Festo showed off some very interesting floating robots at PopTech recently. I love the way they've taken inspiration from sea life.

I saw some images and video of art projects recently that have been swirling around in my brain and mashed themselves up with the boys' interest in sea creatures (which means that I end up reading a lot of marine animal books). The idea is to make inflatable sculptures of marine animals (squid, octopus, sharks, etc...) out of cheap plastic. Inflation could be via wind, fan, hot air, helium, etc...

http://laughingsquid.com/inflatable-street-sculptures-by-joshua-allen-harris/

http://nymag.com/daily/entertainment/2008/07/video_street_artist_joshua_all.html

http://filthyluker.deviantart.com/art/octo-pied-building-90953286

We went with the kids and other relatives this weekend to see Wall-E, the new Pixar flick. I generally expect Pixar movies to be pretty great -- Wall-E demolished all my expectations. Great character development and acting, beautiful and interesting moral questions posed.

A particularly uplifting comment at MetaFilter illustrates the kind of game that the team at Pixar is bringing to movie making. Not cranking out movies for profit work but once-in-a-lifetime, yes-I-worked-on-that-movie pluck.

If you haven't yet, go see it.

A very interesting article on how early theories about how Prozac treats depression are likely wrong. http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2008/07/06/head_fake/

Scientific American has an interesting article about how identical twins can actually differ to a very small degree in genes. Given the boys clear differences, it makes me wonder. Identical twins genes are not identical

Date:	2007-05-05 09:17
Subject:	Last day at Motive
Security:	Public
Mood:	satisfied
Music:	Sound of kids playing

Yesterday was my last day of work at Motive.

When I started there, I had just turned 30.

We had no kids.

Had only lived in Austin for 2 and a half years.

Really it's very little like the company that I originally went to work for. There's almost no common code, no customers left from that time period and they're in a completely different market. They're now the company they last acquired, BroadJump, with the Motive name.

That said, I'm leaving a lot of great co-workers behind (and staying in touch with a number of them as well). Folks who were there for me when my kids were born, whose kids I saw born and with whom I shared too many dinners on occasion. We dressed up for many Bison Stampedes and shipped many products (and buried a few).

I moved more than 4 boxes of papers/books/CDs/etc out of my office yesterday. And backed up ~2Gb of email.

It was a good time.

And I'm glad to be moving on.

A question for my Austin readers. Has anyone been a patient of (or know someone who has been) one of these doctors/practices?

• Dr. Shannon Wong


• Dr. Mitchell Wong


• Eye Physicians of Austin


• Dr. Steven Dell

I don't know where I saw the pointer but the website, Ficlets, is an intriguing concept. It limits (I think to good effect) writers to a short paragraph of text, which in turn can be expanded by other members. The result, a short story, but authored with minimal effort by any given writer.

I don't expect that any of the stories will be especially compelling but the efforts are still intriguing.

While listening to the Will Wright keynote at SXSW, I had a number of ideas. I'm jotting them down here in large part for my own edification:

• Courier - A cooperative game using devices (computers/phones) but coordinated via a web site, where the players take objects from one location to another via Bluetooth transfer. Teams able to move the "package" more quickly or with the fewest/most jumps would get more points. In addition, points might be awarded for meeting new people in order to facilitate package transfer.


• Wondertwinpowers logo - I've always struggled with attaching a graphic identity to the site. I could reference the super heroes, it is after all where the concept came from, but it's hardly a clean graphic identity and is a questionable move from a copyright standpoint. My aha here was to break the words apart and compose them as a an equation, so WONDER times TWIN to the POWERS equals the contents of the web site.


• Cooperatively remixed comics - A web app/social web site that allows members to create newspaper-style comics by composing provided graphics and typing words. Definitely inspired by the fun of using ComicLife to do some LJ posts here and the difficulty of moving that content into LJ consistently.

The Will Wright keynote at this year's SXSW was certainly thought-provoking. I've seen video of a couple of his speeches this year and while he always incorporates some review of Spore, he manages to cover so much other interesting material as well.

This talk began as a review of forms of storytelling, breaking down how story arcs work in various kinds of movies and correspondingly in games. There was a lot of emphasis on how moviegoers make a mental model of what's happened/happening/going to happen in a movie and how movies and games have much different emotional territories.

He then went on to detail how they leverage player content creation to take fairly simple creature, culture, planet creation to improve all other player's games. And while demoing the amazing in-game editors (really like the best 3D editor I've ever seen) he discussed how they use procedural textures, animation and model generation to raise the level of all content creation.

After demoing Spore (again some wonderful eye candy and a game with truly amazing scope) he wrapped up with a great call to arms to consider how games (really more specifically the process of creating simulations) can enhance learning and empathy and in turn improve the world.

There's a meager write-up that unfortunately missing the final point at CrunchGear.

I'm at SXSW early for a panel on reputation and identity. It started out very slow, with the moderator, Christian Crumlish, rambling on without making many definitive statements.

The second panelist to speak, K. Hamlin, went briefly over OpenID both in concept and implementation.

Ted Nodeau went next, with an admitted preface that he was new to identity and reputation. While his talk was rambling, he threw out some interesting observations about existing reputation systems (eBay, LinkedIn, Slashdot, etc...) but generally noting the lack of widespread and open reputation systems. It definitely seems like there's an opportunity for something tied to OpenID and given the direction LoTV is headed, it's worth paying attention to this area.

Mary Hodder spoke next about the Attention Trust, starting with an example of how Google uses attention in the form of links and AdSense to power their businesses. She related that the Attention Trust founders actually had a much easier time than expected in getting large internet companies (Google, Microsoft, Amazon, etc...) to release this information to their users.

The last panelist, George Kelly, spoke about the interactive johari window which allows an individual to self-select attributes and then compare them to the attributes selected by others. The inverse, a nohari window, allows the selection of negative attributes with the same kind of comparison and filtering.

I somehow stumbled on a great series of posts by Mark Woodman regarding his attempts to treat his son's sensory processing disorder on Wired's Bodyhack blog. The series starts with this post.

Following so closely on our visit to San Antonio to evaluate repair options for Griffin's atresia, I was very struck by the disparity that has existed between the treatments that may be available/pursued by an given individual. And while money is a factor; it seems that just being aware that a treatment is available and having the skills/determination to pursue it is a more significant one.

And if you do follow the link, be sure to browse the comments. There's a number of very interesting ones by folks in similar situations.

It's fascinating to observe the interaction between the Griffin, Jesse and Cecelia. I guess that I would have expected the youngest to end up tagging along with the older kids and while that happens on occasion, she's actually much more independent than either of them.

Guess our little girl's not a sidekick.

Date:	2007-01-12 10:11
Subject:	A flurry of ... activity
Security:	Public
Mood:	tired
Music:	Cyberia - Afro Celt Sound System

Since I really appreciate being able to get some insight into my friends lives via LiveJournal, I'm working to update my journal more often.

And it probably helps that my new MacBook comes with some bundled software, Comic Life that makes creating comics dirt-simple. So I'll be trying to make a bunch of posts in that style. If the images end up being disruptive to anyone's reading, let me know and I'll put them behind a cut.

And in the spirit of encouraging me to post, I'd love to hear from y'all in the comments. Especially if there's anything you'd like to see me write about.

Date:	2007-01-10 10:04
Subject:	Chris Returns
Security:	Public
Mood:	busy
Music:	Penn Radio

Date:	2007-01-01 12:00
Subject:	First Night Austin
Security:	Public
Mood:	sleepy
Music:	When I Still Needed You - Afro Celt Sound System

Almost immediately after returning from Seattle, we walked in the procession (read parade) during First Night Austin. For those who are unfamiliar, this is basically a noon-to-midnight New Year's Eve party with a no-alchohol/pro-arts theme.

Because we were having trouble finishing our mini-float (garden cart with PVC canopy) in time, we really only got to see a bit of the family program before the procession. Then it was off to stage for the parade with the Texas Juggling Society. As always, the folks there were great, giving the kids some fun light-up toys and working with us to keep the kiddos away from the fire-torch jugglers.

And we staged behind the samba group which was playing some very upbeat music.

My complaints were pretty small, mostly that:

• The TJS really needs some music. Juggling's a pretty quiet activity and it's difficult enough that you're not going to be talking to the crowd much. Setting up a small sound system on one of the wagons would be a good solution.


• We got separated from the main TJS group because we stayed with the person trying to maintain the group separation.


• If First Night wants fire and glow/light effects in the parade, they need to time it better to post-sunset. We had a bunch of glow/light effects that weren't really visible until about 30 minutes after we finished the parade. This could probably be handled by just staging lit groups near the end of the procession.

I just had to go find a web tool that has been very useful to me and so I thought that I'd post something here to let others know about it (and so that I don't have to re-find it again in the future).

It's a way to create a bookmark (or favorite in the windows world) that you can invoke when on an Amazon page for a book, which will launch a new window with the search results for that book's ISBN at the Austin public library. From there, I typically reserve the book online and pick it up from the library when it comes in a few weeks later.

I don't know that this will work for anything other than Safari on the Mac, although I'll give you some details to make your own for any library further down.

A gentleman, who needed more bookshelf space (and who doesn't) but couldn't block off a door, built a great hidden/swinging bookshelf door as part of a larger unit.

Hidden bookshelf project

Cecelia and Cedar
Originally uploaded by ashertree.