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.

Here we see the trusty stand-in phone testing the harness for a parachute drop.

Here's the audio of my presentation of our Inspector Carbone game, generously recorded by Becky Heritage. I spoke before the salon, which organized by the good folks at games for change. There was quite a crowd there, which made me a little nervous, but they had really interesting questions and comments about the project. All in all, it was an extremely valuable experience.

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)

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.

Stompy City is a physical computing/processing application that uses a serial interface to create a city based on the user's stomping on the ground. Fun! (But you can't play the applet over the internet, because it uses serial and a custom device!)

View Stompy City.