ALL ART BURNS

… so time to start catching up on blog stuff.

The PRK went well, I’m working on a nice write-up of the entire procedure and my recovery experiences. Doc says I’m 20/20, possibly 20/15 in the right light, I have no halos or other visual artifacts. I’m still a little light sensitive, so low-light situations feel very high-constrast to me, but I’m completely fine to drive at night, etc.

I cut way back on classes this semester so I could focus more on work and art projects. Next semester I’d like to take some 2D design and color theory, but for now it’s just Intermediate Japanese 2 and a tangible computing class.

A design degree is still the goal, but my focus on ID has turned into a general inquisitiveness about design. I’ve read a bit about the Bauhaus curriculum, and I think I’m going to try and put something together for me that would be a self-directed degree in Design that includes 2D, 3D, interaction, service and maybe some d-theory to boot. I’m still really interested in things like furniture, tangible computing and nomadic technology, but I’m now interested in the fundamental design theory that’s the common ground behind all the different [Foo] Design disciplines.

And process. I’m becoming obsessed with process at a theory level — what defines process, what is common in process between different disciplines, etc.

Oh yeah, and I have a partner and a day job and a cat and friends and other things that I’d like to keep paying attention to while doing all this other stuff.

More soon.

Technorati Tags: design, personal

Between work and school this semester, I really haven’t had time for much personal writing in this design journal. However, I’ve got a stack of books I’ve read that want reviewing and a pile of notes on various topics and four weeks of winter break to do it in.

However, the good news / bad news thing is that I’m finally getting PRK surgery to correct my vision after finals are over. I probably won’t be able to use a computer for a week or so after that, so there’s half the vacation burned. I suspect that after a week of being laid up on the couch listening to audio books I will be ready to do some serious blog-catching-up, so maybe I’ll pull a marathon in the two weeks before school starts.

Technorati Tags: excuses excuses, personal

Another silly meme to play with….

There are a set of questions below that are all of the form, “The best [subgenre] [medium] in [genre] is …”.

Copy the questions, and before answering them, you may modify them in a limited way, carrying out no more than two of these operations:

*You can leave them exactly as is.

*You can delete any one question.

*You can mutate either the genre, medium, or subgenre of any one question. For instance, you could change “The best time travel novel in SF/Fantasy is…” to “The best time travel novel in Westerns is…”, or “The best time travel movie in SF/Fantasy is…:, or “The best romance novel in SF/Fantasy is…”.

*You can add a completely new question of your choice to the end of the list, as long as it is still in the form “The best [subgenre] [medium] in [genre] is…”.

You must have at least one question in your set, or you’ve gone extinct, and you must be able to answer it yourself, or you’re not viable.

Then answer your possibly mutant set of questions. Please do include a link back to the “parent” blog you got them from, e.g. All Art Burns to simplify tracing the ancestry, and include these instructions.

Finally, pass it along to any number of your fellow bloggers. Remember, though, your success as a Darwinian replicator is going to be measured by the propagation of your variants, which is going to be a function of both the interest your well-honed questions generate and the number of successful attempts at reproducing them.

My great-grandparent is Metamagician and the Hellfire Club.
My grandparent is Sentient Developments.
My parent is Open the Future.

1. The best Post-Singularity Novel in SF/Fantasy is…
The Player of Games by Iain Banks

2. The best sexy song in rock is…
Car Song by Elastica

3. The best cult novel in serialized graphic storytelling (comic books) is…
White Out, by Greg Rucka, Steve Lieber, and Jamie Rich

4. The best first-series for Americans in Japanese anime is…
Cowboy Bebop, by Shinichiro Watanabe and Keiko Nobumoto.

Technorati Tags: anime, meme, singularity

I know I have unusual taste in vehicles. Actually, some people would probably even question if I have taste at all, given two of my favorite vehicles: the BMW R80G/S and the BMW Z3 Coupe.

But this, this I simply cannot forgive. There’s a review of it with less than flattering photos.

You’ll have to follow those links, I’m not sure I can handle the anguish of having photos of that bike in this journal.

One thing good I can say about it — I sleep easier knowing that if I ever needed the perfect motorcycle to ride while I was wearing a superhero costume, that motorcycle now exists.

Technorati Tags: design, motorcycles

I was all set to write up this clever bit about why I wasn’t going to buy an iPhone any time soon, then Laura Lemay went and did a better job of it before I finished mine.

She has a better/different smartphone than my xv6700, but I think we’re looking at this the same way. I have a solution that while not fancy or sleek or imbued with the Essence of Steve, works pretty well, so it’s hard to get all worked up about the iPhone.

More importantly, the Apple hype machine is in high gear showing all sorts of promos everywhere they can, and that makes me a wee bit nervous. Historically, when Apple has had something that’s really good they tend to blindside people with it. They’re not doing this with the iPhone, they’re talking about it everywhere they can, they’re loaning pre-release units to the media, etc etc. Newsweek calls it “the most anticipated gizmo ever”, but buried down in Levy’s review is the gem that it took him a couple of days before he could use it with a single finger and that after two weeks he’s only beginning to get the hang of two-thumb typing. Days to just get single touch to work? Two weeks to learn double-thumb typing?

Oh yeah, and no GPS, no high speed data, and no goodlink support announced.

For $500 and a two year contract.

Nope, not for me.

Technorati Tags: hype, iPhone, Laura Lemay