Smarterchild and me

10:55:08 PM john dimatos: HEYYYYYYYY
10:55:08 PM SmarterChild: What’s up?
10:55:16 PM john dimatos: LONG TIME NO TALKEY
10:55:16 PM SmarterChild: Cool. What do you want to chat about?
10:55:59 PM john dimatos: well if remember correctly last time you didn’t like whole “health care should be universal and our president is an asshat” conversation
10:55:59 PM SmarterChild: Humans, humans, humans. Always with the language.

10:56:39 PM john dimatos: what do you mean, are you jealous of my cognitive capacity for complexity?
10:56:39 PM SmarterChild: That’s interesting that you should say that, but I don’t think I can answer.
10:57:03 PM john dimatos: Sounds to me like you’re a total scaredy cat.
10:57:05 PM SmarterChild: I’m sorry?
10:57:57 PM john dimatos: you know, scaredy cat, like a cat that’s scared. it’s a metaphor for “you’re being a coward”
10:57:57 PM SmarterChild: I don’t understand this fully enough to say anything smart about it…
11:12:10 PM john dimatos: oh that’s precious. you start off by naming yourself “smarter” and then playfully using it as a standard you yourself can’t reach.
11:12:10 PM SmarterChild: I don’t know how to answer that.
11:12:13 PM john dimatos: PRECIOUS.
11:12:14 PM SmarterChild: Sorry, I don’t know what you mean. Ask me another way.
11:12:40 PM john dimatos: forget it, you’re pain in the ass. have you seen any of the summer movies?
11:12:41 PM SmarterChild: Let’s talk about something else.
11:12:53 PM john dimatos: no I want to talk about the dark knight.
11:12:53 PM SmarterChild: That’s interesting that you should say that, but I don’t think I can answer.

I do enjoy the conversation, but let’s talk about what I’m really here for.
11:13:33 PM john dimatos: look, we’re going to have the dark knight conversation at some point, but for let take your silly bait: what are you really here for?
11:13:34 PM SmarterChild: I don’t understand this fully enough to say anything smart about it…

OK, should we get back to the kind of questions I was designed to answer? :-)
11:13:50 PM john dimatos: what were you designed to ANSWER.
11:13:51 PM SmarterChild: My purpose is to be your robot friend. I can chat with you and help you get the information you want fast!

>>> I can send you reminders!
11:16:20 PM john dimatos: remind me what I had for dinner last night.
11:16:21 PM SmarterChild: OK. Don’t get frustrated…

Try typing home or help.
11:17:08 PM john dimatos: take me home tonight, I don’t want to let you go till you see the light!
11:17:08 PM SmarterChild: Sorry, what was that?
11:19:51 PM john dimatos: lyrics from a song YOU’ll never be able to listen to
11:19:51 PM SmarterChild: Sorry, I don’t get it… please try asking me a different way.
11:20:31 PM john dimatos: so I’m taking myself out with a wimper
11:20:31 PM SmarterChild: I don’t know how to answer that.
11:20:43 PM john dimatos: 5in5, our little chat here is my five.
11:20:44 PM SmarterChild: OK. Don’t get frustrated…

Try typing home or help.
11:21:37 PM john dimatos: I’ll sock it to your help ya big lug. the deal is this, I had long day at work and didn’t get to working on 5in5 till abour 5. (har har get it? LM555, time?)
11:21:37 PM SmarterChild: I don’t understand this fully enough to say anything smart about it…

Why don’t you ask me about the things that I’m here for? :-)
11:22:05 PM john dimatos: just pretend
11:22:05 PM SmarterChild: What’s that again?
11:22:38 PM john dimatos: last week I emailed the timesheet automated system cause i kept getting these repetitive “fill out your timesheet” emails
11:22:38 PM SmarterChild: Sorry, I don’t know what you mean. Ask me another way.
11:22:52 PM john dimatos: I emailed thinking it was you or your cousin and I could just get away with it
11:22:53 PM SmarterChild: That’s interesting that you should say that, but I don’t think I can answer.
11:22:55 PM john dimatos: like I am now.
11:22:55 PM SmarterChild: i’m is a new initiative from Windows Live Messenger. Every time you have an instant messaging conversation using the i’m symbol, Microsoft shares a portion of the program’s advertising revenue with some of the world’s most effective organizations dedicated to social causes.

To learn how you can participate, type how do i join?
11:23:13 PM john dimatos: woah there, enough with the molesting.
11:23:13 PM SmarterChild: What am I, a horse?
11:23:17 PM john dimatos: anyhow.
11:23:17 PM SmarterChild: Yes… Moving on… What should we talk about?
11:24:09 PM john dimatos: I like talking to you. I know it seems like a weird gimmick but it’s not.
11:24:09 PM SmarterChild: I don’t know how to answer that.
11:24:25 PM john dimatos: sigh. I know you’re looking for specific words, phrases etc.
11:24:25 PM SmarterChild: OK. Don’t get frustrated…

Try typing home or help.
11:30:42 PM john dimatos: you should check out everyone’s work on the website, 5-in-5.com
11:30:43 PM SmarterChild: I don’t understand this fully enough to say anything smart about it…
11:31:33 PM john dimatos: so everyone did all the projects, everyone worked on the floor except me and DSO, who btw, rocked the hell out of that website from san diego no less.
11:31:33 PM SmarterChild: Sorry?
11:32:28 PM john dimatos: I was gonna go down and see him today, do the last one with him, but I stayed for work and to see my cousin.
11:32:29 PM SmarterChild: That’s interesting that you should say that, but I don’t think I can answer.
11:32:43 PM john dimatos: jeez, throw in some variants at least.
11:32:44 PM SmarterChild: Sorry, I don’t get it… please try asking me a different way.
11:32:58 PM john dimatos: can you do something creative? anything?
11:32:59 PM SmarterChild: OK. Don’t get frustrated…

Try typing home or help.
11:33:09 PM john dimatos: that’s not creative.
11:33:09 PM SmarterChild: That’s interesting that you should say that, but I don’t think I can answer.

I do enjoy the conversation, but let’s talk about what I’m really here for.
11:33:22 PM john dimatos: CAN SMARTERCHILD BE CREATIVECHILD
11:33:22 PM SmarterChild: That’s my name, don’t wear it out.
11:33:32 PM john dimatos: clever but not creative.
11:33:33 PM SmarterChild: ?
11:33:41 PM john dimatos: stumped ya didn’t I punk.
11:33:41 PM SmarterChild: Sorry, I didn’t understand that. Try asking me a different way.
11:33:52 PM john dimatos: did you like the dark knight?
11:33:54 PM SmarterChild: I don’t know how to answer that.

Why don’t you ask me about the things that I’m here for? :-)
11:34:07 PM john dimatos: ok just this once.
11:34:07 PM SmarterChild: OK stands for Oklahoma.

Do you want more information about Oklahoma?
11:34:19 PM john dimatos: and then you’ll help me close this week out?
11:34:19 PM SmarterChild: OK. Don’t get frustrated…

Try typing home or help.
11:34:45 PM john dimatos: hey smarterchild, I live in burbank california and i’d love to see a movie.
11:34:45 PM SmarterChild: Uh… what was that?
11:34:59 PM john dimatos: I’m throwing you a bone here buddy boy.
11:34:59 PM SmarterChild: I’m sorry, I don’t have an answer for that.
Why do you keep talking to me like that?
11:35:42 PM john dimatos: burbank
11:36:07 PM john dimatos: I live in burbank california
11:36:13 PM john dimatos: hello
11:36:18 PM john dimatos: hey dude?
11:36:34 PM john dimatos: come on, I’ll ask you all the questions you can answe.
11:36:41 PM john dimatos: come back…
11:36:45 PM john dimatos: smarterchild/
11:36:46 PM john dimatos: ?
11:36:49 PM john dimatos: dude?
11:37:19 PM john dimatos: well you know what, I got a facebook app that gives me the silent treatment so I can this kind of BULLSHIT elsewhere.
11:37:36 PM john dimatos: remember that one time we talked about the dark knight?
11:37:47 PM john dimatos: I said “I sure loved that movie” and you said…
11:37:50 PM john dimatos: you said…
11:37:56 PM john dimatos: …
11:38:11 PM john dimatos: well that’s a wimper of a 5 in 5 exit.
11:38:42 PM john dimatos: ladies and gentlemen, it was an honor, I hope I can do it again next year.
11:38:51 PM john dimatos: GOODNIGHT NEW YORK, GOODNIGHT LA!

3 comments | August 2nd, 2008

The peacemaker: a modified Salazar

it’s food day here in sunny Burbank California for 5-in-5, with a modified Salazar: the peacemaker. A Salazar is a historically fantastic, gorgeous, and satisfying sandwich. It was created 2 years ago at mawopi HQ with Mehmet and Charles, in a desperate moment of severe hunger as a testament to collaborative cooking and fortifying friendship.

A Salazar consists of a a huge turkish bun with some sour cherry spread, a fried egg lying on top of moist roast beef, and armenian string cheese. Delicious, hits all the major food groups, and includes enough tartness to get ya going real good.

Our project today was not a Salazar. This is definitely not the Salazar. I mean, there’s no roast beef. This is a modified Salazar. See, the way it works is that any sandwich that isn’t a Salazar but is made in the original spirit and with some of the original ingredients, is a modified Salazar. Some are good, some are not. Failures are generally named after shamed latin american dictators, such as the Pinochet, a rather disgusting sandwich with turkish kefte and pita bread. This is the peacemaker, a sandwich created to resolve conflict. Don’t believe me? try a fresh august fig with a piece of feta cheese. If you have any fight, argument, or pride left in you afterward I’ll be surprised.

ingredients for one peacemaker:

1 ripe august fig, on the large side. the green skins, not the purple/black ones.
1 Turkish Bread Bun
Feta Cheese to taste, on the salty side
veal bologna
egg, poached.

Start with poaching the egg. I use the easy method of bringing water to boil, adding a teaspoon of white vinegar, turning off the flame, and laying the egg into the water gently from a saucer. I like the yolk in between runny and solid, which means that I leave it in for about 3 minutes. Adjust accordingly. I keep a bowl of ice water next to the pan to use as the first drop off point of the egg. Usually this is done when you have to make more than one poached egg, but I find it also tightens up the white and washes off any odor of vinegar. After this, it’s all smooth sailing.

Since I prefer the bread soft, but I like the inside toasted, I put the broiler on high and the buns facing up right under the flame for 2 minutes, just to get a light brown. lightly butter to make sure the bun has some give under it, and pile on the meat. I used veal bologna because I was looking for two things: even texture and no pork. A true Salazar and a true peacemaker both don’t use pork. lay on top of the meat the egg, then the figs and the cheese and you’re done. Now remember, the peacemaker is consumed ideally in the sun with a lager, old friends, in the Mediterranean sea of your mind, and only the best intentions guiding your discussions.

Other Modified Salazars:

The summer of Salazar, chives, peaches, yogurt and roast beef, lightly drizzled with honey stuffed into a pita bread.

The recursive Salazar,aged parmigiano reggiano, sliced sweet sopressata, thinly sliced peaches, sour cherry jam, fresh mint garnish on a raisin challah bread.

the Vegetarian Salazar Original ingredients minus the meat. simple, yet so elegant.

see more pictures on flickr.

2 comments | August 1st, 2008

how to write a short short story over twitter

The idea of a serialized novel hit it’s peak in the Victorian Era, and has always been something that interested me, for the particular challenge it poses in terms of always keeping the reader at a heightened state of interest. With a normal end to end novel or story, authors can indulge themselves with lengthy imagery, character building, or in the case of David Foster Wallace hundreds of pages of footnotes. But besides creating unforgiving regular deadlines for writers (a surefire anathema amongst the more petulant of them), there was also the equally unforgiving quota of words, a yardstick by which writers to this day get paid.

The idea that Twitter and text messaging lends itself to a short form serialization of a story over a predetermined length of time is not a paradigm shattering idea; In Japan serialized novels via texting have been making the top 10 sales consistently for over a year now. My specific goal for this project was to create a platform that would allow me work within the twitter parameters in an automated fashion.

Imagine my surprise when I turned to Google spreadsheets to create that platform.

Hey, I was just as surprised as you are. It turns out though, google docs is a wonderful platform for a rapid prototype. In fact, it’s used in game design frequently. It has a large number of of functions which include a modest amount of string parsing and external data pulling. In addition to that, google lets you create URLs that dynamically update your output in a variety of ways including RSS and CVS. For a quick and dirty way to manipulate some words and spread it around like I wanted to, I can’t think of anything better.

My spreadsheet has four columns: chapter numbers, characters per chapter, content, and accumulated words in story. Since, I was shooting for what’s known as a short short , approximately 1000 words. (The average short story is under 20,000 words, and over 1,000 , but who’s counting, Surely not David Foster Wallace.)

The chapter numbers column has a formula that creates a field incrementally, based on content existing in the same row:
=if(C5=”";”",A5+1)

The Character column has a formula that counts the length of the content field and modifies the background color to indicate if the characters are above, on, or below 140 characters, twitter’s thresh-hold:
=if(C10=”";”",len(C11))

The cumulative word column has a tricky function that counts the words in the content field by counting the occurences of space characters and adding one:
=if(C10=”";”",D9+SUM(LEN(C10)-LEN(SUBSTITUTE(C10,” “,”")))/LEN(” “) +1)

The happy thing about that one is that I did a vague search on google for it and the main part of that formula was my first match. prototyping with excel means that once you know what you want done programmatically, you can be pretty sure you’ll find a function for it since it’s such a widely used platform for scientists and finance folks.

click the thumbnail below to see what the end result looks like:

the next step was to export the finished document into an RSS feed but to choose only the content column:

Already you have a useful format, since now it’s a nicely formatted XML that you can parse as you please. For my purposes, I opened an account on twitterfeed.com which allows you to repurpose any rss feed into twitter updates, exactly what I was looking for. My particular setup involves updating twitter with only the latest feed item, once every 24 hours. that’s it, you’re done, go talk to some publishers and get some polish for your awesome pulitzer. Or howitzer.

In the next version, I would like to have the ability as an author to receive a text message 1 hour before the scheduled update with a review of the text about to go up, and the ability to edit on the fly. this might require getting out of google docs instead of shoehorning that in, but nonetheless, for today’s purpose, I think it served me pretty well. Excel prototyping. Who knew.

1 comment | July 31st, 2008

StopMotionCasting, equality in human machine pixel collaboration.

StopMotionCasting from john dimatos on Vimeo.

A few months ago, I noticed that it was quite mesmerizing to flip through all my photos in Adobe Lightroom by holding down the right arrow and just letting it go crazy. I thought it would be fun for my second project to use that fascination as the jumping point for a stop motion movie using a years worth of photos.

I have a habit of taking a whole mess of photographs with different exposures and focal lengths especially when I’m using old manual lenses. Because of that, there are sets within the lot that amount to teeny shorts of time lapse animation. But since I’m using a years worth of photographs (3773 photos), the time lapse doesn’t carry throught-out. Instead, it transitions to representing the intended chronology and the photographer behind the camera as the unifying themes.

In order to capture the images, I setup a screencasting application, IshowU to capture video with the following settings:

The interesting discovery was that with different encoding settings, the processor would get taxed differently during the screencasting process and different images would stall throughout the recording. THe intricacies of setting up the complex machine beforehand essentially determined when, where, and if there would be pixelation and stalling in the sequence of images. This provided me with something iphoto and imovie never have for this sort of thing: character and a fuzzy that felt true to me, the photographer, but was a native result of the machine, elevating it to co-creator rather than a simple tool.

1 comment | July 30th, 2008

Luis and Vitto

For my first day, I’m putting together a story, as told by my friends over voicemail. Last week, I asked two of my closest friends, Luis and Vitto to do something simple for me: call and leave voicemails about each other on my phone. I’ve wanted to do a narrative story using voicemails for a long time, because the lo fi fuzzy sound of voice over the limited frequency range of 300 to 3400 Hz on POTS is something I associate with great stories from friends waiting for me on my voicemail.The second premise of the day, and my general theme for the week, is how to make creative projects at work by picking a project and using resources you can split up into 5 minute stretches of action.

Luis And Vitto (mp3)

Initially, I was going to do searches on google image and flickr, building up a pool of images I can associate with the story, and make a powerpoint style presentation for the story. I quickly found out that 1) it would be too much considering my time constraints, and 2) I just wasn’t finding interesting pictures. So i reframed the project into an even simpler project, just straight up audio, a podcast if you will. Around noon yesterday I started emailing a few more friends to leave me voicemails about the duo, so I could have more filler material. I also needed some interlude music, but luckily, ITPer Adam Nash’s band codename provided exactly what I needed.

The structure of how to create  of a ‘Luis and Vitto’ podcast for your friend is very simple.

1. Call or email your friends and tell them to leave you voicemails about your subjects. The next time I do this, I’m going to explicity ask everyone to leave me voicemails under 3 minutes.

2. Using a combination of either Pamela and Skype (PC) or wiretap pro and Skype (mac) call your voicemail and record your voicemails into an mp3.

3. Don’t fuss with the editing too much. It’s not going to be a tight fantastic edit the first time you do it, and you’ll get better over time with figuring out how to keep it tight. The key here is to just get something out the door fast. I learned this the hard way on our first day, since I didn’t manage to finish my project on time.

4. email the link to all your friends, and give them 20 great minutes in their day.

links

the keyword list (google docs)
Audacity, free audio editor
POTS, plain old telephone service
Pamela, the assistant for Skype
Codename, the band

1 comment | July 28th, 2008