The reason I was in New York (other than to visit Death & Company) was to be on the program committee for the Web 2.0 Expo conference in NYC. Between now and then I’ll be reviewing submissions for talks and trying to convince people I know to attend so I’m not standing around awkwardly a lot.

What I learned from the experience is that there are two ways to get on a conference program committee: found multiple successful web startups by your mid-30’s, or to go to high school with the conference chair.

I got talked into appearing on a panel discussing interactive fiction and the game I wrote eight years ago, Dinner with Andre. I’ll be appearing with Dan (convenient!) and Andrew Plotkin, both of whom are at least famous enough to have Wikipedia pages I can link to.

The event is Tuesday, January 29th, 6pm to 7pm at MIT, as part of the Purple Blurb series on “digital writing.”

I’ve been playing with the Java-based visualization language Processing a bit. Since a client had casually mentioned the idea of some kind of iTunes-like image viewer, I made that my first project.

It’s not perfect by far (it would be nice if it rotated both directions) but I got about as far with it as I could with my limited patience. Still, my first 3D program! My 10-year-old BASIC programming self would be so proud.

This uses seven random photos from my Flickr account:

Apropos of this I’m looking forward to the O’Reilly Emerging Technology conference again this year (thanks Brady!), where I’ll be attending this tutorial on web-based visualizations, focusing on Processing. Honestly, though, I’ll probably have more fun at Food Hacking.

MacBook Pro 17-in Hi-Res WideS

2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
2GB 667 DDR2 SDRAM - 2×1GB
250GB Serial ATA Drive @ 4200
SuperDrive 8X
NO MODEM
NO OPTIONAL SW

Delivers by: Sep 27 - Oct 2

Yesterday the wind blew my glasses off my face and into the street. A co-worker had to run out into traffic to retrieve them because I couldn’t even see the cars.