -- January 29, 2010]

Got a scale – doing daily weigh-ins, not gaining :)

Got a VPS (Virtual Private Server) via Slicehost.com and am configuring it

[update - June 1, 2010]

Averaging a creative output a day?  Close to it, if I count mix sessions I put up on Dropbox.

Slicehost working out well.  It hosts javajoint.com and my therethen* domains.

[this is a sketch about how I see a couple of trends merging to the point where something very new is created]

We are going to hit a point of blurring.  It’ll be great …

I’ve paid attention to Virtual Reality (mostly in the form of SecondLife, but a little exposure to X3D as well) for a few years now, and am about to jump into Augmented Reality …

But I can look ahead and see what’s really going to happen in a few years.  We’re going to get a lot of mixed scenarios where it’s not so clear how to classify what happens on screen:

• Virtual Reality is about synthetic worlds, where content from the real world is brought in.   A couple of examples I have personally worked on would be: bringing photos and video into SecondLife  – sometimes static, sometimes live.  I also have personally worked on objects for Vivaty that bring audio, video, and images from Flickr into a Virtual Space.
• Augmented Reality is about the Real World (as in realtime video), with data from the internet and local storage dynamically overlaid.  The classic example is to take video with a smartphone, and dynamically overlay information for nearest subway stations. places to eat, and real estate listings.

Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality can be seen as the flip side of each other.

You start with the synthetic, and bring in the real / web.  Or … you start with the real, and you bring in the web / synthetic.

For the time being, the worlds are largely going to stay that way.  It takes a lot of processing power and a lot of code that doesnt readily exist at the moment to put the two modes together.

But I can see it — think the present boundaries are going to just stay put? :)

Blended Reality will give the ability to flow seamlessly between real video with synthetic overlays, to the scenario of completely immersive environments, back to straight live video.

Scenario: I walk to Central Park and pull out a decent sized tablet (jam 4 iphones together — That’s a good screen size to envision).  I see live video, and overlays of points of interest.  I may pick a point of interest (let’s say it’s winter, so we pick the ice rink).  I get a feed in-scene of the latest photos / writeups of the ice rink, and I can segue into a virtual world recreation of it.  I meet with friends who may be elsewhere, but who are enjoying the get-together in the virtual sense.  From their point of view, perhaps they see live video of what’s happening at the ice rink.  Maybe their friends in real life have a clickable visual tag floating on them from the viewer point of view (if the RL friends choose to make their location info available to some of their contacts)  Perhaps some of the video comes from my tablet! The gist of this is, mixing modes based on location…

I’m just doing the flat-screen writeup of this for the time being.  It’s enough of a start to envision stepping into and out of virtual and augmented spaces, whether on the go with some tablet, or behind a desk.  Think not so much of overlapping hard window definitions, but of smooth transitions from between flat / augmented / virtual areas of the screen.

As I said, this is just a sketch — thoughts that have occurred to me in the last day.  The basic idea is that I dont see the hard boundaries of Virtual and Augmented Realities staying put.  They are going to blur and meet in the middle ;)

I’ve been thinking about what I want to do, gig-wise.  For way too long, I’d been waiting for Second Life and OpenSim to pop up on the radar as a marketable skill.  I’m good at it, but hell, the average salary for SL gigs is way down there [1]

There is a lot out there in the Tech Landscape that thrills me:

Google Wave, Augmented Reality, and the iPhone (in addition to the Web 2.0 LAMP/AJAX stuff I love doing)

I am waiting for my developer login for Google Wave.  Visualize Email that turns into an IM, which flows into a collaborative document, with full playback of who edited what.  That’s an icebergian tip …

Or you can look at some pretty pictures and get an idea …

I also found it instructive to watch the video on how Wave handles Concurrent Editing.

One imagines Wave dovetailing with projects in SL, Augmented Reality, and all manner of mobile devices.

As for AR (Augmented Reality), three examples everyone should check would be:

• Layar, worlds first mobile Augmented Reality browser
• The Acrossair bit on the BBC
• The biz card demo

Oh, and the ARToolkit running on the iPhone …

Speaking of the iPhone, I have downloaded the SDK and have signed up as a developer.  Objective C hits me as a kinder, gentler take on C++ and Java.  I am digging it so far.

None of this should be taken as a sign I am leaving Web Development.  Far from it!  I am just looking at the likely directions that spring from it, where I think there will be a lot of interest and opportunity.

[1] I  have recent info from Susan, who heard it firsthand from someone presenting from Marketing Truths at SLCC

The countryside beckons.  Worn out roads need their picture taken.  They aim to put on asphalt makeup and cover their bots dots for a “Roadway Pinup Monthly” centerfold (daring Cornwall cliffs shed retaining walls, show you all!).  I aim to see a few roads.

I love to travel, and so have been mulling over dastardly plans on how to do that and get paid.  Snicker not, kind reader, for I am armed with a skill or two!  I shall Dance In The Country! Techstyle!

Perched in the midst of Getaway Central, Somewhere in Europe.  Perhaps I am in Tuscany.  Go with it, y’all…   Some people cant make it that far, ya know.  They have boring jobs and soccer brats and mortgages and neighbors with habits that scare them slightly and one too many frikken meetings to go to this week, and, yep, looks like the next one after that.  Their life is living them.

However, some people love to live vicariously….  We’re not just talking about the Peeping Toms and Tanyas…

And therein lies the country wheat germ of a hint of an idea.  Somewhere in this post I will spell it out, but I am going to my damnedest not to crystalize it in one sentence.  This is a post about the country, where paths meander.

Back to Tom and Tanya and their Peepers…

Would they watch an irreverent slidecast that shows the beauty of Dancing In The Country?  Which country?  Which part of the country? Well, send me money and I’ll alter my travel plans!  I sense that there is an opportunity to cater to the wannabe traveler.  Ok, well a subset of them.  I aim to displease those who would look down their nose at anything less than a high minded exhaustive treatise done by thee Almighty BBC.  Think of David Letterman and Monty Python pulling into town in a noisy oil smoking 1969 VW Bug with a grinding clutch and rusted shirt hanger antenna. Whoa there, move it, we have weak brakes!  Park, grab camera, some cafe coin for coffee, cheerful attitude, and a hankering to satisfy the insatiable desire of Jonathan Livingston Armchair Traveler Seagull.

I love to write and photo and video.  I also enjoy talking to the locals and getting the sense of things.  As it turns out, I’ve been doing this sort of thing in Second Life for the last 2 1/2 years.  Yeah, and the experience surely does spill over to the Real World.  Something about SL has made it much more comfy to strike up conversations with strangers.  Amazingly, most of them do not recoil in horror when I do this.  Could be all of the free Lindens I give em.

So the threads are  .. travel, take in the gist, write and photo it, and …

Omg.. is he going to talk about yet another fucking Social Networking Website?  Bucky!  How could you?  It’s almost 2009 you big smelly gorilla!

Now hang on there pardner.  We have the advantage of history.  We know what doesn’t work (like Sarah Palin applying for Mensa), and we know the world economy is on brink of collapse.  What a great time of opportunity!  Nobody can afford to travel, so we’ll do it for them!  We’ll mash it up on a web site with commentary, supplement with local feeds, point to Amazon Associates items that actually talk about the locale in question, and laugh all the way to the credit union.

So that is the thought .. how to mash up skills and local feeds, and turn the situation of traveling into a self sustaining gig.  It would be a side project.. a weekend here and there to start.  The two keys would be the power of the mashup info (content from elsewhere), and the irreverent look at things (local discontent :)

And that is the Dance in the Country.  Cha cha cha.

I am staying offline tomorrow, Saturday August 30th.

Why?

To switch gears a bit. Think of the last 20 years, and all of the change that has snuck up on us:

• cell phones
• blogs / facebook / myspace / linked in
• web
• twitter
• IMs
• email

It’s amazing when you think back to the 80’s.  In terms of communication, and the sense of being ‘always on’, they seem almost tranquil by compare…  It will be good to stop for a moment and reflect a bit.

So I will do my best to play hooky from the online world tomorrow.  One of the best parts is that I wont be checking online to see if anyone joins me.  It is a switch off day.  I’ll apologize on Sunday :)

I want to write about the speed of running Second Life on my PowerBook, but I’m also thinking I should be writing a review of the Red Hot Chili Peppers “Stadium Arcadium”. Short one: Good Double Album, better if they had clipped it down to One.

Segue: my computer needs a Red Hot Chili Pepper. Anything to speed it up. It’s not gonna happen though. It’s an old G4 with 1gb RAM. And SL just frikken kills it :-) It’s ok if I crank down the detail … I included a snap of my avatar. Yeah, it’s dorky. I figure it’ll evolve. I’m digging SL though – it’s giving me a bit of the “new” rush I felt when I started using the Web in ‘93.

So, to take the steps from the web world to the more immersive stuff, I’m going to cast my net for cheap fast hardware. I think this is going to mean a Mac Mini …

My vivacious new friend M (hey!) was IM’ing to me this week about second life. She meant the general idea of being online, being in chatting mode, and feeling detached from the real world. Face to Face as First Life, online as Second. I had asked her if she had heard of “Second Life”, as in Second Life from Linden Labs

I’ve wrapped up with Friendster, and am about to start a contract doing stuff with Second Life. In other words, my First Life (at least, the work bit) is changing, and I’ll be surrounded by Second Life, the work, and Second Life, the virtual world. Got that?

I’m looking forward to it. Check out the BusinessWeek cover story “My Virtual Life” which gives a good sense of what it’s like to wander in off the web, and into a much more immersive environment. The whole idea of how we ping pong between modes is changing quickly. At this point, many are happy to get the web on their mobile phone, but because of the way that feels, it’s not really convincing “being somewhere else” stuff. What happens in, say, five years when you get realtime photorealistic rendering on an ultra portable wireless device (less than a pound, 8″ screen, insert favorite specs here)? (btw, I am expressing a desire, and don’t know of anyone that’s doing anything that advanced) In other words, will First and Second lives start to blur a bit? Maybe they already have.

It’s going to be fun.

It’s days after ETech, and I really should write a summary. On the other hand, Snapper helped my mixology skills by showing me the infamous White Russian. Ah .. Kahlua.

So much for my participation in the Attention Economy.

I’ll comment on San Diego though. It was an interesting trip that threatened to be fun. The day I got there, I decided I better get my laptop a charging. Little wisps of smoke issued from the skimpy wire off of the power supply.

Not good. Oh, this won’t do. Fuck. I only brought one. I have, like, access to 3 or 4 power supplies at home. Hmm, 3 days of conference ahead, and no way to charge. Double frick frack fuck.

But I’m an explorer, and have some twisted sense of accomplishment in being able to look at a trolley route map in a strange city and Just Get There. (I am guessing that one day, Tokyo will make me shut up on this one). For reasons best known to Apple, the nearest Apple store to downtown SD is nowhere near downtown SD. This would involve a transfer.

So anyway, I get to some place called Fashion Valley, aka Lack Of Character Forgettable SoCal Mall. I can poke fun at it, because I grew up in SoCal amongst all sorts of Interchangeable Retail. It took me about 150 seconds to walk in the Apple Store, get the power adapter, pay, and get out. I actually had more fun checking out the crowd on the Light Rail than I did in the mall.

On the way back, the thought occurred to me that I could just keep riding all the way to Tijuana. The next thought took the first thought out to parking lot and shook some sense into it. I was frikken alone, and it was getting dark, and nobody knew my location. I think I’d head to Vancouver B.C. at the drop of the hat to go have dinner. Tijuana’s a bit different.

So SD is not really a walking city. It’s scaled for cars. I stayed across from the Cruise Ship Terminal. I enjoyed watching them pull out with their horns at full song. It was a mile or so to the hotel where the conference took place, so I got into the pattern of walking along the waterfront … again and again and again. That was a good thing though, as I dropped some weight in the process. The thing I noticed about Downtown is that there is a familiar laid back SoCal vibe, but there’s also an Undercurrent of “keep alert” that I felt. Although I did walk around a bit at night, I’d have to say that I felt a little less wary in Manhattan than SD. It could be because there are so few peds. The buildings are ok. The architecture of the Santa Fe rail depot is really cool. The fact that the USS Midway was berthed along my walk was inspiring. Big, Intimidating Aircraft Carrier, that. I did a double take when I noticed a MiG up on the flight deck!

My impression of San Diego is that I should go back sometime when I have a reason, but it doesn’t seem like a destination for its own sake. It’s no San Francisco, or Portland, or Seattle. On the other hand, the next time I’m there, I’ll take a car and explore. It’s the only major California city that I don’t know.