in Ann Arbor, MI 48103
{ Tag archives }
Try something tomorrow that you haven’t done today, temporarily and for the activity’s own sake. Don’t eat. Don’t sleep, and work on your favorite project vigorously through the night. Disable Verdana and browse the web.
Find a limit and push it gently.
A new micro practice: every night as the plates spin down, I write myself a Mac OS sticky note. When I wake up in the morning, this sticky note is waiting for me.
The rule is that I write down everything I need to do that day into a sticky note, and it has to fit without scrolling. Since 70-75 words fit into my note, that’s about 3½ twitters, or 2 del.icio.us descriptions.
That actually turns out to be a lot of space for describing what needs to happen. More than enough. Today my note only has one thing to do on it! But it’s a hard thing, one that I’ve been putting off for some time, and one that’ll soak up all the time I dump on it.
⁂
Hiveminder is overwhelming before noon. I keep individual project logs, but I don’t want to filter through all that stuff in the morning.
But, in the morning, I can read a few sentences and maybe an encouraging slogan.
And maybe the few sentences, or the encouraging slogan, will energize me enough to open up Hiveminder and the project logs and start typing.
There is a quiet desperation to this practice. Hopefully it’s just something I’m using to claw my way through the graduate degree — hopefully in a month, I’ll be able to open up my laptop and confront the work I need to do without this layer of indirection.
Same adapted (hands-free) work process as Have geek looking for artists. The theme was transportation/mapping of space:
(A full-size version of this image.)
The SmartNav is still super tiring to use, especially for finicky rectangular selection and trying to more or less line things up along whichever axis. I probably don’t use it enough, or long enough, to get truly acclimated.
One of today’s activities:
Collage of two images from RecentChangesCamp 2007: 1 and 2; a higher-quality image of the result.
Made in Seashore using a SmartNav plus a few labor-saving voice commands. This means, no hands. You move the cursor by moving your head. You click by saying “click” or triggering a button or puffing into a tube. The little tiny hotspots and buttons in Seashore are hard to select; slider controls are the hardest.
OS X is pretty easy to wrangle with this kit, after a learning curve. Some applications are better than others, with Quicksilver (not too surprisingly) coming in dead last. It’s a shame because Quicksilver really helps to cut down on mousing and typing, both at a premium when you’re not using your hands.
See grad student bkerr a4a project for more like this.
Working on a4a, which is a bunch of things all at once. It’s an art gizmo, a rehabilitation tool, and an inviting space. Conceptually we’re still in the tag cloud stage, but will serialize that down to an elevator pitch soon enough.
Reading old science fiction, it’s good fodder for wordie.
Other stuff too boring to write about.
Ostensibly heading out to RecentChangesCamp 2007 next week for a few quality days of sitting in a big empty room with a bunch of people talking about open culture + open technology, for some values of “open,” “culture,” and “technology.”
Winter in Animal Crossing, snow on the ground every day, and falling sometimes. There are snowballs; you can roll a couple snowballs up and make a snowman. (Once in a while you can see a tiny dung beetle (!) industriously pushing around a snowball.) If you do a good job and roll a correctly-proportioned snowman, it’ll say thanks, and then mail you a gift. If you roll a grossly disproportionate snowman — whose head is too big for its body — it’ll tell you that it’s happy to be alive, or that it’s enjoying its birthday, and that it’s glad you made it, even if it wishes you had paid more attention. Regardless, your snowman will melt over the next few days, and disappear. There’s a melancholy here, but that’s how Animal Crossing works. It’s kind of how life works too.
Working on a project which I need to figure out how to decloak. It’s something kind of embarrassing, but also the kind of thing that everybody should try at least once.
Enjoying Slicehost: slowly consolidating web sites, defunct project repositories, etc. into the same place. LightTPD with mod_evhost is pretty cool. Maybe the closest we’ll get to Xanadude Ted Nelson’s infotopia is, I dunno, running a jabber server and asking it how early we are for the bus. The nice thing about riding the bus is that you’re always early for the next bus.
Getting ready for a sea change, not sure what I’m looking for but I’ll know it when I see it.
Things: AboutUs, Alice in Ultraland, Animal Crossing, Assistive Media, Community Grants, Dhalgren, Hiveminder, Local Names, NEW Service Network, Portland, Python, School of Information, Shadow of the Colossus, Trellis, Walker Tracker.
Abstractions: Analytics. Collective action. Guerrilla education. Limited peripheral participation. Slow-burn melancholy. Two more semesters at the School of Information; the error was/is my own. What you can measure, you can change. Wrapped up nonprofit sector tour; unsurprising results.
Busting your cycle is where you take one aspect of your life that’s more or less constant and you purposely bust it. By temporarily breaking a routine, you can often experience the world in a very different way. If you bust the right cycle, this shift in perspective can often lead to elation and a sense of possibility.
Ze Frank busted some cycles: by going to the dentist (cycle: not having people fuck with his mouth); by going for walks at 5 AM (cycle: worrying about sleep), by applying peanut butter and jelly directly onto his face (cycle: sandwich-making).
I’ve busted a couple of cycles lately. I read science fiction, Sam Delaney Nova, Babel-17, Einstein Intersection, instead of your meathook information science. Pacific Standard Time instead of Eastern. Walked instead of bussed. Braindumped into index card instead of Hiveminder. Multnomah instead of Washtenaw. Rain instead of snow. No frost but up on the mountains.
And next —
