And here’s why:

I can’t wait until May when I get to do it again!

“Americans have different ways of saying things. They say “elevator”, we say “lift”… they say “President”, we say “stupid psychopathic git.” Alexai Sayles, a British comedian, actor and author

The United States will have a new President soon, so we can rest easy about that. Unfortunately, even with new leadership we’ll be facing most of the same old problems:

• Scary economy
• Bad healthcare
• …
• How to interact with the Middle East
• Looming Energy Crises

Wouldn’t it be nice to know how it all turns out, at least so you could rest easy? Well, I was turned on to a Discovery Channel docu-drama series the other day that boldy makes predictions about what life will be like here on Earth 50 years in the future.

• 2057: The City
• 2057: The Body
• 2057: The World

Ok, so I didn’t care for The Body, only because I hope that we all enjoy universal healthcare 50 years hence and that medical insurance dies a quick, and painful, death. The City was really fun, but the bit that caught my eye was The World - and yes, that one’s cheesy too.

The plot of The World revolves around two scientists striving to create an energy efficient solar panel to ease the planet’s imminent energy wars (they succeed - mark one for the geeks) and they do it all atop a station on the Space Elevator.

Which reminded me 1) that I wrote an entire scientific article about Space Elevators before, which I’m now making available, and 2) that old ideas applied to new situations can sometimes be a powerful and much simpler way to solve a problem.

The article was written with the cooperation of the kind people at LiftPort.

Two quotes come to mind, one puts my thoughts into words very succintly:

“The vast majority of new ideas are not original but are adapted from something else. Most great ideas are really combinations of other ideas.” Paul Sloane

and the not to be ignored

“If at first the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it.” Albert Einstein

Happy thinking!

This post can’t really do the multitouch soundtrack composition project justice because you can’t play with it yourself. Trust me though, it was a blast to create and a blast to play with.

For my CSCI 588 Design of User Interfaces course we were challenged to create a new user interface for anything we wanted. Along the way we had to do standard software project management tasks like come up with requirements, create prototypes and document our progress - but we also did a slew of user-centered activities like user and task analysis, color analysis, dialogue analysis and the like.

The end result was arguably the best project of the course and helped to land me an A+. The really wonderful thing about the whole experience however, was that it really brought me back to my roots in computer science. Way back when, Dr. David Berque took me in as a lowly high school student and began to teach me the principles of programming and computer software. Dave’s main interest lies in the area of Human-Computer Interaction and I was soon working on an interactive educational project dubbed DEBBIE which eventually became the commercial software DyKnow which has won numerous excellence in educational technology awards. I had recently asked Dave to recommend some HCI books and had thoroughly enjoyed the classic Design of Everyday Things by David Norman. Suffice to say, it was a nice change from “traditional” computer science topics like Operating Systems, Databases and even Software Engineering.

Besides being interesting and challenging, I really had fun throughout the entire project - even when nothing was working - which means that I would probably really enjoy doing this type of work and thinking about these types of problems for a living… always good to know.

The inspiration for the project came from some limited exposure I had to Microsoft Surface while working there during the summer of 2007 and my neighbor Jangwoo Kim who is a professional soundtrack composer. It seemed like a logical pairing given the complexity and variety of physical and virtual interfaces used to create soundtracks. We had a chance to consolidate and simply many hardware and software devices into one system while leveraging the multitouch aspect to maintain the intuitive interaction style of the physical devices like knobs, sliders, etc. that traditional software programs struggle with via the mouse.

So without further ado, I’ll give you two things: a video of our prototype and a zip file containing most of the documentation and analysis we did along with the source code for the project. There’s a lot of good information in there, and if there is anything that anyone would like me to a elaborate upon, please feel free to ask.

Here is the documentation and source code for the project (which was originally based on the MultiKey Demo by cerupCat).

As a side note, you can often find me hanging out in the IRC chatroom #nuigroup on irc.freenode.net. NUIGroup are the people behind the touchlib library used to create this project. I also plan on posting an Instructable on the whole project soon, so stay tuned.

About a week ago I really needed to get out of the apartment and experience a bit of culture. Don’t get me wrong, the student life and the area around USC is great and all ahem ahem but sometimes I just need to switch gears and refresh my mind.

I have been wanting to go to a Japanese of Chinese garden in LA for a while, but it seems that everytime I think about it it’s the wrong season or too late in the day, so I looked up the culture section of the LA Times online and took a quick look at the “cultural” reviews they had up. The result was actually a suprisingly satisfying road trip down the annals of Los Angeles automotive history at the Peterson Automotive Museum.

Click on the picture below to go to the photo album.

Me and the Car of the Year 2005, 2006 and 2007. It has no steering wheel or pedals, yet can still be driven - yes sir, I think I’ll take the James Bond meets Crenshaw Blvd edition.

I have to post this picture here because this car is just so stylish. If I could have my pick, I might pick this one.

The way the museum details the interesting rise of the car culture in Los Angeles combined with the wide assortment of beautiful and strange cars makes this museum a must see for me and anyone I’m showing around Los Angeles. Try to catch it while they still have the lowrider exhibition up!

“It takes a certain type of mind to see beauty in a hamburger.” Ray Croc, famous for building McDonald’s into the most successful fast food operation in the world

This all depends on your perspective of course. If you’re American like me, the burger and fries are in, the milk tea is out. If you’re Taiwanese however, like my girlfriend, you might’ve started drooling at the thought of a nice warm glass of milk tea.

She and I were eating a fast food lunch earlier today and we had neglected to purchase anything to drink (alright, so I already had some Coke at home). This led to an interesting conversation about differences of taste, namely, I’ve always wondered why so many Asians in my life love their tea while I feel like most of what I ever taste is lukewarm water. I especially can’t stand barley tea, on my tongue it tastes like dirt.

Talk to an Asian friend however, and they’ll probably tell you that not only are there so many delicious tea flavors, but each one also has some sort of healthy side effect. I think this plays to a fundamental difference between Americans and at least the Chinese in how we choose what we drink: in China and Taiwan they drink to be healthy, here in the States we choose either what we feel is most ‘refreshing’ or simply for the ‘energy’. We don’t even drink to stay hydrated (which really is the whole point), think about all the salt, sugar and caffeine in soda and coffee - all things that actually dehydrate you.

For us, a steaming glass of mildly flavored water is most definitely not refreshing. For the Chinese, drinking cold beverages is bad for your body, while hot liquids are good, especially for women, especially on their periods. You could argue that the Chinese were boiling water to sanitize it anyway, so why not drop in a little flavor? Yet, even when they’re not drinking for the health benefits we can see the dichotomy play out - while studying in Beijing I was often greeted with a glass of lukewarm beer and in Los Angeles I can even order so that the mug comes frozen.

So where did this American preference for icy drinks originate from? It could be from the fact that we fought a revolutionary war against the British, who are avid tea drinkers. It also might stem from our differing views about health, health care and the importance of natural remedies. I am under the impression, however, that like many instances of American tradition and indulgence (think 5 car families), this particular tradition might have its roots in the American highway system. I’ll show you why in 6 steps.

The abridged history goes something like this:

1. Americans come back from WWII with (government) money and buy cars
2. Increasing number of cars jams local roads shared by trains and trolleys (especially in Los Angeles)
3. governments build ever-expanding network of roads and highways to alleviate traffic issues by providing alternate routes to get to destinations without passing through traditional city centers (car culture is born)
4. businesses located at important off-ramps become very profitable as commerce starts to become distributed instead of focused in the city centers
5. the most profitable businesses soon came to be fast food restaurants like McDonalds and Carls Jr. who soon transformed into fast food chains who could quickly satiate their travelling patrons
6. the partners of these fast food chains were big soda companies like Coca-Cola and Pepsi who liked to serve their drinks on ice

And thusly, the inseparable link between America, cars, freedom, fast food and icy cold refreshing beverages was born. So why didn’t this happen in Taiwan and China? It might still happen, but probably in a different manner. Neither China or Taiwan quite has the roadway system of the United States, nor the car culture. And while they both have an abundance of fast food restaurants, they don’t have the variety or distribution of burger joints we enjoy here in the States - not to mention there’s no such thing as a free refill over there.

Which brings us back to the conversation with my girlfriend over a hamburger and french fries. Since we’ve been together we’ve started to adjust to each other’s habits and preferences, so occasionally I’ll share some tea with her and occasionally she’ll drink some soda. Obviously, tastes can change, but how can we analyze this from a marketing perspective?

At first blush, it would seem that ‘energy’ teas would be logical choice here in the States, and indeed if you go to a 7-11 these days you’ll find all kinds of so-called teas with ginseng and taurine and all kinds of metabolic pick-me-ups that are gaining in popularity. Conversely, in China, soda companies might be well off marketing versions of their product lines with specific health benefits - a quick google search dug up an ACNeilson report which stated:

“Taiwanese consumers prefer functional drinks than foods. Taiwanese regular buyers of healthy drinks ranks top 3 of the surveyed drink types. However, 52% consumers don’t like the taste of ‘Yoghurts with Acidophilus cultures / probiotics’.”

Beat yogurt in a taste test? Coca-Cola seems up to the challenge and it would be nice if those fast food drinks had a little more nutritional value to them. Let’s see, I’ll have a #11, with a Tazo-Monster Green Tea blend… no ice.