ALL ART BURNS

After some 15-odd years in the tech industry doing everything from programming parallel supercomputers to developing secure applications for consumer electronics I decided to go back to school for a BFA in Industrial Design. This journal, “ALL ART BURNS”, is as a public design journal and sketchbook. It might turn into my pro designer blog after I graduate or it might continue to be a journal and sketchbook. Either way, I hope this will be of use to other people interested in design or who are also on the path to becoming a designer. The name comes from one of the fire/art themed stickers I made back in 2002 for Burning Man.

The long version of how this came about is in the earlier journal entries. The short version is that I miss what got me sucked into computers and technology in the first place: making tools people can use to improve their lives. When I started developing software eons ago, I often did every phase of delivering a product: determine requirements, design both the architecture and what we now call the user interface, procure hardware, develop the software, build and run tests, write end-user documentation, and install and maintain the product.

Somewhere in the mid-90s, the technology world went through a sea-change. My IT projects turned into installing vendor-provided solutions so I moved into engineering. Engineering in the dot-com boom in the valley was not terribly fun: I had a choice of being either a minor cog in a machine or an ego-driven uber-geek. Neither suits me well and I’ve been a mediocre engineer as a result, with only my passions for hacking, security and privacy keeping me motivated (and employable).

A few years ago I started going to Burning Man and quickly adopted their philosophy of “no spectators”. I started making art for the playa; that quickly evolved into learning to work metal; and soon after the discovery that I really enjoy making physical things that people can interact with. Working over the summer on a project for Burning Man wasn’t enough, I wanted to make physical things year around. I considered going back to school for a degree in mechanical engineering or robotics but both of those felt rather sterile. One day I discovered what it is that industrial designers do, and realized that industrial design was what I’ve been wanting to do for a long, long time.

I still like technology and I’ll always be a hacker of some sort but I have little desire to write software as a full-time job for the rest of my life. I want to make physical things that people manipulate and understand how people interact with those physical things. It’s one thing to develop a new authentication mechanism, it’s another for that mechanism to be usable. Odds are that anything I make will contain some sort of technology and it’s likely that I’ll help design and implement some of that technology.

Technorati Tags: college, industrial design, personal

Classes don’t start for a couple of months yet but I’m already getting in the back-to-school mental space.

I’m filling out more paperwork for Carnegie Mellon than I ever did for a public school and it’s amazing how much of it is, in fact, paper. Some of it I can do online, including applying for financial aid and course registration, but I still fill out paper forms to prove I have health insurance, my shots, etc. Online registration for courses is one of the best things to happen in the past 20 years — no getting up at o-dark-hundred just to wait in line for hours down at the administration building filling in bubble sheets and getting signatures from admins. (If you’ve only registered online, let me tell you about walking to school uphill in the snow both ways…)

A fair amount of my time in the past few weeks has also been spent researching student loans and other forms of funding. My employer has no sabbatical policy and little in the way of educational programs that I can use to pay for school. They’re good about flex-time and would probably pick up the tab for a specific class required by work, but that’s about it. I’m planning for the worst possible case: quitting my day job, starting school on loans, then picking up consulting work during the academic year as time permits.

Quitting could also be the best case if I can scrounge the cash for the first year and really focus on school. I’m going to school to get my core art and design skills whipped into shape by experts not just get some letters after my name (“BFA, IDSA”). I’d rather go to school for 3-4 intensive years and live cheaply instead of taking a night classes and dragging school out over ~8 years. It took me 7 years to get my first BA, I’d like to not repeat that process again.

Looking back at my last tilt at school, something that I really didn’t understand was money. My family never had much money and my father didn’t know how to manage what we had so I never learned how to manage money. I had no idea how finances worked, how to save or invest, why one should buy a house instead of rent, etc. In retrospect I didn’t have to go to a local city college, I could probably have gotten loans and grants for a much better school had I or my parents known how the system worked.

While I won’t spill the entire financial details of my life here, I think I will occasionally talk about some financial things. I’m probably not the only person so clueless about money that they didn’t even realize how clueless they were (are?) about money.

Ok, enough boring personal details. Next entry is about spimes and security, hope you like it.

Technorati Tags: Carnegie Mellon, debt

For the past few years I’ve been working for a high tech company doing various tasks related to provisioning service on clients that make a regular connection to home base. That’s a rather wordy way of saying, “I make people pay us every month and shut them down when they don’t.”

About a year into my job I inherited the code that does all this and took the opportunity to rewrite the code from the ground up. One of my first self-assigned tasks was code instrumentation — generate logging messages that would reveal how the often the code did what and how long it took to do it. I’ve done this enough times that I’ve learned to make the output easy to graph or massage with other programs. (Most of my career seems to be discovering something needs to be done, deciding to do it, then having to make graphs to justify the time spent on the task.) I had no idea what the code did and how often it did it, thus there was no way for me to tell someone how many servers we’d need to add to support a given number of new clients. Logs and graphs seemed the obvious solution, with PERL and gnuplot being the obvious tools.

Now — several years later — I can call up massive graphs of server activity and point to various events in our product’s history: There’s where we launched a new optional feature in version N, and here’s where we made it a built-in feature a few versions later. There’s Christmas. Well, it’s not Christmas, really, it’s the first weekend after Christmas, because most customers don’t bother using it on Christmas day. There’s the day the power went out in the server room, there’s the day the router died and the failover didn’t, there’s the day, well, you get the idea.

One of my favorite things to look at is how the curves flatten over time. Some events only happen once a month, others once a week, others once a year and others only when the client is first activated. Due to random communication issues, every client doesn’t report to the service every day and over time the partial harmonics of the initial event (say, the first weekend after Christmas) slowly flatten out and turn into the fundamental of the daily connection. A spike of activity corresponds to a spike in server load and spikes in server load means we have idle equipment when there isn’t a spike (too many servers) or overloaded equipment when there is (not enough servers). We’d like to avoid overloaded servers as much as possible and not have equipment sitting around idle, so there’s a reason for me to pay attention to the graphs. And hey, this is something I like doing in the first place.

A few days ago I came up with a way to flatten the spikes within a day or two instead of within months or even years. It’s a painfully obvious solution and something we should have been doing all along to smooth out load on the servers. We didn’t suffer any problems, but that’s like saying I didn’t need to wear my seatbelt today because I didn’t get into an accident.

There’s just one problem with the fix: my beautiful graphs will turn into efficient, flat, boring, and completely uninteresting lines. A life unlived is not worth living, a life without interesting graphs is a life not worth graphing.
I need graphing in my life. I need to find something to graph soon lest I go into withdrawal.

Current options include:

• Get a power meter for my bicycle trainer and start graphing that against my exercise routine and caloric intake. Also get a heart rate monitor and use that once it warms up and I’m riding on the streets again, then compare those graphs to the power meter graphs and my daily weight.
• Put a weather station on the roof and compare it to our gas and electricity usage. This would require devising an optical recognition system that could read our ancient gas meter every minute and transmit the data over wireless. (Bonus points if I make it out of Lego Mindstorms, double points if it survives the winter.)
• Put wattmeters on all my wall outlets and figure out why my electric bill is so high.
• Sit down and type in the ~5 years worth of data I have on my truck and make some graphs. I’ve written down all maintenance, gas usage, and abnormal driving patterns since the day I bought it, might as well do something with the data.
• Write a system monitoring app that compares how much time I waste waiting on apps and browsing the InterWeb to how much time I actually work, then have it display realtime, hourly, daily, and weekly summaries on a big screen over my desk.

Technorati Tags: metrics, geek, graphs, obsessions

If you want to see a bunch of photos and a bit of video of the projects I’ve done (or helped with) for Burning Man, hop over to TOTALFUCKINGARMAGEDDON.

Didn’t go last year or this year, and might not go again for a few more years due to school, but I keep thinking of things to do for the next year that I am able to attend…

Technorati Tags: burning man, art, self promotion

This is cute: “How a Designer Grows: Changes in a Designer’s Self-Worth/Knowledge Over Time”

[/tags]industrial design,humor[/tags]