Good Luck to:

Ernie who's a contestant on The Weakest Link (now in syndication)! He's not allowed to tell us how he does, lest he be liable for a hunk of a million dollars in penalties, but Go Ernie! All that time waiting in line like a dork has finally paid off!

The Cal Bears who broke a year and a half home losing streak on Saturday to stuff Baylor's Bears 70 to something-a-lot-less-than-70! Let's hope it's not a fluke. I gotta say, though: I knew Ernie was perfect for this game from the start. (specifically this)

The Oakland A's, who've won 19 games in a row. The only times a team has doen better than that was back when they'd play all their home games at once, then go on the road and play. Not bad for a team with 1/3 the salary budget of the Yankees. Will this be the third year in a row that they face each other in the pennant race?

Me. There's God's own thunderstorm going on outside right now, and I can feel the ground shake betweenthe flash and the thunder. I love weather.

Someone who doesn't need luck is Kristin, kicker of asses and taker of names.

Written around midnight, Thursday August 29th

---

When I flew to Pittsburgh last June to find an apartment, it was the first time I'd been on a plane since jumping out of one. The ascent to cruising altitude was different than every other ascent I'd made, because up until this Summer what happened outside the cabin window was just an unfolding story, geographic in nature, being told on a continental canvas, at a crawling 550mph.

That particular climb into the wild blue hither was different, because I could no longer suspend my belief at the sight outside my window. Having thrown myself (err, been thrown, that is) out of a plane at 14,000 feet, I knew what that distance really means, and what the fall fees like. Not that I was panicked, but it created a conduit of reality, piped into the otherwise insulated torpedo of calm within the rushing mayhem of wind and thrust just inches away from the injection-molded membrane and embedded windows.

Like that four-hour voyage to O'Hare, this straight shot from Pittsburgh to San Francisco brings to light a new dimension of the incredible nature of air travel. Just three weeks ago Ammy and I spent eight days driving 3200 miles between the same dots that I'm currently connecting at over 20 times the aggregate speed.

When you're a kid (or an avid Slashdot reader) one of those questions that comes up from time to time is 'what would your superpower be?' My answer was always the same: teleportation. The power to free myself from the confines of geography always seemed more enticing than freedom from gravity or other powers (and yet in my dreams I can fly when nobody's looking).

After spending days driving cross-country, I have a better feel for what it must have been like a century or two ago. The magnitude difference between flying from coast to coast and driving that distance is roughly the same as the difference between driving it and taking a wagon train across the western frontier. Surprising to me though is that the main difference isn't one of duration, though that's the easiest metric to measure: It's intentionality.

An 18th century family bent on homesteading in the West had to give up everything. The journey was all-consuming, a tremendous commitment, not only for the journey out there, but because of the difficulty of returning. You don't up and move to Nevada, and come back to Boston for holidays.

When cars and the highway system started to tie our country together with asphalt ribbons and interchange bows, lifestyles progressed on with it. At the end of manifest destiny, when Americans had it all, we moved to the next step: having it all at once. Exploring the country was a personal adventure; not a dangerous expedition into the unknown, but a voyage of self-discovery as much as one of first-hand experiences of secondhand stories and pictures.

Now that air travel is ubiquitous, the hour-hand is the one that matters. Intentionality takes a seat next to convenience when for most intents travel is instantaneous.

[side note: I'm looking at the window at the most fantastic lightning storm just outside Denver. It's a wild experience to watch it from the top of the thunderheads, illuminating the clouds more than the back(under)lighting of the city below. You can really see the paths the strikes take inside the clouds; arc-sparks joining together in a snaking pattern that stretches across miles, yet compressed to a few arc-minutes in my own view above it all.]

Of course price is a factor, but factoring in the opportunity costs of lost work when driving (or wagonnering), air travel is far more efficient.

But I digress. Economic arguments are too easy. What I mean to say is that air travel is already on par with so many levels of teleportation. Sure, 20-cent transport booths would be another leap beyond what we have today, but when it takes between 3 and 9 hours to get anywhere in the country from anywhere else in the country more than 180 miles away, distance starts to lose its meaning. How is Denver different than Anchorage or New York when two hours of air travel represents just a faction of the time spent packing, getting to and from the airport, waiting for flights or camping out at baggage claim? Mental maps start to deviate from mercator projections as temporal distances rely more on hubs, connections, and distances from airports than they do on any measure of linear distance. New York City will always be closer than Elko, Nevada. It's hardly the first time. Seas and mountain ranges were more powerful distancers than miles of grassland a century ago. Now they cease to matter, as long as there's enough population to justify conquering nature, carving tunnels and spanning bridges.

It was only 500 years ago that the average European wouldn't travel more than 20 miles from their birthplace. Now consider that for those people in that time, a 20-mile journey would be taken on foot, carrying supplies on their back. Navigating on rough terrain (as seen through our soft-soled eyes), they would be lucky to travel such a distance in a day. Certainly it seems primitive to have a life-long horizon of less than 20 miles, but when a third of Americans haven't even seen an ocean, and most haven't ever been farther from home than they could get in a day, who are we to declare ourselves cosmopolitan through anything other than convenience?

Anyhow, this is the shortest 5-hour plane trip I've ever taken. Recalling so many recent 5-hour stints behind the wheel, ploughing through the night and crosswind for 400 miles before finding a hotel to make up for a morning and afternoon of sightseeing, being in the air now feels so much like cheating. A part of me misses the road, and the unexpected sights that bind the cross-country travellers together in ways that being trapped in a middle seat vieing for elbow room never could. On the road all you share with your fellow travellers is the thrill of the journey. Your journeys are all different, and you're coming from and going to different places, both physically and emotionally. On the plane, everyone is either from point A or point B, and the trait you share is wanting to get to the other one as quickly as possible.

That, and I keep expecting to see Bobbi, excitedly urging me along.

That's it. I'm coming home. I'm leaving, on a jet plane...

...but I'll be back here on Tuesday.

USAir, despite filing for bankrupcy, is offering great Labor Day fares, and so I'm leaving right from class (in about an hour) for the airport, and catching a Pittsburgh to San Francisco flight and will be there before midnight.

On the way back, I'll be on the redeye, leaving SFO around 10pm, and getting in to PIT around 6:30am. Damn timezones. Still, looking for the bright side: the 8:30am Tuesday class is the one that it looks like I won't get in to, however much I want to, so I'll have a few hours to sleep before my next Tuesday class at 10:30.

I'm really looking forward to being back, even if it's only for a few days. I see it as a way to touch-base, playing a game of transcontinental peek-a-boo. Having covered my eyes for a month, I get to peek out and make sure my world, friends, and favorite city, are still there, relatively undisturbed and unchanged.

I'll be able to breathe free for a few days, make a trip to my storage space, effectively a store built for me with things I'd like, and I'll pick those that, with 3 weeks experience in Pittsburgh, I most wish I had brought, pack them into a big suitcase which will make the trip home (ack, I called it home!) with me.

It's really all about the friends though.

Only nine hours. I can't wait.

If you know my new cell number (or old home number, go look up my new cell lower down on this page), you can call the cell.

If you don't, you can send me an SMS message by filling out:
Your name: and...
Your message:

I'm off!

Thanks go to Forest for sending along this meme:

I don't even know what to call this.

Basically a little Zathras, some Father Guido Sarducci, and L337 geek all mixed up and wrapped in flash.

It's pretty sad when you hit 'refresh' on your own blog, just to see if, somehow, new content has posted since you last read it.

So after day two, my class schedule is starting to settle down. I'm really excited about several of my classes, and I'm still on pins and needles and will be until everything's finalized.First off we have the core classes for the HCI Masters students this semester:

Intro to HCI Methods - Dealing with all the old standbys of contextual inquiry, task analysis, heuristic evaluation, and the like, only unlike my classes at Berkeley, this time we'll actually be going through the gruntwork of GOMS instead of just reading about it. (Briefly, GOMS is a 'hard math' way of doing usability analysis. Basically you assume an expert user and calculate exactly how much work, (time and cognitive effort) has to go in to accomplishing each of a suite of common tasks.) GOMS is interesting because it ignores the personal side of things, the enjoyment factor or the learning curve, but it's really valuable for those expert systems where people will be performing repetitive tasks, or will be highly trained in the tool. The class will also contain a good-sized usability project for a group on campus (25 of us are split into 6 groups, each assigned to a different campus computing effort in need of interface design or refinement). More to come soon on that front.

HCI Pro Seminar - Each week we'll have a distinguished speaker in the field come to talk to us on Wednesdays, followed by school-sponsored pizza. This time the class is so large that we'll probably trade off half-and-half for pizza chats, but we'll all get to glean the wisdom of visiting and local experts.

CDF - or Communication Design Fundamentals, is the class I'm taking because I didn't have a formal design background. This year it looks to be principly about typography, which suits me fine. As a bonus, we'll be doing all our work in Adobe InDesign, which I've been meaning to pick up for a while anyhow. I just know this class is going to make me frustrated with the web. I love typefaces almost as much as I dislike using gifs and jpegs on sites just to render specific typefaces. I'm considering putting up the occasional post in PDF, just so I can really run free with the design. As an added bonus, google will index it just the same.

Intro to Computers in Music - One of my two 'wow' classes, this is the first time Roger Dannenberg has taught this class in over five years. Prof. Dannenberg is famous (if you're into music and sound synthesis) for his work in creating Nyquist, the powerful programmatic sound-synthesis tool (open source, multi-platform, and using LISP for scripting no less! I swear I thought I'd never again use LISP after taking my AI class). Filled with CS and Music students (though more of the former), the class's final project is a choice between a ~10-minute original composition or an extension of Nyquist, to be incorporated into the package. Actually, the parameters are more broad, and those are just highly-suggested routes to realizing the final project, but I find it *really* intriguing, especially in light of my interests in realtime use of sound for ambient interfaces.

Interactive Programming - Okay, so I'm not in this class yet, but I'm really hoping (yes, this is the other 'wow' class). Led by Pamela Jennings, this class helps artists (formal or otherwise) realize their inspirations in interactive art, primarily through director and flash, relying heavily on advanced scripting in Lingo and Actionscript, respectively. Now, y'all know how interested I am in art- and computer-mediated communications (AOLiza, Randompixel (Cameo), War, Yahoo Messenger, et al). What I've always wanted is a good foundation in richer tools, because coding in javascript, perl, and html will only take you so far. Anyhow, the class is impacted, and there are about 10 of us HCI masters students and others vieing for maybe 4 remaining spots in the class. I consider this a once in a lifetime opportunity, and I think it would only be even better taking it at the same time as Prof. Dannenberg's computers in music class. I'd love to be able to share the projects with you. Here's crossing all my fingers!

As always, I'll keep y'all posted. The weather's finally cooling off in Pittsburgh, and things are finally settling down. Envy goes out to all those who have TV and could watch American Idol tonight. I've officially been TV-less for a month now, restricted to a diet of DVDs, but the cable guys' due to come a week from Friday, so my TiVo can feed once more.

Wow. This is the first time I've been full-time at a new school in eleven years. One thing's for certain: It's a lot different than starting at Berkeley in '91.

On nearly every axis things are different. At Berkeley I lived in the dorms, surrounded by other freshmen; here I live alone in a quiet neighborhood (across the street from the aforementioned cemetery). Before I came in not knowing what I wanted to do with my life; this time around I'm tightly focused: I know exactly what I want to learn and I have a clear idea of how I want to apply those skills when I finish. Back then I took a lingering academic dalliance that would, over the course of a decade, traverse between academia and industry no less than eight times; this time it's a straight 12-month shot, from Yahoo to my Masters in HCI, back to industry.

I also realize how different a person I am. Always the first to jump to the proverbial wall (you know, the one coated with flowers), shy around strangers while trying so hard to fit in -- a juxtaposition that leads invariably to a palpable social awkwardness far worse than shyness: When you're shy, people overlook you. When you're socially inept, people avoid you.

Luckily 18 year-olds are different than the twentysomethings (and thirtysomethings) in grad school, not to mention our shared interests and complimentary backgrounds.

It turns out that we have a huge leg up on last year's Masters students in that most of us got to know each other before classes, and being a social bunch, we had gatherings pretty much every night the week before classes, so now most of us already know a lot about each other, and hang out together, in sharp contrast with last year, where one of the Masters students told me they spent the whole first semester getting to know each other, and even then they didn't really know everyone. We already feel like a team.

So, first day of classes! More pragmatic and slightly less stressful than Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon condones (or, at least tolerates) 'shopping' for classes: signing up for more classes than you could realistically take, to find the ones you like in the first week or two, then drop the others. This is a nice change from Berkeley where you can't sign up for more than max units, so you have to crash all the classes you want/need. The difference is subtle, and probably all in the student's mind, the distinction between trying to crash into a class and trying to stay in a class, but at least it postpones the despair for a few weeks.

Of course, as a grad student the situation is different. I'm taking one or possibly two classes that are taught at the undergrad level, and are heavily impacted, but as a grad student in the department that offers the class, I got an email today saying I'd been enrolled in the class even though I was #21 on the wait list. It's not as unfair as it sounds, considering that undergrads sign up for Fall classes in April, and incoming grad students sign up in July, so naturally allowances have to be made for impacted courses. Still, it's nice.

Oh, the wireless network: It's great. Every foot of lawn, every lounge, classroom, hallway and broom closet is blanketed in 802.11 goodness. I keep my laptop with me as a matter of course now, pulling it out whenever I'm taking a break on campus, eating lunch, or otherwise want to check in on the ether-world which, month-by-month is where more of my work and communication takes place. It's a wonderful thing to have my distal friends so close, even when they're so far.

I'm making a lot of new friends here, too. Despite the pressure-cooker drive to find new people to share experiences with, I'm making some good friends, and a lot of acquaintances. I still feel odd naming names, since I'm made more aware daily of how many of my costudents read this, but I'm sure I'll feel more comfortable with it as we all get to know each other better.

As soon as I finalize my class load, probably by the end of the week, I'll post the list, and describe each one. You long-timers probably remember the left-hand nav module listing the classes I'm in. Well, I'll bring it back, and I'll try to open it up wider, writing all my assignments in HTML so I can share my voyage of discovery with you.

Well, that's probably it for the moment. I'm struggling to get DSL at home so I don't have to plug and unplug dialup whenever I want to check email or movie times. I also need cable, and a bank account, all of which beg the question "why are you blogging until 6pm when you have domestic things to sort out?" Well, you guys come first.

The apartment's really shaping up, and now that I have a hammer I can finish making my space up just the way I want it. Once I do, I'll take 'after' pictures to go along with the 'before' pics I took last June when I signed the lease.

Oh! And I have a new cellphone number! Okay, call me just too clever, but if you know my old Berkeley home # and want my new Pittsburgh cell #, type the Berkeley home # here (no spaces , parentheses, or dashes):

and click .

"Ooh, honey, is this diamond engagement ring your Grandmother's?"

"No, it's my Grandmother."

Eew.

For the past couple days I've been firmly in a 'don't take crap from people trying to manipulate you' mode. We'll see how it all goes down, but right now, the only 'cow' in my vocabulary is the kind that goes 'moo.'