Live from Chicago...

2011 in Books

2012-01-02T20:16:00.002-06:00

The new yearly post. This was not a good year for reading, but I did get in a lot more writing!

Books Read: 12
Pages Read: 6080
Average Pages/Day: 16.7

Favorite Books: 1Q84, Triumph of the City

2010 in Books

2011-01-02T17:44:00.003-06:00

The yearly post. This year's totals:

Books Read: 32
Pages Read: 14,286
Avg. Pages/Day: 39.1

Favorite Books: Stones Into Schools, Zeitoun, and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Android International Data Roaming

2010-09-07T08:05:00.002-05:00

A note to those traveling with Android phones. Even though you're roaming, your phone might not think it is. I don't really understand why this is the case, but there are at least a few carriers in Sweden (like 3) that a Motorola CLIQ with a T-Mobile US SIM card thinks are not roaming.

In these cases, just un-clicking the "Enable data when roaming" box doesn't help and any time your phone lands on one of these carriers, it'll go mad syncing all of your accounts and using lots of data. In order to prevent this, you have to go in and manually delete the T-Mobile APN in the data settings or it will keep attaching. Luckily I figured this out soon into my trip and just 2MB were used ($30). It could have been *much* worse.

Sensor Glove

2010-07-07T10:58:00.018-05:00

A friend of mine gave me a neat idea a few weeks ago. She has rheumatoid arthritis and often feels that there are various correlations between her joint temperatures and external conditions like temperature, humidity, or time of day. And understanding these correlations can lead to better management of the condition. She had an awesome idea for a glove that could record and log all of this. I realized that with some things I had learned from working with Leah Buechley's class this past semester, I could make one!

So the basic idea is that there is a temperature sensor (or more than one) in a glove that measures surface joint temperature. It relays this information over Bluetooth to a phone which records the data along with the time, external temperature, and humidity from the Google weather API. All of this data gets logged in a CSV file for later inspection and analysis in front of a computer.

The work proceeded along several prototypes of increasing fidelity. The first was done on a dev board using an Arduino Duemilanove and a BlueSMiRF Bluetooth module. I used the Amarino toolkit that Bonifaz Kaufmann put together in order to interface the Arduino board to the phone and started with his SensorGraph example as a base for the code on both the Arduino and the phone. The phone is a Motorola CLIQ running Android 2.1 and Amarino 2.0.

A few things needed to be updated to get the first version working. On the Amarino side, the serial connection speed had to be changed to 9600 baud and logic was added to compute the temperature in degrees F from the analog value received from the sensor. I changed the update frequency to once every 10 seconds and also added some code to flash the LED that's built into the Arduino so that I knew when the sensor value was being sent.

On the Android side, I updated the Sensor Graph application to be able to plot float values and to plot on a scale from 0-100 instead of 1024. Since the application hard codes the device ID, that needed to be updated as well.

A little bit of testing was done to make sure all was working properly. The phone was successfully reading the ambient temperature of the room and when I touched my fingers around the sensor, I was consistently getting readings in the high 80s. That was enough to satisfy me, so I went on to prototype 2.

Prototype 2 added logging on the phone and brought the sensor out to an actual glove. A few extra pieces of code had to be written on the Android side. First, I wrote a simple class that interfaced to Google Weather. It allowed for the zip code to be sent or for the phone to use it's current location to get the zip code. It would then ping the Google Weather API and get the current temperature and humidity. I also extended a logging class from here to support logging the time, temp, outside temp, and humidity data onto the SD card. A new file is created each time the application starts and gets named with the current time.

The glove itself is just an old knit winter glove that I had around. The knit-ness made it easy to shove the temperature sensor into it. I clipped on some alligator leads to the existing wires from the Arduino and now I really had a temperature sensing glove! For this version, nothing changed on the Arduino, but there was a bunch of updated code for Android.

This version produced CSV files with lines in the format of time, sensor temp, outside temp, humidity like this:
07/07/2010 08:33:54,75.59,80,75

With the concept more or less proven and the software on both the Adruino and Android sides fairly final, the last step was to make something that was actually wearable. This involved moving from the Duemilanove to the Lilypad and from wire to conductive thread.

The first step was to move the code over to the lilypad, which was just a change in settings in the Arduino app. With a few jumper cables, a quick check showed that everything was working.

Then came the sewing onto a real glove. We had a few gloves that were potential candidates. We threw away the super stretchy one and tried a more or less standard knit one. It still had a little stretch in it, but not much. With some quick work, everything was sewn into place, however when we turned it on there was a short someplace and it wasn't working properly. Two things made it quite difficult to debug this. First, the glove that we were using was close to the same color as the thread, so it was really hard to see any loose ends or places where threads might be touching. (this made it look really cool though since you couldn't seen any of the "wires" connecting everything together) Second, I didn't have my multi-meter with me, so it was really hard to figure out exactly where the problem was. In the end, we couldn't figure it out and just cut off the components to try on another glove.

With the learnings from the failed attempt the night before, I set out to make a new glove. Since it seemed like the stretchiness of the glove was causing some of the threads to push up against each other and short out, I decided that it would be easier of the wiring was done on another plane from the glove. I cut up an old t-shirt and decided that it would be a perfect surface for this. First, I could draw out my desired sewing paths with pencil ahead of time. Second, it wouldn't stretch nearly as much as the glove material would. And third, I could sandwich the bottom of it so nothing on the glove could interfere with the threads causing a short. So that's what I did and it all came together quite nicely. For someone who hasn't sewn anything since junior high home ec class, I was able to get it all done in about 2 hours. At the end of those two hours, here was the result:

It was fully functional and just needed a little cleaning up. With a little trimming and some fabric tape, here's the "final" glove in action:

We'll probably make one more iteration that's a little more robust. Maybe stiffer material than t-shirt and some snaps to attach it to the glove. The hope is that the electronics will last longer than the glove and can be transferred over to new ones as time goes on. We'll need a connector of some sort for the temperature sensor, but that should be pretty easy. I'll update this post when that happens with another picture.

Overall, I'm really happy with how this came out. Could I have made it look prettier? Sure. And that will be the next step. But I was able to learn a lot about the practical details of putting something like this together and hopefully have made something useful for a friend. I'm looking forward to getting some feedback and new ideas this week at the Engaging Health workshop at the Media Lab that Leah and Roz are hosting.

CHI2010

2010-04-18T14:24:00.003-05:00

For the past week I was down in Atlanta for CHI 2010, the big human computer interaction conference from the ACM. It was a great time as always and so good to catch up with a ton of old friends and meet some new ones. I was in a workshop on Senior-Friendly Technologies: Interaction Design for the Elderly on Saturday where I was talking about our recent study on communicating across generations and distance. During the workshop, I was also on a panel about the future of interaction for the elderly where I talked about the role of ambient devices in connecting people across distances with simple interaction and little configuration/setup. I also had a talk during the main conference on how we created Contacts 3.0, the reference design for the phone book service in MotoBLUR. The talk went really well and we even had a bunch of phones for the audience to play with after the talk.

So as I do every year, here's my annual list of the best/most interesting of the conference:

Skinput - A system from CMU and MSR that turns your skin into an input surface without cameras. A series of sensors placed on your upper arm are each tuned to a different set of frequencies and you can tap different places on your arm/hand and it can figure out where you touched.

Spyn - An awesome system from Berkeley that correlates media from your surroundings while making a craft to the object using your android phone. And then when you gift it, they get all of this rich contextual media about the creation of the object.

Contactless Power Sensor - UW's system to determine how much power your house is using from the fuse box without needing to touch any wires or even take the cover off of the box.

Happy Coincidences - A Japanese paper of a system that plays a chime when you and a remote person both do the same thing at the same time (sit on the couch, change to the same TV program, open the door/window). Really neat.

Newport - UC Irvine and MSR's system to share media from your computer while in a phone call. Sort of like Motorola's Push To View from iDEN phones but linked up to your computer where you might have a whole lot more media to share.

Who's Hogging the Bandwidth - Georgia Tech and MSR's ambient display of bandwidth usage in the home, with sliders to limit certain peoples' bandwidth if you want to throttle them down. Caused a lot of debate and discussion!

Where Should I Turn - A collaboration between CMU, Northwestern, and GM looking at how people navigate in cars with real people of different relations (Mother and son, couple, strangers). Interesting differences between spoken navigation commands.

Measuring the Speed of Light

2010-02-16T20:03:00.009-06:00

I saw this Wired article this morning and thought it would make for a fun little experiment. Basically they claimed that with chocolate and a microwave, you could calculate the speed of light. Sounded right up my alley! I emailed my friend Alison about it and she said that she had done the same thing with marshmallows, so of course that was added to the list of things to try as well.

After work, I made a quick trip to Whole Foods for the necessary supplies. A bag of 365 brand Dark Chocolate Mini Chunks and some Sweet and Sara vegan marshmallows were procured.

I started with the chocolate as I figured that had the best chance for success. I arranged a grid of the chocolate chunks on a plate and stuck them in the microwave (after removing the turntable and placing a saucer on the spinning part under the turntable).

I let them go for about 30 seconds and got a nice pattern with four areas melting a bit. With a ruler, I measured about 6.3 cm between dark spots. Using a little math from the wired site: 6.3 cm * 2 * 2.45x10^9 Hz = 3.087x10^8 m/s which is pretty darn close to 3.0x10^8!

Next up were the marshmallows! I arranged a nice little grid on another plate and put them in for the same 35 seconds. I had never used these vegan marshmallows before, so I wasn't sure if they'd even melt like "normal" ones do.

Sure enough, they did! And I saw pretty much the same pattern as with the chocolate! This time it was about 6.5cm between gooey spots leading to: 6.5 cm * 2 * 2.45x10^9 Hz = 3.185x10^8 m/s which is a little farther off, but still within 6% of the right answer. Not bad for some sweets in the microwave!

But of course I couldn't leave it there! I had melted chocolate and marshmallows! So I really did have to make some smores for dessert! They were as tasty as they look! I highly recommend trying this at home!

Disney Half Marathon Race Report!

2010-01-19T18:52:00.008-06:00

Last weekend, I made it down to FL to run the Disney Half Marathon! Last year after I ran the full marathon down there, Alison and I decided to go for the half this year, and I must admit it was much easier to train for this one!

So last year on the same weekend, it was in the 80s and sunny. This year, not so much. The forecast called for low-30s and sleet/snow. So we woke up at 3am so that we could be on the bus to the start by 3:45 (you have to be on your way by 4am as they close the roads down). We put on every article of clothing that we had with so that we could at least stay warm before heading through gear check. While waiting for the race, I had on:

Short sleeve running shirt
Long sleeve running shirt
Hooded running jacket
Hooded sweatshirt
Running shorts
Running pants
Hat
Gloves

And I was actually pretty warm...or at least not frozen. Then it was time to head through gear check and walk the 1/2 mile to the starting line. While it was starting to snow a little, I checked the sweatshirt, hat, and gloves but added a plastic garbage bag to help keep in the warmth. (BTW, these totally work! Some may doubt it, but not after they tried it!!) The gear check line was super-long, but in traditional Disney fashion it moved along really quickly. I also decided to run this race without music, which I've been doing more of lately and really liking it. And as I had some pockets in my running shirt, I threw in a disposable camera that came in my race bag (which is where most of these pictures are coming from).

The walk out to the start was long, but since it started in the same place as the marathon did, I knew the route this time. We made it to the start corrals with about 20 minutes to spare and stood under a bridge to try to stay out of the wind. Yes, you can try to picture all of the garbage bag clad runners huddling under the bridge for warmth :) With about 10 minutes to go, we split into our respective corrals and got ready to go!

As usual, the race started with some fireworks and wave 1 was off. I was starting in wave 2, and now that I had my garbage bag off was counting down the minutes. Ten minutes later, we were on our way with some more fireworks!

I started off with a good pace of about 9:30, which I was hoping to keep up for the whole race if I could. The weather for the first few miles wasn't so bad. It was cold and a bit windy, but the snow had stopped. I ran past the first water stop at mile 2 and turned onto the road to the Magic Kingdom. As we approached the parking lot, there was a little change to the course this year and we were able to run right through the toll booths which was definitely fun!

From there, we ran around the lake to the East and under the water tunnel by the Contemporary. I remember the uphill after this tunnel being harder last year for the marathon, but my legs were still feeling great at this point as I came up the other side, still at about a 9:30 pace.

The course then made its way into the Magic Kingdom through a side entrance by Main Street. They still had the Christmas Tree up and we ran around that and towards the castle. At the end of Main Street, we turned toward Tomorrowland and ran back to Dumbo and then through the castle and back around to Splash Mountain where we went out a back exit of the park. There was a train parked there and he blew the horn as everyone walked by, scaring quite a few people! As we exited the park, we ran past some floats from the Halloween parade I had seen a few months ago which got the Boo To You song stuck in my head for the next 6 miles. (Maybe I should have run with music!).

At this point, it was Mile 7, and it started to sleet. A super cold, wet sleet that totally soaked my running jacket and added several pounds to the arms I had to move with every step. And it kept sleeting for the next 6 miles. I knew I was slowing down, and knew I was taking longer at the water stops. But there wasn't much I could do about it. I just couldn't keep up the pace I had set before while being soaking wet and running in heavier winds and sleet.

As I made my way to Mile 10, I saw that the course designers were not being nice to us. Between miles 10 and 12, there were two big bridges. Running up the first, which was a 1/2 mile long exit ramp, I could not wait to reach the top. It felt like it was going up and up forever. But then I made it up and realized that running uphill was probably better than the crazy winds that were blowing up there! But I continued on. The bridge just before Mile 12 was a bit steeper and I sort of walk-ran up it as I was just getting exhausted from running in my soaking-wet clothes.

Mile 12 was a fun run through Epcot (except for the giant puddles everywhere!). But I made it around and through the exit chute to the finish just a few minutes short of my original goal. I finished with a time of 2:16:00. When I started, I was hoping for 2:13:00 or less, so given the conditions, it wasn't that bad. And I feel like I can totally break my 2:06:29 record at Sonoma this spring!

It was still sleeting a bit after the race, which made it super cold while getting food and heading back through gear check. I almost could not move my fingers to put on my gloves as I made my way to the reunite area to wait for Alison. And man, was that the coldest 15 minutes that I can remember! As soon as Alison came, we quickly made our way to the nice warm bus back to the hotel! At least Disney does logistics really well, and there were plenty of buses waiting right next to the finish area.

After some warm showers and sitting next to the heater for a while, we were ready to head to the parks. We donned our warmest winter wear and made our way to the Magic Kingdom. It was certainly a cold afternoon and evening there, but definitely lots of fun! There were almost no lines and we got on everything we wanted to ride at least once (including 3 rides on Space Mountain!). The goal of the day was staying warm, so I got to see a bunch of attractions I usually miss including the Carousel of Progress and the Hall of Presidents (Obama was awesome!!). With some tea and hot chocolate in hand, we took in the fireworks show and then ran off to Pirates where it was warm (it is the Caribbean!).

All in all, a very fun weekend! It was definitely cold, but definitely memorable!

2009 in Books...

2009-12-30T20:31:00.001-06:00

As usual, here's 2009 in books read...

# of books read: 30
total pages read: 9475
avg. pages/day: 25.9

top three books: the lightning thief, my stroke of insight, predictably irrational

Where I've Been

2009-11-23T20:20:00.002-06:00

I've been pretty busy these past few months. October was pretty much devoted to travel with trips to Boston (x2), Beijing, Disney World, and London. It was all tons of fun but it was really nice to get back and be able to relax a little. Between all of those trips, I was never home for more than 18 hours which was a bit much, even for me!

The Boston trips were fun and included a Red Sox game with Dawn, a visit to the Media Lab sponsor week, good food at Wagamana and Brown Sugar, and lots of fun visiting friends. Then it was off to Beijing for ACM Multimedia and hanging out with old Yahoo Berkeley friends. It was amazing to see how much the city has changed in the past 4 years. The subway even goes all the way to the Summer Palace now which is amazing considering that there were only three lines last time. It was a great time with a few days of sightseeing and then the conference. I presented our work on TuVista which was a fun talk to give.

From Beijing, I made my way down to FL to run the Tower of Terror 13k race with Alison! I was not feeling well at all and might have been still trying to get over a case of the swine flu, but I felt ok enough to start running and made it all the way through. I have no idea how I found the energy to make it to the finish line, but I did! Maybe it was the thought of MGM staying open until 2am for the runners and running around with Alison riding Star Tours and the Toy Story ride all night that did it :) The Toy Story ride was especially awesome...I really can't wait for the Wii game! The next day we met up with one of Alison's friends and went to Mickey's Not So Scary Halloween Party at the Magic Kingdom. Space Mountain was still closed, but we had a blast! Including getting vegan ice cream from the ice cream parlor on Main St. I love Disney :)

I though I'd be heading home from FL, but instead I ended up going out to London. It was a quick 2 day work trip, but still super exhausting. After the 13 hour ride home from China in Economy, the 9 hours trip to London was really not fun. At least I got a trip to Brick Lane for diner one night!

These past few weeks have been really busy as well with a trip to the opera, a play in the city, and lots of catching up at work. Hopefully things have calmed down a bit and the rest of the year shouldn't be so bad.

All of that is just a bit about why I haven't been writing much on here lately. I hope to have a few posts coming soon including one about some of the awesome things on the new Cliq phone and another on some Arduino programming/building I've been doing lately.

Have a great Thanksgiving everyone!

A Mac User's Guide to the Motorola Cliq

2009-11-12T09:20:00.002-06:00

I'll have a post soon where I gush about how amazing the Cliq phone is. But this post is pure utility. If you're a mac user and want to get up and running on a new Cliq, here's what I've found to get all of your data moved over. Note that if you're on a PC, there's a really awesome tool called MediaLink that will get you all synced up.

I'll also state here that I do work for Motorola and that "The postings on this site are my own and do not necessarily represent Motorola's positions, strategies, or opinions." OK, legal stuff out of the way, here goes...

Contacts

So you have your contacts in mac address book, and you need to get them onto your brand new Cliq. There's really no straightforward way to do this since the device doesn't officially sync on the mac. You'll need to export your contacts as a vCard (This is a little trickier than it should be. Go into Address Book, and select all of your contacts, then export as vCard. This will make a single file with all of your contacts). You can then upload this vCard file to whichever service you'll be syncing with your new phone (Google Contacts/Mail, Yahoo Address Book/Mail, an Exchange account, etc.). Then just add that account on the Cliq and all of your contact information will come streaming into your address book. Added bonus: if you modify any of your contacts online, the changes will get synced automatically to the phone, and vice versa.

This isn't particularly mac-related, but once you add a few services on the phone, you might find some contacts that were not automatically merged together. To merge (aka Link) contacts together, go to a contact detail page in the phonebook and press the menu key. One of the options will be to Link, then pick the contact you want to merge with and everything will come together into one. It's really simple, but I didn't think to press the menu key, so I didn't see how to do this right away.

Music and Photos

First, get a bigger Micro SD card. The phone comes with 2GB, but you can pick up a 16GB card from Amazon for $40. Second, the phone doesn't sync directly with iTunes. But your good friend DoubleTwist can save you. It pulls music and playlists out of iTunes and photos out of iPhoto and lets you sync these with a phone (Blackberry, Android, Palm, etc.). It's a nice utility and fairly self explanatory. Make sure you've removed any Apple DRM from older music from the iTunes store. iTunes Plus lets you do this, but I've found doesn't always get you the version of the song you bought in the first place, so be careful with this route.

Podcasts

The default music player on the Cliq doesn't handle podcasts. So the step with DoubleTwist above will not bring in RSS feeds for podcasts that you want updated. It's ok though. Google has a free app called Listen that you can get from the Android Marketplace. In this app, you can specify all of the podcasts that you want synced to the device. After you've done this, be sure to go into settings and make sure it will automatically download new episodes, and that it will do this over 3G as well as wifi.

I think that's about it. If I think of anything else that I had issues syncing, I'll update this post. And there will definitely be a post coming soon about the awesomeness of the Cliq and MOTOBLUR in general :)

how to watch a cubs game

2009-09-20T20:58:00.004-05:00

It just hit me that I have a way to properly watch a cubs game now!

So like any good Chicagoan, I like to watch Cubs games with Pat and Ron on the radio and the TV volume muted. There's always a problem with this as the radio is usually a few seconds ahead of the TV broadcast. So you hear what's about to happen before you see it.

But today I realized that the MLB At Bat app on the iPhone has the radio broadcast too, but it's *delayed* a few seconds. And my tivo can happily handle that with a quick press of pause and play.

So now I've got my phone piping the audio of the game into the speakers next to my TV and the game playing on mute on ESPN with a few second delay. And it's perfect!

If only I could have figured this out in April! :) MLB better port the At Bat app over to Android this winter! That's one app I'd definitely miss!

8 years

2009-09-20T14:16:00.003-05:00

Last week was my 8 year service anniversary at Motorola. It's hard to believe it's been that long! (For those of you doing the math and coming up short, they add 12 weeks on to the full-time hire date for each internship)

It's interesting to look at how much has changed and how much has stayed the same in all of that time. A good number of people in the lab are still here, although some of them are in quite different roles now. Some great new people have come (and some of them gone). We've been through four different lab names (Applications Research Lab, User Centered Solutions Lab, Social Media Research Lab, Experiences Research Lab). Three lab managers. Three heads of research. Two big roller coaster rides from long-term research to short-term to long-term and back to short-term. And a few big changes on how we commercialize our ideas.

Over this time, I've been able to work in many different domains. I started by looking into how people use, manage, and find photos and music in their lives. This led to the Metadata Services Engine which we published and commercialized in a bunch of phones through the "Media Finder" application.

Then I moved on to location and context sharing. We recorded people's phone calls to listen to how they talked about location, and built a bunch of prototypes to help understand what people could infer from different types of context and what they did with that information (see the Oct-Dec issue of Pervasive Computing for a nice overview). I was even able to bring in some work from my masters thesis in enhancing awareness around TV viewing. In that same time, I was able to work with startups such as TileFile and came to really understand both what it takes to create a successful startup and a successful service. Taking our Ambient Communications research to product was definitely the most fun and rewarding part of the last 8 years. Working with our design group to create Contacts 3.0, a new phonebook and service centered around integrating all of one's social information was a blast! (I'm working on a case study talking about this whole process) You can see a bunch of our concepts in action on the MotoBlur service debuting our new Android devices.

The services bug stuck with me, and for the the last two years I've been working on creating TuVista, a mobile sports video service that gets multi-angle instant replays to your phone in less than 30 seconds from the play in the game. This has been a whole new set of challenges, from the design of the service itself to understanding media production workflows and the crazy world of content rights. It's been our own little startup in the labs and fun to try to keep pushing Motorola more into services. If I get my way, it looks like my next focus area will be aging and health. For any of you working in the area, I'd love to collaborate!

I've definitely had my ups and downs and times when I was ready to leave at a moment's notice. But I'm glad I've stuck it out and have been able to have so many different experiences all in one place. That's the best part about a corporate research lab in such a large company.

Four days in Europe

2009-09-06T17:29:00.013-05:00

Last weekend I was able to spend four wonderful days in Europe! I had to be out in London for Friday and Saturday and decided to spend Sunday and Monday in Paris as I really needed a break and what better place to get away?

Work in London went really well which is always exciting. Since we've been doing a lot of trials of our sports system, it's now super-easy to set up and get going so these trips are fairly stress free. After setting up on Friday, I decided to take the tube into the city and walk around a bit since I had some free time and wanted to force myself to stay awake so that I could adjust to the time change. I made my way over to Covent Garden and had a wonderful dinner at Wagamama (I really hope they put more in the states soon!). After dinner I wandered around a bit and found myself down by Picadilly and starting to get tired, so I jumped back on the tube to the hotel.

Saturday was a busy day of work all day. But after work, a coworker and I again took the tube in the city and ended up at Busaba Eathai. It's another restaurant by Yao - the guy behind Hakkasan and Wagamama. I had the most amazing butternut pumpkin curry with coconut rice and some spring rolls. All very amazing as is all of the food he makes. I was sad that there is no dessert menu, but enjoyed the ginger tea. Upon returning to the hotel, I had a fun little statistics problem to help out a friend that I worked on for a bit before bed. I even got to use some skills I had learned in an AI class at MIT years ago which was actually a whole lot of fun! :)

Sunday was a busy day of travel. I made it into the city early to meet up with an old friend from MIT who was coming in on the EuroStar a few hours before I was going out. We took a photo in the train station (as is becoming obligatory when I meet up with MIT people in other countries!) and made our way over to Eat and Two Veg for brunch. I had their big vegan plate which was a full english breakfast vegan style - beans, scrambled tofu, potatoes, toast, etc. Very tasty and also very wonderful to catch up with Carol, even if we only had a short amount of time between trains.

After brunch, I made it back to the train station in time to board the train to Paris. I ended up with a ticket in the business class section of the train. Since I made the plans to go to Paris on fairly short notice, it was only $10 more, and they promised to feed me a vegan meal, so how could I say no!? The meal was the most amazing thing I've eaten on a form of transportation, so I'm really glad I went this way. There was a salad course, and then a wonderful quinoa dish, bread, and to finish it all off an earl gray chocolate!!! Those of you who have had my earl gray chocolate cupcakes know what a fan I am of this combination, so these little chocolates just made my day! The train ride itself was great. It's sort of surreal to pop out of the channel tunnel going 150+ MPH and all of a sudden see everything in French.

Sunday afternoon turned into a lazy day around Paris. After checking in at my hotel, I took the metro down to the Eiffel Tower and just sat around reading a book, glancing up from time to time to marvel at where I was :) As it got later, I hopped on the metro again, this time headed for Montmarte in search of dinner. There's a vegan restaurant right by the Abbesses station that I wanted to try out. It's basically just a woman who has some tables on the first floor of her house and she makes fresh, organic veggie food. Unfortunately, it didn't open until 7:30 and I arrived around 7.

While waiting for the restaurant to open up, I walked down to one of my favorite places in Paris, the Café des Deux Moulins from Amelie. There's nothing like the sight of this place to put a smile on my face. It wasn't very crowded this time, so I found a seat inside and enjoyed a nice beer while taking a bunch of pictures and sending them to people who would appreciate them. They even had the gnome which I don't remember from the last time I was there!

Once the restaurant was open again, I made my way back there and enjoyed a nice dinner of fresh veggies and baked seitan. There was another American in there and we traded tips on good vegan food in Paris. After dinner, I wanted to walk over to the steps by Sacré-Cœur but just as I got there, they were locking up the gates for the night. I managed a few pictures, but then just hopped on the metro back to the hotel.

Monday started with a really wonderful 10k run around the city. I had mapped it out a few days before and it would take me from my hotel near the FDR stop on Champ Elysees (which I was told by a Parisian is never said FDR but always as Franklin Roosevelt) up to the Louvre, then along the river over to the Hôtel de Ville and down to Notre Dame. From there, I turned back on the south side of the river and ran past the Musee d'Orsay and finished running through the park up to the Eiffel Tower. The run was fantastic and exactly what I needed to cheer me up and bring many smiles to my face :) One of the most awesome things was that the very first song that played on my iPod on random was the theme from Amelie! After the run I bought a very overpriced bottle of Vittel from the booth under the tower and made my way back to the hotel for a shower.

I decided to make it a very low key and relaxing afternoon, so I made my way back to Sacré-Cœur and sat on the steps for a while watching the street performers. There was a guy playing a guitar and singing American country songs and then some puppeteers and a sort of crazy variety show. All in all, fairly entertaining and relaxing. In another strange coincidence, while walking up the steps, I heard a street performer singing "When You Say Nothing At All" which was a song my iPod was playing while running that morning. I read a book under a tree for a bit and then decided to climb the stairs to the top of the basilica since I had never been up there. It was pretty amazing as the pictures can attest to.

On my way back to the hotel, I stopped at BHV which is my favorite store in the world. They sell everything! You enter from the metro into the basement, which is this giant hardware store...basically like a Home Depot with anything you could ever imagine. But then the other floors are typical department store fair...but arranged randomly...like lighting right next to lingerie, or tea next to art supplies (maybe that one makes a bit of sense). Anyway, I left with some of the most amazing tea ever - a green tea with ginger and lemon, a new notebook, and a Paris calendar. I had wanted to stop by the Musee d'Orsay as it's 1) an impressionist art museum and 2) in a train station! What better combination of things could there be!? But sadly, it's closed on Mondays.

That evening, I met up with an old colleague from Motorola who had worked on an earlier version of TuVista with us and had made the journey to Mexico City. While there, he didn't exactly believe me that Paris had amazing vegan food, so we decided that we'd meet up the next time I was in town. We made our way to La Victoire Supreme du Coeur, a vegan restaurant near the Hôtel de Ville (which isn't where it was the last time I was in Paris!). I had an amazing seitan dish with a mushroom sauce and a salad with "veggie poulet" which turned out to be quite good, but not as amazing as Hakkasan's veggie chicken (but really, who can top them!). I learned the French names for a bunch of different fruits while picking sorbet flavors which was fun :) We grabbed a beer in a little alley cafe before I had to make it back to the hotel since I had an early flight the next day.

And that's about it. I made my way to CDG the next morning and was on my way home. It was a very wonderful and relaxing trip. Exactly what I needed.

Microsoft Sync

2009-08-10T18:40:00.002-05:00

So my dad got a new car...most specifically, he got a Hybrid Ford Escape. Yay for the Hybrid part, not so yay for the SUV. But he could have done much worse :)

Anyway, the car came with Microsoft Sync installed, which is this voice UI system for controlling your iPod (or Zune as they happily state!) and your mobile phone. Many of you know that I'm not a fan of voice UIs in general, so initially I didn't think I'd be very impressed with this either. A voice UI, in a car, with road and wind noise. How is this ever going to work!?

And initially, we couldn't get it to work. There's this button on the steering wheel with a picture of a face, and I guessed that you were supposed to press that in order to say something. And being a long-time Push To Talk user, of course I assumed that the interface was hold down button, talk, let go of button. I couldn't really imagine it working any other way. So my dad and I sit out in the car for like 20 minutes listening to this thing beep at us and then every time we tried to start talking, it would make these "error" beeps...you know, the down tone ones that tell you that you did something bad. But for the life of me I could not figure out what that wrong thing was. So we gave up and my dad was ready to return the car to get a new voice system :)

We came inside and I read through the manual for it and discovered that it had been designed in a very odd way. Holding the speech button down for > 3 seconds meant to disable the speech recognition function! So every time we tried to talk and heard that "error" beep it was signaling to us that we were turning off voice recognition. Seems like a voice system should be able to speak back to you and at least tell you how you're screwing up :)

Anyway, once we knew that we were just supposed to tap the voice button, then wait until the system asked us what we wanted, then speak, it became really easy. And it was really cool! So much so that I wish I could get it installed in my car! You can tell it to play particular playlists, artists, albums, or genres by name, and my most favorite feature is the "play similar music" command which uses the metadata of the current song to play music that's like what you're playing now. For those who know my research, I've done a lot in this area of similar media, so it was awesome to see a product that is putting some of those ideas in action! You can also ask it "what's playing" and it will tell you the artist and song title of the song that's playing. That one is a little less useful, since the artist and song title are on the screen right at the top of the dashboard :)

So in the end, it was pretty cool and I wish it was something that could be put into any car. For me, a car is a once in 15 years purchase and I'm only 7 years into my current one. It will be interesting to see how things like ipods and phones get integrated in the future and how easy it will be to upgrade these sorts of systems for people who want to drive their cars until they die. And interesting to see how voice makes its way into more products - hopefully in ways that don't require reading the manual!

Learning Chinese

2009-07-24T21:34:00.002-05:00

I've always wanted to learn Mandarin. Back when I was going to Beijing more often, I took a 6 week course that met twice a week to learn the very basics. From that class I remember how to say hello, goodbye, thank you, train, apple, I, you, America, China, and a few other words :) But it taught me the tones, which was the most helpful part, so when I see a word in Pin Yin today, I know how to say it even if I don't know what it means.

Now that I'm headed back to Beijing in October, I thought it was a perfect excuse to try to learn some more and maybe actually be able to speak more than a few simple words while I'm there. So I signed up for the online version of Rosetta Stone which lets you access all 3 course levels of Chinese for 6 months. Since it was about the same price as just the first course on CD, this seemed to be the best deal. And if I felt ambitious, I could really get my money's worth!

I have to admit that initially I was really skeptical to their whole approach. There is no English at all, no instructions, no "lessons" in the sense of being taught something and then repeating it. It's all learn by doing and all based on pattern-matching. The idea being that you learn best when you have to actually make the connection in your brain without being told what you're even looking at.

So they have screens with men and women, girls and boys and you learn all four words just by association. Or a man eating and a woman drinking and you have to figure out which phrase applies to each. At first I just couldn't imagine learning a language without the standard dictionary approach of here's the english and here's the word in the foreign language: now memorize and repeat. So it was weird getting started, but after an hour or two I realized that with all this pattern matching I was really learning. And not just learning the words, but the grammar constructions as well. It was starting to get interesting.

Then today at lunch I started thinking in Chinese when looking at objects around the room and seeing people in line waiting to order. And the words just came to me, even though I hadn't studied them in a traditional sense. And that's when I knew I was really learning things the right way.

So I'm only on Course 1, Lesson 3, but I highly recommend this way of learning! I'm looking forward to putting some of these new language skills to use in China in two months!

Bastille Day 5k

2009-07-11T08:56:00.002-05:00

This past Thursday, I ran in the Bastille Day 5k in the West Loop. And yes, it's weird that the Bastille Day race is held a week before the actual day. It was my first race since Shamrock Shuffle back in March, and only the fourth time I had been out running since then. I know, I've been bad this spring/summer! All of the training for the winter marathon just made me not want to run for a while. But that didn't get in the way from it being a really fun race!

I was a bit nervous about the quality of the race after last year (when they put all of our gear check bags in the gutter unattended in the pouring rain in a not-so-great part of the city). This year's packet pickup didn't help much either as it took 4 people working together about 5 minutes just to look up someone's name and get them their bib and shirt (no goodie bag, as they ran out after 1,000 and had 6,000ish signed up).

After last year's gear check issues, I decided to go bagless to this event. I stuffed my ID, train pass, keys, and $20 into the key pocket in my running shorts and jumped on the train into the city. It was nice to show up at the start line and not have to worry about checking anything and waiting in lines. I was able to get a little cup of water and walk around and stretch.

It was fairly warm at the start, about 80 degrees, but it was at 7:30 at night so at least there wasn't a ton of direct sunlight with the buildings catching most of it. The race started right on time and I fell into a pace of about 9 minute miles. That's definitely less than normal for me in a race this distance, but since I hadn't run much lately, it felt like a good pace.

5k sure feels short when the last two races you've run are a marathon and an 8k. I made it around to the halfway point and ran right past the water table. I was feeling great (probably due to the slow pace!). As I made it to the 3 mile marker with 0.1 to go, I was starting to feel the heat and longing for the water at the end. I put in a solid finish and went searching for post-race snacks. My final time was just over 28 minutes, definitely my worst 5k in a long time, but I wasn't doing this one for speed. My one issue with this race is the lack of energy drinks at the end. They just had water. But it was great to have some water, bagels, granola bars, and bananas as I made my way through the finishing chute.

The race is held in conjunction with a west loop block party, so I walked over there to see what was going on. They had a cover band playing various 80s and 90s songs which was a lot of fun and some French wine to go with the Bastille Day theme. A nice relaxing end to the run for sure. It felt weird walking back to the train without a bag, but nice to not have to search in the gutter for it :)

NYC

2009-07-05T11:01:00.004-05:00

Last weekend I was in NYC for the program committee meeting for ACM Multimedia. For those of you not in academia, a program committee is basically the group of people that sit around and figure out which papers go into the proceedings of a conference, in this case one of the big multimedia conferences. I was on a new track this year called Human Centered Multimedia, which was fairly exciting. It's trying to bring more HCI methods into the community and look at multimedia generation and use from a user's point of view (which hasn't always been the case in this community).

I flew on on Saturday afternoon and got to spend a little bit of the day wandering around the city. I made it up to the Hayden Planetarium (of Neil DeGrasse Tyson fame) to see the pluto-less planet exhibit. The Planetarium was really nicely done and really interactive which I enjoyed. They even had a little part of an exhibit on AGN which is what a friend of mine is studying for her PhD!

After the planetarium, I made it over to a vegan restaurant that I've been meaning to try for years: Candle Cafe. It's on the upper east side and has a nicer (and I've been told pricier) cousin Candle 79 on 79th St. Candle Cafe was really nice and the menu had way too many things that looked amazing. I settled on the seitan with gravy and mashed potatoes and was not disappointed! Definitely some of the best seitan I've ever had! I finished it up with a chocolate mousse on top of a cookie and that just hit the spot!

But I did leave room for one of my NYC favorites, curry fries and Yuengling from St. Andrews near Times Sq. I met up with an old work colleague there for some good conversation on the economy, research, and mobile computing! All of the lawn chairs in Times Sq were a bit odd though. I still don't know how I feel about that. At least it makes it easier to cross the street to get to Jamba :)

The PC meeting started bright and early the next day at the Waldorf-Astoria. The Waldorf sort of let me down with long check in lines and way too cold air conditioning (when it was only in the mid 70s outside!). But the meeting went well and we got down to our final paper list with an accept rate of 13.5% (which is crazy low!). I was pretty excited that my paper on TuVista was one of the ones accepted (again for those that don't know, the authors or people affiliated with the authors need to leave the room when your paper is being discussed and you never learn who reviewed your paper). I had a 5, 4, 4, 2 for reviews, which continues my streak of large variance and always having someone who doesn't like my paper :)

Overall, I really liked the set of selected papers we ended up with. In previous years, it's been hard to find enough good ones. I just wish this track had some more submissions that were dead on the description of the track. I want to see more studies of how to produce multimedia that's enjoyable or ways to navigate large databases of multimedia on mobile devices or research methods for the multimedia domain. There were good papers, but I guess since the track is new, it will take a while before people know that it's a place to submit papers like this. I would have had no idea if I wasn't on the program committee.

The PC meeting ended with dinner at the Rock Cafe in the plaza outside 30 Rockefeller Center. Definitely a nice end to the day! The next morning, several members from the PC presented their work in the annual workshop after the PC meeting. I got to see what an old lab-mate of mine under Trevor was up to, so that was fun!

And I couldn't make it out of NYC without stopping for some deep-dish vegan pizza at Cafe Viva on 2nd Ave. Always one of my favorite stops in the city!

All in all, a great trip. And definitely fun to put on my academic hat for a while and really think hard about other peoples' work.

Sartre on the Subway?

2009-06-25T09:03:00.002-05:00

From the BBC NewsHour this morning...The Tube in London is now reading quotes from people like Sartre and Gandhi whenever the train has to stop unexpectedly! Much better than Chicago's "We are being delayed waiting for signal clearance. We expect to be moving shortly."

However, I found it sort of amusing that the article I found about it states that the Sartre quotes are designed to "cheer up passengers."

Placeshifting Content

2009-06-24T23:03:00.002-05:00

So timeshifting content is cool (e.g. TiVo or Hulu allowing me to watch programs at any time), but placeshifting is even cooler. As most of you in Chicago know, this week WBEZ (aka Chicago Public Radio) is doing its pledge drive. That mean that on my 7 minute drive to work, I get no news, no content of any kind except for hearing Ira and other beg for money (which I've already given them!). I really hate pledge drive week, and usually just end up turning on a music station and dealing with that for a week twice each year.

But on Monday I got thinking and realized that I had the NPR app on my iPhone and that I could connect my iPhone to my car stereo. So while stopped at a stoplight, I got WBUR playing and hooked it up. In 5 seconds, I was transported to Boston. Content that would not have been available to me in Chicago a year ago was now streaming through my car speakers. And I discovered that BUR has the BBC News Hour on during my drive, so might be sticking with this option more even after BEZ's pledge drive is over.

It's really interesting to have content from anywhere in the world available anywhere. Ubiquitous internet and content are a really interesting combination. I'm really interested in other types of place-shifting, more of the mobile presence type stuff, where people almost feel like they are somewhere else or with someone else who is not co-present. I wonder how some of these place shifting content applications can be a start to that. Just hearing a Jordan's Furniture commercial on kiss108's streaming radio makes me miss Boston and my friends there a little more than usual.

Being challenged

2009-06-22T20:52:00.005-05:00

I've been talking to a lot of friends over the past few weeks and months about the concept of a challenge, especially intellectual ones. As most of you know, intellectual challenges drive me. Over the past 7 years at Motorola, I've had some amazing challenges that have made me think as hard as I ever have. Some have been challenges in understanding people and the way that they communicate. Some have been figuring out ways to use nascent technology to do things it was never designed to do in order to make people's lives easier/happier. Some have been challenges on making sense of thousands and thousands of data points in an academically meaningful way. And these challenges have excited me more than anything else and driven me to work MIT-style hours in corporate America.

I work with a great group of people: computer scientists, designers, anthropologists, and MBA-types and over the years our lab has been a really fun place to be. We work so well together and have come together to do some pretty amazing things. But for the past year, the challenge has been gone, the light in all of our eyes extinguished. As the word "labs" was removed from our organization, the challenges that came with that moniker followed quickly behind.

Sure, I've been "challenged" in this past year. Two of us were responsible for creating 100,000 lines of code. We had to organize a half dozen trials at live sporting events. All of the design bits had to fit ever more complicated interactions. Yet none of this was an intellectual challenge. What did we learn in all that time that will make a real difference for people in their lives and relationships with those they care about? And on a personal level, nothing in the last year has made me think really hard about something really hard. It was more just lots and lots of little amounts of organizational energy here and there. Making sure every little thing was in its place. Which just does not excite me in the ways that a wall full of unorganized data or a design idea that I have no idea how to make does.

I'm lucky to have found a place that has been able to challenge me so much over the past 7 years. Many of my friends still have not found a place that lets them think until their brains hurt (Which really is a pleasurable activity to most of my friends!). I recognize how lucky I am to have had great management that has looked out for me and helped me find my way into the academic parts of my life that I enjoy so much. Without teaching at MIT this spring and serving on various program committees, I think my brain would have started to rot in my head. But I need more than that. I need to be able to create and think and rack my brain on a daily basis, not just after a paper deadline when I get to think critically about other peoples' work.

It's a tough time for a lot of companies out there right now. I hope that now more than ever, they can see the value of research. The value of people thinking up ideas just beyond what's possible today and pushing those boundaries to help bring new ideas and experiences into people's lives. I know what type of work makes me happy and I yearn for a day when I can do it again. I want to end each day knowing that something I did that day will make people's relationships with each other stronger and help them to live happier lives. And I want that something to be something I have no idea how to accomplish when I start trying to do it.

European Vacation

2009-06-07T08:02:00.010-05:00

I'm now back from a wonderful trip to Germany and the UK. After the Paralympics were over, I decided that I definitely needed a break and should take advantage of the fact that I was in Europe. Plans called for Frankfurt, Berlin, and London and seeing a bunch of old friends along the way! This was the first long vacation (other than visiting my parents over Christmastime) that I've taken in the 7 years I've been at Motorola, and I think I have to take many more now!

Vacation started with a flight from Manchester to Frankfurt. I flew my most-hated airline, Lufthansa. The flight was late as always and they had no vegan food, but at least I got some United miles for the trouble :) The day before, I had talked to my friend Helen up in Bonn and we figured out some dinner plans, so after checking into my hotel in Frankfurt, I got on the 300km/hr ICE train and made my way up to Bonn.

I really enjoyed Bonn and the quick tour of town Helen took me on. I find in funny that everyone I tell about going to Bonn asks if I saw Beethoven's house, and yes, I did! Bonn looks like a nice city, and we had some great Thai food before I had to jump back on the train to Frankfurt.

Frankfurt, part 1, was fun as well. I spent the morning wandering around town seeing some of the more historic parts as well as the new crazy mall designed by Fuksas. For dinner, I met up with my old MIT friend Eliza-Beth for an adventure at a veggie restaurant there. The food was great, but I had a curry that didn't come with rice. Oh well, it was thick and tasty :) And wonderful to catch up with an old friend!

The next part of the trip took me to Berlin on the ICE. One of the most interesting things to me was all of the wind turbines that I passed along the train route. The 50 mile stretch outside of Berlin in particular was just full of them. I wonder what percentage of Berlin's power comes from wind? I am just so impressed with the German train system. From the giant boards that show the arrival and departure time of every train on every track all day long, to the boards that show you exactly where every car of every train will stop so you can line up, it's just so amazingly organized and nice.

I spent a few days in Berlin and tried to take in as much as I could. From the super-touristy things like Checkpoint Charlie and the Holocaust Memorial, to some of the museums. The Pergamon museum was fascinating with a whole Greek temple moved to Berlin. It was a temple to Athena, so it was fun to see a bunch of Athena statues and such there. They also had a recreation of the entrance to Babylon which was impressive. The IM Pei Wing at the German History Museum was really interesting and they had some temporary exhibits in there including one on tearing down the wall. It's amazing to think that it was only 20 years ago. It's crazy to think that everything capitalist in what was East Berlin that's there today was built since that time.

One of the most amazing sights was the Reichstag, which was designed by Foster and has these mirrors all along the length of it that rotate to provide natural light to their parliament throughout the day and has some crazy natural ventilation systems in it so that they don't need to heat or cool the building most of the time. With that and all of the wind power and trains, it's so amazing how far behind we are in America.

I must add in here how much I love Starbucks in Europe. Not only do a lot of people stay in to drink their coffee, but they also give you big Starbucks mugs instead of paper cups if you're staying in. As a big coffee mug fan, that's just awesome :)

I had some good food in Berlin, including a Thai place called Restaurant Goodtime. They had some amazing veggie spring rolls and really nicely cooked tofu in their mains. Across the street was an organic cafe that I had lunch at one day. Very excellent curry soups!

From Berlin, it was back to Frankfurt on the ICE. I was mainly just back there to catch a flight the next morning to London, but saw that they had a big river festival going on (thanks to the little translator app on my phone!). FlussFestMeile, as it was called, was a fun music and food festival along the river front. They had lots of vegan food - african, indian, thai - and lots of great music. I had time to take in one band, Fräulein Wunder, and they were fantastic. An all-girl rock band with some very addictive songs. They definitely put on a fun show! They were just the opening act though, but so many people came to see them that after they finished most people left. The organizer was up on the stage on the mic repeating "Das ist nicht gut!" and begging people to come back.

I took an early flight to London (a Lufthansa flight that also was late) and made my way into town. I love that I can get around London without a map now. That evening, I met my high school friend Jess for dinner at a fun veggie restaurant near Baker St called Eat and 2 Veg. Weird name, but great food! I had gone here for tea and cake with a colleague last summer, but had never sat down for a proper meal. The food was fantastic and it was great to hear what Jess was up to out there!

My final day of vacation was filled with being touristy with Alison and her family. We started the day out with the Tower of London, which was much larger than I had thought just going past it on the bus or seeing it from the London Eye. The crown jewels were crazy and it was interesting to see all of the places where prisoners were kept over the years, and read about how the political ones were fairly free to have guests and live a fairly normal life, except for not leaving.

From there, we went on to the National Galleries. Stacie and I had spent about 2 minutes in there when we first came to London, but Alison and I got to spend a few hours there. The Monet's were amazing as expected, and they had another of Serat's works from the island that goes along with the one at the Art Institute in Chicago, so that was fun to see. We also made it to the National Portrait Gallery, where they had a few rooms devoted to portraits of scientists and scholars throughout British history. Which of course Alison and I could not pass up :)

We also couldn't pass up a photo at Platform 9 3/4 at King's Cross. We just had a few minutes as we had to get back to change for dinner, but I knew exactly where the platform was. Or so I thought! We made our way over to the track to Cambridge, but everything over there was under construction. And right where the platform should have been was a wheelbarrow and other construction equipment. But they had a little sign with directions to where they had moved it, and we got our pictures :)

The day ended, as I think all of my trips to London do, with a trip to Hakkasan! It was just as amazing as always, although they took down this really cool candle wall that Stacie and I liked. But the food was wonderful as always including their veggie chicken. This time I was there with a meat-eater, so I had Alison try it to see how much it really tasted like chicken (since I have no idea after 8 years of vegan-ness). The verdict...it was chicken to her :) I really wish there was something like Hakkasan in Chicago with so many great veggie options.

All in all, a wonderful vacation. The next day I was back home and back to work. I really need to take the time for vacations like this more often. I came back all energized and ready to go. And really happy to have spent time with so many awesome people that I don't get to see nearly enough!

Museums 2.0

2009-05-26T06:34:00.004-05:00

Since I had a free day in Manchester before starting the main bit of my vacation, I decided to wander around town a bit. I made it down to the Manchester City Galleries, which is their art museum, and spent a few hours wandering around. The museum itself is a combination of an older building, with mainly older paintings from the 17th and 18th centuries along with a newer building housing modern and interactive works.

One thing that really struck me about the museum was the way that they encourage the visitors to interact with the museum and look at some of the broader themes. Hence this post being another in my "2.0" series. There were interactive exhibits where you could control a timeline and see artistic styles evolving over the decades. There was another interactive exhibit that explored gender and art. Others that allowed you to create your own art from found objects. And unlike most other museums, at these ones, the interactive exhibits were the most popular for both kids and adults.

Another interesting participatory part of the museum was a commenting system for several exhibits which forced viewers to think critically about pieces of work from the past, from propaganda posters to portrayals of minorities and working people. Visitors could pin a note card up next to the art for others to see. The notes get culled periodically by the staff, and the "best" ones are placed under protective glass. I just loved this way to bring the community of museum-goers into the experience of visiting the museum and seeing the art.

Are other museums doing this sort of thing? I hope so!

Paralympic World Cup

2009-05-26T06:08:00.009-05:00

As many of you know, I've been out in Manchester, UK for the past week or so running our TuVista sports system at the Paralympic World Cup! It's been a fantastic week and a great trial for the system. Having never been to an Olympics-style event, the whole atmosphere of the event was interesting as well. And it was interesting to see it from the point of view of the organizers instead of just watching from the stands.

For those that don't know, I can sum up TuVista (now that it's officially public with press releases and YouTube videos and such). Basically, it's a way to get multi-angle video clips of sports video (and associated player bios and stats) to your handset in less than 30 seconds from the action in an event.

For the PWC, we covered every event including Wheelchair Basketball, Cycling, Track and Field, and Swimming. Everything went smoothly and we produced about 1200 clips. Throughout the process we got to work with various people from BBC Sport and BT Vision which was the most interesting bit for me. Seeing how they produced their content and covered events like this was exceedingly helpful. And it was the BBC, who are sort of my heroes :)

The games themselves were just so inspirational. In swimming there were athletes doing one-armed backstroke, and one guy that had no legs and one arm doing backstroke. In Track, Oscar Pistorius won two golds in the 100m and 400m. It was just amazing to see him run and stay ahead of others that had less severe disabilities.

Anyway, the week left me full of thoughts for the next iteration of the system, which is always good. I'm now off for a week of well deserved vacation in Germany and London. It will be good to see old friends and just relax for a bit after a few months of crazy working hours preparing for these games.

Boston

2009-05-17T08:54:00.004-05:00

It's hard to believe the semester is at an end already! It's been quite the 12 weeks for my students (and for me with all sorts of crazy travel and preparing for this Manchester trip). I was out at MIT this past Tuesday for a jam-packed day of activities.

The morning started with Marie-Jose's Social Television class and their final presentations. It was a small class with three groups and industry people were invited in to watch and ask questions. The class was interesting in that they had media lab students and sloan students working together on the projects. It's still always amazing to me though how the Media Lab is such a demo culture. It's all about showing that x technology can work, but not if it should work or if it's useful. I really wish HCI could be more central at MIT.

In the afternoon, after working for a few hours in the stata lobby, I went to a talk from Steven Chu, the Energy Secretary of the United States. The talk was amazing and overflowed from 10-250 into 26-100 and a few other rooms! I made it into 26-100 with a pretty good seat. Anyway, the talk was all about long and short term research and how they play together to create truly revolutionary ideas. He started with some motivation showing that the climate crisis is worse that the error bars on the last round of estimates and that we must act now. Then, he talked about Bell Labs and how they revolutionized telecommunications. He even went into the specifics of Shannon's encoding theories!! And that's not even his field. This guy is seriously the smartest person I've ever seen speak and made me really proud of the Obama administration for picking him! What a difference! Anyway, he ended with a look at some of the areas that need some research now and how practical research into alternative energy and energy efficiency that's also focused on some theoretical contributions can really make a difference.

One more interesting fact from the talk: Apparently the LEED certification for buildings is on theoretical efficiency based on the design. But buildings almost never get that and aren't tuned properly. So the difference between LEED Silver, Gold, etc isn't actually statistically significant in practice!!

OK. And then the day ended with my class. The presentations were amazing...from an alarm clock on your phone that wakes you up when your sleep cycle finishes, to an app that lets you synchronously listen to music with friends at a distance, to a community app to blog road and sidewalk hazards, to a bunch of other amazing applications. They did such a great job!

The day ended with being kicked out of two bars at closing time while trying to catch the end of the (Red) Sox game. They won! :)

Anyway, I'm off to Manchester this afternoon to run our TuVista sports system at the Paralympic World Cup! Then a bit of vacation. It should be a wonderful trip! I'll try to post pictures and updates while I'm gone.

Subsidized Train Service

2009-05-03T09:33:00.005-05:00

Yesterday, I took a fun day trip down to St. Louis to ride the Arch with Alison. When we were at Disney after the Marathon, she said she had never been inside, and I knew we had to do something about that! St. Louis is about 300 miles south of Chicago and as I found out, Amtrak has some really awesome deals on trains there and they run fairly frequently (I think there are 8 a day, even on weekends). It came out to $23 each way, which is quite the deal!

I left super-early to catch a 7am train downtown. There were only a few people around the waiting area, which seemed sort of strange, but the train boarded and left with only about 40 people on it. It really didn't get any more crowded the rest of the way, and after Bloomington and Springfield, there really weren't very many people on it at all. But it got me to St. Louis! And 10 minutes early! Seriously, Amtrak runs on time now? It was really quite a pleasant experience...power outlets at the seat and everything!

St. Louis was fun as always, we got to the arch just in time for our scheduled trip up to the top. The little space capsules that take you up were just as awesome as I had remembered! :) And the view from the top was just as fun as always. Saarinen is awesome! The whole arch is just this amazing view towards the future and definitely fits the time when it was built. It's too bad it was built to commemorate events that led to the killing of so many native americans. I just try to forget that when I'm there!

After the arch, we met up with some of Alison's friend's friends for a late lunch and then it was back to the train for another 5 1/2 hour ride back up to Chicago (Obama, get on this high speed rail to STL thing!!).

The ride back was even more empty than the ride down there. I counted 16 people getting off the train in Chicago. I asked the conductor about this, as clearly 16 people paying $23 does not get a train from St. Louis to Chicago. It turns out that the train is pretty much fully subsidized by the Illinois Department of Transportation. I guess this is a common thing for most of the Amtrak system as the only line that actually makes money is Acela. While it's sort of sad that no one wants to take the train, I think it's great that they are at least provided as a (very cost-effective) option to get around. And it 's nice to be productive while traveling. I read around 400 pages and listened to a bunch of podcasts which definitely made the time fly by.

Anyway, definitely lots of fun in St. Louis!!

trusting text messages?

2009-04-25T09:12:00.003-05:00

So I've been booking some international travel these past few days and I guess my credit card company thought that this was out of character for me (they must not know me very well!). But instead of allowing the transaction to go through and calling me later to verify like they have done in the past, they rejected the transaction and sent me a text message.

First off, it's pretty annoying that the default behavior is to block the transaction nowadays, especially with someone who books international trains/hotels frequently. But the part that really got me was the text message. It had an 800 number to call in it and when you called that number, it didn't immediately identify itself as the bank. Very fishy (or phishy?).

In any case, I hung up and called the number on my card (which was different from the number in the text) and indeed, the text was legit. But really, are they expecting people to trust the text message and give away their credit card number to some automated phone system that doesn't identify itself? Strange.

Fast Trains

2009-04-19T10:42:00.003-05:00

Most of your know that I have a thing for fast trains. Efficient electric transportation directly to and from a city center just can't be beat! Which I why I was really excited to take the Acela a few weeks ago from DC up to Boston. And I was quite impressed. If Obama can be serious about this high speed rail network in the US, it might just be a very good thing!

The day started nice and early with a 9am train out of Union Station in DC. By 8:40 or so quite the line had formed by the track (as it's general seating, which I found sort of strange). The train was totally sold out, but I was able to get a nice window seat. The seats were quite spacious and there's a power outlet for every seat, which I definitely took advantage of in order to work on a paper for a good part of the trip.

The train ride itself was super quiet and the leaning into turns felt even smoother than the french trains that do that. However, there was no wifi, which seems like a huge oversight since the buses that go on the same route (Megabus, Bolt, etc.) all have wifi. It was probably for the best in the end to minimize distraction :)

The cafe car had tons of great veggie food as well...veggie burgers, pita and hummus, and a few other vegan items. Definitely a huge step up from traditional Amtrak fare!

Unfortunately, high speed doesn't mean very high speed in America. The train averages somewhere in the 80 MPH range, although it did get up to 150 for a little bit. Nothing like the 190 MPH on the French trains, but not a bad start.

Anyway, if they end up doing this Chicago hub for high speed rail, I'll definitely appreciate the quick service to Milwaukee and St. Louis if they roll out the same sort of train. Just please add wifi!

The Cable Show

2009-04-12T09:43:00.006-05:00

So two weeks ago I was down in DC for The Cable Show. This was my first time there and I didn't really know what to expect. A really wide variety of companies attended this thing - from equipment manufacturers like Motorola and Cisco to operators like Comcast to networks like NBC, Turner, Disney, HBO, etc. I guess I was expecting something CES-like with everyone showing their latest stuff.

Sadly, it was much more of a sales event than a showcase. Which I guess was ok, but not as cool :) The media companies all had some pretty big stars come out. Turner brought out Wolf Blitzer and Fox had Danny DiVito and a bunch of other people I didn't recognize! Our booth was right next to Turner, which owns Cartoon Network. At one point they had a dozen or so storm troopers come out and do battle in the booth which was pretty amusing. And they gave out a whole bunch of Clone Wars goodies!

We were showing off our sports service, TuVista. There's a video up on YouTube if you want to see more about it. The video came out OK, especially since they just came up to me and were like, put on this mic, we're going to tape you. So no planning, but it tells the story :)

While in DC, I was able to run over to see the Cherry Blossoms, which were in full bloom that week. I had always wanted to do that and was happy to have the chance! Sadly, I had to head up to Boston on the day they were doing the 10 mile race through the blossoms - that would have been so much fun! I was also able to meet up with a few wonderful MIT friends for dinner which definitely made the trip awesome!

Some good food was had as well. I highly recommend IndeBleu which is a sort of Indian-inspired restaurant with lots of veggie options. Vegetate was also really good, although on a block of abandoned buildings which was a bit odd.

fainting in dc?

2009-04-11T19:56:00.002-05:00

Sorry for the long break between posts here. I've been out of town on a crazy Chicago-DC-Boston-LA-Chicago trip. I'll be posting some updates about fun things at the Cable Show and CHI, but first a weird occurrence...

So my first day in DC, I had just landed and we went straight to the convention center to set up our part of the booth for our demo. I hadn't really eaten anything all day and was pretty hungry, but didn't think much of it. While setting up, I had to reach in a sort of contorted way for a cable and pulled something in my shoulder. Not really badly, but enough to want to take a break for a minute. So I stand up pretty quickly and walk around a bit to shake it off. But I can't walk, at least not well. My head was getting light and I could just feel my brain slowly shutting down and fading away. Apparently I stumbled a few steps and some people in the booth helped me to the ground. It was pretty scary!

As soon as I was down, I was feeling much better - although completely soaked from sweating. But the paramedics came anyway. Nothing was really wrong with me although my sugar was a bit low (not surprising since I hadn't eaten anything in quite some time). Anyway, a super scary experience!

Which would have been enough on its own. But then I had dinner with a friend who lives in DC and she told me that she had just recently fainted while at home. And then the next day I had dinner with another friend who also had fainted at work. Now there's something weird going on. Three people, all within a short amount of time, fainting for the first time in their lives in the same city. Something weird is going on there!

Google seems to be no help. But if anyone has heard anything about this, let me know. It's too weird to just be a coincidence.

A Snowy Shuffle

2009-03-29T20:33:00.003-05:00

Snow for Shamrock Shuffle
Originally uploaded by bentley79.

It may officially be spring-time in Chicagoland, but you wouldn't know it from this morning. It was the 30th running of the Shamrock Shuffle, and as I've done for the past four years now, I was running.

Last night and this morning also brought a lot of snow to Chicago. Which is definitely weird for this time of year. (It was 70 here not so long ago!) I woke up super early this morning and took a look outside and almost went back to bed. They hadn't gotten to plowing my street and the forecast said that the snow wouldn't let up until well into the afternoon.

But I thought that it might be fun after all and certainly an experience I wouldn't soon forget. So I got ready and put on many many layers of clothing and got out there! The drive to the city was pretty bad with cars spun out on the freeway every few miles. But I got there and made my way to gear check to leave my bag. The show was pretty heavy (this was around the time the picture was taken) and they were handing out plastic bags, which I definitely loved. I threw that on and was able to stay a bit warmer in the 1/2 hour until the start.

This year I was up in starting corral B which is really close to the front! (I had a really good 5k time last year from the runway race at O'Hare) I made my way into the corral and waited for the start. The corrals were full of snow and slush and just pretty nasty overall. As we all made our way to the starting line once the race began everyone's feet were just soaking wet. From standing around for 1/2 hour in the snow and 30MPH winds my feet were pretty cold.

Crossing the starting line, I realized that my feet were indeed pretty cold. It felt like I had numb bricks on the ends of my shoes for the first few blocks, but I was starting at a pretty nice pace so I quickly warmed up. The street was not well plowed at all though and it was a slushy mess the whole way with lots of giant puddles.

I made it through mile 1 in about 8:30 which was a great pace, but one I knew I couldn't sustain...especially in all the slush. But I was feeling great and kept on going! Mile 2 was a little less than 9 minutes and I was still feeling great. My feet were all warmed up and I was definitely in the groove at that point. I ran right past the first aid station...definitely not in need of a cold drink at that point!

Miles 3 and 4 were also pretty easy. I got a little gatorade at the mile 3.5 aid stop but otherwise kept moving along. My pace slowed down a bit (especially since Jackson St was not plowed at all and was a giant slush puddle for 3/4 of a mile!). But I made my way along!

As I turned up to Roosevelt with 0.2 to go, I saw that this street too was filled with slush. It was a tough "climb" up Mt. Roosevelt, but the end was in sight! I came in a little cold, but feeling great! My final time was 45:30 (9:09 pace) which was a PR for me in this event. It's amazing how 5 miles feels like nothing after having trained for a marathon a few months ago! If the weather would have been nicer, I really would have had a great finishing time!! I ran into Jen's sister in the finishing chute which was fun (and random in a race with tens of thousands of runners!).

Gear check was annoying as usual. The bib numbers go in order of start corral and so do the gear check tables. So all 1,000 runners in the 4,000 rage will finish within 5 minutes of each other and all want their bags at the same time. It's just silly to do things that way :) But they never learn!

I grabbed my free post-race beer and then made my way up to Schoolyard for beers and food with Zack and Marissa. I really love their black bean burger with hummus! Such a good idea!

Shamrock was definitely a race to remember. I've done this race in the 70s and now with windchills in the 20s with blizzard-like conditions. And it's always a good time! Let the Chicago outdoor running season begin!

busy and about to be busier!

2009-03-24T18:37:00.002-05:00

It's been a busy few weeks around here. Last week I was off to Boston again to teach and to celebrate St. Patrick's Day. It was fun to hang out with my friend Susan and as always wonderful to start the day with some Bagel Rising!

The next few weeks will surly be busy. Next week I'll be at the NCTA Cable Show in DC showing off what I've been working on this year (on the main floor!!!). From NCTA, I'm taking the Acela (yay!) up to Boston for CHI. I'll be around the 4th-9th if anyone wants to get some veggie food or a drink sometime. I'm really looking forward to CHI as it should be a nice break from my crazy schedule at work and it's always fun to see old friends there. This is the first year in a while where I'm not presenting at the conference proper (I have a workshop paper), so it should be a fairly relaxing week.

Random things:

I went to the CSO for the first time since 2003 last weekend. It was great! Even the flutists, which didn't make me cry :)

I'm running the Shamrock Shuffle 8k this weekend. If you are too, let me know and let's meet up after the race!

If you're in the LA area on April 10 and have an iPhone/iPod Touch/N95/ZN5, let me know. You might be able to help me with something.

Diebold's UI issues...

2009-03-12T19:26:00.001-05:00

As I was driving up the 405 the other day there was a great story on KCRW about a particular button on the Diebold voting machines in use in CA and other states. Apparently on the management screen, there are three buttons in a row: "Print" "Save" and "Clear". After an election, they are supposed to print a log and save it to disk for future use. But that third button, well, it happens to clear out all records of voting having occurred with no prompt like "Are you sure?" just click and poof, no election ever happened here.

The KCRW show was awesome in that they talked in detail about usability and all of the issues with that little button - from where it was placed, to what it was named, to the lack of confirmation needed to do something really bad. Oh, and the worst part is, since it deletes the logs, there's no log of the deletion of logs anywhere!

In previous elections, some polling places have accidentally hit this button and all votes were lost. So the voting machine is officially illegal because under CA (and most others states) law you can't have a voting machine that erases logs. So how did it get through inspection?

Anyway, just thought it was interesting that there was this detailed discussion of usability on (sort of) mainstream radio. And sad that this is what our country relies on when it comes to elections.

More here in the wired article.

IL-MA-NH-VT-MA-IL-CA-IL

2009-03-08T22:18:00.003-05:00

The title was my travel itinerary for last week and yes, it was a bit crazy! But it turned out to be a wonderful week and I'm in such a great mood right now and ready to dive into another long week of work back here.

The week started with a trip out to MIT. I had my colleague JoEllen in to guest lecture a class on mobile design which went really well and the students really got into...which is always a challenge with such a fluffy topic at MIT :) I really think they're beginning to see how all of this human centered design stuff works which is awesome! While in Boston, I made a quick trip to Grasshopper for some awesome "chicken" fingers and No Name with Susan! So great to see old friends and eat good food!

From Boston, I drove up to Dartmouth to give a talk at their CS Colloquium. I talked about our Ambient Communications work and the general process we use for ideation and prototyping. It got people talking which was good, as was dinner with Andrew and Tanzeem. It was a bit cold up there though! While at Dartmouth, I made it over to see the Orozco murals, including the skeleton giving birth to knowledge.

A quick stop in VT for coffee, and then I was back to Boston to catch a bit of the Boston FIRST regional before heading to the airport. I ran into an old WildStang student on the way in which was a bit crazy, but fun to catch up with her! Then I hung out with Dawn who was the pit announcer while watching TJ^2 move around and the MIT robot stand around as usual :) A quick lunch/dinner at Wagamama and I was on my way home!

I stayed in chicago for about 11 hours and was on my way out again, this time to LA to test a system for work out at UCLA. It was a fun trip, the system worked, and it was good to see it in action again! On Saturday, I made it down to Carlsbad to see my friend Stacie and go to Legoland. We had such a blast (pictures coming soon!) and I even got a picture of me at the (lego) Obama inauguration!

Now I'm back in Chicago and definitely ready for sleep. Super early meetings tomorrow at work. To all of you that I got to see on this trip, it was so totally wonderful to see you all!!!

busy, but relaxing weekend!

2009-02-15T20:19:00.004-06:00

It's been a fun-filled weekend here which has been relaxing, but busy at the same time. The weekend started early yesterday morning with a trip to the opening of the Munch exhibit at the Art Institute. They had a special members' preview in the morning and I went down with a friend who is a member :) The exhibit was really well done and I really liked how they hung most of the works with contemporaries who had influence on Munch and his own works. There were some nice Monets in there that I hadn't seen before which was a nice surprise! I really liked some of his street scenes and some of the series on couples in love. Definitely not the sort of image that usually crosses your mind when you think of Munch (The Scream, Golgotha, etc.)

After the museum, we made it up to one of my favorite Thai restaurants in the city, Roong Petch for some Massaman Curry with Mock Duck and 00 Tofu which definitely hit the spot! And I picked up some vanilla green tea on the way back to the train which was definitely very tasty :)

I spent the night watching this sci-fi bollywood movie, Love Story 2050. I thought it was sort of appropriate for v-day :) Despite the 3-hour length, it was actually pretty good. One of the dance scenes had dancing robots, which I think just really made the whole movie awesome! It was pretty high budget for an Indian film!

This morning, I met up with a really good friend of mine from MIT for brunch at Karyn's Cooked. It was really wonderful to catch up as I never get to see her now that she lives in DC. We had a wonderful time sharing fun stories of the last few years over fake sausage and scrambled tofu :)

The afternoon was filled with paper reviews. I'm on the PC for JCDL and had a few more papers left to review. I'm finally through them all and actually had a couple good ones this year. Sadly, due to Moto cutbacks I can't make it to the PC meeting. But at least I was able to put in some good reviews.

So I know all of that sounds like a crazy busy weekend. But it really felt relaxing. Art museums and catching up with friends is just such a nice peaceful way to spend a weekend.

I hope all of you had a wonderful weekend! I'm jealous for all of you who have tomorrow off :)

Dentist 2.0

2009-02-08T08:11:00.004-06:00

I really love my dentist. I spent way too long searching for a good one a few years ago and came across a guy who really understands turning a service into an experience (see The Experience Economy). Besides having like 10 honorifics after his name, he's also up on all the latest technology.

The office is going completely paperless/filmless and all records are digital. Before your appointment you have the choice of getting a text message or email reminder with a link that you can accept on the web. When you get there they hang up your coat and offer you a bottle of water and they know your name because they have pictures of everyone who is coming in that day on a screen behind the front desk.

Once you're in the chair, you get a remote to control a TV in front of you. All of the staff is amazingly friendly and they all do things together outside work, like running the Shamrock Shuffle next month! They're all super geeky and love showing you everything they can see and their thought processes when it comes to treatments.

And they have all the latest toys. This past time, I had a little bit of extra gum growing in between two teeth. They wanted to remove it and after explaining how it was getting in the way and causing no good, used this water-laser to chop it off in a few seconds. The amazing thing, they didn't need to numb me and it didn't hurt at all. New gadgets are fun :)

Oh, and after the appointment, they send you a web survey for feedback so that they can improve anything that wasn't totally up to your expectations!

Anyway, I wish more medical professionals would come up to speed on offering a true experience and make visiting a doctor/dentist something that's enjoyable and not dreaded. If you're looking for a dentist in Chicago, I definitely recommend Dr. Tomaselli.

Boston, Part I

2009-02-05T19:42:00.002-06:00

This week was the beginning of my spring semester journeys to MIT. For those that don't know, I co-teach a class, 21w.789 Communicating with Mobile Technology, with Ed Barrett. And yes, for those in the know, that's the Writing and Humanistic Studies department...which is a very interesting place to have a class like this. The class is about the human-centered design process and creating mobile media applications. It's basically my job at Motorola taught in 12 weeks :)

So Tuesday morning I made my way to O'Hare, standing out in the 4 degree weather to catch the train to the airport. My flight was canceled, but as I have one more month left of 1K on United, it was a breeze to get a nice seat on the next flight! Not too much later I was in snowy Boston making my way to MIT.

After some Anna's Taqueria and a few conference calls, it was time for class. We have a wonderful group of around 30 students. I'm really excited to see what they can come up with for their projects! It's going to be another great year!

After class, I made my way to Eastern Standard to meet up with my friend Helen and a bunch of our college friends for drinks. It was so wonderful to see everyone and catch up! And I talked Helen, Nicole, Erin, and Nancy into running the 2010 Napa-Sonoma Half Marathon with me!! It's going to be so much fun!!!

I stayed with my high school friend Susan and in the morning we made our way to Bagel Rising for wonderful tofu-cream "cheese" bagels. A quick T ride to the airport and I was on my way home!

When I got to the airport, I realized that my flight home wasn't direct. I had forgotten all about this as I booked the trip a while back. Non-stops to Boston are pretty crazy this year and it was much cheaper to make a stop in Charlotte on the way back. Anyway, I was in the airport down there and went to CPK ASAP to get a pizza to take on the next leg of the flight. I asked for a Hawaiian with no meat and no cheese, my usual CPK pizza. And the girl behind the counter looked and me really funny and said "What y'all orderin' ain't no pizza" at which point I was quite confused and asked if she could make what I was asking. She called back to the guy making pizzas and his response was "I ain't got no clue what that is, pizza with no cheese!" I explained, it's just sauce and pineapple, and he was like "OK. I can make that for you! But that's weird." Ah, the South.

Anyway, after getting to Chicago I made my way downtown for some fun data analysis with our mobile devices design team. It totally made my day, as did a fun dinner at Elephant and Castle. I miss working with that team!

In other news, I just accepted a request to be on the Program Committee for the Human-Centered Multimedia track for ACM Multimedia '09 so I'll be down in Cancun for the program committee meeting (on my own dime, but don't get me started on that) :)

MIT...stating the obvious...

2009-02-01T09:29:00.002-06:00

I was downloading a set of MIT Certificates to my new work laptop and in the process got the following message:

According to our records you last changed your password on: Tue Sep 14 23:16:29 1999 which is more than a year ago.

Yes, I do think that 1999 was more than a year ago :)

25 things...

2009-01-31T21:11:00.002-06:00

I posted this on facebook, but decided to post it here as well. So enjoy 25 random facts about me...

1. I ate meat multiple times a day until I met my friend Amber and she lent me some books eight years ago.
2. The first complete sentence that I spoke was "I need new batteries" when I was 2.
3. My first vivid memory is from my third birthday when I thought to myself that when I'm twice as old as I am now, I'll be 6!
4. I was hijacked to Havana, Cuba in the early 80s with my mom when we were on our way to visit my uncle in Miami.
5. I love museums and my mom would take me to one on every school holiday when I was little. I once spent the better part of a day in the Louvre, however on another occasion spent about 5 minutes in the National Gallery with my friend Stacie (we had to catch a bus!).
6. I've traveled to ten countries in the past four years.
7. I've always been a recycler. I remember my mom holding me up when I was little to put the glass coke bottles into the recycling bins at the grocery store.
8. I had never heard of MIT until I met Woodie Flowers late in my sophomore year of high school. He suggested that I check the place out :)
9. While at MIT, I lived in a co-op where I cooked dinner for up to 30 people at once. I miss all of my old housemates a ton.
10. I never liked cooking much until I became vegan. Now it's one of the most enjoyable things that I do.
11. I've run two full marathons and a few halves. I'm trying to get into triathlons, but I'm a horrible swimmer.
12. I wrote my first computer program on the night of my 5th birthday in BASIC on my brand new C64.
13. In high school, I created our school's first website and put our school newspaper on the web. This was in 1996, and I wrote this fun java program to turn our newspaper into HTML. For this they gave me an office with a computer. It was fun to have friends visit and we kept Jen's soccer schedule on the whiteboard.
14. My favorite restaurant is Hakkasan in London which I don't get to go to very often. The one I frequent most is Thai Garden in Schaumburg where I eat almost once a week.
15. I'm an avid reader and love reading about almost any topic. Most of my reading is non-fiction, but I do enjoy fiction as well. There's just too much I want to learn first!
16. While most of my schooling was in engineering, most of my job involves ethnography and design. I don't see a contradiction in that at all, and see so many links between the arts and sciences every day.
17. Last year I watched a soccer game at Estadio Azteca from the broadcast booth.
18. I make lists. Lots of lists. Things to do, books to read, studies I want to plan, papers I want to write...
19. I try not to drive my car on weekends. This is hard in the winter, but living by the train helps.
20. I've been to Disney (World/Land/Paris/Tokyo) 17 times in my life. I'm only missing Hong Kong Disney which I hope to go to later this year!
21. I can't go to San Francisco without making a trip to Muir Woods. It's one of the most peaceful places on the planet.
22. My favorite places to run include the Chicago lakefront path, the Charles in Boston, and the Golden Gate Bridge. I guess I like running near water?
23. I strongly believe in helping young people love to learn. For the past three years, I've tutored at 826 Chicago and prior to that mentored a high school team in the FIRST Robotics Competition. If you're looking to volunteer, check both of them out! They are both national.
24. Amelie is my favorite movie. I spent a day in Paris going to all of the scenes in the movie (and noticing the extreme lack of photo booths in the metro!)
25. I miss the academic rigor of MIT. I'm definitely looking forward to getting out there this week to teach again!

bored...

2009-01-26T20:50:00.003-06:00

Research (at least in the lab I work in) is cyclical. We strongly believe in commercializing our ideas, so we'll go through years of intense research and then years of development before moving on to the next big thing. For the past two years, I've been deep in the development side of things for two big projects. Which is nice, and it involves a totally different set of skills and functions that must be accomplished. And it's been great working on that side of things and seeing my work through to be at the point where millions of people can use it later this year. That's why I work where I do, and not in a university someplace.

But I must admit to being bored lately. Not bored because I have nothing to do (because certainly there's plenty to do!) but bored because I'm not able to work on things that are challenging or intellectually stimulating. Helping work out a business deal or port some software to one new platform after another just doesn't make my brain go whirring about with joy.

Today however, I made it down to our city offices to help a colleague there with some data analysis and just felt so wonderful! (another colleague stopped me later and asked why I was smiling so much!) The joy of having pages and pages of data and needing to make sense of it makes my head spin in a million directions at once. To find patterns and invent new ideas based on those findings is just so stimulating and something I've missed so much.

As I said, all research goes in cycles. And I already have some plans to start up another ethnographic-style study of my own. But in the mean time, it's nice to be able to help others with theirs :)

MoMo Chicago vs. MoMo Silicon Valley

2009-01-20T18:37:00.003-06:00

Last night, I attended the new kickoff for Mobile Monday Chicago, which is a group of people in the mobile industry who get together once a month to talk about specific topics in the mobile space. This was the first event in the Chicago group and it was really interesting to me the sharp differences in the people who came vs. the people that come to MoMo in the valley.

I've been to a few of the events in san francisco, and they're all huge...hundreds of people, mostly from startups (but also established players like Nokia, Yahoo, Google, etc.). The Chicago group was quite different, and it reflects the sorts of businesses that are in Chicago. Chicago isn't a tech city. It's not the place for the next hot mobile startup or social website. It's home to big home-goods companies (Sears, Kraft, etc.) and lots of advertising firms. So for the most part, that's who showed up and the discussions were so different from anything in academia or the startup world out west.

This month, Tom Emmons from Sears presented the work that they've been doing in the mobile space. From 2D barcodes in store, to SMS contests, to a nice iPhone-friendly mobile web site that allows you to buy almost any item from your phone and pick it up in the store. It's definitely not the glamor apps of Loopt or Flickr or the latest mobile browser, but clearly the sort of app that will be immediately useful for a lot of people.

It will definitely be interesting to see how the Chicago Mobile Mondays evolve and the topics that people find interesting. Sadly, I think I feel much more at home in the ones out West or in Boston :)

Marathon Splits

2009-01-16T07:23:00.002-06:00

In case it wasn't obvious where I lost my pace in the marathon, there's this handy graph produced by my nike+. That big dip is mile 20-21 which involved lots of sun, and a giant hill just after the mile 21 sign. Other than that though, fairly consistent pace, You can see a short drop after mile 13 as the sun was up a bit more at that time.

Official splits:
5 Mile 50:01
10 Mile 1:40:23
Half Split 2:12:52
20 Mile 3:34:49

A magical marathon...

2009-01-12T10:01:00.004-06:00

As most of you know, yesterday I ran the Walt Disney World Marathon in FL. It was a wonderful day and even though it was a hot day for running those kinds of distances, I had a really great time!!

The day started early with a 3am wake up call from Mickey Mouse :) I was staying at the contemporary so that I could take the monorail to the start line and we had to be on board "no later than 4am." I figured that meant that there would be crazy lines, so wanted to get to the station by 3:40 or so in case I had to wait for a few trains to go by. I ended up getting there around 3:35 and there were only 3 other people waiting, so they let us all ride in front with the driver which is always fun! I don't think I've done that since high school and coming down for the FIRST robotics competition.

At Epcot, they guided us to the gear check tents and pre-race entertainment. It was over to the side where the FIRST stages used to be and had plenty of room for everyone. It was starting to get warm already, even at 4:15 am and was already hitting the 60s with very high humidity (90% or so). I checked everything (including the garbage bag I had brought to keep me warm if I needed it) and began the one mile walk from gear check to the start line.

I was in the "Blue" start which is the top 1/3 or so of the runners. We had a special starting course from everyone else and got to go around the World Showcase at Epcot while the "Red" start just went around the parking lot. They had us all get to the starting corrals about 45 minutes early, so there was a lot of standing around and stretching. They had some big video walls where they were interviewing some of running's elite before the race. Galloway was there running his 150-something marathon. That guy is insane!

The race started with fireworks which were launched surprisingly close to us in between the blue and red corrals and from a bridge right above me. It was a fun way to start a race, especially a race that starts an hour and a half before the sun rises.

The first 13 miles of the race were wonderful. Without the sun, I kept a great pace. There were some crowds to run through as some of the roads were fairly narrow, but overall the course was pretty wide, at times going down a 3 lane freeway. I saw my parents at mile 1, which was pretty unexpected since it's almost always impossible to spot people so early in a race.

Coming around Epcot at mile 2 was fun as all of the countries were lit up. I saw my parents again at mile 4 coming out of Epcot which was nice. Then it was off to the Magic Kingdom which was at mile 10. On the way there were a few unexpected hills, including one under the canal connecting the two lakes. I also saw my parents again at the Transportation and Ticket Center. Once at the Magic Kingdom, we ran in to the start of Main St, up through to Tomorrowland, around to Dumbo and then *THROUGH THE CASTLE* which was amazing! Then a quick run over to Splash Mountain and out a service road.

Mile 13 was still great and I was at 2:12 at the half which was ahead of my Chicago time at that point. But the sun was starting to get high enough and hot enough that I could tell that the second half would be hard. Luckily, the route to Animal Kingdom was mostly in the shade. At this point the aid stations were just about every mile which was nice. Mile 16 had wet (and cold) sponges which were greatly appreciated. I was hoping for more of these later as it got pretty hot!

Animal Kingdom was fun and they had all sorts of animals out along the side of the course. My friend Alison from MIT was at mile 17.5 cheering which was a lot of fun. I knew what was coming next and I needed all of the encouragement I could get!

So at 17.5 I was still feeling great. I was still pretty much on pace and was hoping for a really great finish. But from there until mile 22 we ran down an open freeway with no shade and lots of hills for the overpasses. Mile 21 was the craziest with a giant overpass on-ramp. There was a huge collective groan from all of the runners when we turned that corner and saw how bit it was! These miles were tough for me and I really slowed down a lot and took some extended walk breaks at the aid stations (and up that giant on-ramp!).

Mile 23 was the backlot at MGM and we got to run down the streets of New York which was fun and through the costume design shop. Then it was along the Boardwalk (which was also pretty hot) and into Epcot for the final 1.2. The heat was really getting to me at this point and I made a fairly slow entrance into the World Showcase. Only in the last 0.2 was I able to kick it up a little and make a somewhat respectable finish.

I ended with a time of 4:52, which given the conditions I'm happy with. If it just would have been a little more cloudy, or less humid, or cooler out, I could have done so much better. At the end of the race it was 80 with 85% humidity.

The finish area was well run with water, powerade, clif protein bars, and bananas. I made it from finish to gear pickup in less than 10 minutes. It was nice to be done and able to cool off a bit.

Overall, the race was a lot of fun and I highly recommend it. It's very different from running Chicago though as most of the course is through access roads with no spectators. It's not the 26.2 miles of rah-rah cheering that is Chicago, but still fun and awesome to run through all of the parks!

After the race I made it back to the hotel for a quick ice bath and shower and then it was off to the Magic Kingdom with Alison for an afternoon and evening of fun! I was feeling pretty good and was able to walk around and get into rides with little difficulty. However my feet had expanded quite a bit during the day and were hitting the front of my shoes which was a bit uncomfortable. But I made it through and we rode everything that we wanted to and saw a wonderful fireworks show. All very fun!

Registration is open for next year!

409

2009-01-07T20:56:00.002-06:00

409...that's the number of miles I've run in training for the marathon. It's been a long year with lots of running in different cities and definitely different temperatures. I've run from 32 degrees up to 88 degrees and in Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Florida, London, Birmingham UK, and NYC, Mexico City, and Boston.

It's just 3 1/2 days until the Disney Marathon now! I'm in the Blue start, so I get to run around the world at Epcot twice! I'm super excited!

netflix on tivo

2009-01-03T16:43:00.002-06:00

This week I decided that I'd play with the new netflix on tivo feature. I had only been subscribing at the 4.99 level (2 a month) but for $4 more, I could get unlimited video streaming to my TV. Seemed like a no brainer to me as they have a lot of TV series on there that I can now stream directly to my TV set.

Setting it up was pretty simple, you just put a code that's displayed on your screen into a netflix website and your queue shows up (at least the portion of it that supports streaming). I had always wanted to watch the TV show Heroes, so decided I'd start there. Picked the show/season, saw a list of episodes, picked the first one and off it went. HD-quality streaming started in about 5 seconds or so and there was never a hiccup.

I did run into a DRM/rights issue though. I got to episode 20 and it just wouldn't play. I had heard that Netflix was running into some licensing issues with streaming TV shows at the same time that networks had the rights to air it and I'm guessing that it was what I came across. The error messages were not so helpful ("This title is not available to be streamed at this time" or something like that). Anyway an hour or so later, all was working fine again.

I sort of fear the day when back catalogs of all shows are available for streaming. Just with the amount of time I spent watching Heroes this week, I can't imagine how much time I'd spend if I had every episode of any show available to go in 5 seconds. And I'm really not that much of a TV person.

Some disappointments from the netflix/tivo offering:

1) They force you to have 2 queues on Netflix now and for things you want to stream, you have to add them to a special "Instant Queue" even if they are on your main queue for you to see them on your tivo. To start, it was smart and created this list with everything in my main queue that was streamable. I don't see why it couldn't just keep doing this. I really don't want to have to maintain two queues.

2) The DRM issue mentioned above. Sometimes shows can't stream because of rights issues and as far as I know there's no way to know when a show will be unavailable.

3) You can't add shows to the queue or browse available titles from the TV. It's not so bad since I had my laptop nearby to add things, but it still would be nice if you could add related content (like the next season of a show) from the TV.

Things that were surprisingly good:

1) Instant start to streaming

2) Not forcing you to think of content as being on DVD's. Streaming TV shows in their web interface is still very DVD centric where you have to pick the disc and then jump to the appropriate chapter for the episode. The Tivo interface was just a list of episodes, like it should be!

3) Speed of navigation in the netflix "app" on the tivo. A lot of tivo apps are really really slow since they do most of their processing on a server. This app was lightning fast - seemed as fast at the rest of the Tivo UI. So they're definitely doing something special and that's greatly appreciated!

2008 in books...

2008-12-31T17:03:00.002-06:00

As usual, here's 2008 in books read...

# of books read: 24
total pages read: 8205
avg. pages/day: 22.5

top three books: the corner, three cups of tea, there are no children here

Chicago 10

2008-12-31T16:53:00.003-06:00

I just finished watching the movie Chicago 10, about the Abbie Hoffman trial and the '68 Chicago convention. I can't put into words how awesome this movie was. I had known a bit about what had happened that week as I grew up in Chicago and my dad was down there working while it was going on. I had heard stories and seen an occasional photo or two of what had happened. But the movie was just so compelling with the actual footage from the protests and marches, video of police savagely beating people just sitting in the streets or standing on a sidewalk or in a park.

I highly recommend everyone rents this movie and watches it, and shows their kids (it is R rated, ironically enough due to the police acts of violence) the real power of like-minded people joining together.

And in seeing this movie I'm saddened...not just with Daley Sr. and what happened in Chicago that day, but with my own generation and how we really failed to come together against the current wars and the horrible acts conducted by our current leaders all over the world. Sure we had protests and marches here and there, but there was no voice that really brought everyone together (maybe Michael Moore, but he was a bit too outspoken to be taken very seriously). I just wish we could have done more and done it sooner.

Let's hope Barack can take us into a new America. An America that cares about its people and people all over the world and respects all human life.

running and amazing weather!

2008-12-29T15:04:00.003-06:00

Yesterday I returned from a wonderful 9 day vacation in Florida. The weather was perfect the whole time with temperatures in the 80s on most days. Of course I did all of the normal retirement-community activities with my parents - bocce, shuffleboard, driving the golf cart, etc. but I also got in 38 miles of running.

The runs were 4, 20, 4, and 10 which all went so amazingly well. I definitely feel ready for the marathon in less than two weeks! For the 20 and the 10, my dad followed along in the golf cart with water/powerade every two miles or so to approximate conditions of the race. It was all very fun and so fantastic to be able to be outside for all of that time running in the sunshine.

Christmas down there was fun as well. I cooked up a little vegan feast to accompany the ham and other meat-based items my mom was cooking. The vegan menu included a banana bread, a baked pasta dish with soy meat, and some vegan mashed potatoes. All quite yummy!

Now I'm back up in the cold in Chicago (although it's really not that cold out) for another 11 days when I head back to FL for the marathon!!

electric "car"

2008-12-19T22:13:00.002-06:00

I never thought I'd see the day when my dad was driving a fully electric vehicle...much less to have that day come before I was driving one!

So as many of you know, my parents retired to FL last year. And they live in this community where you can drive a golf cart everywhere you need to go...to the town square, grocery store, theater, restaurants, walmart, etc. So he decided to get an electric golf cart and now uses that as his primary mode of transportation.

I'm so proud :)

covering their (moon) bases...

2008-12-10T13:41:00.003-06:00

So I just got the waiver for the Disney Marathon (which is a month and a day away!) and found this section particularly entertaining...

"I further grant the Released Parties the right to photograph and/or videotape me and further to display, use, and or otherwise exploit my likeness, voice, and appearance forever and throughout the world in all media, whether now known or hereafter devised, throughout the universe in perpetuity."

running in SF

2008-12-08T19:27:00.006-06:00

Early last week I saw the weather for Chicago this weekend and realized that there was no way that I was about to be doing an 18 mile run here over the weekend. There were highs around 20 with lows way down in the single digits with negative windchills.

So I booked a quick trip to San Francisco, home of perfect marathon-training-weather year round. With highs in the low 60s you really can't beat it. So I left the land of this:

For the land of this:

I had a very wonderful weekend in the warm weather including dinner at The Plant (formerly Lettus), lunch at Naan-N-Curry, lots of holiday shopping, and of course the run.

For the run I left Union Square and headed up Market towards the bay, followed the bay all the way to the Golden Gate Bridge, ran across and came back to Union Square the same way. A wonderful 18 mile run. The fog was still in as I ran out to the bridge, but by the time I made it to the other side it had lifted and I had a wonderful view of the city as I came back into town. The weather was perfect and I felt great all the way through. Which is a relief. I didn't really know what to expect as my previous long runs had all been cut short with knee pain. I was doing this one with some new shoes and thankfully all was great!

Here's the route:

And because I'm in a data-centric mood today, here's the nike+ graph. As you can see I was quite consistent except for a little walk break up a big hill :) And I finished sub-3-hours which was my goal. Well, my goal was to finish, but that was a nice stretch goal that I made! :)

So now I feel like I'm totally ready for the marathon in a month. Just another 20 mile long run and a three week taper and it's time for the big day! I can't wait to have evenings and weekends back after months and months of running, but I'm really looking forward to the actual race day and running through all of the parks at Disney! :)

friends doing amazing things...

2008-12-08T19:24:00.003-06:00

This past week I was able to see two friends doing very amazing things. One friend was in an opera at the Lyric Opera House! And another friend was an associate producer on a wonderful documentary about the Chicago lakefront.

Both were very wonderful and it's so great to see friends making such wonderful works of art.

(If you check out the chicago lakefront website above, make sure to do the interactive map. It lets you see parts of the shows by clicking on flags on a google map...very very cool!)

can I put fantastic and LA in the same sentance?

2008-11-26T17:37:00.004-06:00

Hi! Today I made it back home from a quick trip to LA. Now most of you know that I'm not a big LA fan...the sprawl, the pollution, the car-centricness, etc. But seriously, I had such a wonderful time these past few days that I may have to rethink that. Part of it of course was seeing friends there, but there's a lot to like...

I made it out on Monday afternoon and made my way down to Orange County to visit my friend Allison. She works in the forest (or as she puts it woodlands) up in the mountains just south of Irvine. It was really wonderful to get out of the city for a bit, get the tour, see the sunset over the mountains, and eat some nice thai food. Definitely the relaxing evening I needed.

Tuesday I was up super early (6:15) to go run 16 miles along the ocean. I was staying up in Santa Monica and they have a wonderful running/biking path that runs alongside the beach. I ran down to Maria Del Rey and then back up to Santa Monica and my knee was starting to hurt a bit...a few miles later, a little more than a little bit. So I cut the run short at 14 miles, which is still a really nice run. It's about time to change shoes, so that should help the knee problem.

I was just amazed at how nice the weather was. Running in shorts and a t-shirt in almost December is such a foreign concept to me! Apparently it is to the people who live in LA as well, as there were people out there in long sleeves and gloves. I think they don't have any idea what cold is! :)

After the run, I met up with an old friend from Student House for some raw vegan food. It was good...although bread without heat isn't so great. I don't get the whole raw thing. But good food, good conversation, and eating outside. You really can't go wrong!

The work part of the trip went well, and I got to take in a volleyball game at UCLA which was a lot of fun. And then back into Chicago today...and it's actually not so cold here...in the mid 40s. I also happened to get through two books on the trip.

This trip was just totally what I needed. I feel so relaxed and non-stressed right now and that's a place I've been trying to get for some time now. And it was LA that did it...weird. :)

Happy tofurkey day everyone!

Mental models of metal

2008-11-24T08:19:00.002-06:00

Overheard in the airport security line:

Metal detector going off
Woman: I took off all my metal
TSA: do you have a cell phone?
Woman: yes, but it's a plastic one
TSA: yes, but it still has metal in it
Woman: really?!?

Running in the cold...

2008-11-18T22:47:00.002-06:00

I had my first real cold-weather long run this past weekend and it was...cold! The temperature was down around 35 (with a 27 wind chill) and I had to put in 15 miles. I decided to go for a Moraine Hills run since the 3 and 4 mile loops put me back at my car frequently to get some gatorade (or warm up a bit!).

I went with the three layer top and two layer bottom approach along with a hat and gloves and that worked pretty well. I dropped the gloves off in the car after the first 7 miles and my fingers were a bit cold after that. Especially after gatorade breaks. But other than that, I made it through.

The last 3 miles were in fairly heavy snow though, and that wasn't really a whole lot of fun. I had a nice covering of snow on my outer layer by the time I was done and had to brush off the car a little bit before heading home.

In total contrast, my next long run will be on the beach in Santa Monica. Where I can wear shorts and definitely do not need to worry about snow :) That will be nice!

Ariely Talk

2008-11-18T22:44:00.002-06:00

Near West Side, Nov 15, 2008
Originally uploaded by bentley79.

This past Saturday I put on a talk for the MIT Club of Chicago. We had Dan Ariely from the Media Lab/Sloan come and talk about behavioral economics. Which may at first glance sound a bit boring, but Dan is such a great speaker and filled with tons of great stories.

It really amazes me that Dan's way of thinking isn't more common in economics. His ideas really coincide with a lot of my own thoughts on understanding people. Basically that people can't be modeled and they ways in which they interact are way more complicated than any model or equation you can come up with. And that the only way to know how people will act is to put them in that condition and see how they act.

Sounds a lot like well-practiced HCI, right? :) I think some of the submissions I reviewed for CHI this year could have taken some advice here.

But I digress, Dan had some of the traditional stories on survey bias (have you seen the opt-in vs opt-out organ donation stats!) and prisoner's dilemma-style games but then got to more topical issues of interest-only loans and bail-outs.

It just amazes me how many in Washington and on Wall St. still go on believing that people are perfectly rational and will act in their best interest (at least in aggragate).

smart homes

2008-11-09T20:31:00.002-06:00

Yesterday afternoon I visited the "Smart Home" at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago. It's one of those "homes-of-the-future" that's supposed to be all green and filled with the latest technology. Thinking back on the time I spent at MIT working on the Intelligent Room, it's interesting to see how the perception of what constitutes a "smart" home has changed.

It used to be that smart homes (or rooms) were all about anticipating your needs. You know, stuff like setting the thermostat automatically or opening the blinds or trying to infer your activity and act appropriately. In the Intelligent Room (and other projects going on around the same time) we found that this wasn't so useful. The room had to be smarter than you for it to be of any real use and not get annoying really fast. And it had to be wrong almost never or you'd just get annoyed with it.

The Smart Home at MSI takes things a different way. Sure there's still a big central control system to which everything is connected, but it's controlled by you, not the machine. And you get a little remote control to do it. Want to close all the blinds on the south side of the house because it's night time, one button will do it, and bring up the lights too. Ready for bed, again, one button will get the house in the right mode.

There were other bits of technology spread throughout, but it was mostly things that were "smart" by being green. Which is great! Why keep a tank of hot water around all the time when you can heat it on demand in a tank-less way. Why water your grass with drinking water when you can catch rainwater in barrels under your house and use that. Why burn natural gas in your fireplace when you can burn ethanol.

Other green things in the house included bamboo floors, half flush toilets (which aren't new if you've been to Europe in the last few decades), recycled countertops, and rollable solar mats that can be rolled out on the roof and cover 90% of the house's energy needs, even in Chicago.

Overall, it was a pretty impressive house. Some things, like the tankless water heater or the rain barrels are pretty easy to fit into existing houses and hopefully more people start taking some of these simple actions...along with switching to CF or LED bulbs!

For those in or visiting Chicago, it's at the MSI until January.

more mobile magic...

2008-11-06T20:31:00.002-06:00

I wrote the other day about the avis receipt to email magic. Today I had another moment of wonder around a mobile app. I was down in Evanston for a lecture by Yoram Kalman on "Online Silence" at the Center for Technology and Social Behavior. On the way back, I decided to try out the "I <3 Radio" app from ClearChannel on my iPhone. I connected it up to my car stereo and started streaming Kiss108 FM from Boston while I was driving home. It was just sort of surreal to hear it coming out of my car speakers in IL. So amazing :)

The iPhone, and online app stores in general are really changing mobile computing so much in such a short time. It really shows the power of a strong and (mostly) open mobile platform with nice APIs and easy application distribution.

red states, part II (but it's blue now)

2008-11-06T20:16:00.002-06:00

So part two of my red state tour of the week was this monday night-tuesday. I was organizing a panel at the Int'l Workshop on Urban, Community, and Social Applications of Networked Sensing Systems at SenSys 2008. The workshop was great and the panel went really well. I had Rahul Nair from Yahoo talk about what we can do now that location information is so pervasive on mobile phones. He was followed by Pedja Klasnja from Intel Research / UW talking about the UbiFit Garden application and how our phones can persuade us to stay fit. The panel finished with Tim Bergin from Motorola talking about sensing application for first responders in public safety. Lots of good questions and synergies among the panelists, so I was very happy.

What I was not happy about was being in North Carolina. When your hotel needs a giant "no guns" sign on it, you know you're in a crazy place. From tons of gun stores all over the place to signs saying where you can or can't have a gun out, I just couldn't wait to get out of there. That and the billboard on the highway saying that 50,000,000 children had been murdered in the US. I was not in friendly territory.

But somehow, NC turned into a blue state by the end of the day and voted (ever so slightly) for Obama. I really can't see how this happened given the reality of the place, but I'm so glad it did. Maybe they're getting beyond their guns and god to see that we really do need some change in this country.

I'm so excited for the next 4 (or hopefully 8) years! All of my friends from different countries have been sending congratulatory emails saying how proud they are of the united states for finally picking a smart guy. I couldn't agree more. I almost feel happy to go abroad again and admit to people that I'm from America :)

avis

2008-11-04T15:27:00.002-06:00

The new avis e-receipts always amaze me. The guy is standing next to the car I just returned, presses a few buttons, prints a receipt and almost always before he hands it to me, I get the email on my phone with the PDF of the receipt he just pulled out. There's still something magical about wireless communication.

Red States, Part I

2008-11-03T15:14:00.001-06:00

Purdue, Nov 1, 2008
Originally uploaded by bentley79.

This week I've found myself going to two red states...which I usually try to avoid!

On Saturday I made my way down to Purdue with some work colleagues for the Purdue/Michigan game. The game was great and super high-scoring (48-42) and we had a nice view from inside the stadium. It was a long day though involving almost 6 hours of driving, so I was very happy for the extra hour Saturday night.

While there, we heard radio advertisements for various brands of soybean or corn seeds as well as the scoreboard which was sponsored by a soybean and corn seed company. Definitely a different place over there in Indiana! :)

Sunday was a running day as I completed 13 miles on the lakefront path. It all went well, but I'm a bit sore today as you might imagine!

And right now, I'm off to NC (a very slight Red State - +0.6 according to the latest poll of polls) for a conference workshop on Urban, Community, and Social Applications of Networked Sensing Systems.

oddities...

2008-10-28T21:36:00.001-05:00

The co-lead singer of Rilo Kiley, Jenny Lewis, played Haley in the 1989 Nintendo movie The Wizard!

That was too odd not to post :)

vote early (not often)

2008-10-28T20:18:00.002-05:00

This morning on my way into work I thought I'd zip by the Palatine Village Hall and get my voting done. I had the judges list all printed out (in cook county, the majority of the ballot is deciding which of like 100 judges get to continue on), had reviewed the ballot initiatives, and was all ready to go.

As I turned the corner onto the second floor of the building I saw a pretty crazy long line snaking back and forth down the hallway. I almost turned away, but the poll watcher (yeah, the stereotypical 70-something grandmother-ly looking lady) convinced me to stay and said it shouldn't be more than about 45 minutes. It was almost exactly that.

Now I was really impressed with the voting system this year. Cook County has only a small number of early voting sites, but hundreds (thousands?) of permutations of ballot based on different districts. But early voters can vote anywhere which means that they need to match the proper ballot with the proper voter no matter where they show up.

So instead of having a paper printout of all of the registered voters, it was all on a computer. The computer brings up a code for the type of ballot you need, they punch that into the voting card machine and then give you a smart card with that ballot type stored on it. You take that to the electronic voting machines and up pops the ballot for your district.

I've been really impressed with the Cook County voting machines since they introduced them two years ago on a trial basis. You get to review your choices three times including reviewing and approving the paper trail that gets printed out. The interface is simple and easy to use and makes it really easy to correct any errors you might make.

All in all, a great voting experience, despite the wait. They said they had a two hour wait over the weekend, so it could have been worse.

my tivo scares me...

2008-10-28T20:15:00.004-05:00

Let's add this to the pile of posts about ipods playing meaningful songs in meaningful places, amazon.com recommending books that I've just talked about with friends, etc...

Last week when I was eating dinner in Hollywood, Jennifer Esposito from Samantha Who was eating at the table next to us. I had no idea who she was and thought I'd tivo the show to at least see the person I sat next to in action. I never got around to adding it, but what was in my tivo suggestions today? The latest Samantha Who.

Weird. Scary. It's always interesting how unrelated/random events can seem to have so much meaning.

LA

2008-10-26T14:03:00.003-05:00

Well, although my trip to LA had a wonderful and relaxing start, that's not how it ended.

Work went well Thursday and I met an old housemate of mine for dinner in Santa Monica. The food was tasty and it was wonderful to see her! However, the next morning that food was not so tasty anymore. I came down with a pretty bad case of food poisoning and had to spend the day in bed in the hotel, which was not anywhere near my plan.

I had hoped to get up at 6am, head down to the beach, go for a nice 6 mile run, head off to the work I had to do out there that day, and fly home on the red eye. Instead, I had to extend my trip until the next day when I wouldn't be sick all over the plane and spent the time in between confined to my room.

Yesterday morning I felt a little bit better, and more confident that I could make it home. I drove down to Santa Monica and tried to keep down a Jamba Juice which was successful and then made my way to LAX for the flight home. The airplane ride wasn't that bad...but the bus ride to lot G a O'Hare was almost enough to take away my day of success.

I'm feeling mostly better now. My stomach still feels a bit off, but hopefully will be all back to normal soon. I missed a 6 and a 12 mile run, so jumping back into things this week will be a challenge.

finally relaxing...

2008-10-23T00:06:00.002-05:00

As most of you know, this past month or two has been less than fun at work. Lots of coding and 12-15 hour days have been the norm and well that's just not my idea of a good time. I've been super stressed out trying to keep in my mind dozens of things to do and trying to squeeze in runs as well.

Today though was my first day to relax. I flew out to LA, ran 3 miles, and had a wonderful dinner with an old friend at a vegan restaurant in hollywood. It was fantastic to relax and not be super stressed. Hopefully I can keep up this less-stress living for a while.

busy but fun?

2008-10-10T19:43:00.002-05:00

It's been one of those insane weeks where I've felt like I just can't take a minute to breathe. Work has been insanely hectic and I'm up to 21 mile weeks in marathon training, which as you could imagine takes a lot of my free time away.

All of you know I do love to work hard on things, but I'm way deep in development for my main project now and it's all coding all the time. Which does not tend make me a happy person as that's my least preferred activity :)

So this afternoon I took a few hours and sat down with my colleague Crysta and belted out a workshop position paper for CHI. Now that's the kind of afternoon that totally turns my mood around. Crysta and I write papers together all the time, so it was just nice to sit down and do something that involves thinking for a while instead of sitting alone in our super-heated lab battling poorly documented APIs and implementing 3 different applications at the same time.

I'm looking forward to more of the fun side of work this weekend. I have a nice load of CHI papers and shorts to review and it's about time I got cracking on that.

bad?

2008-10-09T21:48:00.002-05:00

is of bad that I smiled when I saw that the Ethel's Chocolate in the train station downtown has closed?

Vegan Milano Cookies!

2008-10-06T22:03:00.001-05:00

Vegan Milano Cookies!
Originally uploaded by bentley79.

Tonight I decided to stay in and have a nice quiet evening at home after a super-busy weekend. I've been dying to make these Vegan Milano cookies for weeks now so turned on the Sox game, turned up some nice relaxing music, and gave the recipe a go! They turned out really well and are amazingly tasty. I really love everything those two chefs do. My friend Amber turned me on to their book Veganomicon and I later discovered Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World which is just as amazing and even more sugar-packed.

So I highly recommend the cookies! Perfect with a nice cup of tea :)

Let's Go Sox!!

2008-10-06T21:58:00.001-05:00

A Boston Bar in Chicago
Originally uploaded by bentley79.

The Cubbies may be out of the playoffs, but the Red Sox are definitely still in it! Last night I made my way into the city to meet a friend of an MIT friend to watch the game at a Boston bar. There's no name on the outside of the place, but it goes by either Triplio Tap or Nic and Dino's and it's on Armitage just west of the brown line stop.

So we get there and the Pat's game is still going on...and the place is packed, with half the people wearing Pat's jerseys on and the other half with Sox gear on. It stayed super crowded for the whole game and the whole place got into the game more than any section at the stadium! Cheers, clapping, high-fiving, cheering for every ball and strike. It was pretty awesome! It's definitely a place I'll have to return to for future Boston sporting events. Highly recommended!

SNL

2008-10-05T10:02:00.002-05:00

The Biden/Palin debates, definitely one of the best SNL bits ever! The last line is pricesless, but I won't spoil it for those who haven't seen it yet...

a bunch of nice people

2008-10-05T09:25:00.002-05:00

I always tell people how awesome my high school class was. Seriously they are some of the nicest people I've ever met. Last night was my 10-year high school reunion at Cubbie Bear North and I got to see so many people that I hadn't seen in these. And all of them were just as nice as I remembered :)

Among the highlights I got to see an old friend from junior high shop/home ec, a friend from math and spanish classes that has lived in spain for the past 6 years, most of my ap physics/calc class, my across-the-street neighbor from elementary school, the girl who sat in front of me in Oral Communications, and one of the editors-in-chief of our high school newspaper. All wonderfully nice people!

It was a very fun night! Too bad the cubs lost.

Kansas...

2008-09-24T19:44:00.001-05:00

DSC_3913
Originally uploaded by Steven+Alison Hoober.

Yesterday I took a quick trip out to Kansas with some colleagues from our Mobile Devices business to speak at the Design for Mobile conference. As many of you know, the conference was in Lawrence, Kansas. Which is a bit of an odd location for a conference like this, but only an hour flight from Chicago so that worked out nicely.

I have to give credit to the organizers for getting a great lineup of speakers to come out to Kansas. Mike Lundy from Sprint gave a nice case study of how they made their now super-popular Instinct phone. Unfortunately for device manufacturers, they pretty much just took the hardware from Samsung and designed all of their own applications on it. It will definitely be interesting in the next few years to see how the carrier/manufacturer experience wars play out.

Moreten Hjerde from Vodafone gave a nice talk about metaphors in UI design and on the importance of spatial interfaces. He had a lot of great ways to describe the thinking that has made phone design how it is today...the silo-ed applications that keep data in separate databases, unlinked, unexplorable, unconnected. Also just how so many phone interfaces take the easy way out instead of really mapping themselves to how real people think about their data.

One other talk of note was Francis Djabri of Nokia who talked about Mobile Services. As most of you know, Nokia is strongly moving towards services in their business and made a major reorganization earlier this year in that direction. Francis laid out the case brilliantly for services and for worth-centered design. Mobile applications really do need to be services that are in constant beta and easily updatable. The web world has a lot to teach the mobile industry and new mobile apps/services really do need to be down in that 9mo time to market and not up in the 24 month range they are in today.

So what did I do at the conference? I was on a panel with Rafiq Ahmed, JoEllen Kames, and Lauren Schwendimann from our mobile devices business talking about "Collaborating Across the Corporate Divide." We used our work together on two projects as case studies for successful collaboration across multiple disciplines and organizations to move ideas from initial concepts through design, prototyping, and commercialization. Unfortunately we couldn't talk about the specifics as our work hasn't quite hit the market yet. But it still made for a great talk on how research, design, prototyping, product engineering, and business teams can all work together in small teams to get new applications and services created "quickly" and with high quality.

While there, I was also invited to join a panel on " Envisioning the Mobile Future." That was fun and we had a nice discussion on the personal aspects of mobile devices, constant ambient awareness of others status/photos/etc., the (un)importance of video communication, and the impact of mobile services. It was a fun way to end the conference part of the day.

After drinks in a bank-turned-restaurant (with restrooms in the vault!), we had dinner at a nice little Thai place called Zen Zero. They had a great yellow curry with tofu and potatoes that really hit the spot after a busy day.

Since there's a lot of mobile stuff in this post, I must state as always: "The postings on this site are my own and do not necessarily represent Motorola's positions, strategies, or opinions."

5k on the runway

2008-09-21T12:24:00.004-05:00

I think I should keep running 5k races. Everytime I've done one this year, I've shaved about 45 seconds off of my time on the previous one!

Today was the Athens Sister City 5k on the Runway at O'Hare. Yes, like the airport. O'Hare just finished a giant new runway so that they can have 3 simultaneous takeoffs/landings going on at the same time instead of 2. It's set to open soon and mayor Daley is having this all day celebration there today, beginning with the run.

I arrived about an hour early and all was amazingly well set up. Free parking in lot G, clearly marked packet pickup and t-shirt tables, D-tags (disposable RFID timing chips) taped to the bibs, no line at gear check. These are the same people who put on the horror that was the Bastille Day 5k, so I was expecting the worst :) No one had an idea what the course would be, since they told us that for security reasons they couldn't tell us and to just follow the course officials. It started about 15 minutes late due to other unnamed "security issues" but other than that, it was all pretty fantastic.

As I feel a cold coming on, I wasn't expecting to go very fast. I planned for just a nice little fun run along the runway. But I ended up lining up a bit towards the front of the pack and decided to just go for it, and if I felt tired, I could just slow down. It was about 3/4 of a mile out to the end of the runway and as I turned the corner, the clock showed I was going a bit faster than planned. I hit mile 1 at about 8:10. The race continued as an out-and-back on the runway and as I turned to come back I was still feeling great. I ran past the aid station and hit mile 2 at about 16:25, still on a great pace. Coming off the runway there was a bit of a downhill to get back to the parking lot and I stepped it up a little, figuring why not? As I made it to the 3 mile mark, they announced that it was coming up on 25 minutes. It was a good thing he repeated it twice because I was sure he had to be wrong. Putting it in high gear, I crossed the finish line to end at 25:30 clock time (25:18 chip time - 8:08 pace!).

Water, gatorade, and bananas were to be had after the race and gear check had no line. All in all, a very wonderful race and fun to have another PR as the race running season comes to a close. Of course for me, the personal running season is just getting going as it's 16 weeks to the Disney Marathon!

design...

2008-09-20T20:40:00.002-05:00

As many of you know, I'm heading off to Lawrence, KS this week for the Design For Mobile conference. I'm in a panel with some coworkers on "Collaborating across the corporate divide" where we talk about how we work together across research, design, prototyping, engineering, business, carrier, etc, etc roles. Of course we can't actually talk about the project we worked on since it's not out yet, so we have to focus just on the process. Which should be odd, but good!

Anyway, tonight I was telling my dad about this and he became confused. Design? But you write software? So I had to explain, but I design too. And he was like, yeah, design the software, right? And I said, no, like design how the device works and what it does and how people interact with it. At which point his response was a confused, so you write software, design, interview people, write papers, write patents, teach at MIT, and talk at conferences? Yep, was my reply :)

I love my job!!

Redmoon Theater

2008-09-20T14:53:00.001-05:00

Redmoon Theater
Originally uploaded by bentley79.

I had a wonderful time last night seeing Dr. Egg and the Man WIth No Ear at the Redmoon Theater with Sara. For those not familiar with the theater, their motto is "engineering wonder" and it's spray painted on the side of their warehouse/build center/performance space on the near northwest side of Chicago. They also like puppetry.

The show was visually amazing with video projected on a screen in front of the actors, super-intricate puppet scenes, and scenes that utilized the screen, actors, and puppetry in unison. I'm definitely hooked on Redmoon and their productions. Actually, I became hooked without even seeing a show after their creative director spoke at Pecha Kucha a few months back on dreaming big and being ok with failing big. Oh, and when the show is over, you can go up close and look at all of the amazing props/puppets/etc that they built for the show.

After the show, we enjoyed some amazing views of the city while trying some wine at the Tasting Room on Randolph. Also highly recommended!

It was so nice to have an evening out...I've been so stressed with lots going on at work lately and last night was totally what I needed to kick me out of that funk and calm me down a bit.

rove on mccain

2008-09-15T21:10:00.001-05:00

When Karl Rove says you've gone too far, you've really gone too far!!

not running...

2008-09-14T08:26:00.004-05:00

I was signed up to run the Banco Popular Chicago 1/2 Marathon today and was definitely all excited about it. However, when waking up at 4:30am to get ready, weather.com and the TV weather both said that there should be 22MPH winds and heavy rains by around 9am in the city. That convinced me that a two hour trip to the south side was not worth it and I decided to go back to bed.

In retrospect, I wish I would have just gone through with it and made it down there. The race started to not-so-bad weather, although a few dark yellow/orange blobs did quickly pass through the route. It would have been a wet race, but still fun I think.

The next race I'm signed up for is the Disney Marathon. I might try to find another half or something else in the mean time. Maybe the Tower of Terror 13k if a work trip to FL happens to align with that.

EDIT: for those not living in the area, my town got 10" of water in the last 2 days.

cool things I've seen lately...

2008-09-08T20:29:00.002-05:00

Not a whole lot of time for a full post tonight, but thought I'd pass along a few good links I've seen lately...

1. The BBC has a nice article on global footprint issues and meat consumption. While the article mainly focuses on greenhouse gas emissions, there's a lot to be said about just land footprint use as well. Maybe I won't have to keep explaining myself to people if this gets enough press this time :)

2. Tag cloud of the various convention speeches. I find it interesting that Obama didn't say "change" nearly as much as he's being criticized for.

3. HP is now selling laptops in laptop bags. Awesome! It's a nice bag too!

And finally, it's hard to believe that it's the start of the school year again, but today tutoring started back up at 826! It was a fun afternoon with so many kids showing up and lots of fun had by all! I'm so happy to be back for my 3rd year now. And love the veggie bite across the street for after-tutoring dinner!

gates and seinfeld?

2008-09-04T21:39:00.000-05:00

I was working out at the gym today (raining outside) and saw this commercial and was very confused.

Nike Plus Human Race Chicago

2008-09-01T09:55:00.002-05:00

Last night I ran the Nike Plus Human Race in Chicago. It's a worldwide event that was going for setting a record on the number of runners in a one-day event. They had about 500,000 which is pretty amazing, 15,000 of which were in Chicago.

I took the train/el down there and got to the stadium about an hour before the race. Gatorade and Ice Mountain were sponsors, so there was plenty of water to hydrate with which is good since it was still about 87 degrees outside. Gear Check was inside soldier field and super-organized. Nike really knows how to put on a race!

The start corrals were a bit packed while we were all waiting for the race to start. There were a lot of last minute sign ups and they didn't quite realize how many people would be there. After Wayne Messmer sang the anthem, and the US top finisher in the olympic marathon wished us good luck, we were off!

The course followed LSD down to Oakwood (about 40th st) st and then came back on the lake front path. I went out a bit fast, but really wanted to try to set a PR on the race - which I knew would be hard after my awesome napa-sonoma 10k time. I hit the first few miles at 8:30 pace which I knew I couldn't sustain, but also knew that I only needed a 9:00 pace overall to hit my goal. Around the halfway point I was just so hot and not feeling extremely well but kept going on. My last few miles were around a 9:30 pace, so all averaged out well in the end. As I turned the final corner, I knew I could make it and set a new PR with a time of 56:08, 9 seconds better than my old PR.

After the race there was the usual gatorade, water, etc. but following that was a Fall Out Boy concert in Soldier Field. They put plastic mats on the grass and all 15,000 of us made our way onto the field for a great concert! So much fun!

I know these people!

2008-08-25T21:04:00.002-05:00

It still surprises me when I see people I know on TV. This time, a two-for-one! I was watching an old episode of Nova Science Now that featured two people I knew from back at MIT. First, they had a spot on robots that prominently featured Cynthia Breazeal from the Media Lab. Back as an undergraduate, I worked on a study to determine emotions of certain robotic facial features for her group.

Then just a few minutes later in the show, a face I knew I recognized came up. It was Josh Sosin, once a history professor at MIT and the faculty adviser to Student House for a year. Apparently, he's off studying ancient greek texts in egypt now.

Yay for Nova!

Crazy busy weekend...

2008-08-24T20:17:00.002-05:00

It's been a non-stop weekend over here, but a very fun one too! Yesterday I had a bunch of papers to review for the Urban, Community, and Social Applications of Networked Sensing Systems workshop. So I took the train up to Evanston and sat around Panera for a bit reading and reviewing. It was actually a very nice and peaceful afternoon. Later on, I made it back to Palatine in time to meet up with Elizabeth and Jack at the Palatine Street Fest, a little neighborhood festival right down the street from me by the train station. They had a really horrible band playing that was trying to do magic while they played rock songs. Their whole first song was the lyrics "Welcome to the show" again and again. No one clapped. We left...

Today began with a 3k race through my neighborhood as a part of this weekend-long street festival. I decided to see how well all this training has been going, so I just gunned it and ran a very solid race. I came in 40th place which is pretty amazing, with a time of 13:50. That's 7:24/mile which as most of your know is *way* faster than my normal pace. So I was happy :) Some iPhone code writing this afternoon and another 8 miles of running to finish out the week at 22 followed. Then a wonderful close to the weekend, going to see Mike and Joe play at Street Fest with a friend from grade school. For those not from the midwest, these guys are pretty much *the* cover band out here and do a terrific job on everything from Michael Jackson to Green Day. It was a great show! But now I'm exhausted and am about to crash and watch the closing to the olympics. Hope you all had wonderful weekends!

stressed...

2008-08-22T22:16:00.003-05:00

Anyone who has been around me lately can probably sense that I've been a bit stressed this past month or so. It's no one thing, just a lot of responsibilities I'm juggling with work, volunteering, and trying to get in fairly long runs with the 1/2 marathon just a few weeks away. It's been a stressful time and I'm sorry for mostly disappearing or not having much patience. Work has been extremely busy lately and I'm probably doing the job of 3 people or so and cranking out ~600 lines of code each morning for one project while trying to stay on top of two other projects in the afternoons.

Hopefully things will lighten up soon and things will be more normal (which is still pretty busy for me!). The running continues straight through to January though, so there's no let up there. I'm getting excited about the Disney Marathon though!! I'm staying at the Contemporary and I can take the monorail to the start of the race which is just awesome :)

why the nbc olympics video website is horrible...

2008-08-20T22:26:00.003-05:00

I didn't DVR the olympics this evening, so I missed Usain Bolt's amazing 200m race. No problem I think, I'll just go online and watch it! So off to nbcolympics.com/video to find it...search for "usain bolt" - no videos from this olympics. Search for "track and field" - nothing from the 200m race, but a video of the 100m race I already saw the other night. Search for "recent" - nothing from the 200m race. Page through the "highlights" - nothing. There seems to be no way to find this video.

So I go over to YouTube. There are search results for "Usain Bolt 200m" but none of the links to any of the real video are clickable. I hear that NBC is forcing Google to remove the links to these videos.

I've also heard that NBC is not posting the video of the race to their own website now until all timezones get the broadcast tonight.

NBC, if you want us to watch the olympics online with your horrible website, at least let us actually watch the big events of the games!!

Edit: It's posted now. Still not terribly easy to find, but it's buried a few rows down under "Track and field"

Location, Location, Location

2008-08-14T18:32:00.003-05:00

So I knew that one of the features of the iPhone that I would enjoy the most would be the location services. The iPhone is really the first mobile phone out there that makes location such a central focus of the device and included with many of the native applications that ship with the phone. A lot of it has been talked about in the ubicomp research community for years and years, but it's finally all come out in one package.

Things I enjoy the most:
1) Google maps - click the location button and it zooms into your cell tower area, wait 10 seconds more, and it's pinpointed you on the map. Get directions and click the location button again, and the little dot follows you along your route. Simple, beautiful.
2) Geotagging of photos - take a picture, allow access to location, get a picture with lat,long in the exif headers! So wonderful!
3) Yelp - a 3rd party app, get lists of nearby restaurants, bars, coffee shops, etc. with one touch. Automatically gets your location and creates the list, complete with reviews from yelp.com.
4) Weather - the weatherbug app can center on your location and get you forecasts and live radar for wherever you are.

The mobile phone is not just another computer. It's a device for information and social access *in* the world. Which means location is often a large part of what you're experiencing. From getting places, sharing photos from those places, finding more about the place where you are, and making sure you stay dry this is just the tip of the iceburg for location access on mobile devices. All of this is possible because location is such a core part of the platform. Any application can get it with just a simple call. (another app that I didn't mention because I don't have it installed yet is loopt which lets you see where your friends are - very useful for microcoordination tasks in meeting up).

Bush

2008-08-14T18:19:00.002-05:00

The Bush administration pisses me off more and more every day. They are currently trying to redefine the term "abortion" to include birth control which means that laws which allow workers to refuse abortion would now apply to distributing birth control. And they are doing it in some sneaky way called a "rule change" that doesn't need congressional approval. Such that they can say it and it is so. Moveon.org alerted me to this fact, and if this issue matters to you, you should go here to be added to their petition.

from moveon.org...

The draft regulation would define birth control as abortion...it could deny access to critical family planning for women across the country.—Letter signed by Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and 26 other senators.²

The draft rule could void laws in 27 states that require insurance companies to provide birth control coverage for women requesting it [and] laws in 14 states requiring that rape victims receive counseling and access to emergency, day-after contraceptives.—Houston Chronicle editorial³

The administration needs to stop playing word games with women's health and state clearly they will reject any regulations that will undermine women's access to basic health care.—Cecile Richards, president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America.⁴

[It's] a spectacular act of complicity with the religious right... —RH Reality Check, Information and Analysis for Reproductive Health⁵

The birth control pill, the IUD, and emergency contraception might all become unavailable—illegal—as a result.—Brigid Riley, executive director of a Minnesota teen pregnancy prevention organization⁶

from abcnews.com...

"If the administration goes through with this draft proposal, it will launch a dangerous assault on women's health," said Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., calling on President Bush to "reject this policy."

Tribune...

2008-08-14T18:12:00.002-05:00

Many of you by now have seen the front page article in this past Sunday's Tribune about carbon use and online carbon calculators. About a week ago, a reporter from the trib contacted me after seeing a blog post about carbon calculators that I had posted back in may. He wanted to talk about the differences in calculation as well as how I've managed to offset for all of my air travel which is about 70% of my total carbon use. Anyway, the article was ok. I wish it had focused more on land use than just carbon as land use is also a big issue, especially as more of the world goes to meat-based diets (and seen by the latest food crisis). Also, it seems like it's easy to read the article as saying, look at all of these things Frank does to save carbon output, but he's still average in terms of carbon output - these things don't do much. But in reality, they have let me travel 40,000 miles a year by plane and still have an "average" footprint. Also, I had no idea that I'd be so central to the article :)

olympics...

2008-08-09T13:02:00.002-05:00

I've been glued to the olympics since the opening ceremonies last night. There's just something so addictive about it. For those who didn't watch the opening, go watch it now! It was just so amazing both what they did technologically (1/4 mile long video screen around the top of the stadium, 500' long LED screen on the floor), and with people (the movable type boxes!). Seriously, go watch it now! :)

Then this morning I was watching the cycling event and really missing Beijing. They rode through central beijing, past the forbidden city, up to badaling by the great wall. All places I know well from my trips to Beijing. It really would have been fun to go out there for the games...

wet at wrigley...

2008-08-05T22:05:00.002-05:00

Last night my dad and I went down to Wrigley for the Cubs game. It had been raining a bit during the day, but had stopped and turned quite nice outside by mid-afternoon. And it stayed lovely for the first 5 innings or so. And then the thunder and lightning came, then the rain, and then the tornado watch!

At first it wasn't very bad. They made an announcement to seek shelter because of severe weather, but we were fairly comfortable where we were sitting, and we were down in terrace reserved under the upper deck so we felt safe and dry. But then the 70 MPH winds kicked up and brought the rain in sideways and upways and all over the place. It was pretty crazy for about 15 minutes or so with tornado sirens blaring and crazy winds. We just stayed in our seats with a bunch of other people and eventually it passed and they started playing baseball again about 2 hours later.

After about 2 more innings (and the 7th inning stretch with about 6,000 people left in the stadium) the rain returned. There was lightning all around us, and eventually some hit the upper deck on the 3rd base side, right above us. The players all started sprinting for cover and the game was called. It was a bit of an adventure back to the el with lightning strikes all around us, but we made it back safely.

Sadly, through all of that, the Cubs lost 2-0 to Houston. Defintely a game I won't forget though!

The Trib has a nice story on the game and I posted some videos on Flickr of the sirens after the rain died down a bit to get my phone out.

3D Printing on the cheap!

2008-08-01T10:45:00.002-05:00

So most readers of this blog know that I'm in love with 3D printing. It's amazing! But I definitely don't have a daily need to be making stuff, which is why this interested me so much. It's so simple. It's a company that takes your design, prints it, and sends it to you. Sure it takes 10 days, so it's not the instant gratification of seeing it built before your eyes, but still, pretty darn awesome!

nyc!

2008-07-30T20:10:00.002-05:00

After being out in the Newark area for work yesterday, I took the train into the city and found some time to catch up with friends. First on the list was visiting a friend from Yahoo and his brand new baby boy! This was also my first trip to Harlem, which was interesting. I must say that I am a fan of the D train express :) It was great to hang out for a bit and always odd to see west coast people on the east coast! I was able to walk through Columbia's campus on the way back to the 1 and wow...it's beautiful at night! I wish my phone was up to taking better pictures at night because they just didn't come out well.

Then it was back down to midtown to see an old motorola colleague now striking it out in the finance industry in nyc. And I was reminded of one of the reasons that I love nyc - Yuengling beer! We had a few pints at an English pub along with some excellent curry fries. So good!

And this morning included a wonderful run through central park. I'm quite jealous of people who live near there and can run there everyday. So many paths, hills, trees, and just a total isolation from the city. I really felt like I was far removed from the city which was nice for a run. I only went four miles but was scoping out longer runs for future trips.

I was also reminded of some of the reasons I don't like nyc. I hadn't been there in the summer for a while, and I was reminded of the horrible smell of garbage that takes over the whole city all summer long. A friend of mine always comments on how clean Chicago is and I never really realize it until I go someplace dirty and smelly. :)

"from your web-enabled mobile device"

2008-07-26T15:05:00.004-05:00

I was on the number 80 bus yesterday on my way to Wrigley (more on that later!) and one of those automated announcements came on. I was sort of not paying attention to it until it said "You can check the location of any CTA bus by visiting ctabustracker.com from your web-enabled mobile device" Wow. OK. Well I guess mobile web penetration has finally made it to a significant number in Chicago. It's pretty cool that it's getting this kind of publicity on the buses!

Speaking of web-enabled mobile devices, I just ordered my iphone 3g. It should be here in 10-14 days!

Batman at Jordan's IMAX!

2008-07-22T22:10:00.002-05:00

This weekend while in Boston I joined some friends in seeing the new Batman movie at the IMAX at Jordan's Furniture in Natick. Now I know what you non-Boston folks are thinking...an IMAX in a furniture store!? Yes, it's true and something you can only explain by watching the endless competition between Boston-area furniture stores.

So the theater is at the back of the store and also happens to be a few blocks away from Bose Mountain. So it seems that Dr. Bose and company have turned the theater into their little playground. The latest innovation, a subwoofer under every seat. So when there's an explosion, your whole chair shakes. It was sort of like a Disney ride :) And quite excellent for all of the explosions, crashes, and other chair-shaking action in the movie. Bose rocks :) It's really too bad that he doesn't teach his class at MIT anymore. He was definitely one of the best professors I ever had.

The rest of the Boston trip was wonderful and included some running along the river, good food at Grasshopper and Wagamama, and cold beer in Harvard Square.

Apple Wins

2008-07-18T07:56:00.003-05:00

Many of you know that I've been looking for a new phone for a while. Since I work for Motorola Labs, it's been a hard choice since Motorola isn't making many great phones right now. And then the new iPhone came out. And Motorola split up so that I'm no longer with the cell phone business.

I had a post last year about why I wasn't getting the first generation iPhone, but a few things have changed since then. Sure they still have no removable battery, and they still don't support video capture or MMS. And the keyboard is still a bit hard to type on. But Apple has changed the game in many ways.

1) Exchange support - corporate email on your iphone! It's a feature I've always wanted, but struggled to find a phone that did everything else I wanted and wasn't the size of a Q!

2) App Store - this is really the game changer. A non-carrier portal for apps with 500 at launch! It's exciting and there are already about a dozen apps that I want/need :) And the option for OTA download + sideloading through iTunes is fanstatic.

3) Auto-geotagging of photos. Sure I could get an n95 and use ZoneTag, but having it built in is nice.

4) 3G - I wasn't about to buy a 2.5 G phone in 2008!

5) United has decided that the Apple Dock Connector is the default media interface and you can now use your iPhone to watch movies on the 15" screens in business class!

So after my trip to Boston this weekend, I think I'll be making a trip to the nearby ATT store to pick one up.

As usual when it comes to postings about phones: "The postings on this site are my own and do not necessarily represent Motorola's positions, strategies, or opinions."

WALL-E

2008-07-16T22:14:00.002-05:00

I went to see WALL-E tonight with my MIT friend Stacie. It was awesome! :) And definitely a fun movie to see with another robot-building MIT alum. A few observations...

1) I loved that they really got WALL-E's robotic movements down. They clearly had some serious experts on hand.

2) Robots in love are cute :)

3) It was awesome that WALL-E's startup sound after charging off of his solar panels was the Mac OS 7 startup sound!

Gang Leader For a Day

2008-07-15T22:10:00.004-05:00

I finally got around to reading Gang Leader For a Day. Sudhir was on The Daily Show and other venues a few months back talking about the book and I really wanted to give it a read. I'm sort of in a rut of books on inner city life from The Corner earlier this year to There Are No Children Here right now (about Henry Horner). Gang Leader For a Day is also set in Chicago, down in the Robert Taylor Homes on the South Side. It's written in a very readable way and recounts the author's experiences interacting with gang leaders, members, residents, community leaders, and police in the area. While a lot of it is similar to what was reported in The Corner, it's really amazing to me how much police bribing and crimes by the police that there were. Sure, it's Chicago - home of the bribe. But reading about the police regularly rounding up gang members to steal their money or taking bribes to arrest or evict people just really surprised me. And it should be shocking to read about these things. It reminds me of reading the police brutality in Courtroom 302. It shocks me how corrupt the Chicago Police were in the '90s (and probably still are today).

I guess like Sudhir in the beginning of the book, I really don't know as much as I probably should about how things work in the housing projects of the city. It's such a lonely, seperated world with very little support from any outside organizations including the police and government. The book was a good insight into how people in this community banded together to make the building and community work and how often it was the gang that held everything together and helped bring order and togetherness into the buildings.

I'd really like to read more and might try to find a copy of his dissertation to get some more scientific data. The book was a good read but totally devoid of any theory or data beyond some interesting stories.

Anyway, highly recommended and a good plane read. You could definitely finish the book in a flight to the west coast :)

you know it's bad when...

2008-07-14T20:16:00.002-05:00

So this evening at work I was talking to a colleague from another part of the company and happened to mention that "I'm going out to [a major US carrier] in a week and a half." And he just totally assumed that I meant to leave motorola and work there, not, you know, like for a meeting. Ah yes, it's some hard times in Moto-land.

As usual - "The postings on this site are my own and do not necessarily represent Motorola's positions, strategies, or opinions."

bastille day race

2008-07-11T18:14:00.006-05:00

So many running posts lately! I need to start doing other things, but lately running and work are taking up most of my time. I'm looking forward to a nice relaxing weekend next weekend in Boston though, so there should be lots of fun to blog about there. And if you're in Boston, let me know!

Last night was the Bastille Day 5k. The sole reason I signed up for the race was that I had tied my previous 5K PR at Race to Taste and I knew I could beat it. Unfortunately, it was raining all afternoon yesterday and I was having serious doubts if I'd be able to make a PR in a downpouring thunderstorm. I jumped on the train downtown in all the rain, and magically when we pulled into the station downtown the sky to the west was bright and sunny! The race started (to French music!) in beautiful weather and I was feeling great.

The first 1/2 mile or so was a little rough since a bunch of packs of very slow running 20-something girls had decided to start at the very front of the pack and were running 5-wide down Jackson St. After getting through that, it opened up and really was not too crowded of a run. For those not familiar with the course, it's a dumbbell shape with lots of turns every few blocks. Thankfully I never really got in too many bunches of runners and was able to make it through. At mile 1, I was just about on pace to break my PR and I was feeling great, so I decided to kick it up a little bit and just give it what I had in me. I approached mile 2 a bit winded, but generally feeling good. Unfortunately, the clock at mile 2 was a bit off (reading 4 hours and 13 minutes). I knew I wasn't running a marathon, but had no idea how fast I was actually going. I continued at probably an even quicker speed towards the end. As I turned one of the final corners with about 1/4 mile to go there was a giant bolt of lighting a few blocks away and the sky just opened up with rain. I stepped it up a little faster and saw the 3 mile clock at 25:30. That surprised me a bit and I started running even faster!

In the end, I crossed the finish with a chip time of 26:11 (8:26 pace) which was almost a full minute off my previous PR from the Taste. As I got my bagel, banana, and Gatorade the rain really started coming down hard...in torrential downpour fashion. It seems that all of the people handing out food and beverage had gone home and we had to pick them up ourselves. I went over to gear check to find all of our bags in the street covered in water and muck from the backed up sewers. Fun.

All in all though, it was an awesome race and I'm quite happy with my time. I just wish it would have been nicer at the end for the post race block party with french music, wine, and lots of friends who ran the race. I ended up just getting a ride with a friend home and trying to stay warm and dry after being soaked through for a good 1/2 hour after the race trying to find my bag.

By the way, throwing my time into McMillan gives me a 4:15:15 marathon...which would be awesome!!

Running log is back!

2008-07-06T13:31:00.002-05:00

So I'm back in training mode these last two weeks. I'm running the hal higdon 1/2 marathon training program. Just the beginner one as I basically didn't run last year and feel a need to warm up. I'm thinking of maybe switching to something more advanced for the marathon training later this year.

In any case, a formal training plan means that the running log is back up for any of you who wish to follow it. It'll be an overview of what I've run and hopefully some insights and notes about routes as it goes on. Much like it was in 2006.

Speaking of running, I had a nice 4 miler today up at Moraine Hills State Park. It's definitely one of my favorite places to run with nice limestone trails and lots of hills.

Race to Taste 5k

2008-06-29T11:45:00.002-05:00

This morning I just tied my 5k PR in the annual Race to Taste in Chicago (27:08 8:44/mile). It's always a fun race and a part of the giant Taste of Chicago festivities in Grant Park. This year sported a new, hillier, course that included Mt. Roosevelt, getting on and off LSD, the hill going around Soldier's Field, and the underpass by the museum campus. A really nice course though! I felt good the whole way through and had I known that I would have been close to my PR (more on that later) should have given it a little more at the end and gotten at least a second or two off.

So why didn't I know my time? Well, sadly, this was probably the worst run race I've ever been a part of. It started about 15 minutes late because they were still checking people in (there were 2 workers to check in 4,000 runners), all of the clocks on the course were at different times. I knew I had a good mile 1, but then when I got to mile 2, it said that I had done that whole second mile in less than 8 minutes which I knew was wrong. Then the mile 3 clock said I was already over 27:30 and I turned the corner to see the clock at the finish line a second later and it's still in the high 26's. And then after the race, the gear check line was over an hour and a half because they hadn't thought to put the 4,000 bags in any kind of order.

That said, I really do love this race. It's the first one I ever ran so it holds a special place in my heart :) And who doesn't love running to the Taste of Chicago, the best summer festival around :)

Speaking of the taste, there are even more veggie options this year as Soul Veg has joined the crowd! Yay!