Ceaseless Student

So I started the semester with 22 credits.

Then I dropped intermediate differential equations and swapped in Sci-Fi instead.

Then I asked for permission to overload to 24 credits so I could add a class that was still in the works - Analog Filters.

Then I was not really digging on Advanced Digital Systems… so I dropped that. I figured this would leave me with 20 credits. And SigSys NINJAing and, uhmmm, life. So I dropped that.

But now it looks like Analog Filters isn’t going to happen. So I’ll be back down to 18 credits. Which I find quite humorous.

I’m OK with all of this though - after all I’m doing my OSS. I have an arbitrary amount of (enjoyable) work to do whenever I please. Awesome.

Also. The new Smash Bros is coming out in March - bring it.

True.

Or at least substantially true. Boxes and arrows, a design blog, recently posted about design games. My favorite game is easily “Design the Box.” The idea is that the team, well, designs the box.

In this game, individuals or teams create a box, as if the project is going to be sold at retail. Small groups work together to answer key packaging questions: What’s the tone? The name, the tagline, the short hook on the front to entice a consumer to pick it up? What are the features and functions, the details that connect this product to some real need? Those go on the back of the box. What about system requirements?
…
Even though it’s a playful output, it’s highly practical; one client kept a box on his shelf for six months, and would toss it over anytime someone asked what his team was doing with the new intranet. People understood the core of the product immediately, and enjoyed the break from reading yet another document describing an initiative.

Our UOCD (User Oriented Collaborative Design) teachers would be happy to see this sort of thing out there. This sort of thing allows you to get a better grasp on your project than mere specifications ever would. Now they need to start talking to the end users in parallel to playing these creative, big picture games - design will owe a lot to any movement of this kind.

I was a bit saddened by one of the comments:

…Of course, as Jess said in the article, just don’t call it a “game”! That’s the kiss of death for any game technique.

It’s quite sad that people doing design today can’t handle the concept of furthering knowledge through gameplay instead of work. Arbitrary labels have so much meaning.

Interestingly, the dude who’s trying to get s’more publicity seems to have it right - or at least more UOCDish.

I’d also like to stress that there is a fairly substantial difference between the “Design the Box” exercise you describe (and it’s variants) and the Innovation Game® Product Box. In Product Box, the focus is external, on your customer. What do they want? How do they design the box? What images do they use?. In “Design the Box”, the focus is internal, on the internal product team. What does the internal team want? How does the internal team design the box? What images do the internal team choose?

I don’t really see “Design the Box” as confining you to ignoring the end user, but I’m still happy to see it explicitly mentioned.

You have pics. you know you want everyone to see them. You know you want them to show up on PlanetOlin… it’s a bit pathetic that 2 years has gotten us 613 photos. And by us I mostly mean Tostie14 who has 422 of those pics. All the other members combined don’t match him. So let’s fix this:

To start putting pics in a nice shareable public place you need a few things:

-Get a flickr account
-Add me (bdieseldorff) as a contact
-Upload some pics (I suggest using flock for this)
(Here you might have to wait for me to invite you to the group)
-Go to the ‘Organize’ tab
-Drag all the photos you want to give to the pool into the workspace
-Click the send to group button
-Click the Olin group

Yay!

If you’ve got Q’s comment or e-mail me for some A’s.

So I was going through Lifehacker and I happened upon a little blurb about Flock. Flock describes itself as a social browser. Aight, I thought.

I downloaded it, started it and found that it had a lot of shiny stuff and then Firefox as a browser. As it turns out, that’s pretty much exactly what’s up. Flock is a Mozilla based browser. The stuff it offers is a huge emphasis on rss feeds, blogging, uploading pics etc.

The blogging interface is really not worth it. I guess I could hit either of my blogs from a single place, but it opens in a new window so it might be a longcut for me (I keep both blogs open in tabs all the time). It does have a neat right click menu with a “blog this” option. This would be great if I had a quicker blog like that; however, there are Firefox extensions that do this (eg JustBlogIt).

So that was lame. Then it has this media stream thing going up top, which displays your flickr stream or equivalent from some other site. Pretty cool, but eats screen real estate. So I tried the upload functionality. This was wonderful. It was magnificent. It gave me so much control for so little effort. Oh fantastic. Auto resize (important due to the limited monthly bandwidth thing), easy naming. Really great stuff.

In short: lame browser; great flickr uploader.

When I logged into Flickr (for the first time in a long, long time. I found a message telling me that I was now one of the Olin flickr groups admins. OK. So I posted an effortless 27 pics and then added them to the Olin group (yay Flock). Here’s the pathetically lame part. This makes me the second biggest contributor (48 pics). It’s really easy guys.

Sometimes I have a tendency to take blogging too seriously. I’ll check my stats more than makes sense. I’ll ping. I’ll check out Technorati. I’ll see where I show up on a bunch of Google searches. This is unfortunate because I write mostly for myself. It makes me solidify some thoughts and it gives me an audience for random stories I’d like to tell.

I’ll be on lifehacker and link over to problogger and soon enough I’ll be all like “Y’know what? My blog has no f***ing focus. I mean it’s ridiculous. How is something like that going to maintain traffic?”

Answer: it’s not. Duh, self. But that’s not what it’s for. I’ve had 208 unique visitors and I have 81 returning visitors; not very large numbers. This is probably a bit low due to rss, PlanetOlin and the fact that Olin IPs probably show up as the same visitor (?). Man. I’m silly. Part of me really wants to come up with something to seriously blog about. And part of me thinks that’s dumb. Oh well. This particular blog refuses to be consistently useful or informative.
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I’m having a not-so-fun time transitioning my sleep pattern. I have yet to get more than 10 minutes of sleep from any naps. This means that I’m pretty much just operating on my core sleep of 4.5 hours a night. Oh well. At least I decided to do a 4.5 hour core instead of a 3 hour core this time around…

When I did biphasic last year it was actually after a month or two of normal sleep with a 20 minute nap at noon. By the time I got to doing biphasic, I was awesome at falling asleep nearly instantaneously. I’ll have to redevelop that skill. Hopefully soon.
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Barnes and Nobles didn’t have the kind of Moleskine I wanted. *sigh* Tim to order online…

Ooh! Speaking of ordering online, I just ordered some book darts. These are neat little line markers. They clip onto books without leaving any marks. Word on the street is that librarians absolutely love these things. I have a plan that involves these. If it turns out not to be dumb, I’ll post about it at some point in the future.
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Now I remember what biphasic was like. There’s just not that much to do this late on a weekday… it’s OK. I have some books to read. I’ve also been considering being a wikipedia badass…
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OK. I’m done for now. Hope you enjoyed random stuff.

Boris out.

I’m going to repeat something Mel wrote b/c it’s part of a big “I don’t have time for this post” post.

Mel is in a sweet competition. If she wins she’ll be helping out the world as she is wont to do (she’ll be doing OLPC stuff).

People should hit up this site and vote for her. It’s super-fast. Really. 3 clicks and you’ve finished voting. Oh yeah. Or you could read the list and see if there’s anyone who’s doing something you consider more awesome. Then vote for them.

Sweet.

Haha. So. Here’s the setting: it’s the 4th of July. I’m bored. So are other peeps. We decide to adventure…

We start by heading towards Needham, but we’ve got very little gas. We turn to go towards Eliot and fill up on gas at the full service station right before route 9. We then head east on 9 because it’s easier to get on the highway in that direction and we really have no plans. We try to get me lost by heading north and west. I keep on knowing where we are. Finally, I get lost. Then we cross 16. Damn. We work at it some more. OK. I’m lost. we stop to eat a snack at a Dunkin’ Donuts.

We head out more or less randomly again still trying to go more or less northwest. Eventually we come to this sign.

I call a halt. This is where we adventure. It’s raining, it’s dark, it’s perfect. WE head into the woods…

and come to a body of water. There’s a bench next to it. Interesting. We wonder if it’s a river or a pond or whatever so we decide to go along it for a bit. We pass a massive log and an almost climbable tree. We come to a place where there’s something like a sandbar but with lots of sticks. I suggest going out to the middle of the river. They laugh at the idea, but I go ahead and try to see how far I can go without freaking out because I’m carrying my camera and cell phone.

I use a large piece of wood I found to help cross. One of my friends makes a snarky comment
about stepping on a shield. As it turns out, she was right! Incredible. I went on an adventure and picked up a quest item. Un. Be. Lievable.

I carry it with us the rest of the way. We eventually discover that we’re on the Charles in Newton. On our way back to the car some guy asks if we were sword fighting. I answer that we weren’t; I’d just found a shield in the Charles. He laughed and agreed that it was awesome.

Content.

So I’ve been going to Vinny T’s on a weekly basis since I got to Olin this summer.

Their food is not exceptionally tasty, but I absolutely love the restaurant. They have huge, starving-college-student sized portions; and for a bit more they have incredibly big family platters that are meant to serve 3 or 4 people. To me this means I have dinner for a couple of days or something of the sort. More important than their portions, their service is great. They take huge reservations in stride professionally and without batting an eye.

They’re cool with things like “20-25 people I think… I’ll call if it seems like it’s going to be more…” Oh yeah. They also deal with huge bunches of loud college kids quite well. It’s really quite a pleasure to eat there.

So. Here’s my plan.

I recently decided that it’d be awesome if I could get non-student members of the Olin community to come. Last time we had one prof, and this Thursday I expect two more and one prof’s family.

I’m really excited to do this on a regular basis. I hope I can keep it going during the year; it’ll be much harder b/c the dining hall is such an easy option. And of course scheduling is annoying. There are conflicts every single day, so its actually been a moving appointment. We’ve done Monday, Monday, Friday, Wednesday and next week is Thursday.

If you’re an Olinite reading this in the Boston area, but you’re not at Olin itself, send me an e-mail to be included in the invitation e-mails for these dinners.

I am really excited for Thursday.

Wow. So I sent two pictures to randomness; they caused quite a ruckus. I sent them out at 22:40.

By 22:44, three people had responded. Two were generally confused and one was concerned.

It was also said that the pictures were “obviously photoshopped.” Honestly, I wish I was that awesome. To have not only photoshopped a picture, but then photoshopped the same scene from a different angle… so much badassness. But alas, such is not the case. An expedition was launched to photographically verify the lack of trees to a few doubters.

I caught them on their return with evidence and aided in lovingly berating the doubters. By the time I got back to my room (22:49) three more e-mails had gone out. One was from our aforementioned concerned citizen advising his fellow students that a work order had been sent out. The other two were from more perceptive folk who pointed out that the trees that had been cut were exclusively the ones that, well, were already dead.

Wow. People react to things so amusingly.

I was about to post but I figured I’d put in the newest e-mail (23:05). It concerns a student questioning the work order that was sent. Perhaps someone will question the questioning or something so that my entertainment can continue. One can always hope.

And one last e-mail (23:08) after I already posted and am going back for minor edits. A sarcastic fellow suggest that maybe new trees should be planted. Fantastic. I love randomness. And humanity.

I shall never be bored so long as I have other people in my general vicinity.

So I now know what I’m working on.

I’ll be on a team that’s making an x-ray flux meter. This will pretty much count photons per unit time above some energy threshold. Ideally, we’d be able to figure out the energy of each incoming photon so that we could build up a spectrogram.

The other team I’m on is actually doing two projects. The first involves making a cheap x-ray imaging device by either hacking the software from a webcam or making our own camera. The second is something I’ve taken to calling ISPS - Inter-Stellar Positioning system. This is a lot like GPS except it can tell you where you are in space; it’s somewhat harder than GPS b/c there’s an extra dimension and we don’t have satellites anywhere except around Earth. The idea is to use millisecond pulsars (neutron stars that send out x-rays at an extraordinarily steady interval) instead of the satellites. We’re not actually even sure if this can be done, but hopefully it can and hopefully we can put together some software that could do it.

Anyhow, I’m super-excited. W00t!