de-scrambling

alright, ever since I got back from Europe I've been excessively lazy at posting blog entries. So for the five or so people out there who still even look at this page, thanks for coming. Things have been crazy... I moved from Berkeley to my new home in the Mission District of SF, have been buried in work in a "pre-startup" company - a little summer experiment about which more should surface later, and have had more social engagements in the last month than in the entire three months before I left for Europe. So where does that leave me? Excited, exhausted, and with one too many mid-week hangovers.

Throughout it all, fun things have been afoot...

• All my conference talks in Europe went really well. While having the A/V fail on me during my big CHI talk was truly a blast (for this paper, on designing directive systems, or, machines that tell you what to do), my workshop talk at AVI on invisible interfaces was the most fun. It was a bit unnerving to get up in front of a bunch of more-or-less ardent computer scientists and (1) not talk about computer science, but rather a bunch of philosophy, psychology, and sociology, and (2) tell them that the way they conceive their work may be flawed. Fortunately it went over well, and great comments and debates of various types ensued. I guess it's hard to be disagreeable in an abundance of wine.
  
• My infovis class project, Vizster, a visualization of friendster networks, was treated to two very nice blog entries by Sean and danah, so that when I got back from Europe there were over 500 Google hits (it's now down to under 200) in at least a dozen languages. I should get around to releasing something by the end of the summer...
  
• My visualization toolkit, prefuse, didn't quite get accepted to the UIST conference, but has generated a lot of interest. Mucho thanks to all those out there playing with it and providing feedback. And for those who haven't seen it, check out the video (it's 30MB and requires the DivX codec). And why the name "prefuse"? Since UI toolkits in Java have musical themes (Swing, Jazz, etc), I named it in honor of the musician who provided the soundtrack for much of the coding.
  
• I will no longer get to enjoy my living room view of the bay. However, one of my former roommates is moving into the house next door to the old one, so I'll have to crash his living room instead.
  
• What else? Was in Los Angeles for the 4th... for a loft party in downtown, pool side mansion party in Glendale, hipster party back in LA (and where, though he apparently doesn't check his voicemail, I got to randomly run into the greatest artist I know), and then a complete fireworks immersion in Long Beach.

Next on the docket, two black belt promotions at my aikido dojo this weekend, and a sure-to-be-fascinating workshop on urban computing next week. And, if I can finally get my act in gear, maybe even some regular blog posts. But don't hold me to that.