Tag: reflections

Buy Nothing Day is upon us again. As usual, it’s being held in the US on Black Friday and elsewhere either on Friday or the day after.

I’m a supporter of BND and try to celebrate each year. Unfortunately, it usually ends up turning into, "buy everything you would buy today the day before day." This arrangement is certainly more convenient for those who like to eat but perhaps not entirely in the spirit of things.

Access and borrowing privileges at Harvard libraries is one perk of being an MIT graduate student. Actually taking advantage of the privileges of course is a borderline Kafka-esque quest that involves 5 forms, several databases, two universities, a rather impressive MIT libraries official stamp, and three geographically separated offices on opposite ends of Cambridge. Only once all those obstacles are triumphantly overcome can one go through the two card swipes and/or manual verifications necessary to get into the Widener stacks.

The webpage makes it sound easy and, in all fairness, nothing about the process is threatening or difficult. While the libraries are worth the effort, it is long and tortuous: by no means for the bureaucratically faint of heart.

The high point of the process, in my opinion, is picking up one’s ID from the Harvard ID office. The ID office is appropriately located on the ninth floor of a building that requires ID to enter.

In my computer supported collaborative work seminar, we were discussing the design of table-top systems for synchronous collocated collaboration. There was a bit of conversation on the problems and strategies with images projected onto the table (e.g., people getting in the way of the beam). There seemed to be consensus that most simple and effective solution was projectors mounted directly above the table.

I pointed out that, in this context, straight down was the most straightforward.

I think "Cilia" is a pretty name for a girl. My biologist friends disagree. As far as I’m concerned, it sure beats Flagella.

Kiko, Micah, and I ate at Legal Seafood’s yesterday and had this little message on the bottom of our bill:

PLANNING A REHERSAL DINNER? MAKE YOUR ONCE-IN-A-LIFETIME EXPERIENCE UNIQUE. JOIN US.

Where I come from, rehearsals are things are things that, by definition, happen more than once. When they do happen, it’s usually with an a between the e and r.

Of course, I have to respect Legal for so succinctly combining a redundancy and a contradiction on the same topic.

Last night I was out in Dublin and, due to the length that the night dragged on, I invited my friend to crash in the extra bed in my Hotel room in central Dublin rather than return to his place in the suburbs which, at that point, may well have been impossible.

When someone came by to clean the room in the morning, they noticed both beds full and reported this to the Hotel managment who called me up to say that they knew the room had been "double occupancy" last night and that they wanted to know if it would "single occupancy" the next night.

That’s a pretty strange way to talk if you think about it. There is an extra person in my room and the Hotel complains that my room has somehow changed into a new state that they are unhappy with.

I suppose this circuitous way of speaking is designed to avoid any potentially embarrassing discussion about who the extra body is and why they are there. That said, this type of obtuse conversation is difficult for patrons to puzzle through immediately after being awoken.

Dublin, of course, is great.

If one is in a public or shared restroom at a urinal or in a stall and the person at the adjacent urinal or in the adjacent stall sneezes, is it appropriate to say "bless you" or "gesundheit" or another culturally appropriate post-sneeze statement? Is it appropriate to say nothing at all?

It’s cold season at the lab and the fact that I do not know the answers to these questions is becoming a source of stress.

Obelisks have been on my mind recently.

I think it started with this suggestion I made to help use up some space in the newly remodeled "Alley" (the new home of the Electronic Publishing Group at the Media Lab):

I think we would be wise to purchase and display this very high quality seven foot Large Reprocessed Garden Obelisk in the Alley.

In addition to the happiness that the presence of its simple geometric shapes would bring us, it would provide us with both a great conversation starter and an undeniable symbol of our power during Media Lab teas.

Good morning Freud.

There was some confusion about my recent post on the Melnick book on manhole covers from people who were unfamiliar with the term "manhole." One way to describe a manhole cover is a sewer lid. However, manhole covers are employed to cover a variety of holes that men (and women) explore for a variety of purposes. I prefer to think of a manhole cover as exactly what an obelisk isn’t.

My country’s national intelligence is now in the hands of a man so powerful that he is not publicly referred to with even a fake last name.

Of course, it’s nice to know that as mysterious as he is, "Jose" is a maximum of three shorts degrees of separation from me on the social networking graph. Add this to the list of benefits that come from knowing Nicholas.

One benefit of having a blog is that you don’t have tell the same stories over and over to all of your friends and acquaintances.

One drawback is that you can’t.

I have a sore throat today and I asked Mika if she had any Fisherman’s Friends. She asked what they were. I said "fish."

I was making a joke. After all, calling a fish a "fisherman’s friend" implies a relationship that is beyond the realm of even dysfunctional friendships. Of course, this also makes one wonder about the term "friend" in the context of a throat lozenge that hardly fairs any better than the fish in the same company.

I was talking to Eben Moglen a couple days ago. In addition to saying many insightful and inspirational things, Eben used the word "physical" metaphorically.

I am looking for suggestions on sensible way to use the word "metaphor" metaphorically.

While some people think it’s fine to soak their contacts in water overnight, it is my opinion than water is no solution.

In a paper on computer supported collaborative work I was reading recently, I read this line in the opening paragraph:

This has partly to do with the fact that in recent years the importance of understanding human computer interact ions in social and cultural context has increasingly been acknowledged.

I spent longer than I should have trying to figure out what "interact ions" were before I realized that there had simply been an extra space inserted into "interactions."

I still think "interact ions" sounds like an excellent Media Lab project.