Earlier last week my Super Elhad changed the lights in the elevator ceiling creating with blinking colored bulbs. The effect is a wonderful holiday disco. Elhad is awesome, he takes care of business like no other and he's a nice guy. The photo left is a holiday card he left. I love it! He's in the wreath! Rock on Elhad!

Yesterday I began teaching myself PHP and MySQL. Setting up the environment was remarkably easy in OSX.

Here's some links to keep you busy over the break:

Coolhunting's 05 top 25

Diebold voting machines hacked in Flordia. Big surprise.

Business Week covers 3Form

Riders love the new Metro-North stop outside Yankee Stadium

And from the ITP list serve:

My favorite picture of me from the party after the Winter Show

The UK is watching

And, Rocketboom does the weather (Whether | Man has been busy these days, go Andrew)

Rocketboom is officially my new favorite news source

The Transit Workers Union went on strike today. With the semester coming to a close yesterday evening, my life seems relatively unaffected. Tricia and all the other commuters who depend on the subway and busses to get to work are pretty much pissed (but seem to be managing, its only day one so we'll see). The PATH trains were apparently a zoo and in general it's a pain in the ass to have to go to Jersey and come back in to the city just to get to financial district. But that's how it goes...

The second night of the ITP Winter show last night was great fun. The second night had an even better turn out than the night before.

Some links to keep you busy

Recent work from JT Nimoy. Josh is an ITP grad with some amazing work and an amazing track record.

Mulciber gets an online presence for their Deck Ring

Macnn gets a facelift and Apple signs another lease for one more location in NYC.

John Maeda's new show (Warning! Annoying sound. I still don't understand why people use audio like this. Don't you think I'd turn it on if I wanted to hear it? You're cuttin' into my iTunes mister!)

Ars looks at toys

And these are just plain halarious:
Skier
Nosebleed
Body Massage
Carnival

The ITP Winter show went off last night with a bang. The show was well attended and the work overall was amazing. The Sound Domes I've been working on were well received. In case you missed it, the show will be open again tonight from 5-9 (721 Broadway @ Waverly, 4th Floor, South Elevator).

For those who can't make it, there will be a live video feed when the show is going on.

More info can be found on the show's website.

Yesterday our Physical Computing class took a field trip to the Citigroup Bank center to see the model trains. The exhibit is amazing. Apparently it took eleven months to build. Afterwards we went over to the Bitforms gallery and saw the Lynn Hershman Lesson exhibition. The highlight of our trip was when the gallery owner graciously took us up stairs where Danny Rozin's Trash Mirror is being stored. We have the Wooden Mirror and the Shiny Ball mirror at ITP. I've never seen the Trash Mirror before. I think it may be my personal favorite. The Oren's cups and the ATM receipts are funny to see your reflection in.

Also, I'm presenting my Comp Media final today.

New photo's are up on the Sound Dome site. We've scrapped the small speakers and gone with something slightly larger. The new speakers sound 800 times better. They have a range. So, maybe blowing them was good thing.

The weekend was busy. It's the last week of the semester and final projects are due. My time has been spent working with each project team to wrap things up and get prepared for our presentations later this week.

Physical Computing
The Segment Tags prototype pictures and PIC code are up on the documentation site. We've ironed out the bugs in the software. Tomorrow, were looking into mounting the displays in an unused wall socket. The idea after all is tagging. Mounting the displays into a wall seems to fit the bill quite nicely.

Lo and Behold: A place to find the meaning of phrases.

Spatial Design
The Dome team met. We hooked up the system and began testing our audio content. The move to the bigger ams has been good. However, I question if our speakers can handle it. Overall all, the tests went well. Panning sound through the system is creating the desired affect: making visitors of the space more aware of their surroundings through the use of sound.

Computational Media
For my Comp Media final I've been working on a world oil consumption visualization. It's going to land somewhere in-between a generative piece of art and a clock. More to come on this later in the week.

I came home to this. No, it's not a PComp project. It's my elevator! Go Elhad.

Also, I found out my schedule for next semester. I got into Toy Design, Programing A-Z, Networked Objects, and Interactive 3-D next semester. All great classes. Dan O's experimental registration system worked quite well (for me anyway). The biggest complaint seems to be mainly from people who didn't have their shots up to date and were blocked from the system.

For non-ITPers: Dan O'Sullivan built a registration system which allows students to rank the classes they want to take in order of importance. The system figures out which classes are most important to which people. The idea is to avoid the 'click race' used by rest of the university.

The PComp team spent the later half of Wednesday working on; integrating the third segment display and we soldering up a perforated board (which will be more stable). Overall things went well. There are still a few bugs with the code. Namely, the character selection to move backwards through the alphabet jumps to M. We've also reached the limit with how much amperage we're able to pull from one power supply. We may be reengineering our power distribution in the near future, or using two supplies as a work around. Jenny has posted some photos of our earlier prototype on the website. Talking things over with Todd and the PComp team, it feels like things are falling into place. Here some links to keep ya busy until I can get more documentation up.

Measure Map! Thanks Rob.

Tile Toy was on Core77 a few days back. With all the LED and display work I've been doing I have to give them props.

The Beating Heart Pillow is similar to some work that Min did for the mid term.

And, Curbed covers the Eero Saarinen expansion at JFK.

Last night was the first snow in New York. We had a dusting Saturday but no real accumulation until last night. There's something magical about the first snow of every year. You wake up and your world outside has been transformed. The photo to the left is snow on my neighbors bamboo.

Perusing

Apple signs deal to distribute NBC shows.

Wikipedia enforces social accountability by requiring authors to register.

From the ITP list: Xgooglers rant about their previous employer (and use Blogger to do it). Executed Offenders, and their last meals.

Sound Domes
The Sound Dome Spatial Design final project was accepted into the ITP Winter show. Yesterday we tested the full scale prototype in the hallway at ITP. We've been debating audio content and if the amplification device will be loud enough. I've posted sound thoughts with regards to audio content on the Spatial Design blog.

Segment tags
Jenny, Karl and I worked towards completing the cursor movement, character selection and scrolling software on the Segment Tag prototype. Overall things are going well. We're almost done with the software component and will begin working on refining the physical design and form factor later this week. More about Segment Tags can be found on the documentation site.

This is a reblogged content from the Segment Tag project I've been working on:

Yesterday Jenny Karl and I worked mainly on the software side of Segment Tags. Karl worked on making the text display scrollable, while Jenny and I worked on implementing edge detection for the cursor and letter selection.

One big ah-ha happened when we realized that the decoder in the 1414 cal translate string character like "A". This save a lot of time because we're no longer need to send the IC binary.

And for those of you non-ITPers, info on our winter show was sent out recently:

ITP Winter Show 2005

Date and Time:
12/18/2005, 2pm - 6pm
12/19/2005, 5pm - 9pm

Location:
ITP, TSOA
721 Broadway
New York, NY

South Elevators to 4th Floor

An amazing display of interactive technologies, resulting in physical installations and screen-based projects.  Twice a year, ITP hosts a student show that draws roughly 2,000 visitors over the two days.  The diversity and creativity of the students are evident in the work as they explore a wide range of fields like interactive art and sound, assistive technology, wireless devices and physical computing to name a few.

This event is free and open to the public.

Components have begun to come in for our Physical Computing final. Last night we setup or 1414 smart displays. The 1414 is a great IC for displaying small amounts of text. The chip is easy to setup and takes the heavy lifting (and added complexity) of duplexing off the board and does it internally. Through research we've learned a tremendous amount about 7-segment and 16-segment display. Additionally, there's also been activity on the Sound Domes documentation site (Spatial Design final). We have a guest critic coming tomorrow from Show and Tell. We'll be planning our presentation and putting together our prototype later this evening.