This week I’m circling on the Milan orbit.
My headquarters until friday will be the newly opened and very white Cowo, a coworking space in the forever up and coming Lambrate area. Monday actually started exploring the neighbourhood and ended up with an introductory coffee for Alberto to the place.
Milan these days is bursting with the usual plethora of activities, events, gallery openings and performances that accompanies the Salone del Mobile. Usually the sensation at the end of the week is that you ran around for days, missing one shiny event after the other, and getting drunk in the process.
Tonight I’ve been very briefly at the Fabbrica del Vapore, an interesting, totally cool, ex industrial space now converted to creative studios, galleries and performance spaces. Conversation and the usual nice conversation with Vanz.
Among the many, I’m looking forward tomorrow to go and have a peek at Lago’s new space, and absolutely visit the Peter Greenaway installation at Palazzo Reale.
On Friday I’m looking forward to aggregate some Openspime and Arduino crowd, let there be dork.
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Here at Headshift we love being green. We read our McDonough, some of us cycle a lot, we even have a green (and orange, ok) logo! And we always, always shut down unused appliances, like the coffee machine.
Now, in order for a coffee machine to work it needs to warm up. It takes an average of 4′33″ to properly warm it up.
That’s a tricky number, and contemplating it sends minds haywire. So much so that the coffee machine usually ends up idling for far more than the named 4′33″.
On these occasions, Headshift people (me first) loving being green knights, literally dash to the kitchen and with articulated acrobatics that would make Trinity and Bruce Lee go hide themselves in shame, they switch off the machine.
More often than not, a few minutes later you can hear screams coming from the kitchen, as the coffee craving employee sees his caffeinated dreams vanish in front of a dead LED.
So today, I proudly armed myself with duct tape, moo cards and post-its (and not even a swiss army knife!) and made this little artefact, turning the coffee-making experience in a proper state machine (if it’s on and claimed, don’t transition to off).
there is also a generic version for the lazy (or not moo-powered):
A week or so ago, I noticed Emily Chang twittering about the rebirth of Game Never Ending.
For those of you who wonder, gne was the massive multiplayer game from which, in a sense, Flickr then evolved.
Excited by the chance to play it again, I dashed at the site, and had a nice (if short) evening session, making a mental note of writing more on the subject.
No notes, screenshots or anything else was taken.
Well, bad, bad idea… this is GNE’s site now:
“GNE is a shared temporary hallucination”
Fair enough :)
Have a look at Andy Baio’s coverage for screenshot and a video of the endgame.
Watched Juno last night.
You know what? I loved it.
Well done, better played.
Nice story, maybe a bit on the optimistic side…
…but hey, what’s wrong with that?
Yesterday night at 2am, the project that has been keeping me quite busy in the past monthes has hit the (soft) launch.
It’s been an incredible learning exercise, for the mind, the body and the heart.
Now let me finish the working week, pass out for 24 hours straight, and then I’ll try to go back to write something more meaningful.
Saturday and sunday I managed to get “out of the screen”, even though still geeking out at the Arduino workshop.
I discovered a new and fun way of approaching electronics, same as juggling has been a gateway to physics in the past.
For those of you who wonder, Arduino is a open electronic prototyping platform, that comes with a pretty simple programming environment, plenty of code and experiments to get your hands dirty and a very active practitioner community to support your efforts and achievements. Just have a look at youtube and get inspired!
Now I have the tools to make some of those physical computing related pet projects happen… will I have the will, and time, too? :)
Kudos to Alex, Nick and Brock. They’ve been amazing. And the class was quite challenging and fun too, an experience I can’t help but recommend. Oh, you can have an idea of what’s all about from the flickr group.
True, I said one week out :)
I’ve been spending a couple of weeks (almost non stop) kindly hosted by a client’s office in order to facilitate the launch of their new project.
Apparently there’ll be more (support, documentation, handover, other than the fun bug-squashing) so until the end of the month you’ll find me in the Fleet Street area more than in SE1.
Interesting discovering of the past week: the Leon Gobi.
I also realized that I didn’t write a word about the week spent in Italy.
I was at a Barcamp in Turin where I did a presentation about webdesign-meet-gamedesign (here my slides, in Italian), and at the girlgeekdinner in Milan (where I wasn’t the only UK based guest, as Sarah Blow, Maz Hardey and Amanda Lorenzani were also there).
The other surprise from my trip I wanted to write about is OpenSpime: almost by chance, stepping by Leandro’s, I had the chance to see a live preview of the first prototype, amazing. Good luck with the tour now, and call me in for the next brainstorm :P
To understand OpenSpime in a nutshell, watch this interview to David Orban on YDN:
In this post on the newspaper blog, Marco Pratellesi, chief editor at Corriere della Sera, apologizes for having published the gallery of the mysterious digital artist Paulthewineguy without link nor references. Babysteps, yet steps they are.
From Tateru Nino’s blog:
Sorry, Portal. For nearly a half hour, you asked for wit and ingenuity. Then right near the end you started asking for reflexes. Sorry, I don’t actually have any of those.
Guess I won’t be able to finish the story. A shame.
Switching metaphor or required skillset half-way through a game (or story, or application, or whatever media experience imho) seems like an excellent way to loose audience.
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