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One of the things I’ve been thinking about lately is locational information foraging. Whether it’s a Burlington augmented reality art project or localized SEO or playing with Twitter hashtags or any other location-contextual topic/service/whathaveyou.

Today I was using Foursquare to find a place to eat in Tribeca, I’m in NYC doing some on-site work for a client. I looked at the nearby tips and found one that mentioned the 388 Greenwich building. I’ve never been in 388 but it’s close enough that I could throw rocks at it if I felt like it. The Foursquare tip mentioned a website, Serving Other Deck, which gives the complete breakdown on how a double-decker elevator system operates and how to game it both in raw gaming terms and also in terms of gaming it so you don’t damage social relations with the passengers (who you will likely be inconveniencing if you game the elevator).

It’s a fascinating read for anyone who likes systems and how systems interact with human behavior.

Currently watching a lot of Shaw Brothers and reading two fascinating books. As happens when I do several things at once my brain wants to make associations and synthesize everything into some sort of unified field plan. Read the rest of this entry »

While I was in New York recently I had the opportunity to hang out with my friend Ben. Ben works as an arborist for the city of Brooklyn and is currently working to negotiate sidewalk alterations that will be helpful to older trees which are starting to strain against their concrete boundary. It’s pretty cool stuff. But that’s not what I want to share with you about our conversation.

Ben, who besides speaking for the trees isn’t a Luddite or anything, referred to our current technological existence as the post-wonderment age. It used to be, when you’d be out walking and consider seeing a movie or a band or whatever you’d say something like “I wonder what’s playing at the movie theater.” Now, instead of wondering, we just whip out our post-wonderment devices and beam the information in. This observation got me thinking about how easy it is to access information today (even with my non-phone post-wonderment device: an iPod Touch).

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed. –Albert Einstein

In the absence of knowing something, we imagine multiple realities and possibilities. We can make plans based on whichever variations of these possibilities seem most interesting to us, creating multiple futures. When we lack the time and space to actively wonder about something, I wonder what happens to our ability to innovate and generate new things.

Like my fancy title? What I’m really going to write about is how to manage the balance between computational power and portability. This is only relevant to people who do “heavy lifting” with their computers. Most people probably don’t even need to worry about this stuff outside of just needing more storage available on-the-go. Since lots of us have experience with manual transmission cars the concept of an optimal shift point might be useful as an analogy.

Powerful computational devices (Lower Gear)

Powerful computational devices are, at the time I write this post, desktop machines, clusters and servers. Damn physics is holding us to CPUs that generate heat (and thus require vents/fans/cooling blocks that take up physical space) and consume power (which decrease battery life). Moreover many of these computationally intensive tasks still take time. I’m talking about video cross-encoding and so forth. Serious heavy lifting and shmushing digital assets against one another (yes, shmushing is a technical term and defining it is outside the scope of this post).

Portable Computational Devices (Higher Gear)

Then there’s the stuff we need to do everyday. Multiple times a day even. Like check our email. Fire up OpenOffice. Surf a little web. These tasks don’t require much shmushing or heavy lifting. As a result, no need for cooling blocks and the power consumption is lower. This is pretty frickin’ handy because we send email a lot more often than we render video or composite HDR panoramas (at least I do).

The Problem, in a nutshell

When to shift between low and high gear? What if you’re in high gear and need to shift back? What if shifting back means travelling a few hundred miles? In a car it’s easy enough to shift gears. For computers maybe not. You need to shift into the lower gear as your need for computational power increases. And you need to shift into a higher gear as your desire to be mobile increases. But sometimes you gotta move fast and haul a heavy load.

21st Century Split Shift

What if we had a place where we stored the assets (the gigandor video files or whatever) and the instructions for what to do with those assets were light-weight (like a video edit-decision list or settings for node-based compositing or whatever–something text based that a machine can use as instructions). What if we had something portable that could control, remotely, the heavy lifting (iPod Touch, MacBook Air, Kindl, Nintendo, whatever is capable of messing with an XML file I suppose). Probably, we’re going to need some sort of low-bandwidth prep-work preview VNC voodoo to get at least a glimpse of what we’re doing on our NinKindle Air, but if the heavy lifting is done by the low-gear machine maybe it’s all going to be fine. Oh yeah, we’re going to need bandwidth too.

Here’s the shopping list:

• Heavy lifting machine
• Portable machine
• Software that can do EDL-style communication between the portable machine and the heavy lifter
• Hardware that can make previews quickly
• Bandwidth to transfer the EDL from the portable machine and previews from the heavy lifter.

I’m guessing we’re damn close on this sort of thing. Aside from the software part anyway (when is Pshop going to ship with a client/server version where the client is a NinKindle and the server is an Xserve in your basement?). It’s already easy enough to use VNC on an iPod Touch to get back to a main rig. And audio server-on-the go has done a lot for pushing data back and forth.

Anyway… what do you think?

Great little post over at 37Signals about why long-term planning probably doesn’t matter much. Fits in with the GTD mindset in it’s focus on the now as being most important. While I do think it’s important to look ahead to help get a sense of where a person/company wants to go, I know from personal experience that it rarely gets done. Maybe the time would be better spent thinking about be-here-now.

Read the post and comment.

My friend Vince over at Vinceland loaded up a great post today on altering perceptions, the ephemeral nature of knowledge, and a few other choice bits. Here’s a little quote:

Our lives, laws, morals and traditions are built on the idea that the past and future exist outside of the present and that which we have control over is only the future. We record and remember the past. We look forward and work towards a better future. But we live teetering on the thinnest edge of good and evil that we consider NOW, now, now.

Now that sort of fits in with something I’ve read in the past two days that goes something like (sorry for my vagueness, I really can’t remember) “History doesn’t repeat itself, it isn’t even gone.” And if no one else can take claim for that phrase I’ll gladly collect my 200 bucks and pass Go.

Go read Vinceland: Change Your Life Yesterday.