bad [PATH] luck coming
February 24th, 2005 at 1:39 am. 0 comments.the last four times i’ve walked down the stairs to a PATH station i’ve arrived at a train pulling in, or having just pulled into the station, and i’ve gotten on, without any waiting on the platform 1. this of couse called for a little, evaluating. the times this occurred, two times manhattan-bound around 10:15 and 8:45 and home-bound at 10:30 and 8:45 (AM and PM where they should be) and, the time between trains respectivly: every 4-5 minutes, every 10 minutes, every 15 minutes, and every 10 minutes. assuming that we give a one minute window of ‘catching’ your train when you walk into the station, in order my chances for ‘catching’ my train should have been: 1 in 4, 1 in 10, 1 in 15 and 1 in 10 (randomness being randomness i should ‘catch’ my train 25% of the time if it comes every 4 minutes) that puts my recent 4 for 4 streak at 1 in 1501 . normal joe office worker working 9:00 to 5:30 (that 30 min lunch being unpaid of course) living at my stop ( train times, 4-5 minutes in the morning, every 5 minutes in the evening), and working in lower-midtown-ish manhattan has a daily 1 in 10 chance that he/she will ‘score’ on their inbound and outbound trip in any one day. four times in row (two morings and two evenings) though would be 1 in 100. im not a statistician in the least, but i’m guessing that i’ll have plenty of twenty-nine minute late night waits in the near-near future 2.
1 waiting on the platform allows sorting out of the ipod and beginning/choosing some reading of some sort, so it’s not all bad
2 the twenty-nine minute wait occurs when you arrive to the train as it pulls out of the station late at night, leads to unwise sitting on the floor
GPS, i am here
February 23rd, 2005 at 9:20 pm. 0 comments.for The Future of Infrastructure i have chosen to research the impact of gps (global positioning system) and other locative technologies and the habits that are changed or created by their widening adoption.
what is the importance of the use of gps? how does it’s use change the habits of the users? what are the habit changing qualities, who’s habits are being changed, and how? where do those change fit in within the bigger picture? at what ‘place’ are the technologies now, and in the near future?
mapping, automobiles, tracking, networks, trans and inter continental shipping, the surprises found elsewhere
perl : not dynamic nor web develpoment yet
February 18th, 2005 at 2:41 am. 0 comments.im enjoying learning perl probably alot more than i should be. and we’ve just got into mysql, which brings me dangerously close to my unrealized and unfathomable love of m$ excel and database’y stuff. really i’m hoping for the best, to actually bring my site up to somethign close to dynamic and database driven. if im lucky i’ll obsess myself with the intricacies of perl and mysql and make some thing completely nerdtactular.
linkage to the first three weeks:
week 1, perl/html
week 2, perl/logic
week 3, mysql
werd.
keeping a journal
February 18th, 2005 at 2:18 am. 0 comments.inspired from a post at lifehacker.com i’ve spent a little time thinking about how to organzie my ideas. i’m supposed to be trading in my ideas, but i don’t really have a good way of keeping trak of them. i’ve been through the sketchbook, the moleskin notebook entering items into a PDA, emailing myself, tinkering with an ‘idea’ blog, text files on my laptop, random notes in the back of a book on the subway, or in a notebook during class. Almost everytime i’m writing or entering an idea into one of these forms i’m overcome with the anxiety that it’s getting lost, that the idea is not being filed in the ‘perfect’ filing system, and would thus be lost forever, and the world deprived of the greatness that could have been wrought upon it. maybe the best idea is actually writing / typing the idea down. usually it is nothing, an idea for a project that only has to ‘live’ for a few weeks at most, usually a day or three. but it is the act of writing it down that actualizes it in my brain, well i hope, at leat until i sort all this out.
six of nine
February 15th, 2005 at 8:30 pm. 0 comments.i received my most recent PASS on an ARE exam yesterday. yay for me. three left and i get to call myself an architect
contrast
February 12th, 2005 at 7:06 pm. 0 comments.Manipulating contrast is one of the essential ingredients for all careful acts of art or design.
random color motion tracking
February 6th, 2005 at 2:16 pm. 0 comments.
first attempt at creating something from live video using java. using dano’s pixel grabbing class as a starting point i set out to get some stripyness going on and seperate the foreground from the background. it uses a referance frame and then checks every pixel againsnt that referance frame and tests to see if it is different (in color particularly). if it is different it either gets painted the color of that stripe, or not painted, depending on which version you are looking at.
the discussion that followed me telling my original idea that i wasn’t able to code was extremly helpful and im working on it now. im hoping to seperate the the foreground from the background and modify the resolution based on the amount of change from the pervious frame. a still scene would show low res (large pixels) and moving objects would ‘shine through’ by becoming more ‘focused’ (smaller pixels)…well see how that goes.
more images after the jump
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IT matters
February 4th, 2005 at 3:19 pm. 0 comments.A short article from Technology Review written by the inventor of ethernet on wheter IT matters in corporate America was assigned for Infomation Contours. the article itself was a reaction to an article published in the Harvard Business Review by the editor Nicholas Carr. Not having read the original article but gleaning some of its points from Metcalf was that IT, has become a commodity and is like electricity. (more…)
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