It's on!!

Rather than agreeing and disagreeing on the article, I've found it informative. So it's hard to point out ideas which work for me or not.

The idea of having every document to be linked to each other reminds me of "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" and the book that knew everything about everything. It feels very powerful even thinking about having a guide like that and wondering in foreign spaces (not places, spaces!) However, I'm not sure how this can save the world from stupidity. As information gets accessible to people, they'll be willing to give less effort looking for it, because it's already there, "I can get it whenever I need it!" Knowing that information is already present in a very easily accessible network may work good on stupidity but it will also make it a lot harder to be (or look) smarter. Is it only me or isn't it scary to think about everybody know about everything? - ok, I'm getting confused, let's jump to something else.

But I can not agree more with Kevin Kelly in not being able to
see what the web has become. "Any hope of discerning the state of the Web in 2015 requires that we own up to how wrong we were 10 years ago." got me thinking of what we might be doing right now. Thinking about ten years later is not as hard as thining what we are doing wrong right now. I have a guess though: People will get so sick and tired of dating site or self-representative sites (like myspace, facebook, xuqa and etc.), they will look for something maybe less entertaining but more interesting/smart: an interaction that is not based on interpersonal relationship, but more on “informational” relationship. About ten years ago, when I was a younger loser, I was subscribed on almost every chatting website. I was so all over the place, I became a tester for a couple of Turkish dating websites. Right now, I spend most of my time either on Wikipedia, Yahoo or Eksisozluk.org , kind of a Turkish urban dictionary but the entries are done by users.

This shift has already begun; by blogging. I do agree a lot with Kelly on everything he says on blogging and it is amazing to see how valuable it is to share certain experiences. Usually I read a couple of blogs before I go out and try a new restaurant, I never read magazines or rely on their websites. True experience can only be present in a true user’s blog, who is not seeking an economic outcome of what s/he is writing.

“The human brain has about 100 times that number - but brains are not doubling in size every few years. The Machine is.” What if we compare how complex they get every year? The Machine is created by people, it’s easy to predict where it is going, but the brain is still carrying so much mystery, it’s hard to guess the upcoming 5 minutes of it.



Oh, by the way, it was hilarious to see where baloney Cliff Still was!
Thinking about everything being linked to each other, here is a sweet site on data visualization:
http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/

The awesome movie

So not related with elegant design

Kelly is actually a male comedian, Liam Kyle Sullivan. S/he getting pretty famous on myspace and youtube. A friend from work made a lot of fun about me when I told him I had no idea about her/him. As a very generous person, I won't like you guys to be in the same position.. so here you go:

My favorite two lyrics:
"I'll go Alanis Morisette on you"
"I'm gonna blog and text and post and host, podcast your bastard coast to coast!"

Also s/he has a music video on shoes as well...

You are coming to a sad realisation, Cancel or Allow?

I laughed pretty hard at this one. As a PC user, I do hate the obsessed security/firewall/whatever. Here you go:

Nooooo!!!

Last minute hiccup.. Well it's more a vomit than a hiccup. Three of our motors decided to die on us. Luckily we have a couple more to work on with.. but still.. this is way too depressing..

Brainstorming

As I started brainstorming about putting everything together, my day got pretty frustrating and I do need a drink right now!

At the moment we have a hat, a helmet and a remote. These three pieces have to be on the user and it takes time to get them on. So we're going to figure out something for that.

Also there is a possibility to put the breadboard in the helmet and have a relatively small remote, which I think will help us in user-testing.

horray friday

feel the helmet

As the haptics person for the helmet, it's going pretty good actually. We are having some problems with the code but they'll be ok (I hope). In this session, I added two more motors to the helmet, so in total we have 5 motors (yay). Two of them on the front, two of them at the back and the main motor on the top.
Also the wires are tagged from now on, because it's getting pretty annoying to figure out which is going where. YAY!

so we have four modes for the motors:
GAME START: Front motors. they will run during the game on a small pace
SHOOTING: Back motors and the main motor
SHIELD: Starting from the front all of them.
GAME OVER: ALL OF THEM!

Right now, GAME START and GAME OVER is working. The SHOOTING is OK, only the SHIELD needs some work. Also the accelerometer is not in good shape, but the screen is going pretty good!

I'm planning to sew the motors in the hat so we'd get rid of the catastrophic tapes. Well, let's see..

bbbooooooooooooooooooorrrrrredddd!!

things to do when you are bored:
http://www.beseechfanclub.com/bored/

Our cute little bear will have lungs and a cute little heartbeat :) The idea of the suicidal bear got quite hard in many ways, but especially because of the usage of touchsensors gets complicated, we decided to postpone the idea to another project

Pong Prototype

The Pong Prototype came out a lot easier than the helmet. All we have is a wood, two motors and a pack of reese's. The power of these two motors change depending on which side the "ball" hits.