Quickly skimming an online version of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, I came across this strikingly modern prose:

“I never was at his house; but they say it is a pretty sweet place.”

I imagined for a moment that Sir John lived in a rent-controlled penthouse featured on Apartment Therapy.  It was disappointing to re-read it correctly:

“I never was at his house; but they say it is a sweet pretty place.”

1. Just because I bought something from you online or in person does not mean I wish to receive marketing materials by email.
2. If you do send me marketing materials by email, include a single URL to let me unsubscribe. Do not make me send you an email saying “unsubscribe.”
3. Do not force me to type in my email address — I can’t be bothered, and you may have an older address that forwards to my current address.
4. Do not make me tell you why I am unsubscribing.
5. Do not ask me to select which marketing newsletter to unsubscribe from. I have no idea which one I’m getting because I didn’t opt-in in the first place.
6. For God’s sake, do not send me an email confirming that I have been unsubscribed. I am unsubscribing because I don’t want to receive email from you.

If you fail to follow steps #2-5, I won’t bother unsubscribing. I will simply mark you as “spam” in Gmail.

Note that this increases the likelihood that other people receiving your marketing materials will instead have them delivered to their spam folder.

I’ve been following a lot of publishing blogs lately so I’m obliged to post about We Tell Stories, by Penguin Books and alternate reality game company Six to Start.

The project is subtitled “Digital Fiction”, which immediately brings back memories of dreary academic “hypertext fiction”. Those projects often amounted to “Choose Your Own Adventure”-style short stories with multiple endings, where clicking on words to move through a branching plotline was deemed sufficiently interactive to be interesting.

Film critic Roger Ebert famously doesn’t see the appeal of videogames, but he’s astutely observed that a story with multiple endings really has no ending at all: as soon as he (the audience) realizes there are multiple endings, he’ll want to experience them all, and then loses the pleasure of knowing what “really” happened. Interactive fiction has grappled with this too, and as a player I generally side with Ebert. Once I’ve “won” a game by achieving an obviously acceptable ending, I lose interest in finding any other good or bad endings. I’m ready to move on the next story, not traverse the whole plot tree. (Admittedly I’m also the kind of player who wants every modern videogame to be twice as easy and half as long as it is.)

Some blogs are calling the first We Tell Stories episode “interactive fiction”, but The 21 Steps is not really interactive at all. It’s a linear story told through new medium: short text overlaid on the Google Maps interface. It’s an interesting idea that, like many kinds of experiments, could be compelling once the novelty wears off and an author really dives into the medium. Unfortunately the actual “story” behind Steps is pretty thin, with an ending that reads like a clever high school writing project, and the plot didn’t feel like it truly made use of the map paradigm. Conceptually, co-opting a straight information-based API for use in storytelling and gameplay is definitely intriguing — I’d love to see what someone could do with Google Street View. No doubt stories told in short blurb-bursts are here to stay, given all the attention that mobile phone fiction has been receiving.

I imagine the Google Maps component does work well when combined with the story’s alternate reality game, but the ARG requires one to be in the UK. I’ll be interested to read reviews from people who’ve played it through.

The next episode of We Tell Stories comes out tomorrow, March 25th.

Although I enjoyed most of the talks I saw at ETech, I started having the best luck when I stopped trying to go to ones that seemed useful.

The Commodore’s bartender Scotto Moore performed his “digital fairy tale” called Intangible Method. It’s short, watch it.

Also as part of the Ignite series, Matt Web’s Science Fictional Tour of the Solar System, which has absolutely nothing to do with anything:

Two good talks that I don’t have video for:

Las Vegas: Behind the Scenes. What Sensors? What Privacy? What Anonymity? The Whole Story

Jeff Jonas

Presentation [PPT]

Open Source Hardware

Phillip Torrone (Maker Media), Limor Fried (Adafruit Industries)

Presentation [PDF]

By E. A. Vander Veer
First Edition January 2008
Pages: 268
Series: The Missing Manuals
ISBN 10: 0-596-51769-6

Note: This was a review copy I received for free

I’ve done a bit of writing and editing for O’Reilly on the programming side which means I’ve come to expect a certain dry, technical style. That’s rarely a bad thing, though, as any developer who has suffered through someone else’s cutesy variable names can attest.

But this is a manual for a web site — already an inherently ridiculous concept — and what’s more, it’s a manual on Facebook. Currently on my Facebook home page:

• J– is now a fan of Fall Out Boy
• T– received a “fluff gift”
• Oh and Southwest airlines is apparently having a fare sale

These are not likely to be the subjects of the next Knuth book.

So on the lighter topic of Facebook.com and Facebook apps, it’s appropriate to interject some personality and wit:

Facebook lets you join only one regional network at a time. If you try to add a second, Facebook simply replaces the first with the second. That’s kind of annoying if you’re a multiple home owner, but on the bright side, you own multiple homes.

Plus, I’ll admit it, I learned some things. Facebook has an annoying habit of renaming concepts that already have names, so for example I had no idea that Notes were actual blog entries, and could be imported from external blog sources (I use a third-party app for that). I was also inspired to finally figure out how to get added to the network of my college alma mater, and start a new network for my company. So hey, useful.

The book has sound advice throughout in terms of the fuzzier aspects of Facebook: how to maintain a modicum of privacy, how to use the system to promote yourself or your employer. (The author also recognizes that the first thing everyone does is look up their exes, and provides helpful tips for that too.)

I hadn’t seen any of the Missing Manual series before so the layout was new to me. For me, a tech book just needs some text and an animal woodcut but for a popular “technical” book it’s pretty nice — lots of useful callouts in soothing colors and no incomprehensible icons or annoying cartoons. I don’t know if I’d recommend this book to any of my friends who are clearly all-too-capable of using Facebook already, but I totally recommend it for your boss who wants to know what this “MyFace” thing is he keeps hearing about.

I’ve been to Revere a handful of times and today it was to see an opera.

This is the second year of the New York Metropolitan Opera’s HD simulcast project, in which live performances are beamed to hundreds of movie theaters running digital projection.  This one was Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes. I don’t know squat about opera but it was kind of awesome, both from a logistical standpoint and because it annoys a certain strain of opera purist.

The local Boston showing was sold out so instead we got Clive to drive us to Showcase Cinemas.  There were some expected culture clashes (”IS THIS COFFEE STARBUCKS?”), and the signal glitched out for about 30 seconds, but overall it went smoothly.  In addition to the performance itself the Met ran additional programming on Britten and the opera’s background, and the live cameras moved freely around backstage before the program and between acts. There was something especially charming about interviewing the sweaty performers who’d just come off stage (”Hi mom!”).  The bonus material was hosted by French soprano Natalie Dessay, who had more enthusiasm (”Now let us enjoy Britten’s sad and ‘orrible opera!”) than skill (”So you are Scottish, and Britten was British…”). Not everybody can be good at everything.

As much as I liked this, I am not disappointed to be missing next week’s five and a half hour simulcast of Tristan. For one thing, the last opera I saw was also in German. The next one will be in Sanskrit.

One of the two half-day tutorials I attended was on building visualizations for the web. It was billed as something of a hand-on tutorial on Processing but ended up just being a talk, which was kind of disappointing. Here’s what I took home:

• The “show everything” principle: dump in all the data right away and allow users to winnow down, not up
• “If you can count it, you can color it”: map values to colors, there are algorithms to do this nicely (e.g. ColorBrewer)
• For non-numeric data, take an MD5 hash of a unique identifier and assign that to a color, to make colors unique (IBM History Flow)
• “Scented widgets”: sliders that show previews of the data (c.f. Bleep, which has scrubbing sliders to visually represent the song)
• Size metrics for visualization: technology vs. number of data points

1. JavaScript/HTML: 1,000
2. Flash: 10,000
3. Java: 100,000+

…but download size becomes an issue after 10,000 data points.

• Ideally visualizations can be bookmarkable and shareable on sites like Digg
• Visualization libraries for Java and Flex: Prefuse

Someone asked the most important question (to me, anyway), which is: Processing is great and all, but what can we do about the fact that Java applets suck? The speaker admitted it’s a problem and that his firm mostly ended up using Flash for client-facing applications. This is a real drag. Processing is great and I already know Java. I don’t want to learn Flash, and I wouldn’t trust an open source applet implementation after dealing with gcj.

I have an idea for my next experiment with Processing and it would end up producing a static image. That might be all that can feasibly done with it for now outside of kiosk or downloaded applications. Bummer.

This book, by one of the main developers of Processing, did come recommended and I’m going to pick it up.

(The first post is mostly pictures because I’m too tired to type.)

I had a fantastic time at this year’s Emerging Technology Conference. A lot had to do with the personal and social angle, especially being a part of the Commodore’s entourage, but the talks were overall really excellent.

The Commodore

Photo by James Duncan Davidson

San Diego

One of the few photos I took, waking up at East-Coast-o’clock in the Commodore Suite:

Here I am partying Disney-style

Photo by John Adams

I look like I’m wearing a parka in this picture because the Marriott air-conditioning was extremely enthusiastic.

The Disney party was awesome in that it approached an almost surreal level of corporate self-parody. They ejected the O’Reilly photographer for “stepping on a Disney executive’s toes” (literally) and also booted an in-character member of Austrian art collective Monochrom for walking around in a faux Soviet uniform with a video crew. Good times.

Here I am partying Facebook-style. Facebook didn’t eject anybody.

Trumpet is to the aughts as saxophone is to the 80’s.

To wit:

• Sufjan Stevens
• The National
• Beirut
• Arcade Fire

Note to classical trumpet players: move to Brooklyn.

This afternoon while walking the dog a man started yelling at me in Davis Square:

“I know what you like, honey. I can tell. You like girls. Girls and big dogs. You don’t like guys.”

Then he turned a corner, singing the theme from Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome.