Jeff Crouse Industries Blog

Do you want to work on the cutting edge of telematic manufacturing?

Do you want to earn Lindens by repeatedly pressing a button?

Do you want a small plot of land outside an industrial factory to build a hovel of your very own?

Are you available for 2-3 hours a day, from January 17th to January 27th?

Then contact me immediately! jobs@doublehappinessjeans.com

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So I go to check my mail one last time before I go to sleep and what do I find?

Scary, right? Talk about nightmare-inducing. Talk about wishing I had LeechBlocked gmail after 1am.

But if you really want to look like ol’ Slambert, you need this.

Stephanie and I will be presenting a workshop called “Make Your Own Wearable Photoshop Clothing” this Saturday at Eyebeam. This is kind of a warmup for Invisible Threads at Sundance - we want to have a bunch of people print out some patterns so that we have plenty of experience when the pressure is on.

I wanna make a shirt like this, but with me instead of a weird painter guy with an insincere smile.

Date: December 1, 2007
Address: 540 West 21st Street
Materials: $20
Times: 1.30PM, 4PM
Length: 2 hours
Description: Eyebeam’s new large-format printer is primed and ready for you to create your own fun-infused fashion. You will be provided with ready-made templates, but the rest is up to you. Gather images from the net, take pictures with our digital cameras, and put it all together in Photoshop to create a design. Creative support will be in abundance to help with ideas, such as mapping Youtube stills onto a jacket, or your favorite chair onto a pair of pants. Printing will take approximately 10 to 15 minutes once the design is done.

The next Dirt Party is coming up soon, and this time, the theme is “Educational Video/Museum Exhibit”, since it will be at the Natural History Museum.  My wonderful associate Nicole made this video out of some clips that I found.  This is the aesthetic that we will be going for, but it will all be live, of course.

Eyebeam Senior Fellow Jeff Crouse is looking for interns to help with several web-based projects at varying levels of completeness. YouThreebe is a web-based tool that allows users to make and share triptychs of YouTube videos. It was launched about 6 months ago, but I have a long list of awesome new features that I want to implement, including an “export” tool, better buffering, volume control, and more subscription features. DeleteCity is a WordPress plug-in that scans and caches UGC sites periodically, looking for deleted content and automatically posting that content to a blog and emailing the deleter, asking why it was deleted. The problem is, it doesn’t exist yet. Earthify is a service that maps Craigslist posts onto Google Earth. It was launched a year ago, but since then, some problems have surfaced that need fixing. Plus, there are similarly awesome features that I want to add to it, such as Google Maps compliance and scraping modules for other sites like Gumtree, going.com and Menupages. Fartsy is an artist statement generator that uses human-generated grammars and several different APIs to construct personalized artist statements based on user-provided keywords. It has not yet been launched because it is missing a few key interface features. Fartsy is based on a markup language that I created called Dynamic Text Markup Language, which will also be used in a few other upcoming projects.

These projects utilize (or *will* utilize) stuff such as the PHP, CSS, JavaScript, XML (RSS and KML - the Google mapping language), YouTube API, the QuickTime API for Java, the Flickr API, the WordPress Plugin API, screen scraping (hacking public data for your own purposes), web spidering, and more more more! If you do not already have these skills, you will be taught, but some experience with web development is preferred. If any of these projects interest you, please email me with a resume and why you want to work on one or more of the projects.

Come Out and Play is a festival that “offers a chance to explore new styles of games and play.” Dave and I submitted two proposals to the festival this year, including one called “City Ball”, a baseball-type game played throughout an entire city at 1/100 speed, using GPS-enabled phones and a cyber-ball. Dave submitted the other proposal, “Bocce Drift”, as sort of an afterthought. He even included an email saying that we would much rather do CityBall, but if they want us to do both, we could.

Make a long story short, Jeff.

Ok, Bocce got in, City Ball didn’t.

Bocce Drift is a no-tech variant of Bocce that Dave, Dan Klainbaum, John Goetzinger and I used to play back at Georgia Tech when we got tired of working on our theses. The essential difference between Bocce Drift and regular bocce is that a new round begins where the jack landed in the last round. This has the effect of moving a game around an area in an interesting way. Being on rough, unpredictable terrain, players must learn to use obstacles and geography to their advantage. And that’s about it.

So, we were a bit surprised that the conference organizers wanted us to fly to Amsterdam on our own dime to play a slightly modified version of bocce. But so be it. I want to go to Amsterdam, and this seems like a barely-passable excuse. In the meantime, Dave and I are going to put a little more effort into improving the game so that it is more interesting for us to create.

It’s easy to forget that you are in the middle of the desert in Las Vegas. Our goal at the moment is to remind ourselves. And not just by making the daring journey across the strip from one casino to another. We’re doing it right. We’re strapping as much water to our backs as we can carry, renting a car, and driving out into the void until we find some secret military bases. Right? They’re out there. And we will be too. We might shoot machine guns. They have those here too. It’s time for all of this CSI Las Vegas that I have rattling around in my brain to pay off.

We came to this godforsaken oasis for our much needed first corporate retreat, and to attend “the Largest Underground Hacking Convention in the World”, Defcon 15. I came 3 years ago and I thought it was lovely. Lots of delightfully nerdy folks talking about delightfully nerdy stuff, and having delightfully nerdy parties. This year I learned about Tor, SQL injection, the inherent insecurity of widgets, police procedure, the Z-phone, among other things.

Sadly, all of the Defcon folk are now packing up and heading home. Even sadder, arriving in their place are members of the Tau Kapa Episilon fraternity from all over the world. A noticeable change, to say the least. If you aren’t familiar with real hacker culture, picture something between “The Crow”, “Hackers”, and “Office Space”. If you aren’t familiar with frat culture, watch “Animal House”. Now picture these two groups colliding amid nickel slots and blackjack tables in the run-down, surreal landscape of the Riviera hotel at the far north end of the Las Vegas strip. I was kind of daydreaming about a West Side Story clash between the two in the elevator today while listening to a group of buffed-up TKEs try to decide whether they would be getting free drinks at the Hooters Casino tonight. It would start with a TKE accidentally tripping over the cord to one of the Hackers Wardriving devices. After some posturing and shit-talking by the DCers (which would probably revolve mainly around the TKEs moms reputation on the #skankyho IRC channel), the TKEs would administer severe beatings, encountering little resistance (”Minus 100 hit points - need food badly!”, one of them would scream), until the TKEs would get distracted and try to invite a group of passing strippers back to their rooms for a brunchtime beerbong, only to find that, by the time they got there, they had been locked out of their rooms due to a computer glitch, and the national TKE website had been DOS’d into oblivion. Back in he elevator, in response to the Hooters question, they decided: “we goddamn well better get free drinks.”

This morning I walked down to the concierge to ask where I would find the nearest internet cafe because the internet in our room wasn’t working. The man immediately outed me as “one of those computer security guys” and accused me of bringing the network down myself. I congratulated him on his shrewd observational skills and intuition and proceeded to wonder around in the 100 degree heat for an hour, failing to find anywhere with a connection with witch I could check on the disaster unfolding in Second Life.

One of the great things about Dreamhost is that they give you ridiculous amounts of hard drive space and bandwidth because they know that 60% of the members aren’t going to use anywhere near as much as they are allotted. For instance, I currently have 2.91TB of bandwidth and 291.2GB of storage, and besides the time when I accidentally left Jonah BC’s bandwidth testing application pointing to jeffcrouse.info, I have never even come close to approaching my limit. Well, this project will add me to the 40% that do.

Delete City will periodically scan Flickr, YouTube, LiveJournal, and download huge random swaths of content. Maybe like 20 gigs of content a day, with an associated username and/or email address. Each successive download, it will compare what it downloaded that day to what it downloaded the day before, and if anything is missing, it will add it to the DeleteCity blog and automatically email the user whose content is missing, asking why it is no longer there. Any responses it receives will be added to the post. I haven’t worked out exactly how much this has the potential to piss people off, but I’ll get back to you with those calculations as soon as possible.

Below is the video for the project that Stephanie, Andrew and I have been working on in Second Life for the past few months and just submitted to the New Frontiers category at Sundance.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NbHI6k22hDM]

This morning I woke up to an email from Andrew, telling me that our factories have been disassembled and we have been banned from our land. Something was afoot. So when I was finally able to log on, I find 3 messages waiting for me:

Fithin Exodus: (Saved Fri Aug 3 11:10:54 2007) You have 24 hours to respond to this inquiry to give any details on matters that took place on your Land within Devlynn City Control on Wednesday Aug 1st 2007, if no information is obtained from you concerning this matter, then the City Managment will have no other choice then to find you in violation of the City Covenant

Fithin Exodus: (Saved Fri Aug 3 11:05:59 2007) This is to inform you that a formal complaint has been placed with Devlynn City Management concerning violations of the City Covenant concerning a direct violation of the Harrasement Clause within the Covenant, A formal investigation is being held to gather information about the Attack by yourself or a guest on your island within the City. If it is found that the attack did take place by yourself or a guest on your land, Your will be found in direct violation of the City Covenant, and action may be taken to include but not limited to, Reclaiming of Property and banishment from the City Property. As noted in the Covenant Devlynn City has a Zero Tolerance Stand Point for Attacks taking place on City Property or Within City Owner/Operated Lands.

Fithin Exodus: (Saved Sun Aug 5 16:28:55 2007) This is to inform you that, as of 8-5-2007 you have been found in Violation of the City Covenant, A Member of your Group & Guest on your Property violated the Devlynn City Covenant by openly firing a weapon at another resident on Devlynn CIty Property. Due to this formal complaint, and your refusal to respond to the Violation your land is being reclaimed, all items are being returned, and you and your group members will be banned from the City for Direct Violation of the City Covenant that you agreed to be bond to upon purchase of the Land within Devlynn City. Have a nie day. Devlynn CIty Management

What the hell does this mean? How can you get shot in Second Life and why does anyone care? Something weird is going on here, and luckily we have an undercover team who is currently working on finding out. But fear not - whatever happens, it will be in the upcoming Double Happiness documentary, “Indentured Cybertude in Happyland - the story of the first Cyberspace Sweatshop”.