Ambient Techno is my Friend.

Telephone Support Gem of the Day

I don't know if I should laugh or cry.

• Dialogue partner: So it will work now?
• Me: Yes.
• Dialogue partner: If not I'll send you a letter bomb!

Roböxotica (Recording Included)

How many festivals for cocktail robotics do you know?

Let the link insanity begin: monochrom's current artist in residence Francesca Birks, Cory Doctorow of Boing Boing fame, Jake Appelbaum (who has way too much websites as it seems) and last but not least Johannes Grenzfurthner were having a discussion, sans topic, during the annual Roböxotica today. (Yes, it's a festival for Cocktail Robotics.)

To describe the conversation with a couple of keywords: future, society, capitalism, creativity, subversion. No robots at all... But that doesn't make it less enjoyable. You can listen to my recording in quite poor audio quality (beware especially of the first 5 minutes). At least I know I'm not alone with my poor audio engineering skills. There's even a little part missing, it's about Flickr being bought by Yahoo!, who then screws everyone over.

I recorded Cory talking about his grandmother and reading After the Siege, as well as answering a few questions, too, and might put it online later. The audio quality is better but still not good.

I promise I'll try harder next time, and maybe actually plan more, instead of relying on my spontaneous inspiration alone. (And maybe, I can get it annotated with that prototype too.)

As you can see , my photos aren't very great either, but I'd recommend to check out Jake's, they're more than excellent.

There are lots of great people here, and reading everything, and seeing photos, attending to just a few of the makes me envious of everyone involved. I miss the times I've spent more time with monochrom. And I wanted to go to bed more than two hours ago.

Good night.

Goddamn, Late Again

The annoyance of having the same plans as someone important.

Today I'm off my job at the callcenter as my voice is recently not on top. More specifically, if I talk more than a half hour in a normal conversation, it feels similar to when the laryngitis started (or revived) this year. And that's not even a very active conversation, as I'm holding myself back as much as I can. So I'm home this week, and have time to work on the recent ideas me and Johan planned on working.

As I dig through my RSS feeds, I find that the BBC is working on audio annotation. Bugger. That was the first prototype me and Johan were working on, and we even had a catchy name for it.

Their approach is quite interesting though we're taking a different direction. Instead of an "annotation" field with no specific purpose, you get several fields for various purposes. The UI isn't bad either, but as we're also trying to get full transcriptions I think we've got something better for our intentions.

So, I wonder if we'll ever get as much attention as the BBC on this, as they've been the first to "announce" it. Now to where the potential lies: their application is still experimental (whatever that may mean), and not yet available to the public, and as it seems they probably won't release it as FOSS to the public. If we can get it out of the door soon, make it look nice, and maybe work better, then I guess we'll have a chance.

Oh have I mentioned it's not that it's our idea? Actually I "stole" it from Andreas Leo Findeisen (some of you that have attended the Transmediale and Ars Electronica people might know him from there – also the father of Serious¡!Pop and Sloterdijk's assistent) as well, but only because he didn't listen to me, and hey we're going to present it to him anyway, so collaboration might (re)ensue. I did consulting on Hyper Audio Learning (yes, his version), almost two years ago, and the prototype should be up for ages, but still isn't as far as I know. So I guess we're doing good in that part.

And last but not least, I've talked a lot with Ryan about this project. We wrote a model, a comparison between ours (which is similar to the new one) and Leo's. Even worked a little on prototyping, but it makes a real difference to have someone sitting right next to you. After years of online collaboration, I really enjoy being able to talk about it with my extremities.

At least David (the orange flower) seems to have his stuff done in time, especially since we're thinking about borrowing code from this project, for cross platform and compatibility reasons, but more about that later.

All I'm hoping for is the late to stay this way, without an added too.