From Popgadget - the chalk mug. The second after I realized what it was a shudder ran through my body and I writhed around in my chair for a bit. Even now, having a hard time handling the thought of handling this mug. Chalkboard…dusty chalk…putting your mouth on it…….aahhhhhuurrrghhhdhfdsfdsfadfbdsfajkhvbalgkhsdkgjahewaoruiy(’489y6!!!
Can I get the magic marker mug please?
I guess this is how these things work. Cut and paste from a file on my desktop, thingsiforgot.txt:
I forgot…
M 05.21.2007 …to take out the PET bottle recycling in the morning
T 05.22.2007 …to bring my wallet downstairs at lunch in order to recharge my lunchcard and as a consequence I had to borrow money
Since 05.22.2007 …my thingsiforgot list
camera…dead…RIP 2004-2007
it makes me a little sad
i want to buy a new one but…
will have to think about that - it is a lot of money now but pictures from this summer…i have to say it…priceless
that was supposed to be yikes but even on the second try is became wikes so now it is wikes. i have not been writing. i’ve been busy. a good kind of busy. still alive and doing well…but channeling all my energy into other projects not writing here. but dead space makes me sad so i should continue. even if short and sweet.
sid and i are currently trying to put a cultural probe (short article for those with no acm access) design exercise together for the folks in our lab group. neither of us has experience implementing cultural probes so it has been a learning process. how much should we stick to the original definition and recommendations for the probes and how much should we change to suit our goals (designers as subjects, resulting product to be in a specific activity space)? it is complicated and i should probably write about it afterwards so that i may remember the process.
bbiab.
I was searching for a project done by a woman I am meeting on Monday called “kotonoha” and came across kotonoha.cc. Very interestingly because both are related to my work - object interface to information and (given the current direction of things) questions, surveys, and polling for personal expression and satisfying that desire to see what other people think.
Kotonoha.cc looks addictive and with my current Japanese and browser translator I am already enjoying the type of questions posted and the responses. Oh yeah - what is it? It is a site where people can indicate their opinion on various “things” (koto) by choosing “O” or “X” and add a little explanatory comment. The “O” “X” o tsukeru system is the common “yes” “no” system in Japan. Examples of things are:
- which are scarier, spiders or cockroaches
- can you remember numbers past 3.1415
Users have simple profiles (photo, nickname, URL) and you can subscribe to different users and receive feeds of their posts in an site-based inbox.
Browsing the questions so far has been really really interesting. I am not just learning about the people or “community” through their responses but also through the questions they are posing. Yes some (like my examples above) are about mundane, general things but others are about current events, issues, popular things (indicators of what the “current” in the country might be) and others about the kotonoha community itself.
モスバーガーはモスと略す O X
(”mos burger” abbreviate to “mos”?) from what I can tell, most people do. It is good that I know this.
The one thing that bugs me is that they don’t display (from what I can tell) a tally of “O” and “X”. I can see that 690 have responded to the mos burger question and a list of the most recent results and comments…but not those two numbers - how many “O” and how many “X”. But…is this intentional? To avoid bias?
What if it went a step further and I had to respond before seeing any responses/comments? While this might motivate people to respond and eliminate bias from seeing what the majority thinks, it might take away from the experience of being in the kotonoha social space which, now that I think of it, seems less to do with knowing what the majority thinks, what the winning side it, etc. and more to do with knowing that people have an opinion.
I should not be writing right now. So much to do. A day that has no end unless I declare “this is enough I can’t take it any further”. Tomorrow I demo something to somebody (maybe sometime I will talk about my work but for now I like being mysterious) and I am a little uncertain, not a little - completely uncertain about how the demo and presentation will progress. Going for the second party of last night’s work party was probably not the greatest idea. I didn’t even talk much, have much to socialize about. The nihonshu was just going back to easily. Possibly stress? Anyway, during golden week oh so long ago one of the things I did was go to a little town close to Tokyo (in Saitama) called Kawagoe. I went with another intern here, Martin, to see a few temples and shrines, old Edo style buildings, and a street lined with candy shops. Prior to going I was worried that I might lose photo taking opportunities due to worry that my travel partner would get annoyed. But then we arrived and Martin pulled a huge black camera (insert brand and model name here…I call them huge black cameras) out of his backpack and I knew it would be a good photo taking day. At one point we turned down a side street to escape a crowd of tourists and I think we both experienced a heart leap into the eyes when we saw a woman’s blue balloon posing for us because it knew how good it looked again the background wall:
That scene made my day.
I mentioned that I would be going to the digital public art festival last weekend and that I did. The most impressive piece was まばたきの葉 (mabataki no ha = wink or winking leaves roughly). Hundreds of paper leaves were scattered around the base of a high white tower. Each leaf had a picture of an open eye on one side and a closed eye on the other. We picked up piles of the white leaves and fed them into the two slots on the tower around chest height. The tower ate our leaves and blew them out from the top with a phffft! sound. The leaves floated down, twisting and twirling, winking to us as we craned our necks to watch them. It really scratched my itching to stuff paper into a tower that would immediately spew it back out. But I didn’t realize that I had this itching until after I experienced まばたきの葉.
berns said: “Ever considered how pigeons look _exactly_ the same everywhere in the world?”
Man you are so right. That is weird. A little spooky too. Worth keeping an eye on those guys. Like they were all “sent” from the same place. Totally weird.
Just came back from the can on the 2nd floor and they have a new Toto apparatus installed. The controller for this one (for the bidet, massage, heated seat, etc.) indicates the time. I looked at that time…11:30am…and realized that I never see the time from the can. I not only do not see the time, I don’t think of it and in fact, I think of the bathroom/washroom as a timeless space.
Ok so maybe that doesn’t completely work because over the time the washroom is the room that becomes the most noticeably dirty (to me). It is the blue stripe on the toothbrush or that band on the battery telling you when time is up, something needs to be changed, cleaned, done.
But - we can put clocks in anything computer controlled so why not? It is cheap and it adds an extra function to advertise. But when is time an uninvited guest? Like in the bathroom stall where the time reminds me of the world outside almost like it is a person standing outside the door making sure that I come out in due time.
I might have mentioned spending some time in the park near my dormitory (umikaze koen) this past week. We had beautiful weather - blue skies and in the mid-20s - for most of golden week and it was definitely taken advantage of by those with tents and bbqs and children. The masses you see in the picture below - they come early to get their spot. Some do not leave. One morning around 8am I jogged through to see some young men crawling from their tents, rubbing their eyes, examining the boxes and coolers and tarp around them to remember what they were doing the night before.
The children are too cute.
A drum circled played some beats and girls were dancing in bare feet.
It is Golden Week and most people have taken Tuesday and Wednesday off of work as well so currently there are like 6 out of 40 some people in the office. It is a good chance to travel but expensive so I am limiting my adventures to the park/tokyo bay by my apartment which actually has been very vacation-y and relaxing. Both Sunday and Monday afternoons were gorgeous and I sat by the water drawing with the sound of waves lapping over voices of children and BBQ aromas in the air. A nice prelude to the summer and enough alone / meditation-y time spent for me to get to the thesis for the rest of this week. Except for on Thursday - I am going to check out the digital public art festival in Tokyo.
But…the reason why I called you here…please look at these amaaaaaaazing works of art in cake form. Astonishing.
