Blogging from the eee

Looking good so far! The tiny keyboard takes a little bit of getting used to, but I’m already typing pretty fast on it. Wireless is working pretty well, I haven’t played with the built-in camera yet.

The weather is fairly awful; lots of snow last night (we trudged home in it), and rain this morning, but my dad is still (so far) committed to the plan of coming down here to pick us up. A real boon for us; we’d have to be on a train in an hour otherwise, and we’re nowhere near ready for that.

*looks over, sees Jeremy under the covers with an eee on his chest, checking his email*

I still have presents to wrap, and a present for my mother to assemble, too.

Last night we had dinner with Jason and our beloved Catspaw, our favourite Google engineer. She’s looking fantastic. I love the time I get to spend with her when she’s in town…definitely time for a visit to SF.

I could really go for a quick nap about now…

Cancerland

I finally managed to get a video of Cancerland. This way you can get a sense of how the audio fits in with the visual. The text remains a mystery in this format, unfortunately. I’ll have to find some other way to get that information across. The narrative is really held together by the text.

Christmas, and the Honeymoon

So, first, I have to get Jeremy into the country. Fortunately, the airlines have agreed to help me out. Then we’ve got dinner with friends, Christmas with family, and then, finally…we’re off on our honeymoon, nearly a year late.

Other people, on choosing a location for their delayed honeymoon in December, might consider picking somewhere like Hawaii or Bermuda, maybe Barbados or Jamaica. Somewhere warm and relaxing. But not us! No, we’re going to Brussels. Two weeks in Belgium, from Brussels, to Bruges, Ghent, and back to Brussels again in the heart of winter. We had at first considered putting Amsterdam in the mix too, but we’d rather dig into one place than cover a bunch at once. So Belgium it is! We will sample fine beers and cheeses and pastries! We will dance around in Bruges city centre at New Year’s and hug some Belgian strangers. I will go around the Brussels market square taking pictures of guild houses. We will visit museums and art galleries and trip on cobblestones. I’m so looking forward to it.

Jeremy announced at thanksgiving that he was planning to bring his macbook with him, in case anyone needed him the first week in January. Must be able to deal with emergencies from a distance, of course. I didn’t like this idea.

Have you ever shared a network connection with Jeremy? Here’s what you need to know: he has an infinite number of RSS feeds that he tracks. When his software checks the feeds, the entire network very nearly shuts down. There is always someone emailing him. There is always a dissertation to work on, another paper to submit, journal editing to do. That macbook, lovely as it is, represents the biggest distraction of all time.

It’s not that I don’t want the internet on our honeymoon. I love the internet. It’s the air we breathe. It’s just that one machine gets to tied up in work; I don’t want to bring all the WORK along with. Can’t we bring the internet, but not the work?

Our solution: two eeepcs. These netbooks will allow us both to stay connected to our beloved internets everywhere we go, but will keep us from our regular day to day. These things have 12 gigs of storage on them; not enough for our regular software and stuff. They’re surfers, they’re portable, they fit in my purse. They let us check our mail in a pinch, but we’re not even putting mail clients on them. They’re just going to let us get our internet fix.

See, we could have just used local terminals to say hi, right? Well, sure, but we’re power users. We need our own…space. We don’t want to wait in line. We don’t want to pay to tap on a foreign keyboard with other people’s crumbs on it. No no, we like our own crumbs best. But we could have just got one eee, not two, right? Again, have you spent any time with Jeremy and me? We’d spend all our time fighting over it. We don’t want to use our cellphones (have you seen roaming charges lately?!), so here we have it: the eees. His and hers; a matching set. His is black, mine is white.

What we plan to use them for:

• consulting wikipedia on the history of foodstuffs, drinks, locations, and anything else that pops into mind;
• checking our email;
• posting to our blogs to tell the world about our wonderful trip;
• posting to twitter so people know where we are;
• uploading pictures of our wonderful trip for everyone to enjoy;
• checking the news in the morning over tea and coffee and pastries in a sweet little coffee place in the heart of Brussels/Bruges/Ghent;
• watching movies (on a flash drive) on the plane when we don’t like what they’re offering us;
• watching episodes of Torchwood while cuddled under cosy quilts in quaint bed & breakfasts;
• sharing our cheer with our friends on IM;
• sharing our cheer with our friends on IRC (#joiito).

So we’re going on our trip, but we’re planning to take everyone with us. Happy Christmas, Merry Hanukah, and joyous holidays to all!

Ubiquitous Accessibility

So last night as I was drifting off to sleep, I started to imagine a life far in the future when Jeremy and I are retired and living on Ward Island in our own beautiful little cottage, across the sidewalk from Jason and his lovely wife Yuka, amid lots of roaming cats and a beautiful little English Cocker Spaniel. I wondered if Aleja would like that sort of life as well.

Then I started thinking about what it would be like out there, with no grocery stores, no general amenities. It’s just a short ferry ride onto front street, but that’s still a longer trip than we’re used to taking. Not much you can do if you forgot the milk.

So then I thought about ubiquitous computing, and online grocery shopping. How would you do grocery shopping with a ubiquitous interface? How about if your kitchen is smart, and it uses it’s own surfaces to display items? Like, virtual food, holographic food. Varieties of fruit, kinds of breakfast cereal, different artisan breads and cheeses; cans of soup, bags of pasta; different varieties of food, shown on your own counters and cupboards, based on your current chosen categories. It could pay attention to what you usually buy and show you those items first; it could learn what you hate and never bother to show them to you. You pick your holographic groceries, put them in your virtual cart, and pay for them; you shut off the interface and wait for your groceries to arrive.

I’ve been pondering ubiquitous computing since I was in Copenhagen a couple of months ago. The idea that our cityscapes would become interfaces, that we would interact with the world around us and interact with networks and programs at the same time: I found it compelling and somehow inevitable. Our current interfaces are rich, but so limited; the idea of full-body interface that is seamless with the rest of our world seems so endlessly useful.

And then I remembered about Aleja and my Ward Island fantasy retirement plan. What would it mean to be mobility-impaired in a world where the physical environment is the interface? Would she be able to shop as easily as I could? Would someone be thinking ahead and creating these interfaces to account for her mobility issues? Would the system be sensitive enough to allow her to make tiny movements that would look more like our grander gestures? Would we prefer the small motions to whole-body interfacing? Would we still prefer to sit still?

Note-taking goes Ubiquitous

Faculty can usually tell if they’re being recorded, what with the need for some sort of obvious recorder. But what if the computer and the recording device are in the pen?

This would be pretty wicked if you could mash up all the notes from the class along with the lecture recording. If we could get the pen to work online instead of just off, you could see the notes being created in real time.

I’m in Beta!

Who needed that other a anyway, right? Not me!

Help a Friend

I’m not sure where to start.

She posted this. Her friend, her ex, her roommate, key part of her life since she was a kid; Jon died. She watched it all happening, helpless to do anything. She made the key phone calls. Death is hard on the living.

Then some other things happened. I won’t go into detail here, but suffice it to say that lawyers are having to become involved, she is feeling trapped and bullied, and the door to her apartment is opened by people who have never lived there, at odd hours of the night. (You can read some more details here.)

In Jason‘s eloquent words:

I’ve been down here the whole time, and other friends have rallied around from Queens and New Jersey, and California and Toronto.

Aleja has lost everything except her bed, electric wheelchair, some of her clothes, a TV, and some books. No table or chair, lights, cups, plates, cutlery, basic cleaning goods, and the list goes on. We’d normally offer stuff from our homes, but she can’t use normal plates, due to weight, or tables due to height and chair access; you get the idea.

Can you help?

Edit: things keep getting worse. I’m scared for this girl. If you’re in New York and have some sympathy for someone in the position of being bullied senseless and want to help out (just physical presence helps a lot), please let me know.