shawn rider dot com

I am way too much of a nerdy novelty music fan. I can’t help but love all sorts of comedy music, especially this duo from New Zealand. Mock me if you must, but I will be laughing at you from the Jonathan Coulton and Paul and Storm show next week! 

Flight of the Conchords - A Texan Odyssey

The Phone

The Phone is a sequence of interactive vignettes. It reminds me a few other things that are very similar, such as 99 Rooms and Not Pr0n. All of these things will suck you in for an hour, and I like them because they occupy a territory between artful decoration, interactive game/puzzle, and narrative. One one hand, all three of the mentioned works are collections of mostly disconnected vignettes. They are not overtly narrative, which is why I use the term vignettes to describe the individual elements of these interactive objects. In a way, they operate very much like a painting — they draw the viewer in to look, and look closely. They reward scrutiny. The interaction is very low-impact, generally involving a poking, prodding, or tracing rather than simulated actions and movements. It would be really interesting to have a frame on the wall that could display different beautiful riddles for you to figure out, using your finger to interact. I think there will be a future for those kinds of decorative/engaging pieces.

My Tiny Life: Crime and Passion in a Virtual World by Julian Dibbell (Book) in Computers & Internet

Long out of print, Julian Dibbell’s My Tiny Life is a must-read for any fan of online worlds, cyberculture, or plain old good storytelling. Check out the review I wrote last year in my library section for more on the book itself.

What’s especially cool today is that My Tiny Life is not only back in print, but it’s in e-book form (PDF) and downloadable for FREE. Awesome. So now you have no excuse for not reading at least the juicy first chapter. 

As Congress returns tomorrow to start a new session, OpenCongress is excited to announce a major update that will put all the bills and votes at your fingertips. It’s never been easier to track what’s happening with your government.

Now you can build a personal profile on OpenCongress of the bills and people you’re tracking, network with other users, comment and vote on bills, and much more. To get started, create your own "My OpenCongress" profile, it’s free and only takes a minute.

OpenCongress.org

This seems like a very unique time for Open Congress. I have wanted this site to add social features for a long time. It still amazes me that something like OpenCongress doesn’t already exist. I see it as a great experiment that will (hopefully) lead to significant social reform. Although I still doubt the kind of reforms I want will happen within my lifetime (eliminate the electoral college, parliamentary representation in the House of Reps, etc.). Nonetheless, it is a great thing to add so much functionality to an already robust database.

Funny enough, the first thing I notice when exploring OpenCongress now is just how little activity there has been so far. I see "hot" bills that have no user-votes on them. I was the first person to vote for the Internet Radio Equality Act? Seriously? I can’t believe that…

As it is, OpenCongress brings to bear two things: 1) Government is HUGE. The list of bills is pretty staggering and in spite of all the helpful organization and flexibility of the website it is going to take awhile to parse through the stuff I’m interested in. 2) Government is complicated. When confronted with the text of a bill, it’s impossible for me to solely rely on the blog and news articles also listed on the page. I feel obligated to read through the text, which is arduous to say the least. So it takes awhile for me to get up to speed. On a new movie review site I can review 300 films in a couple hours of absent-minded browsing. On OpenCongress I spent two hours reading and got through, I think, three bills.

Although the pages of OpenCongress seem a bit empty at the moment, I am holding out hope that this thing takes off in a big way. I could envision additional tools to help citizens track and comment on legislation relevant to them. I have even seen a few suggestions for how users could actually contribute to government by drafting model legislation, which causes a bit of a forehead-smacking moment. Of course! Why should it just be giant corporations who influence lawmaking? Power to the people! (crowd? mob?)

It remains to be seen what effect OpenCongress can have on the world at large. The site has a lot of hard work ahead of it, but so far the direction and execution is good. I’m pulling for it, and I suggest others check it out. It’s free! 

xkcd - A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language - By Randall Munroe

Carlo, our new team member at TeacherLine, just forwarded me this XKCD. No matter how much you mine through the archives at XKCD, there is always another funny episode you missed. It’s incredible.

This comic does pretty much sum up the experience of moving to Python for us. It’s been great to work with, and Carlo is finding it rewarding after just a couple weeks of messing with it. We have a joke around the office whenever somebody pulls off something cool in Python and is asked, "How did you do that?" We always answer, "You just have to import awesome at the top of your code."

Let’s think about the future for a second. You probably don’t understand the kids that make up the bulk of our audience, but I do. I call them the network MySpace remix 3.0 social generation. Unlike any other people before them, young people today like to interact with each other. They also like music. YouTube is the perfect example of whatever point it is I’m making. Everything should be online and customizable.

Five Short Video Game Industry Keynotes (Magical Wasteland)

This summary of five generic video game industry keynote speeches is gold for anyone in game / software / web development.  True high-larity. I haven’t read the Magical Wasteland blog before, but it’s definitely on my list now

YouTube - Head Tracking for Desktop VR Displays using the WiiRemote

This is one of the toughest problems in Virtual Reality to solve, requiring hundreds if not thousands of dollars worth of equipment. And here, good old Johnny Lee has figured it out. Wonderful! I also want to see VR Wii games now!

YouTube - Garth Marenghi - I’m A One Track Lover

Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace just started on Adult Swim. Check it out. 

The BBC is clearly one of the best production groups out there these days. Not only do they actively explore and support interesting technology applications (although their open source video codec never really went anywhere… but you can’t blame them for trying!). And they have always had a progressive attitude towards online media.

This series is like Look Around You meets Dr. Who. It’s a retro show done with such perfect pitch that you will wonder whether or not it is really an old 70s/80s BBC production. It also features Richard Aoyade, “Moss” from the IT Crowd, which is another of my fave recent BBC productions.

Darkplace is an interesting thing. How much longer can it be before Adult Swim picks up Look Around You?

I really enjoy sites that are collaborative, but in a way that isn’t just centered around ego. Instructables.com is a perfect example: Users sign up and can post how-to articles about projects. It’s a brilliant idea — another one I wish I’d thought of myself. I like this much better than sites like MySpace where it’s all about creating a weird value system of uploaded photos and linked-in friends.

Sites like Instructables (or GameFAQs, Good-Tutorials.com, etc.) encourage people to make useful things. The social rewards are still there, but the valuation is based on the quality of material submitted to the site: A really good tutorial writer is valued on a site like Good-Tutorials, or even on old sites like FlashKit. These software-based sites were some of the first to provide this kind of directed how-to information, but sites like Make: Blog and Threadless and Etsy have pushed things much further. It’s the collaborative CMS qualities of SlashDot and SlashDot-descendents like Digg mixed with the how-to software culture and the DIY ethos of the Web.

Here’s a sample from a project on Instructables that I thought was exceptionally clever: How to turn a $3 ball point pen into a $200 ball point pen.

Save $200 in 2 minutes and have the worlds best writing pen

Transform a $3 pen into a $200 pen in just seconds. Mont Blanc pens are the worlds finest writing pens but they make specialized refills so you must buy their $200 pens to use their amazing ink…until now. This is the easiest hack/adaptation to give anyone the king’s writing ink.

Google Web Toolkit - Build AJAX apps in the Java language
Google Web Toolkit (GWT) is a Java software development framework that makes writing AJAX applications like Google Maps and Gmail easy for developers who don’t speak browser quirks as a second language. Writing dynamic web applications today is a tedious and error-prone process; you spend 90% of your time working around subtle incompatabilities between web browsers and platforms, and JavaScript’s lack of modularity makes sharing, testing, and reusing AJAX components difficult and fragile.

The Google Web Toolkit is a resource for developers. I haven’t gotten to play with it much, but I’m very interested in some of the things it offers– it provides a framework for AJAX-based Web app development that is very robust. It not only helps make portable, reusable code, but also helps avoid AJAX-issues such as Back-button state management and whatnot. I’ve been using Paul Visco’s Surebert class for my AJAX needs, but this might be suitable for larger app projects. I’ll get to it as soon as I can…