curiousLee

A Laptop for "When I'm 64."

According to Brainy History, Nicholas Negroponte turned 64 over the weekend. I hope he got a good weekend's rest from his world travels promoting the wildly innovative XO-1 laptop for children in developing countries, and strategizing the Give One Get One program where consumers in the U.S. and Canada can donate a laptop and get one themselves. Even though I have two prototypes, I ordered my production units as soon as the offer went live on the morning of November 12th.

Nicholas is pictured above in a phonecam shot I made at SFO for a moblog entry on my way to the TED 2006 conference. Nicholas was to speak on the first day of the conference and was waiting for the same prop plane as my (then) boss Mark and I were taking for the final hop to Monterey. As is apparently the norm, he was answering emails on his IBM laptop in keeping with his legendary swift responses. I introduced myself as my company's liaison to the Media Lab and he gave a knowing smile saying he had heard that our sponsorship was about to lapse, but asked us to hang on a minute while he finished his email.

Closing his laptop on a folded Wall Street Journal, Nicholas said that he had just come from London by way of New York. He said he was circling the globe every three weeks, travelling over 300 days a year single-handedly promoting the project. I was amazed that he only had a small rollling case and laptop bag in tow, but I remembered reading in a magazine about how he travels really light by FedExing his laundry to and from desintation hotels.

We chatted about how we needed to jump through some hoops with a reluctant division Vice President to get our sponsorship renewed (we're renewed now). Nicholas offered to help, and furthermore said he could pay us a visit while in DC the following Tuesday to talk about the laptop and pitch our bosses. We said we'd pull out the stops to schedule a meeting. He scribbled some notes on one of the standard Media Lab-logoed 3x8" paper scratchpads.

Since that day, aside from countless news articles and videos, I've seen Nicholas in person in a few meetings and also saw him whiz by at Boston's Logan airport coming off the shuttle from DC as I was getting on. I've often thought about the kind of drive it takes to take on an insanely grand vision such as equiping 150 million children across the planet with ultra low cost, yet technologically advanced laptops. Day after day fending off naysayers and would be slayers has got to take a toll. And not to mention electing to travel over 330 days a year.

But on his 64th birthday Saturday, while hopefully getting some rest, Nicholas had a lot of wonderful presents to charge his spirit: he had extended the Give One Get One offer until the end of the year because of vigorous sales and widespread interest (really a gift to us), the first batch of production laptops were deployed in Uruguay and several hundred thousand new orders came in from prospective countries.

I imagine that at 64--maybe humming the famous Beatles tune--all those nights staying up until quarter to three debating implementaion details, going for rides to the airport on Sunday mornings, scrimping and saving to ensure there was enough money for mass production and trying to convince several hundred million consumers give him an answer of "yes" all seemed worth it. He has pallette-fulls of shiny new laptops with which to change the world. 

Happy birthday Nicholas. You're growing old in grand style!

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My Real and Virtual Chumbys

My Chumby arrived today! So far, it's integrated with my Flickr and Facebook accounts and plays from my iPod quite well.

My unboxing photos are on Flickr.

A lasting last lecture

[Update: I had linked to a CBS interview here originally, but the file was taken down. So here's an even better clip (10 minutes) of Randy's appearance on Oprah on Monday, October 22, 2007.]

After seeing it linked from several blogs, I loaded Professor Randy Paush's last lecture on my iPhone to watch last night in bed. I had encountered Randy's work in building virtual reality worlds over the years, but never met him or followed the work closely. But what a way to get my attention upon hearing that at age 46 (my age), he has been told terminal pancreatic cancer is leaving him with 3 - 6 months to live. He is married with three children. The embedded video above is Diane Sawyer's interview with him Randy's appearance on Oprah that, in less than nine ten minutes, gives you a taste of his 85-minute farewell lecture to friends, colleagues and family at Carnegie Mellon University's McConomy Auditorium (PDF transcript). Randy talks exuberantly about his decision to maximize his last life sprint in the most positive ways. If you can spare the time from your problem-filled life, I strongly recommend watching the deeply inspiring full lecture on Google Video. His lessons will endure.

I'm keeping his lecture on my iPhone to watch, in part, over and over again.

Real Transformers

Since I'm moderating a panel with several MIT Media Lab professors in early September, including roboticist Cynthia Breazeal, I had brought home my copy of her book to read a few chapters on her basic research. Coincidentally, the New York Times Magazine ran a cover story this weekend on robotics at MIT. There's good coverage on one of their newer robot projects, Cory Kidd's weight maintenance coach which I've been following with photos on Flickr. Both Cory's and Dan Stiehl's huggable theraputic teddy bear robots will be on display in the exhibit hall at AARP's National Event in Boston September 6-8, 2007.

The NYT article is already behind advertising pages and a registration wall, but you'll likely find a copy at the MIT Media Lab Personal Robotics site or on the press page in the next few days.

Radically rethinking product designs

More as an excuse to test out SlideShare than actually reviving this blog, here's a post on a quick presentation I made during John Maeda's Simplicity Research Consortium retreat last week. Activities like this come out of planned interactions between Media Lab students, lab sponsors (like me) and invited guest speakers. This particular exercise was catalyzed by Amanda Parkes of Hiroshi Ishii's Tangible Media Group. As the sponsor-in-residence at her work table, I volunteered to do a hands-on build and report out this PowerPoint.

Related links:
Topobo
Leica camera
Article on compressive sensing

Core77 podcast of John Maeda's musings on simplicity, design and Cape Cod

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Need it now!

My sister-in-law Mary, who works at a large architecture firm, told me a funny story about a recent BlackBerry text entry gaffe. A co-worker was on a job site and needed a certain numbered document sent over in a hurry. So she used her company issued BlackBerry to e-mail a message to someone back at the office saying, "I need 428 now." As is probably common with BlackBerry users in a hurry, she momentarily confused the shift key with the unlabeled ALT key (with funky half moon icon and located where you might expect shift should be), and document number became the letters S-E-X. Without re-reading the contents of the screen, she sent the message "I need SEX now." Yes, the ALT key even capitalized the letters. The e-mail recipient calmly replied asking if she really meant what she said. I'm sure the co-worker blushed the full spectrum of red.

[Note: I originally wrote that my sister-in-law Mary made the BlackBerry error, but it was actually someone else at her office. I've corrected the text above.]

Been nesting

Well since my last post here 15 months ago, we moved into a new house, fell into a grey fog at work which lifted suddenly on 6/22/06, and our daughter took on and beat epilepsy. So aside from some travel, I've been nesting at home. Here on this blog, I retreated to the right sidebar where I've still been moblogging, photoblogging, and posting links. I did a little bit of cleanup in the blog template today, but what I need to do next is hire a freelance developer to fix the dry rot in the code, add some new features, and perhaps apply a new design.

Not acting anymore

On Monday March 14th, I accepted the permanent position in which I had been acting as Director of Client Services in the AARP Services Web Strategy and Operations (WSO) group. Client Services is now, after several months of transition and new hiring, a team of 16 people responsible for web content consulting, message boards, e-mail newsletters and web metrics. Since our re-organization began last August, WSO itself has grown from 30 to 46 people (including contractors), and now our division, AARP Services, which handles all of the for-profit activities of the association, is in the middle of re-organizing to grow from 110 to 175 people by summer. While we might have said last fall that change is in the wind, the winds have now hit gale force.

My team is still going through a transition period where the project load is being leveled across our three sub-teams. This has been happening while we are hiring new people, re-launching the web site and expanding our process to accomodate new roles and responsibilities. While all of this (and much more) plays out, we also have to keep scores of web site stakeholders and partners informed of changes and progress. Fortunately, our senior leadership has been 110% supportive of us as the changes continue.

Progressive re-organizations of companies, where people and resources are being added, result in expanded capacity and capability to meet corporate objectives. One of the stated objectives of this expansion is for us to enhance our culture to become more innovative. So the other part of my job is to engage in creative activities and outreach that will inspire out-of-the-box thinking.

One approach to inspiring innovation is to see how others are doing it. To that notion, we're continuing our longstanding sponsorship of the MIT Media Lab's Simplicity Research Consortium (formerly called information:organized), where I am the the active liaison. The co-chairs of Simplicity, John Maeda and Dan Ariely have both visited AARP Headquarters to engage with staff, and through frequent trips to the lab, we have taken all of WSO's directors and managers and some staff on tours and to workshops.

For a different perspective, we've also just become an affiliate of Stanford University's Media X program. Unlike the MIT Media Lab, which is mostly housed in one building, Media X is more like a portal to the entire Stanford campus. The Media X team facilitates access to researchers and their projects that would be of interest to a particular affiliate. One of our first activities with the program is a new relationship with Dr. BJ Fogg of the Persuasive Computing Laboratory. BJ will be coming to AARP later next month to speak on computer-mediated behavior change.

And finally, to wrap a long view around all this activity, I've conspired with my co-worker Beth Mazur to engage the Global Business Network in a scenario planning project we're calling Web 2011. Scenario planning is a method of facilitating a small group of people with diverse perspectives to think about the multiple possible futures. The outcome for us will be four narrative scenarios about how older Americans will be using the Web in the year 2011 and beyond. We are conducting internal workshops in June with internal and external thought leaders, and the resulting scenarios will be released at a two-day conference at our National Event this fall. This effort will yield new insights which will help WSO's strategic planning, and the scenario stories should stimulate interesting conversation amongst the association's leadership.

Because I'll continue to be immersed in what is the best job I've ever had, as well as being a daddy at home, I can't guarantee that I'll post here any sooner than another month from now, but do keep an eye on my moblog where I'm able to post frequently during commuting time and lunch breaks.

I'll also add mention here of a very good Washington Post article on the current state of AARP.

Behold the Gates

This past Sunday we made the journey to see Christo and Jeanne-Claude's Gates in Central Park. We were in town to visit with Erica and Sam, and to make their engagement portrait. Our first sight of the Gates was from our taxi as it approached the park towards the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The museum was mobbed, eliminating any chance of viewing the Gates from the roof. After a lunch break at a diner on 82nd Street, we headed into the park by the egyptian gallery on the north side of the MET. The gently curving path was covered in a tunnel of saffron cloth and vinyl structure, which served as a dramatic introduction to the park-wide network of 7,500 gates.

With only enough time to make one trip across the park along the 85th Street Traverse, I wasn't able to spend as much time as would have liked reflecting on the Gates. But perhaps our short visit kept me from over-thinking this ephemeral display so I could enjoy it at a pre-rational level.

In addition to moblogging from the scene so Amy's parents could get a look from Ohio, I also took lots of photos. Indeed, many have remarked that the Gates will likely be the most photographed artwork. Most of the park's visitors had cameras that will, over the course of the 16 days that the Gates will be displayed, no doubt create millions of similar images and video. When the Gates are dismantled for recycling on February 28th, every visitor who took photos will carry into the future a piece of a collective memory of the project much larger than what the artist himself could possibly produce.

In a city full of large-scale constructions, the Christo's gift of human-scale gates gave everyone a chance to make art from art.

Here are some more photos from our visit to the Gates.

And some links:

• Christo page on the Making of the Gates
• Article in New York Magazine with a nice diagram
• National Geographic on Gates from space
• Arts Journal on the Gates
• Victor's photographs of people at the Gates

UPDATE 2/23: One other thing I didn't have time for while we were touring the Gates was to wait for a project volunteer to return with some of the 1,000,000 free sample swatches that are being given away. But sure enough, a search in eBay turned up plenty of them. I ended up using "buy now" to acquire a set of two swatches and postcards. Other items noted are Gates tote bags (made of the same nylon fabric) that were sold at the MET, baseball caps, metal bolts and plastic covers from the gates and a funny entry of Gates made from LEGO Duplo blocks which are selling for $5000. One shouldn't underestimate the ingenuity of native New Yorkers—I fully expect to see a mostly intact Gate on auction after the 28th. There are also enough of these orange fabric samples floating around now that artists will likely incorporate them into their own pieces.

Icy creations

We stopped in Halethorpe on our way home to Baltimore Friday night to behold our friend Bill's ice sculpture. He and his creation are pictured above in a time exposure. Bill snaked a garden hose to the top of his swing set and suspended the spray nozzle above his decomissioned Christmas tree. For 12 hours in last week's below freezing cold, he misted water over the tree, which grew a shell of beautiful crystaline knobs and spikes.

Bill left a string of colored lights in the tree, and with some jiggling after the ice formation, lit up the interior of the tree so that it could offer up some very pleasing nighttime close-ups.

I imagined other people have thought to do this too and hit Google. Sure enough, among other random examples, I found an artist in Fairbanks, Alaska named John Reeves who has created two ice sculptures using a segmented vertical water pipe rig and a specially-designed array of spray nozzles. The works are big.

The current ice wall, a more ambitious iteration of last year's, is, as of January 22, 2005, 97-feet tall and still growing in temperatures that go as low as 50 below. With the help of climbers from the Alaskan Alpine Club, the twin pipes at the core have been extended in 10-foot increments, and the nozzles have been spraying water almost non-stop since November 2004.

Last year's ice wall sculpture, titled Foxman's Raven, was built from October 2003 to April 2004, and ended up being 80 feet high, 140 feet long and 40 feet wide. Voids inside the sculture created ice caverns to explore. At its largest, the sculture weighed an estimated 45,000 pounds, and took a 106 degree day in July 2004 to melt completely away.

Reeves didn't embed lights in his works as Bill did, opting for some reason to just dump dyes on the ice to colorize the work a bit. Perhaps getting power to the spot was an issue, but for the next one, I hope they do add lights. Lighting the ice wall from within would dramatically showcase the spikey ice caverns.

A member of the club is documenting the project on the club's web site. Be sure to check back in the coming weeks for progress reports. The club has also collected an excellent page of other ice walls (used to train ice climbers) around the world.