When I can sit in front of a browser and read about events all over the world, it's easy to habitually distance myself mentally from events geographically distant. For example, I'm probably more startled by the near-bombing of De Anza college, 40 miles away, than the Columbine Massacre a thousand miles away.

I just went downstairs to buy some milk, and the kid in front of me was buying a calling card to call India. His mom was visiting there and he hasn't heard from her since the 7.9 quake there several days ago. He thinks she's all right, as her itinerary put her several hundred miles from the epicenter, but it's sort of a reality jolt.

It's like the EgyptAir crash about a year ago: I was shocked and saddened, but it hit me in an entirely more real way when I found out that, save for a miscommunication by a travel agent, my grandfather would have been on that flight, instead of the same flight the next week...

My CMU application has featuritis. I keep thinking "Oh, I should do this too." Ack. Well, it'll be done and out the door one way or another tomorrow, and if I'm really good for the next hour I might let myself watch The West Wing.

How am I supposed to write a one-page statement of purpose when I have fifty things to say? Brevity was never my strength.

"I'm not materialistic. I'm just object-oriented."

Well, I had a feeling that voicemails and emails to Archos would never get answered, so I actually managed to talk to a person at Archos today! They looked me up in their database ("F-o-x and what else?" "That's it." "Fox?" "Yep." "Oh, okay.") but couldn't find me. Asked me what catalog Macworld Expo is in, and so forth, then handed me over to someone else who claimed to have left me a message letting me know three weeks ago that my credit card didn't go through. (They didn't.) ("Can you try it again?" "Sure, just give me a new credit carcd number." "Try the same number." "Okay, hold on... Okay, we'll ship it out today or tomorrow.")

Anyhow, it should be on its way now, so I'm happy about that.

On the 'letter a day' front, one person wrote me with the subject "A letter a day?" and for one sinking moment I felt sure someone took my idea of writing a letter a day and was going to start writing me a letter a day until I put up some Cameo pictures. Of course, like an idiot, I'm mentioning it here. Please don't email me every day about Cameo. Don't throw me in that briar patch, Briar Rabbit!

He also gave me a cool idea about a 'letter a day' or, more realistically, 'word a day' project I might put together after the CMU deadline has passed (3 days and counting!!!)

So much to do, so little time...

The human brain is an incredibly powerful pattern recognizer, especially when it comes to sound. Yes, a lot of it is in the hardware (the cochlea in the inner does hardware frequency analysis, meaning you don't have to try Fourier analysis in your head, literally) but a whole lot, including stereo separation (through a combination of phase displacement, relative amplitude, and frequency dampening, where you can tell a sound is behind you because things sound different when they have to pass through your earlobe before entering the ear canal), threat identification, sonar (it's not just for bats and dolphins. we may not actively ping, but people can tell, with their eyes closed, whether they're 2 feet or 10 feet away from a featureless wall, by the way the room sounds different), and a whole slew of other preattentive tasks.

Just like in visual search, commonly performed audio identification tasks can migrate from attentive to pre-attentive behavior. For example, upon hearing a phone ring, many people will automatically move to pick it up, without making a conscious effort to recognize that it is actually a phone that is ringing. Similarly, many people find themselves thinking of their spouse, roommate, parent, or child, moments before they enter the house because, without realizing it, they heard the faint sound of that person closing their car door outside, or coming in the driveway, or what-have-you.

The above is a long-winded way of saying that the brain does a lot with sound, and it's not all hard-wired stuff. We learn to unconsciously recognize sounds that are meaningful to us, and ignore those that aren't.

Example: Way back in 1984 I was lucky enough to get a Mac 128K as my first computer. I would stay up long after my mother went to sleep, working and playing on it and, ever the curteous housemate, I'd wear headphones at night. Now the Mac back then wasn't exactly the paragon of audio output that it is now, and it 'leaked' a lot. When it would read from the floppy drive, you could hear faint blips. When it was reading and writing to the RAM chips, you could hear faint but distinct frequencies. Almost everything the computer did had some effect on the audio-out, and while at first it was bothersome, after a few days or weeks, I came to understand it, like a foreign language.

Watching the computer go through its paces, while also being able to 'hear its thoughts', I gained enough of an understanding that I could shut my eyes and know, to some degree, what the computer was doing. It sounded this way when it was starting up Microsoft Word, and it sounded that way when it was getting ready to print.

Of course, this was all accidental, both on my part and on the part of Apple's engineers, but my brain figured out how to interpret it anyhow, without any intentional effort from me. The key here is, that while in that case it was an accident, there's absolutely no reason we can't tap audio as a passive means to understand our surroundings.

As we spend more and more time around electronic devices, we know less and less about our immediate surroundings because these devices tend to have two modes: utterly silent or screaming for attention. Visually they may be more accomodating; your phone may show that you have voicemail waiting, or your computer may show that you have 12 new emails, but sonically they scream and shut up.

"Bing!" You've got mail! "Riiinnggg!!" Pick up your cellphone! Electronics use sound 'in the moment' to let you know temporal data right when you need to know it, and that's good, but they're bad at informing you of status. If you want to know how much room you have on your credit card, you have to make a query and get the information explicitly. If you're getting low on hard drive space, you might not know until you're trying to save your file and you get a 'disk full' error.

Ubiquitous computing isn't about putting circuitry into golf balls and pens, it's about being able to convey information between people and electronics (and consequently, often other people) using the modes of communication that people have evolved over millions of years. Voice instead of keyboards, ambient presentation of data (wind, temperature, light) instead of explicit requests for common information. Telling generally what time it is by seing the nature of the light in the world instead of looking at a watch.

Okay, once again I started out intending to talk about one thing and getting sidetracked on to another. What I originally wanted to say was that Andrew York, the guy who wrote MindChimes (mentioned yesterday) wrote back and is excited about the idea, so when he gets back from his current business trip next week, he and I are going to talk about ways to adapt MindChimes and OceanSongs to be front-ends for ambient data.

For quite a while I've been interested in being able to convey small bits of information from my computer to me in a passive, 'pull' fashion. That is, the data would be there, plain to see, but presented so subtly that I would only notice it when I looked, or when the data passed some soft threshold.

For example, I thought of having a little LED light that would sit somewhere in my apartment, and blip quickly whenever I got a web page hit. If it wasn't in the middle of the room, or was fairly dim, I might only notice it when activity became abnormally high.

Researchers at Xerox PARC (I think it was PARC. I'm sure someone will correct me if I'm misattributing this) recently created a rubber band on a small electric motor, hanging from the ceiling. The motor was tied to network activity, so anyone in the office could tell at a glance how busy the network was.

I'd been looking at a few less distracting, more harmoneous possibilities, including making a zen water fountain, where the flow of water was determined by traffic to a web site, available RAM, waiting unread emails, or some other piece of quantitative data that matters to the user. Unfortuantely, I'm not an EECS major, and don't have the facility to go making my own circuit boards to vary the power to a small water pump, and I haven't yet found an X-10 module that will do the same. (hmmm. I wonder if a dimmer switch would work...)

Anyhow, today I came across MindChimes, a background app (Mac only right now, but a windows version is promised) that simulates a windchime using random data, with wind speed and volume determined via sliders by the user. Unfortunately, the current version has no applescript or other real-time way to adjust these variables programmatically instead of by hand, but I've written to the author, and just maybe he'll add Applescript support in a forhtcoming version. He also has a version of the software that imitates ocean surf.

Either of these, running in the background, could be an excellent way to let you keep tabs on your computer (or phone, life, kids, whatever) without having to devote any of your own brainpower to it. Like the Zen Alarm Clock I've gone on about before in these pages, such a tool would help you to be in command of your data, without giving it the ability to jar your mental process like a flashing icon or dialog box would, or force you to constantly check the status, like a server activity page or an email program.

Like the incoming email sounds project I did a couple weeks ago (oh, didn't I blog that yet? Oops! Well, I'll write it up tomorrow) I'm hoping that this project would help create a computer-human interface that wraps itself more around what the human brain is already good at, instead of making us learn new trick and new modes of interaction.

I know I'm ranting now, but someday soon computers will be less about interfacing with people directly, and more about subtly changing our environments in relevant, meaningful ways.

(No, not a new line of neo-classical swiss plastic timepieces)

ArchosWatch: My campaign to write Archos a letter a day and make a call a day until I get a response. Their web site (such as it is) is back up, so the problems were probably ISP related, but their customer service, so far as I can tell, consists of a null mailbox and a phone number that points to an unattended voicemail box.

At any rate, I'll keep y'all posted.

So today's the big day! Months of competition, dozens of twisted knees, bouts of whiplash, careers ended and careers made on the landing of a foot on one side or another of a white line. The whole world watching! Blech. Who cares.

TiVo's recording the game for the commercials, I'm taking my mom to the airport, I'll probably go do some shopping or something, then back home to work on my application portfolio.

As un-jock as I seem, it's mostly because I don't really care about either of the teams playing. I'm far more interested in Cal's basketball team which, while nothing like Stanford's 19-0 powerhouse. is coming on stronger than it has in the last 8 years. Not that I've actually been to a game yet.

I wonder if they'll use the new 'bullet-time' 3d cameras during the halftime show for a Brittany Spears flyaround...

I'm starting a new webring: "Berkeley Bloggers" for people associated with the university (or otherwise Berkeley oriented folx) who blog.

Starting off the ring will be:

• Fury
• Linkstew
• In Passing (oops haven't asked IP_Admin yet, but most likely)
• Zoo Station 7

Do you know of any other Berkeley weblogs? Let me know, so I can get in touch with them!

One reader wrote in to say he's read that Archos is having trouble with their ISP changeover, which would explain the DNS and web site issues. He ordered his jukebox at expo and has it now.

I hope that's all it is, and it does seem probably, as a company folding wouldn't cause DNS errors unless they deliberately tried to wipe the domain name from their primary DNS.

Still, that doesn't explain why they're not answering the phone, but I won't give up on it just yet. Coincidentally, a whois query states that their domain name registration will expire on Jaunary 30th, so if they don't get on the ball and pay Netowrk Solutions their $35, they may lose their web iste again.