@lindsay.at

David Foster Wallace is an author who means a lot to me. I just woke up and learned (via Twitter) that he died by his own hand yesterday. "Infinite Jest" is my desert island book: I've read it at least three times, and will continue to return to it for the rest of my life. So much of his more recent work lays bare his constant struggles to write in the face of the internal critic, so that theme is particularly bracing right now as I work through my PhD thesis.

In other, far more trivial news, the blog (and domain) is back. It disappeared for too long because of some nic.at mixup, probably as unforeseen fallout from my transfer between domain registrars.

As previously blogged, I attended the BBC's Mashed08 hack day. I explored some of the noteworthy hacks on the LOLCODE site, but it's time that I explain what I did with my 24 hours straight of hacking.

The number of APIs and virtual toys unleashed by the BBC at Mashed08 was a bit dizzying with all the choices. In the end, however, I had to go with an idea that had been rattling around in my head for the longest: a twitter bot based on the Echo Nest Recommend API. Twitter bots are nothing new, not terribly original, and not even all that feasible nowadays with the API limits, but it seemed quite a nice application of the EN Recommender.

What I spent a lot of time on was the ergonomics, context awareness, and giving the bot a memory, all in aid of getting maximal information from minimal effort from the (mobile) twitter user. The bot's name, 'recomme,' was designed to be easily keyable with a T9 keypad. I spent a fair amount of time on maximizing the amount of information in 140 characters.

Given a tweet with a bandname to @recomme, it responds with the closest recommended bands:

If you name one the BBC's (pop) music radio stations, then the bot is aware of the context at the time: it goes off and checks on what's currently playing:

If you messaged the bot too late, however, you can correct it, asking for the track immediately preceding:

If the recommendations are on target, you can ask for more of the same:

As you can see, there's a fair bit of state saved with each interaction with the bot, and it responds with as much information it can fit into the space allotted.

The fairly terse URLs that follow each set of recommendations are give each query some persistence, an easily accessible reminder of what was requested, capturing the context of the moment, and offering more verbose detail than can be captured in a 140 character message. The user's past queries (saveable, sharable) are also accessible via a linked user page.

The cherry on top, and perhaps the only part of the hack that couldn't conceivably be done last year, was that the BBC Audio & Music Interactive team brought live archives of the BBC pop music radio stations. For the Mashed08 event, I was able to link to these live, time-indexed archives, so in the above "BBCR1" query, the persistent link pointed to the right time in the past such that you would hear the BeatFreakz song that was playing at that time.

Most of the development time was spent re-learning parts of Django, and getting the model for the underlying web application ("memory") right. The twitter bot is a separate process that requests information from and saves things to the Django webapp with some special POST requests.

The project was a a fair bit of fun, and it felt rewarding to see it through. I'm a bit conflicted on whether to deploy it: I think it would be good, fun, and useful to some, but it could easily use another solid 24 hours of polish before it's presentable. Furthermore, Twitter is in no state to support a new bot: 20 API requests per hour are nearly useless for something that's ostensibly an interactive mobile application.

As a postscript, I noticed that the "recomme.com" domain was cybersquatted by the time I returned to my hotel in London. I wasn't too bothered by it, as I have other domains that could be pressed into service for this, but I was mightily impressed at who's paying attention.

Last month I was requested to reflect on an aspect of my experience at ROFLCon. I did so, but forgot to cross-post what I wrote here. Augmented Reality Overload: A Digital Natives Guest Post:

Last week, in my post on ROFLCon, I wrote that

All barriers between real life and digital life seemed to collapse during the conference. In an audience full of laptops, iPhones, BlackBerries, and digital cameras, the volume of instant commentary created was enormous and baffling. But it wasn’t even just the audience: Adam Lindsay [a panel member, representing his website LOLCode] apparently live-posted much of his own panel directly to Twitter, between answering questions about LOLCode. And he wasn’t alone.

Only problem: I was wrong. In the comments, Adam Lindsay kindly noted that while he had planned to Twitter from the panel, and had in fact mentioned that he might (hence my confusion), in the end he wasn’t able to divide his attention that many ways at once. After reading this comment, it struck me that it might be valuable to see to what extent a digitally adept adult— in a sea of other digitally adept adults—experienced a digital usage generation gap between himself and his peers vs. the hundreds of college students milling about at ROFLCon. Adam was kind enough to oblige with the following guest post.

It’s worth noting that Adam’s views are his own, and though I’ve chosen to reprint them here in their entirety, they should be taken as one personal narrative rather than representative of any official position of the Digital Natives project. That said, we’re incredibly grateful to Adam for sharing his acute observations and personal experience, for writing such a thought-provoking piece, and for being willing to enter into this discussion in the first place. We look forward to hearing your responses.

-Diana Kimball, Digital Natives intern

I am 35 years old. I have been on the internet for half of my life. I “speak digital” fluently, but I have to admit that I don’t speak it as a native, and likely never will. I’m a dinosaur in this world, and I know I will be replaced by more nimble successors.

I’ve been thinking about it, and my big failing is that I can’t multitask like the younger set, or as women are famed for doing. The cost of switching between digital life and real life has a real mental cost, especially in terms of attention, in the psychological sense. And the reason why I feel as though I am not a digital native is that I feel this cost with every transition. I’m monolithic. I can think about one thing at a time. I am Windows 3.11. I am Mac OS 7.

This hit home for me during ROFLCon, where, armed with iPod touch and a long-established Twitter account, I thought I could keep up with the real and virtual worlds into which I was immersed. My droll plan was to live-twitter during my own panel, perhaps with just a “HAI WORLD. IM IN UR PANEL…” As it was, the panel was too fast-paced, and required too much of my attention just to keep on top of it. I had to be present, in the moment, and any step away from that would have been unfair to everyone else in the room.

I would try to keep an eye on Twitter during the conference while I was in the audience, but always ended up discovering that focusing on it took too much away from my understanding and enjoyment of what was going on in the panels. Twitter was useful, it did enhance the experience, and I believe it was the right medium that consensus established as a backchannel. However, for me, it was a matter of stepping out of the real life experience of the Con, and stepping into a digital reality. It was not an augmented reality; for me, ROFLCon’s digital backchannel was simply another parallel session track that I could follow. It seemed clear that for the younger set at ROFLCon, there was far less difficulty in meshing the real with the virtual.

So. I don’t feel like I’m a digital native. There are some trends, some things my younger colleagues love, that I know I don’t share in fully. I think they point to my failure to change context nimbly, but it could possibly just be me. What do you think?

Unlike nearly every person out there, I hate watching video while at the computer keyboard (with one notable exception). That is, I hate browsing through YouTube. Thankfully, I don’t have to miss out on videos of cute kittens, theremins, or both together, because I can defer YouTube to its proper context: I mark a promising video as a “favorite,” and when the mood strikes me, I use my AppleTV to catch up on all these effectively bookmarked videos while lying back on my couch.

I love music. I have spent tens of thousands of dollars (erk) on a legitimate music collection over the years. Yet I hardly listen to it, primarily because I can’t listen to most music whilst working. Music with lyrics (and I love intelligent lyricists) just collides with all the reading and writing I’m constantly doing at the keyboard.

As I close in on finishing a large, overdue project, I realize more and more that I need to swear off instant messaging. I have been instant messaging, in one form or another, ever since 1990, when I stepped onto the proper internet. I like to think I communicate well in the medium. However, IM takes far too much of my attention: I dedicate myself far too intensely to a real-time conversation, and everything else that I try to do is disrupted. I don’t dip into chats while continuing with my emailing, my writing, my editing, my coding, or my web surfing. The chats eat my attention.

I look at the next generation, say, my three-year-old daughter, and am in awe of what they will accomplish, having all the collected knowledge of the world wide web at their fingertips from day one. I’m am absolutely confident my daughter will develop the mental agility that I lack in order to mediate between the real and multiplicity of digital worlds she will be presented with. I hope, both as a parent and as an educator, I can help develop the critical facilities she and her peers will need to filter through all that information.

In the meantime, I’m having fun in this new world, myself. I get by pretty well with the language, after all. I know there will come a time when I will reach my limit, when all I can do is sit back and watch in wonderment what these kids can do.

But not just yet.

Adam Lindsay finally got used to being called The LOLCODE Guy while at ROFLCon. He sporadically blogs at http://lindsay.at/blog/, and formerly blogged more regularly on the role of digital multimedia tools for research in the humanities at http://mediadescri.be.

(Originally at Digital Natives.)

ROFLCon is slipping away into old news now, but for all my posts on the topic, I didn't get to talk much about my own panel (which, incidentally, has just been released on video). So, I shall navel-gaze upon the nature of memehood. My blog, my prerogative.

As I've alluded to in my guest post on the Digital Natives blog, the LOLCats panel moved quickly, to great effect. I had imagined a much more chin-stroking, pipe-smoking, deliberate affair, but Alexis Ohanian of the LOLMagnetz and of the big hands knew to keep it moving and light.

However, as a result, there was a bunch of stuff I thought I'd get a chance to talk about, but didn't get to say while on the panel. As we're at LOLCODE's anniversary, I thought I may as well collect those thoughts now.

On the panel and the one preceding it, everyone got to comment on success being a fluke. I expanded upon that, and was quoted quite extensively, that you can't own the idea. I felt it very acutely because there was an inevitability to LOLCODE. If not me, anyone could have come up with it. If I hadn't've put LOLCODE out into the world, someone else would have within the month. Variations on the theme already existed.

I also have strong feelings on the meme-ownership issue because of the issue of standardization. A computer language doesn't really prosper when it varies from implementation to implementation. On the other hand, I think the LOLCODE meme would be strangled at its infancy had I taken hard line with the specifications. "Ye canna call native functions tha' way! We haven't defined it yet," would have been foolish. LOLCODE is a much stronger meme than it is a programming language.

And that's a key change in how I've viewed LOLCODE over the past year. I thought it could be a nifty, fun, teaching language, but it hasn't been that. What it has been is a fantastic, fun "Hello World" for compiler writers. I'm pleased as punch that LOLCODE gets mentioned next to Microsoft's DLR and Perl's Parrot virtual machine now. That in itself makes me think that LOLCODE-as-meme will be around for a fairly long time, being so embedded in the computing tools of the future.

During the LOLPanel I also thought there might've been an opportunity for more shout-outs. While I thanked most of them personally for the inspiration, I thought it should be done more publically. I did get to thank Stephen Granades personally for his LOLTrek for inspiration. Although I had been seeing cat macros around the place for months, and they amused me, LOLTrek was the first variant on the LOLs that made me think there was really something to LOLCats. I've long acknowledged the analytic role Anil Dash's and David McRaney's articles played, but regretted not approaching Anil in person.

I also wanted to say here, for the record, that the people I really admire in the web and meme sphere are the web-cartoonists. The LOLpanel were recognized for their contributions to humor over the past year or so, but I really think the people who bring teh lulz day after day, week after week, really don't get the recognition they deserve in that community. (Of course, they probably don't cry too much about it, having sussed profitability from free content on the web ages ago.)

I will need to discuss traffic more some other time. It's an incredibly rich topic. I know one of the first overwhelming moments with LOLCODE was "Oh, shit. I had no idea there were so many people on the internet." It's pretty overwhelming when thousands of people march through your front door each minute, as happened on the first day of LOLCODE's launch. Now, a year later, after interacting with people incredibly versed in the internet at ROFLCon, and seeing a steady march of new blog and forum posts introducing new people to the language, my thought was "good lord, so many people haven't heard of LOLCODE yet."

That keeps me in my place, but I also see it as an opportunity.

ROFLCon felt like a life-changing event. I don't know if the effects will really be that long-lasting, but it feels good for now. What really affected me was the massive outpouring of positive energy from nearly everyone: the enthusiasm of the organizers was infectious, and the attendees were touched with a sense of childlike wonder upon learning that the conference was really real. At first I was concerned about the dynamics of 600 introverts in the same room as 100 extroverts (largely from the marketing contingent), but it worked. People found their respective crews, and there were enough good will and shared reference points that misfits like me could wander from group to group with no resistance and lots of good will.

I was blown away by all the kind words said and blogged about the LOL panel. I actually couldn't explain the effusive praise from such worthies as David Weinberger. Alexis Ohanian, our moderator, certainly kept things moving and varied, and the panel seemed pretty well-balanced in their contributions. What really helped the panel, however, was the overwhelming goodwill from the audience. LOLCats were simply a fun, silly thing to talk about, because kittens make everything better.

This is relevant to my interests

What surprised me most about ROFLCon is how much I was supposed to be there. I thought it was right to attend completely separate from my professional duties at the university: LOLCODE has always been a separate thing, a lark ostensibly done in my spare time. For so long I've said my personal shtick was about tools for creativity, and the day job was more about multimedia content distribution, shading towards metadata, user-generated content, and vernacular creativity. I can be myopic sometimes. The biggest facepalm moment was learning that new pal Kenyatta was 'yatta' from the unmediated blog, from which I nabbed loads of articles for an old work blog. Of course, I didn't learn this until an hour after he left.

I loved how nearly every interaction could be memorable. I think the energy behind this was down to how young the participants were: starry-eyed youths were still in their teens, and the majority of the panelists who had done something tended to their twenties and thirties, with only a few incursions northward. This was in sharp contrast with the professional and academic conferences I'm used to: the young ones are comfortably into their early-to-mid twenties, and the accomplished ones are far older. And yet it seems I'm still most impressed with the youngest set at those same conferences.

I spoke with a fair few young people there. By the end of Saturday afternoon, I was pretty tired, emotional, and perhaps a bit full of myself. I ran into a young man named Dixon, describing himself as a Smosh fan. He "so wanted" to come to a school like MIT, and I told him of the relief I felt at MIT and other similar-tier universities recommitting to need-based financial aid. Once again, if you show up as a desirable student, they will make it possible to attend. And if you're there, there's no problem with who you are, regardless of color of skin: the MIT I know is one of the ultimate meritocracies. He seemed a bit relieved and... hopeful. I have hope for him, too.

MOAR

ROFLCon itself might be best termed a symposium: it was neither a conference in a traditional academic sense, nor was it like a convention, with the usual commercial bent (I wanted to get schwag from a number of creators, but there was no way of grabbing it.) Rather, it was a gathering of practitioners (meme creators), theorists (like the keynotes and Josh Green's session), and some engaged commercial interests (e.g., marketers) about the economy of ideas and internet micro-celebrity. It was an alchemical combination, not least because the practitioners were humble, introspective, and tended to be thoughtful about what led to their being there.

I would love to see another ROFLCon happen. I will do what I can to help make it so. I think there's more room for an academic track, not only in the social science of memes and microcelebrity, but on more technical subjects on the dissemination of ideas and traffic analysis, and even on practical technical matters like scaling to handle such traffic.

Can I imagine ROFLCon being a yearly thing? An institution? I'm a bit more dubious about that. What made ROFLCon so wonderful was that sense of childlike wonder from everyone, a hovering sense of disbelief just over everyone's shoulder that it actually happened. The positive vibes that grew from that disbelief permeated all the ecstatic interactions described above. Once the event gets taken for granted, I think it will be time to move on.

And if/when negativity or jadedness invades ROFLCon, it won't be pretty. This year, anonymous was in full force during the final two sessions. Props to them and their session about Scientology: I really think it's a brilliant social hack they hit upon in targeting the CoS. But when they're a masked mob causing havoc with no answerability... not so much. Not clever and not funny, and it really encroached on the good will that permeated the rest of ROFLCon. If ROFLCon can stay on the sunny side of the street, it has a bright future.

I almost hooted out loud when I saw the email sent out to MIT Alumni/ae: " MIT to be tuition-free for families earning less than $75,000 a year." I'm generally proud of being an MIT alum, but not terribly passionate about it. Still, there are two rather important facilities that I was the beneficiary of, and think were important educational institutions. The first was the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP), to which I'm proud that my class dedicated its class fund. The second was the commitment (at the time) to need-based financial aid.

I can't point at any particular figures, but in the 18 years since I learned of my financial aid packages, it has felt like the overall commitment to financial aid has diminished, not only at MIT, but across America. I felt as though need-based financial aid made the insane tuition prices in America "work": the rich and students from abroad could subsidize the poorer students. It's something that I felt the English introduction of tuition fees (yet another instance of imperfect aping of the American system) missed was the need for a smoother spread of grants for students.

Back to the announcement, it's interesting, and an impressive headline, but what made MIT's financial aid great back in the day was their calculations of living expenses included in the package. The price was much more than tuition, and MIT recognised that. There are some hints of that in the clauses, "For families earning less than $75,000 a year, MIT will eliminate the student loan expectation," and "MIT will reduce student work-study requirements for all financial aid recipients," so I'm optimistic that this really is as meaningful as it appears on the surface.

I hope other institutions and people who can change things take notice. I feel like the need-based financial aid gate swung shut shortly behind me. Re-democritizing education is absolutely essential for the future of America.

My daughter is very clever at two and one-third years of age. Not a day goes by when she doesn't surprise and delight me with something new she's learned. She just returned from a weekend with her grandparents, and proceeded to strut her newly-acquired linguistic stuff.

That a very very big butterfly!

Mummy [com]puter is tiny tiny one!

A missing verb here, an elided article there, sure, but I was amazed at the assured use of repetition for the purpose of intensificatory reduplication. I was stumped as to what to call this, as I started out thinking about reduplication, but wikipedia's article on it gave me little clue as to whether I was right. Google eventually sent me to the Language Log for the above-linked blog post. Reading the very very good post also let me know why I had such trouble finding a description of the process:

When I realized in 1999 that intensificatory reduplication (of both adjective modifiers in the noun phrase and adverb premodifiers in adjective phrases and adverb phrases) needed to be described in the Adjectives and Adverbs chapter of The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, I rummaged around in all the earlier reference grammars I could find to see what they had said about it, and the answer was that the exact facts had apparently never been recorded. What Rodney Huddleston and I wrote for Chapter 6 of The Cambridge Grammar (pages 561-562) was apparently the first description that dealt with both adjectives and adverbs.

It's strange. The Language Log only came onto my personal radar when it covered LOLCODE, but it now requires an honoured place on my blogroll. My weekend has been filled with it, since I've become obsessed with the recent controversy over the Pirahã, as described in the New Yorker. The Language Log's coverage of Dan Everett's work has been a great introduction to the topic.

A photocopier has been jamming almost constantly here at work, and I'm the sort of guy who will muck in and help clear the jam when I notice it. There was yet another complaint of it jamming. I cleared it, and decided to give a mini-lecture on paper curl to my colleagues:

For future reference, when the paper jams again, (after you clear the jam) figure out which tray it was feeding from, and flip the paper over.

Why? It's about paper curl. It's been a long time since I've had to worry about this, but with 1) cheap/thin paper, 2) cheap copiers/printers, and/or 3) high-performance copying (seriously), the "endianness" of the paper really matters. With this batch of paper, the ream should be placed in the copier paper tray "seam-side up" where the seam is on the packaging.

Uh, that's hard to describe, but dead simple when you see it. Email me if you want a demonstration.

I actually refrained from going into further, scarier detail. Y'see, paper is manufactured and stored as massive rolls before being cut into sheets. The natural curl is always going to be present, and (naturally) more pronounced with thinner sheets. Add heat and pressure to the mix (such as the fusing stage of Xerography), and a thin sheet of paper is going to show its curl.

Well, that's a bit of nostalgia from my misspent youth. The smell of high school to me was the smell of ozone from the school district's Xerox 9900 copier (yes, high-performance copying, indeed), which I operated for four years as a part-time job, during lunch and after school. I very rarely sat in study hall – all my spare time was spent making copies, doing spare bits of desktop publishing on the mac there, doing paste-up for my Model UN club's newsletter, or videotaping sports events. Then there was my paper delivery route, once I got home. Is it a wonder I still have an abiding love of paper, printing, typography, and multimedia?

He peered at Richard seriously. "Do you have a good sofa?" he enquired.

"Well, yes." Richard laughed. He was cheered by the silliness of the question.

"Oh," said Reg solemnly. "Well; I wish you'd tell me where you got it. I have endless trouble with them, quite endless. Never found a comfortable one in all my life. How do you find yours?" He encountered, with a slight air of surprise, a small silver tray he had left out with a decanter of port and three glasses.

"Well, it's odd you should ask that," said Richard. "I've never sat on it."

"Very wise," insisted Reg earnestly, "very, very wise." He went through a palaver similar to his previous one with his coat and hat.

"Not that I wouldn't like to," said Richard. "It's just that it's stuck halfway up a long flight of stairs which leads up into my flat. As far as I can make it out, the delivery men got it part way up the stairs, got it stuck, turned it around any way they could, couldn't get it any further, and then found, curiously enough, that they couldn't get it back down again. Now, that should be impossible."—Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

Rosemary and I got a new sofa. Guess what.

Yesterday marked my ten-year anniversary of living and working in Europe. On 19 October 1996, I got off an overnight Sabena/Delta flight in Zaventem airport, and took started on an adventure that at the time was framed as, "a year contract to be paid to live in Europe? What's the downside?"

Well, here I am, fairly well ensconced in a job, with a house and a family. The years of living on the continent have taken their toll: I'm certainly carrying a lot more weight around than ten years ago. I'm still using Macs, and am still surrounding myself with fun work on multimedia. I hand-coded my html then, and I still prefer to do so, now, only with a bit of CMS help on the boring, repetitive bits.

Although I have (a couple) iPods, I listen to music a lot less often than I did when I was dragging huge stacks of CDs from place to place. That's going to have to change.

The majority of my adult life has been spent away from my country of origin. I have always felt an outsider, anyway. Before 1996, I had never been outside of North America, or even on the west coast. Now, I am a seasoned (some might even say jaded) traveller, who can hit the ground running in any of four continents.

So, here I am. I don't think I want to turn it into ten more, right away.