I've been looking into a number of possibilities for wireless sensor networks, tiny little bugs called motes hiding in corners of who-knows-where collecting who-knows-what kind of data. Imagine the kinds of fun we could have at Parsons with this stuff!

So far, I'm most impressed by moteiv and their Tmote Sky motes. For $78 a pop (bulk order), you get a USB stick-like board with built-in temperature, humidity, and light (both in visible range and up to IR.) There's an antennae attached to each of them, and they all talk to each other over ZigBee and run on the open-source TinyOS. Sweet!

The Theory and Technique of Electronic Music is a book that Miller Puckette is writing. I've been working my way through it while on vacation here in rural Oregon. Very useful stuff, especially for non-audio folks, like me, who want to get the most out of things like Max/MSP and Puredata. In fact, it comes with a linked package of Puredata example patches.

So close, I can taste it. This semester is almost in the can. Just need to finish uploading a few important details here, and this thing is all wrapped up. Whew!

We've had a lot of fun talking about technology and we're it's going this semester. And, I think, most students' view of the future is somewhere between the dystopian horror stories and the utopian dream worlds. And that's all well and good. Everyone's entitled to their opinions. For now. But no one seems to actually be preparing for the future they see coming. Oh sure, we're learning all sorts of great skills that will help us out in the next few years. But I'm talking long term here. I'm talking ROBOT ARMY.

The U.S government has made several well publicized forays into military robot technology, most recently with their armed UAV programs. Other nations are starting to follow suit, such as South Korea and India. The prospect of an all-mechanized army, coming out of some nation in the world, during my lifetime is not terribly unlikely. And, given recent events, it's entirely likely that the army will be extraordinarily advanced and really, really miserably managed.

• Managers
• Translation Memory
• Terminology
• What's the difference between terminology and translation memory
• how it's managed?

• Homework
• Develop and present
• non-linear narrative of your journey from home to school

• New Project
• Five or Six Weeks

So, I saw Cameron B's Electrosketch project at dorkbot tonight. Really, really cool stuff. Inexpensive, but really engrossing and with a lot of depth to it. A Sharpie with an infrared LED is tracked by a hacked webcam that has its IR filter removed and a piece of 35mm exposed film put in its place. The computer, running proce55ing, locates the pen and generates vertices in OpenGL that form strands. The strands formed these great different shapes depending on the direction in which the vertices were generated, which was controlled by a custom box hooked up to serial.

• Katie Salen

• Homework
• Read the first three chapters of Kurtzweil
• Mander: speed read the four arguments
• AI Lecture after that

So, I'm trying out a class notes blogging idea, dropping my class notes into my blog from the VYM app. See below for my notes from Major Studio: Interface on October 30, 2006.

The design is still bare bones, but now there are tags, pages, places for me to actually upload content (and document my work.) This will definitely make my life easier.