Google Patents - [My del.icio.us] I've recently been leery of both Google and patents, but this search area is pretty great, especially if you're like me and love old mechanical drawings. Check out the mechanical man!

I'm listening to Malcolm Gladwell's talk at Pop!Tech. I'm blogging in real time as I listen, so this is straight from my head to the blog.

A chair maker decided to use mesh that allowed the chair to breath and yet does not pinch, as well as a bunch of other cool innovations. (I had one of these at my previous job--they're great!)

Anyway, the chair has to be comfortable and look good. It was very comfortable--an 8 out of 10. Still people didn't like the way it looked--in fact they thought it was ugly. Market testing, for this aspect, was abysmal! Even designers weren't keen on it. People said it looked like lawn furniture!

Okay, this really tears it for me. No more Salon.com. And it's because of an article called "Why Johnny Can't Code".

With that kind of headline, that article should have been great for me. It is exactly the kind of area I'm investigating--how we fail at teaching code to novices.

Turns out, it's a three-page rant that we don't have command-line Basic anymore. The author makes a huge leap from this to saying that kids aren't exposed to the "nitty-gritty" anymore and, therefore, our civilization is doomed. Huh?

Part of my MFADT application portfolio was a series of animated penguin videos that I made using Blender, most of them in the fall of 2005. I'm a little obsessed with these birds, but I can't quite say why. They're just so damn funny.

Anyway, now they're all "you tubed."

First off, you can see my YouTube profile and subscribe (or not... hater). And, if you're a Parsons MFADT person, you should join the MFADT group.

Also, here are links to Inti and TrayJayG's pages. I'll add more once I get everybody's YouTube channel links.

Podcasts are pretty cool, though I haven't really found the killer app for me yet. Since I don't own an iPod, I don't really have that available to listen to the casts on. So, for the most part, I just have to listen to them on my computer. Not always what I want to do, to be honest, because I'm usually busy with other things.

For that reason, a podcast that does work for me is the audio commentary podcast for Battlestar Galacticca. It's like having the comment track on a DVD. Nice! And it's something I would use--since I'd just play it off the laptop as I'm watching the show, it doesn't distract me from what I'm doing. Instead, it adds to it.

Under the guise of researching for my casual-games class (how great is my life that this is work for me?) I found this:

It's good to see that I have company. Here's my bathroom hack from fall of 2006, where I added audio triggered by the IR sensor on the 10th floor sink:

The best part was that I left a "record" button on the device underneath, so people could sample their own voices, music, sounds, whatever. Hence, audio graffiti.

I'll be blogging for the Major Studio: Interactive class for the rest of this semester. I may also blog about my other classes, but I'll keep those tucked away under my main blog section.

I graduated from the University of Virginia, Phi Beta Kappa, with an honors degree in Anthropology. I spent the last eight years as a programmer for various dot coms with varying longevities. I'm a mostly self-taught hacker, which means I have the right combination of pig-headedness and lack of social skills to get pretty good at it. Foo.

I have a lot of odd interests, but here are a few, in no particular order, that have tickled me recently:

I presented the EPA game that Jonghoon, Lena, and I made for the OSI collab. The game, Inspector Carbone, got some really excellent feedback from the audience. I also got to meet a whole bunch of other people interested in using games for education and activism. I'm really glad I went.

The other game demos were also very good. Check these out:

• Lance Vikaros, Teachers College, Global Warming Interactive
  (produced by Michael Hillinger)