Mostly True

Texas and some other stuff

2007-03-20T01:16:00Z

Hey there! I hope you enjoyed the last Mostly True update, because I have yet another computer nerd conference to tell you about. That’s right y’all! Last week I went to “South By Southwest” in Austin, Texas- better known as sxsw. I think South by Southwest started as a music/film festival, but now they invite nerds too to a segment called “interactive.” You might be wondering why I have a picture of “Michael Dory’” above. I’ll tell you why- it’s because I barely took any pictures at sxsw-- but Mike took like 5 million, so I’m going to steal all of them and use them on this blog. Thanks Mike!! PS - you can check out Mike’s flckr here and his bloggie blog here.

So, I’m gonna make this recap quick cause I gotta get back to my thesis- but basically sxsw is a bunch of parties and panels. Here’s a panel.

Here’s a party.

Here’s Josh Knowles winning this computer-dj competition thing (sorry Josh, I don’t remember what it’s called...but- congrats!) Josh hosted 10 ITP’ers at his family’s house in Austin. Josh’s parents are pretty much awesome. They put up with us strolling in anywhere from 3AM-7AM each night. His mom also made us extravagant breakfasts including but not limited to: breakfast burritos, bagels, fresh fruit, and french toast. You name it, she made it.

She even made us cookies one night! Mrs. Knowles-- we love you.

All in all - sxsw was really fun. Here’s Mike and Rebbecca livin it up at the Good Magazine Party.

Here’s Kate sneaking a photo with Ze Frank. Kate you’re such a Groupie!!! I would never chase some video blogger around.

Right. Anyway....

We saw a presentation of this thing called Spore. Spore is awesome. I don’t care if you don’t like computer games--- this is rad. You’re going to love it. I was most impressed by how quickly you can model and animate custom 3D characters. I took a couple 3D classes at ITP and spent hours and hours in the labs making ugly things that walked funny. This program magically automates everything-- but still gives you a completely unique character. You can read more about Spore here.

Here’s a pic from a party Yahoo! hosted. I scavenged this photo off Flickr from some guy named Mil8. Nice to meet you Mil8, thnx for your pic. Going to this party just reminded me that Yahoo! owns everything.

Like Bix.

And Delicious (another pic from Mil8).

And Flickr If I ever start a company that buys everyone else’s companies-- I will totally project all the logos of the companies I own on the walls. (Of my HOUSE!) Yes, that would rad - sort of like a logo-trophy case.

Like any good tech-party, they had LED ice cubes too.

I like this picture, also not mine. This one is from Incanus. Hopefully I won’t get put in blog jail from all these stolen photos.

Here’s a pic from a venue called “Austin City LImits” where we saw a group called Vox Trot. Good music. Check em’ out on itunes.

Before that we went to the sxsw web awards. Ze Frank was an entertaining host, but honestly web awards are one of the most boring awards ceremonies you can ever attend.

I did sort of love these post-awards show loser shirts that this company called ”Innertee“ made.

Towards the end of the week ITP represented with a pretty sweet games panel - here’s Kevin Slavin (center) and Dennis Crowley (right). So, that’s about it for sxsw. Panels.

Parties.

And podcasting pickles.

Back in NY- er...a week before sxsw - there was the usual TNO which included a little Pecan Jackson...

mixed with some Jenny LC and Ran Ran.

And then before that it was happy birthday to Kate Hartman. Pecan busted out with homemade mac n’ cheese for this party. Honestly, it was the best I’ve ever had.

Fast forward to this week- a bunch of us went to a Thai restaurant called ”Room Service.“ Sitting there I realized I haven’t been out to dinner in forever. It was nice to sit down and eat something that took longer than 3 minutes to prepare.

After that we were off to Sing! Sing! for some karaoke action.

Next time, can someone puh-leeease remove the sweater from Matt’s waist before I take a photo?

Special thanks to this guy for offering to pay for half the East Village to sing and drink. Dens, that was so generous of you. We all love the google for hooking you up with that super cush job.

After karaoke we made our way to another bar. But not before Ran dipped her paw in some free cotton candy.

Yum.

At Stoned Crow I met up with love-birds Monica and Josh.

They will be married later this year and hopefully that will be the end of these obnoxious displays of public affection.

After Stoned Crow, Matt, Ran and I stopped into the Washington Square Diner for a 3AM breakfast.

Finished off the night with crunch, crunch, crunch in the filthy snow home. That’s it for now. Expect spotty updates for the next 2 months-- thesis is taking up most of my time these days. As soon as I get that project up and running, I’ll be doing some shameless plugs here. Hmm......maybe this blog will be good for something after all?

Everyone Loves The Telephone

2007-03-07T06:25:23Z

Last week I went to a conference called ”Etel“ in San Francisco. Etel is short for “Emerging Telephony.” Me and a couple other ITP’ers went to present some projects we did that ~~utilize an open-source PBX called “Asterisk”~~ let us program robots that will talk to you when you call them. We were just a small part of the conference. Some other bloggers covered everything way better than I could- if you’re interested you can check out the press here.

One of my favorite things at the conference was this OpenMoko phone-- that little orange thing above. (Pic stolen from Shawn’s Flickr) If you’re a control-freak this phone is for you. You know how your Verizon or Cingular, or Shi-t-mobile phone menus kinda suck? Like, maybe you have to go through about 8 menus before you can get to your missed calls list? Or maybe your ringtone keeps defaulting to that one Britney Spears song unexpectedly. Well, if you had a OpenMoko phone you could change all that. You could make any menu system you wanted. The whole phone is a touch-screen (no keypad), so, if you wanted to replace all the numbers on the touch-screen keypad with little dancing hamsters, you could. Then every time you made a call, instead of pushing buttons with numbers on them, you could play with dancing hamsters. Get it? The options are infinite!

Unfortunately, the first day of the conference I missed a bunch of talks to work on my thesis and another school project. This is the view from the lobby. It was nice to see water and sky for a change.

Wednesday evening we presented our projects. Here’s Anh showing his ”Surprise Dialer“ which lets you surprise someone with a message from a bunch of their friends.

Before the presentations we took a quick trip to Kinkos to make about 500-too many flyers. (I needed maybe....20?!)

Did I mention we presented our projects during Etel Happy Hour? Everyone seemed to think our ideas were really good after a few glasses of wine. Why don’t we serve drinks at the ITP Show??

Here’s Matt presenting his ”Bangla Bollo“ project which will help you practice speaking and listening to Bengali over the phone.

Jury and Chris busted out the ”Megaphone 3000“ which turns your cell phone into a remote controller for a bunch of games played on a giant screen.

Kate H. and Kati lured passers-by into their jungle of hotel plants to show off Botanicalls. Member this one from the ITP show? Your house plants call you when they need water. Awesome. The big excitement for us that evening was when the server that handles all our calls decided to die. This meant whenever someone tried to call and test our projects, they would either get a busy signal or hung up on.

Luckily we had Asterisk-genius Shawn Van Every with us. He prayed over the server, and quickly got it back up and running.

That evening I took this blurry pic when we went out to the city for some Mexican food.

My nachos stood still for their glam shot.

After that it was a quick trip to Beauty Bar across the street. (why did we go here? don’t we have one of these in NY?)

And even in the bars....more fun with phones. The next day at about 11AM a few of us got a call from the conference organizer who explained that a speaker had dropped out-- and offered us a spot “on the big stage.” This was such a sweet opportunity because this way the whole conference-- or at least everyone in the main room got to hear our pitches.

Ducan Davidson (Etel photographer??) snapped this photo of me presenting on stage. Oh- by the way I presented “The Human Race.” Remember? It’s the project were callers on hold compete to be the first to speak to a human. You can try it out at thanksforyourpatience.com. Some really nice bloggers wrote about it here and here. When the conference was over I went into the city to visit my friends Laura B. and Jen Raffanti. Unfortunately I didn’t take any pictures-- so I’m going to bust out with these old ones so they can still represent.

Boychenko and her pride-n-joy the pontiac “spitfire.”

Jen and her pride-n-joy Marley the make-out dog. Love you both!!! Did I mention there was an earthquake in San Francisco that day? I dodgeballed back to NY to let everyone know. Unfortunately no one seemed concerned for my safety. Sighhhhh....

Anyway, the flight home included a full row to myself,

and California-only all stars Pete’s coffee and See’s candy,

Back in the 14-degrees-feels-like-1-degree weather of NY now. (Why don’t they just write “don’t go outside” !!) Until next time Cali...

Cupcakes and Chocolate Fountains

2007-02-21T17:21:00Z

So the 3-day birthday extravaganza started out with TNO, but I’m going to skip ahead to the real fun which was at the “Bite Me - No really, I insist” party Kate and her roommates hosted last Friday. There were so many great things about the party, I can’t possibly blog them all, so I’ll give you a few of my favorite highlights, like the chocolate fountain you see above.

Kate showing off her years of experience doing the wine-glass-and-hair-dryer balancing act.

Candy necklace eating contest.

Whips.

Pain.

Bondage.

And Burton.

really,

drunk. God bless the digicam. These are the photos I blog for.

Did i mention everyone had to pick a boyfriend for the night?

Everyone stashed them in different places.

And, just like in real life, some were greedy and insisted on taking two (ahem! girl in the red!)

The party included some sweet college undergrad flashbacks. Like Jello shots.

And lots of red plastic cups.

Towards the end of the night, we sang happy birthday to Kate.

And I was nice enough to keep my promise of whiskey to Alex since he beat me in our snowboarding race.

He loved it.

At the end of the night I had whip cream sprinkled all over my dress and pieces of feather boa stuck to my shoes. (look at the left heel!).

Ok- rewind to Thursday for birthday TNO which was at The Professor’s Loft- a new favorite of mine. Close to home, cheap drinks, and a pretty nice space. Here’s Jeff, Preston, and Ran.

Gabe and I were hungry so we promptly ordered one of everything fried.

Stefan was kind of upset we didn’t want to share.

So Kate and I made him feel better with a group hug.

I spent most of the night just trying to quench my thirst. Er...this isn’t my darkly painted fingernail, but whatever, I like the shot.

Mid-TNO Gabe took over the DJ booth and turned the bar into a crazy crazy dance party.

I tried to spend some quality time with Josh. But, as usual, he only had obscene words and gestures for me.

I left Josh and his evil laugh and decided to pick up Tikva instead, which is always tons of fun.

Ok, on to Saturday. We decided to have our birthday at Back Room. Some other blogger predicted Back Room would be too crowded and suggested we move the party to another bar. We ignored him.

Turns out Back Room was too crowded, so we had to move the party to another bar.

We ended up at Revolver. Also pretty crowded, but better than Back Room.

Thanks to all the rockstars that came. Like Ran.

And Gabe. (PS- Ripped these pics off from Ran’s Flickr!)

And Songul.

And Elvis.

Extra special thanks to Dave G. for coming- cause he brought these almost-too-pretty-to-eat cupcakes. I snagged that pb and chocolate one on the bottom left.

So good.

Anyway, a couple more pics....

and a couple more drinks...

..and we were on our way to yet another bar.

I snagged the last cupcake.

And took it on a march through the LES. We ended the night at The Annex.

I think I got home around 3 something. I guess that’s kinda early, but I was pretty tired after our third birthday celebration. I guess I’m getting old. Thanks x2000 to everyone who helped us celebrate. Happy Birthday Kate.

Thanks again for cleaning out the chocolate fountain.

Birthday x2

2007-02-17T01:35:01Z

I’m 27. Kate is 26. Come to Back Room and bring us twenty-something cupcakes.

Here’s the original version of the invite that Kate drew. I asked her to re-draw it and give us bigger boobs. Don’t you think it looks better now?

Happy V-day

2007-02-14T14:16:01Z

Happy Valentines day! Now, my plans aren’t completely solid for tonight, but pretty sure I’ll be spending some part of it with this article + the bottle of gin Gabe left at my house Saturday night. Now I’ll give you the list of “reasons” I don’t have to celebrate this hallmark holiday:

#1 This is by far the truest of all. You like me? Really? So not interested. You don’t like me? Really? I LUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUV You. Forever. And ever. And ever and ever. Unless you start to like me, then I probably won’t like you anymore.

Once Kate got her paws on this magazine, she jumped straight to the most obviously explanation for both of us....

No, no, not the “Because You Party Too Much” one...the other one....the one on the right!! Sadly, though I wanted to believe this reason, towards the end of the article, I found out the truth.

Sigghhhh. Someone get me a drink, and a couple cats I guess.

Oh and by they way - Kate is hosting a Bite Me party on Friday. Couples are welcome- with a hot single friend of course.