Category: tech

ramblings

What I do

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I have been working in the Interactive space since I graduated from college, which is longer ago than I’d like to admit, and my job title has always been either producer or project manager, which means that most people in my life do not understand how I actually earn an income. Usually, when trying to explain my role to friends and family, I use a general contractor or a movie producer as examples.
For the general contractor example, I say, “If you are redoing a kitchen, you don’t care about the types of pipes being used, or the type of wires that are going into the wall. All you care about is what exactly is being done, how long is it going to take and how much is going to cost.” That resonates, especially with homeowners.
For the movie producer example, I say, “Think of the Oscars. Who gets the award for best picture, the most prestigious award of the evening? The producers. What did they do? Direct? No, that went to best director. Make the sets? No, that went to Best Set Design. So what did they do? Everything else, from securing and managing the budget and timeline to making the director and actor get along, when they really dislike each other.” That really resonates, because how doesn’t like movies?
Still, that doesn’t necessarily nail it and now, I can also refer these fine folks to the image below:
What does a producer actually do?
Via Kay

humor

Top Auto-Correct Fails of 2011

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If you are using some sort of mobile device to communicate, you have probably experienced some sort of auto-correct failure. This is where you meant to say one thing but your phone/tablet/whatever automatically decided that you really meant to say something else, often to hilarious results.
Damn You Auto Correct is a very funny blog which features, you guess it, a collection of outrageous auto-corrected text messages submitted by readers. At the end of last year, it unveiled its top nine laugh-out-loud entries of the year, based on Facebook shares, tweets, comments and page views. For your reading pleasure, please see the list below. Enjoy!

  1. Intended word: “Monday,” not “Man boobs.”


     
  2. Intended word: “Clinic,” not “closet.”


     
  3. Intended word: “Mortgage payment,” not “MOTTSAPPLESAUCE.”


     
  4. Intended word: “Kissed,” not “killed.


     
  5. Intended word: “China,” not “vagina.”


     
  6. Intended word: “Dimples,” not “nipples.”


     
  7. Intended word: “Shirt,” not “shit.”


     
  8. Intended word: “Persian,” not “period.”


     
  9. Intended word: “Mistletoe,” not “cameltoe.”


     
art

The Patternizer

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Ever need to develop a pattern as a place holder, filler, background and didn’t know how? Well then, the Patternizer is for you.
From the creator, who happens to be a co-worker of mine:

“All patterns are saved with the URL patternizer.com/username/pattern , and each time you save, it creates a new version /1 or /2 or /24. For you extra-techies, this site is a front-end (or UI) for the patternizer.js < canvas > script I wrote. So the patterns you make on the site can be used anywhere with the code it generates.”

Good job Matt.

food

Sushiactive is alive

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Back in 1999 when I was hitting my sushi loving stride (having started to eat it only a few years earlier) and starting my website at the same time, I decided to create a site that matched pictures of sushi with a Mortal Kombat style voice over / description feature – basically an interactive menu that one could use to make sense of this strange and foreign culinary world that I was in. The site was to be like the paper menus that one sees in sushi restaurants, the ones with the photos of the fish and rolls along with their phonetic Japanese name and English name, except again with that booming voice over. For instance, you might see a crab stick fly into the frame and then hear, “Kani! Crab! Delicious!” I decided to name it “Sushiactive.”
Like so many of my great ideas, this one never went anywhere, aside from living as a flash trailer of sushi flying around that I developed and which then lived on my site for the past decade, that is before the Sevensquared to Keymaster Productions move when I took it down. My friends would ask me about it from time to time and while I would always say, “it’s in development” that wasn’t true. I gave up on developing the idea years ago.
Like so many ideas that were spawned during Web 1.0, this one was ahead of its time, a little over a solid decade to be exact. With the rise of mobile computing via “phones that are really mini-computers that happen to also make phone calls,” this idea was one that many people had. “Order Sushi Like a Native, and Know What You’re Eating” published back on 6/8/11 reviews phone applications that all mimic my idea. The last one mentioned, SushiGuru, is also the only one uses my VO idea. From the article:

Unlike many other competing apps, SushiGuru also has audio pronunciations. If you ever opted for a California roll simply because it was easier to say than Aburasokomutsu, a kind of mackerel, this is a worthwhile feature.

I like being ahead of my time but at the same time I am wistful and rueful that others have implemented it. I’ll need to review what other ideas I’ve had that I’m not acting on. I think it’s time to revisit my nascent “Little Classics” publishing model.

tech

How Twitter Works

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Designer / Illustrator / Blogger Jessica Hische developed an infographic for her mother on how Twitter works that I found enormously useful. I used to tell people that Twitter is “basically the Facebook status update feature as a stand alone site” and/or it’s “a real time search engine” which I’ve learned is true but not really true. There are parts of the site I come to understand, like how tagging works: you put a hash tag in front of a word, like #nyc, and then whatever is in your tweet is tagged as something as NYC related. Then, if you search by #nyc you will get every single tweet that has that tag in it, which is why I call it a real time search engine. When the plane landed in the Hudson a few years back, the easiest and quickest way to find out what happened was by using #hudsonplanecrash or something similar.
Well, after reading the infographic, I’ve learned a whole lot more which makes a stat I recently read make a whole of a lot more sense. The stat said that email use across most age groups has dramatically fallen and one reason was that people were tweeting much more. Well, now, again after the graphic, I understand how Twitter is robust and unique messaging platform. Want to learn more? Click on the image below:
how_twitter_works
Via Elizabeth

science

More on Brain Rewiring

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Seemingly right after I became acquainted with the whole “Too Much Tech at Once is Bad!” idea through Mr. Nicholas Carr, the Gray Lady featured not one but two articles on this subject along with an interactive quiz designed to show how if you are a heavy multi-tasker what has happened to your cognitive abilities.
The first article is titled Hooked on Gadgets and Paying a Mental Price and is about how:

Scientists say juggling e-mail, phone calls and other incoming information can change how people think and behave. They say our ability to focus is being undermined by bursts of information. These play to a primitive impulse to respond to immediate opportunities and threats. The stimulation provokes excitement — a dopamine squirt — that researchers say can be addictive. In its absence, people feel bored.

If you surf the web (um, you are reading this blog) and/or use a computer to navigate and manage your life , this is a must read article. It’s long, but worth it.
The second article is titled An Ugly Toll of Technology: Impatience and Forgetfulness and I think the title speaks for itself. This is also a must, ans much shorter, read.
The Test Your Focus and Test How Fast You Juggle Tasks quizzes are an eye opener. I for one have tried to check my email less and I’m making more of a concerted effort to get through my magazine backlog and to get to the books on my list.
What does this all mean? Like so much else in this wide world, moderation is key. Too much of anything in excess is bad, m’kay?

tech

Rewiring Your Brain

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As you might know or gather from my previous 800 or so posts, I’m a web professional during the day. I write a lot of emails. I type a lot of documents. My fingers bother me tremendously by the end of the day. I’m 33. My hands feel 99. I really think that this prevents from writing more lately, because when I’m done with the day, I’m done – as much as blog posts flitter across my mind, I never get the nerve to write them down because writing hurts. Maybe that is why I’m listening to Trent Reznor’s new outfit “How to Destroy Angels” while I type this – I hurt myself today, to see if I still write.
In the latest issue of Wired, Nicholas Carr writes a very compelling article about how the ‘net literally rewires your brain, some for good, some for bad. It’s backed up by science and it confirms a suspicion I’ve had for a long time, because I got hooked on the ‘net in 1995 and therefore have been using it for 15 years now. “Even as the Internet grants us easy access to vast amounts of information, it is turning us into shallower thinkers, literally changing the structure of our brain.” I think that’s true for a lot of people, and sheepishly I think it’s true for me as well.
The article titled “The Web Shatters Focus, Rewires Brains” goes on to say:

The ability to scan and browse is as important as the ability to read deeply and think attentively. The problem is that skimming is becoming our dominant mode of thought. Once a means to an end, a way to identify information for further study, it’s becoming an end in itself—our preferred method of both learning and analysis. Dazzled by the Net’s treasures, we are blind to the damage we may be doing to our intellectual lives and even our culture.

Yikes. Personally, I do not believe I’m there. I think that my attention span is scattered because my parents are selling my childhood home at the exact same time I am supervising a full house renovation in NJ while living in NY in a small one bedroom apartment with an 8 month along pregnant wife and a 2 year old while working a stressful full-time job.

ramblings

No more PPT for CENTCOM

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“We have met the enemy and he is a bloated Microsoft Office Suite product!” ~ paraphrase of Gen. McChrystal
Some choice quotes from this NYT article all about how “Like an insurgency, PowerPoint has crept into the daily lives of military commanders and reached the level of near obsession” are as follows:

  • “PowerPoint makes us stupid,” Gen. James N. Mattis of the Marine Corps, the Joint Forces commander.
  • “It’s dangerous because it can create the illusion of understanding and the illusion of control,” General McMaster
  • “I would be free tonight, but unfortunately, I work kind of late (sadly enough, making PPT slides).” – Lieutenant Nuxol
  • “Some problems in the world are not bullet-izable,” General McMaster

You have got to love the pun in the last one in the list. The image below is a PowerPoint diagram meant to portray the complexity of American strategy in Afghanistan which certainly succeeded in that aim.

The article makes me think of my Tufte related post from back in Jan, 2005 about how PowerPoint was incredibly bad for information dissemination and five years later, the game is still the same. Now though, lives are on the line so, let’s say it all together now: PowerPoint is bad, mmmkay?

tech

GSM To The Rescue

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A few months back I read in a NYT Circuits (now called “Personal Tech”) article the eyeball’s equivalent to music to my ears: that the GSM Association (a cellphone-company trade group) said that its members have agreed to settle on a single, standard charger design for all cellphones – MicroUSB (what is currently used by Blackberries and Canon cameras) and that they will aim for New Year’s Day, 2012 as the deadline. Sweet.
So far, AT&T, LG, Motorola, Nokia, Orange, Qualcomm, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, T-Mobile and Vodaphone are all aboard. No word on whether Verizon or Sprint, both non-GSM carriers, are on board.
This means no more “do you have a charger that fits a ____ phone?” “Sorry, I only have one that fits a ____.” conversations. Gone will be the company emails that say, “Do you have a ____ charger for our ____ Client who is visiting?” The new question will be much simpler – it will just be, “Do you have a charger?” Period.
I cannot wait!

tech

The First Artificial Contestant on America's Favorite Quiz Show

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Answer: This highly successful television quiz show is the latest challenge for artificial intelligence.
Question: What is “Jeopardy”?
Not content with simply winning at chess, IBM has decided to build a machine that can win at “Jeopardy.” One point that has been decided is that the box will not be hooked up to the net during the match – it will have to reference its memory just like the rest of us. While you might think who cares, it’s brain can be many terabytes in size, just remember the AI has to synthesize the answer and then search this ridiculous amount of data before a human can do the same to figure out the right question. Sounds like a huge query challenge. Because it is.
As Kasparov is to chess, Ken Jennings is to “Jeopardy” so I hope that the AI indeed plays KenJen and that KenJen takes it down to Chinatown…