I do not want to be a political person.

That said, the last few weeks, maybe months have been absorbing. Hillary disappeared, and with her my heart left the race. I needed to stop listening to NPR because I couldn’t feel the race anymore.

With her gone, my plans to vote also evaporated. I am not much of a voter. My vote is worth almost nothing. And more: I think there are more important and meaningful things someone can do than vote. Taking an hour of my time once a year to do something that is supposedly a right (though given the people on the street, and on the tv, and those who tell me how much this matters – it sounds less like a right and more like a forced action, which if I do not perform I should be excommunicated and then cut open with a thousand knives) in my opinion does not make an active or engaged citizen. Join a club.

But then even with my still incomplete thoughts on actually motivated and truly respectable citizens and the mindless voting sheep, I have decided to vote.

Mostly to appease Rob Simmons. He has been working so hard to convince people to vote that I believe I owe it to him, to do something that really was not very difficult for me, and really doesn’t help him at all even though he wants me to do so very much.

This is a decision I have come to accept, even though it goes against my voting for a candidate who I do not truly believe in. The old man is a politician, but I couldn’t vote for him because his alaskan wingwoman is just too crazy and shouldn’t be allowed to run any country, even though he was on my ballot three times. So my vote goes to a man who has assembled the most solid graphic design team I have ever seen. The vote really goes to Gotham, as much as it does to anyone.

As for the rest of my poster sized ballot, I tried to find information about the candidates on the internet. This approach mostly failed. So I did the best I could with what I knew. For the amendments & resolutions, I read each, and went with my snap judgment. I am rarely in North Tonawanda anymore anyway.

The best thing about all of this. Is after today, it is over, and I can go back to living as apolitically as I can, and if all goes well, by 2012 I won’t be in the country anyway.

It could have been terrible, but it was actually a good time.

This past Saturday, myself, Janice, and Amelia from CMU GSA headed up to Eden Hall Farm the newest acquisition of Chatham University. There we met up with Byron & Emily from Pitt, and Julie, Patrick, Dan, Tiffany, David, and Doug from Chatham. We had a good afternoon, grilled food, ate food, discussed grad studenty things. I am looking forward to working more with Pitt & Chatham, I think the last year has been good and I hope the collaborations continue. I believe Julie, Chatham’s new GSA president, is right in that continuing to improve the graduate student relationships within the city of Pittsburgh, will help keep young educated professionals in the city. Or, we can hope.

As for the Eden Hall Farm house, itself, you should check out the pictures (click photo above to see the whole set) was really great, I look forward to having more events there. It reminded me of my days back at RIT, and our LEAD retreats. The industrial kitchen, the large lodge type house. The only thing that didn’t quite fit was the right-out-of-There-Will-Be-Blood bowling alley in the basement. Which was amazing, and functional, and we bowled a little — though setting up the pins after every frame gets really tiresome. But there is just this right out of the past, creepy movie-set feel to the whole place, which in my mind makes it the perfect place to take graduate student leaders.

I am clearly a big fan of order.

So, as Danny and I had to present at IEEE VisWeek 2008: InfoVis (below), We thought we might as well make a weekend of it and hang out in Columbus.

So we stayed right downtown, and right across the street from the conference at the luxurious Red Roof Inn. And I say that sarcastically but the place was actually really nice and considering we had no room reservation until we walked into the lobby I think we did pretty well.

So we head up to the room to drop off our things, and as we walk into the room we notice they have left the microwave running for us. No seriously, the microwave was on. And on for some riduculous amount of time which may have been 13 minutes or 13 hours left, who knows. But the whole room smelled like a hairdryer had been running for too long.

So we turned that off, and left the microwave door open. And went out to explore the streets of Columbus. As we quickly learned, many exciting people hang out in Columbus, and many of them want to be photographed. We were twice (within fifteen minutes) approached by people who wanted us to take their picture. I don’t understand it. I just shoot the pictures.

The first man asked me to take his photograph, and then said he was a social worker, offering it up as a reason for his need to be photographed. Check.

Our second and more exciting subjects, asked us why we were taking pictures. Well, buildings? art? tourism? Then after checking to make sure we were not the po-lice they posed for us. Then after we took their pictures, they asked us what we were going to do with them. Here, we offered no answers … “umm, nothing?”

Right…

To see our photographs, click on my Nobel & High shot above for my full set, to see Danny’s click on his book lofts picture below for his full set.

We had dinner at Tony’s Italian Ristorante which I think I would only give three stars. The food was alright, but not spectacular, and probably not worth what we paid.

Then we went straight to the Book Loft. The Book Lofts are these old rowhouse type cottages that have all been merged together with seemingly just some saws and some bookshelves. The place is broken into thirty two rooms and there are maps in each room to help you find your way around as well as little yellow sticky notes on the floor to help you find your way out. It’s a maze. A maze of books. Heaven.

So I told Danny to cut me off at ten, and I think I only got nine! (And a stylish dark brown canvas bag so that I can advertize for them around Pittsburgh I suppose.)

Then we headed back to the hotel and we planning to you know, make some slides for our presentation the next morning, but instead got hungry and I convinced Danny we should go get a snack. Turns out I picked a restaurant that was, with no exaggeration twenty feet from the door of the hotel. I didn’t even need a coat! Flatiron Bar and Diner was a great pick. They specialize in southern, cajun/creole, and it was a neat building, good atmosphere, good food. Danny got the gumbo and I got fries covered in balsamic vinegar, red pepper flecks, and melted Vermont cheddar. So good. And my lips tingled with the spicyness.

Sunday, the first day of the conference, and the only day for Danny and I, ended up being pretty eventful. We checked out of our hotel. Walked across the street, put our stuff in the car, and then down went and saw some people from the Columbus Marathon. I wanted a shiny silver blanket.

We checked in at the InfoVis registration table, and they had our information so that went unexpectedly smoothly. We each received full copies of the proceedings, a conference DVD, and … that was really it. No real swag, I was hoping for a nice conference bag but not this time.

After wandering around the poster presentations for a bit (and deciding that they were all pretty badly designed, but a few had topics that could possibly be interesting) we noticed there was infact a spot for our poster. So we set that up and then decided to head out for lunch.

We ate at North Market which was really nice. I had the indian from Flavors of India (picked mostly based on their nice signage) and it was certainly up to standards. Danny and I finished putting together a few slides, and then went back to the conference.

We saw the art show, and then attended a session on “Visualization for the Masses,” including a Jeff Heer talk (on really old work), a pretty terrible presentation on some sort of circular system for showing poll results, and two good ones, one on museum displays and another entitled VisGets.

The final session of the day was a combination of one-minute intros to each of the posters, a review of the Art Show, curated by Golan Levin of CMU, and the InfoVis contest results. Robert Kosara introduced the InfoVis contest, the MERL dataset (which they thought was interesting), and then our submission, pictured right above this for those of you who forgot. As Danny and I were the ONLY submission to the contest (first place & last place! whatup) we were given a few minutes to talk about what we did, as you can see from the photo above. We also each got an award. And a publication. So I think it was worth it.

After this, Golan invited Danny & I, to dinner with Martin Wattenberg and Frank van Ham of IBM’s Visual Communications Lab. We had some great conversations about the state of IEEE InfoVis Week generally as a conference — including their decision to remove both the Art Show and the contest next year, replacing them with some sort of research showcase type exhibition. Only the future will tell how well that goes. We also talked about, among other things, CMU, our own research, what the ManyEyes team is up to, and the absence of designers at the conference.

That, was our quick trip to Columbus.

So much to post. Friday was fun. The cathedral is lit these days as part of the Pittsburgh Festival of Lights. I took some photos. Danny posted one. We also wandered around CMU at night, which was nice. We scared a guy who was making a bunkbed. We printed a poster for Marissa. Then we played Dr. Mario. End of Friday, more soon.

Last weekend I drove to he Akron-Canton Airport, picked up Katie who had flown in from Boston, and then we went to my Aunt Carol’s house to surprise my grandmother for her 89th birthday. While the rest of the family knew, it was at some point decided to make this a surprise for my grandmother.

When we walked in the door, we were thankfully not met with a heartattack, just a series of questions. Why are you here? Aren’t you supposed to be in Boston? Why aren’t you in Boston? How did you get here? Why are you both here? Did you drive her here?

After the, what we are told was not surprise, but, shock subsided we had a wonderful weekend, with all five of the grandchildren and all six great-grandchildren. Including fun games such as stick the hat on the turkey and fishing for skittles. Pictures are here.

You need to click on this to see the full size image.

A bit ago I put together a script (details on how to do this in a later post) to keep track of the number of e-mails in my inbox. I keep e-mails in my inbox in Mail.app until I have resolved them (responded, read a paper, performed an action, etc.) keeping them as a bit of a to-do list.

I am really interested right now in passive or ambient indicators. This is an application. Especially because I believe that the amount of e-mail in my inbox is a good indicator of my current busyness, or generally how hectic I am at any given time. I plan to make this a bit better, put it up on the web as more of a sparkline, and also probably a more abstracted level of busyness. I am thinking the scale will be something like:

• 0-20 emails — So Relaxed That This Can Never Happen
• 20-50 emails — Doing Good, Time To Find More Work
• 50-110 emails — Average Busyness Insues, If It Can Wait, Let It Wait
• 110-200 emails — Very Hectic. Too Much To Do. Don’t Expect To See Patrick.
• >200 emails — Might Be Dead, Might Wish He Was.

(Note this idea was borrowed from Dave Shea’s Stress-O-Meter on his contact page at BrightCreative. However his functions differently, it is a constantly increasing counter, that he resets when he has free time, the more he remembers to reset it, the less he has to do, is the model behind it.)

So, I am behind. I know. It has been a crazy, busy semester and will continue to be – more on everything that has been going on soon. But I wanted to catch you up with the weekends, before I begin my travel spree which will last for the rest of this month.

The last weekend of September, Katie, Phluff, and Kevin all came to visit. It was great. They got in Friday night, and we all (plus Danny) went out to dinner and talked exclusively about human breast milk as a possible supplement for cow’s milk. (Just as PETA suggested the breast is best)

Then Saturday, a bunch of people came over and we had grilled cheese and tomato soup and played Bananagrams and Settlers of Catan, and most importantly chalk-muraled the wall directly outside the windows of my living room. I have provided a reference diagram to explain what I mean by the wall outside of my windows and how there is a strange little enclosed type patio space which is not really useful.

So the chalk mural, which can be seen up above, was placed on the wall labeled “chalk goes on this wall” to cover up a giant blue rectangle which was seemingly painted there for no purpose. And it was a fun thing to do at a party. Now out of my living room windows I get to see beautiful art everyday. The rain doesn’t seem to wash it away.

Anyway go explore the photos.

• Danny’s Set which are really good.
• Kevin’s Set which has the best full shot of the mural (the one I used above).
• And then I don’t really have a set – but there are a bunch of photos from their visit that were taken on my camera and they are around this part of my photostream

The thing about undiscvered countries, is that they are not called as such until after they have been located, charted, and written about. That is to say when you hear about an undiscovered country it has actually already been discovered. What people really mean is that the country was undiscovered until they came along and decided they had found it, because they rock exploration, hard-core.

So here we see some discovery, and a bit of cold war love, and we have all sorts of Klingons over for dinner, and we see a cast that just might be a bit older, and we can enjoy it all. It is a fair treatment. An even conclusion, of sorts.

And like we have been told: even movie, good movie. Carry on.

The girl on the right in the above picture is Kerri, who I became friends with when my sister met her on the first day of kindergarten. Kerri and I have been friends nearly as long, something like sixteen years, two thirds of my life.

This past Christmas, as we always do at Christmas time, all of my North Tonawanda friends came over, and Kerri told us that her sister Beth had had surgery and was recovering. Her twenty-seven year old sister, above on the left, had brain surgery. Brain surgery because she had realized something was strange with her vision, and within days was being operated on after an MRI showed a brain tumor.

Now, ten months later, an easy recovery was not to be, instead five surgeries, a radiation program, memory loss, and now heart problems have followed. Here is the whole story, written by Kerri’s mom, Lois.

This past weekend, the Friends of Beth Hayes held a fundraising banquet for her, back in NT, which I could not attend. However, I have to applaud everyone who is supporting Beth, and the amount of community support she has received as she goes through this, and to tell Beth that we are all thinking about her and wishing the very best to the older sister, of my oldest friend.

Donations are also being accepted on Beth’s behalf here.

I watched this movie months ago. Seriously we watched all of these with in the span of maybe two weeks, not the six months it has seemed. But clearly this brought on such a hard review block that I had to stop even thinking about movies since June. That or I was busy.

But really, what a mistake this movie was. Much like the photograph above where we see god attacking Kirk who is being pulled violently backwards by the stage wire, clearly visible. But really, the final frontier is god? Let’s just pretend this didn’t happen and move on.

This semester I am TAing Privacy Policy, Law & Technology taught by Lorrie Cranor (my advisor). If you have some free time or are looking for a class to take and you want to explore the depths of privacy law, the philosophical roots of privacy, and the way technology can and should shape privacy in the information age, then I expect to see you this afternoon.

Sidenote: I am really excited to be TAing, it has been a while (haven’t done this since City as Text with Jessica) and since I basically love teaching, it has been way too long. I will likely post more about this as interesting things come up, the semester progresses, and the students start working on – hopefully impressive – projects.

Rick’s Wedding – Set One.

Katie’s Wedding – Set Two.

Words will supervene soon as scheduling sanctions constructing constructive commentary.

Web web Web web web web web web Charlotte’s Web web web web web web webby web web web we. we. web. web. web… web web web web web web. spiderweb spiderweb. world wide web world wide web web world wide web web web web web.

Blog blog blog blog blog blog blog blog blog blog blog blog blog blog blog blog blog blog blog blog blog blog blog, blog, blog blog blog blog blog LOG (whale) log log blog blog blog blog BLOG blog blog blog blog blog blog blog. blog.

weblog.

oh. i get it.

The Symposium on Usable Privacy & Security which is hosted by the Carnegie Mellon Usable Privacy & Security Lab, which I am a member of and which my advisor Lorrie is the director of, is occurring right now.

This year we are also currently hosting our own blog, documenting the sessions, discussions, and events at the conference. It can be viewed here so you can go take a look at how I have been spending my week. Tomorrow I will put up the poster we presented, till then you will have to live with the blog and some photos here.

I am giving this movie a 3.5 because it wasn’t bad, and I have of late been on a streak of really bad documentaries. Or it seems that way. Or I don’t like documentaries. I don’t know.

This movie is about four people who work as superheroes on the hollywood walk of fame. They stand there all day, all year round, and take photographs with tourists. They do accept tips, sometimes more forcefully than the tourists would prefer. Superman is absolutely obsessed; Wonder Woman actually seemed sort of normal, but can’t quite pull off being an actress; Batman was old, did sort of look like George Clooney, and had rage issues; The Hulk used to be homeless, but actually does pretty well for himself now. It is interesting enough to watch, and done well, a bit artsy, that was nice.

There is another movie coming out, supposedly this year, called The Reinactors, it is the same movie, again. The same Superman & Batman are in it, so that is pretty exciting. It is like a sequel to a documentary, except made by different people, and really isn’t that much further along in time, so it will likely be the exact same thing again. So maybe I shouldn’t watch it. Or maybe I should, and then tell you all which one is better.

Each year the IEEE holds VisWeek 2008, a series of three co-located conferences: Visualization, InfoVis, and VAST (Visual Analytics in Science & Technology), this year in Columbus, Ohio; October 19th – 24th. Also each year all three of these conferences host visualization conferences, which I of course always think about entering but then never actually do.

Except this year. This past spring Peter Landwehr started up a reading group on Large Scale Visualizations, which slowly shifted – I expect mostly because of me, to a group more on information visualization generally, and at some point we decided to form a group to create an entry for the VAST contest (more on this later). And at the same time as that progressed I convinced Danny that he wanted to spend some time on the InfoVis contest.

The InfoVis contest this year (details here,) focused around over a year’s worth of data from the Mitsubishi Electric Research Lab. They released all this data to the public to allow them to mine and visualize whatever they so chose; and the dataset was also chosen for the 2008 contest.

Danny and I eventually got ourselves together and over the last few weeks put together the following poster. (For a higher resolution version, see my portfolio which has been updated additionally this exists on flickr. )

I expect this is a very different direction than most of the people who entered the contest went in, which may or may not be good, and I have no idea how it will be judged. Either way though, for the amount of time we had, I am quite satisfied with our solution. They contest pages infer they are looking for stories from the data and I think as an overall story, to someone who has never seen this dataset, or worked with sensor data before, it is a nice introduction.

The poster and all of its charts and tables were created in some combination of Apple’s iWork suite and Processing ( processing.org ), the data was mined and refined using some Python and mostly Java.

Now though, the information visualization time of the year is over and it is time to get back to real work. Cell phones and privacy and student organization websites and swappable policy interfaces and paper reading and user testing and rule specification interfaces and other secret and exciting things.

I don’t mean Pittsburgh. Though maybe in some very indirect way I am benefiting the Pittsburgh community by reviewing its fine dining (and other) establishments. (Like maybe as a city becomes more popular on Yelp, the internet elite will flock here, naming it a technologically savvy mecca for the young thus infusing the city with fresh new yuppie-hipster blood) I have used Yelp for quite a while, probably a few years, to help me find places to go, especially while traveling. On the roadtrip last summer Yelp decided most of our food choices and even occasionally how we should spend our evenings.

Two weeks ago while I was in Houston visiting Amy and for Kelli’s wedding I actually broke down and (finally!) created myself a Yelp account. I then proceeded to review a number of the places Amy & I liked on the road trip, as well as a bunch of the places I commonly eat around Pittsburgh.

So, head over to http://pgage.yelp.com and read about what I like to eat, or even better become an active web citizen and sign up for your own account. I am sure you have opinions about food; and what better way is there to force your own tastes onto others than by participating in content creation on the internet.

Someone over at Nintendo Wii-land decided that it would be a good idea to have each console have a sixteen digit unique ID. So my Wii can meet your Wii and they can become lovely little friends and play all their games together. Oh wait. No, such a system is sadly not to be. Each game also has its own twelve digit code which must be input to play that game with your friend. And not only that but it seems most (all?) games require it to be done by both parties, so I need your code and you need mine, a one-directional code entry does not seem to prompt any sort of confirmation ability.

Getting past all of the inanity of the system however (when a perfectly good console ID exists), it seems it will be a necessity to share each individual game code with everyone and the best way to do that is to copy Patrick Wagstrom’s method of posting all his Wii codes on a page dedicated to … all his Wii codes. Thus, in my copy a great idea way, I have created my own list of Wii codes for those of you with Wii’s to friend me up.

I spent the last (several) days in Houston, and Katy, Texas. First visiting Amy, really down in Webster/Clear Lake by NASA, hanging out at her apartment and the pool; down to Galveston for a day; viewing The Incredible Hulk at a theater where a waitress (actually like three waitresses and a waiter) served us dinner during the movie; shopping for a wedding present, some legos at the newly opened Baybrook Mall Store, a tie, and of course I bought a few books, before we drove up to Katy, TX. It is there that my eldest paternal cousin, Kelli Johnson, married Justin Davis. (The photo above can be clicked to see a bunch of photographs from the wedding, or just click here for the full set. ) It is also there that Amy, Katie, and I saw Wall•E, and I got to see much of my family and other such things.

However, I am glad to be back in Pittsburgh, catching up on e-mails and meetings and work related things, as well as friends here. Now I just need to get some sort of functioning version of Reading to the Rain up so that I can post the seven books I read on the trip.