Apartment 2D

Holy crap on a cross. Lots has happened since last I wrote. For one, I am now the proud tenant of Apartment 2D in a nice, new building in Williamsbrg, Brooklyn – the exciting climax of a hellish week of packing, driving, and not sleeping. We’re mostly settled in, and I will be posting pictures of the new place on Flickr very soon.

I also have a shit-ton of projects in the pipes, as usual.

Current Projects

Hit! or Sh!t
Work is ostensibly underway on the new and improved Hit! or Sh!t, but the going is slow. I spent several days before I went to Atlanta retooling the site to use the same class structure that is used in the AMFPHP server. I realize this probably means next to nothing to most people, but it’s all part of my effort to imitate the MCV structure in Ruby on Rails in my PHP projects. This makes it much easier for outside developers (such as Jamie Wilkinson and Devin Hunt, the Hit! or Sh!t super team) to come in and make stuff happen on the site.

I also started using phpDocumentor, the Javadoc equivalent for PHP, and I am happy with the results. It has forced me to be more diligent about commenting my code, which is always good when there is more than one person working on a project.

MTV is being a bit shady about future plans for Hit! or Sh!t, but that doesn’t change our goals or schedule too much. They’ve told us flat out that they can’t allocate any more resources to the project at the moment, which is fine with me because our contract stated that we could only be held to the 2 month deadline if we received the resources that we needed. Now we have a bit more leeway, which is desperately needed.

Fartsy.org (previously: the artist statement generator)
Progress has been slow but steady on the Artist Statement Generator. I’ve made a slightly more user-friendly interface, and next week I will work to make the grammar a little better and the construction a little less formulaic. And now that I have moved to Dreamhost for my private server, I have the PHP5 environment that I need to make it live, so a working version should be available soon.

Pocket Dirt (an offshoot of Dirt Party)
During my short visit to Atlanta, Dave and I completed the Ars Electronica proposal for Pocket Dirt, which is the mobile version of the Dirt Party, which I blogged about a few weeks ago. But rather than reading me ramble on about it, why not kick back and watch a 10 minute video?

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEwcq4BX2X4]

As a disclaimer, I’d like to say that I am far from a video editing expert. We threw this video together in one day, and we were laboring under the impression that the video had to be 10 minutes long, so I apologize for the bullshitting at the end.

Anyway, moving on.

Stop Work Day is the monthly meeting at Eyebeam where all of the fellows and residents talk about what they are doing. It’s exactly like show and tell, except that we are all in our 20s and 30s. So at the last Stop Work Day, I gave a little spiel about the Dirt Party and how awesome it could be. At that point, it was still a “what-if” project. Just an idea I had been toying with for a while. But immediately after my presentation, Evan Roth of the GRL approached me about a class that he is going to teach at Parsons called Internet Famous. The class revolves around a yet-to-be-built application that calculates your Internet Fame index based on several sites around the web. They are very protective of the idea, so I’m not going to say any more about it, but suffice to say, it has a lot in common with Dirt Party, and we are going to try to combine our efforts to make both projects even awesomer than they would be separately. Stay tuned for more awesomeness from this direction.

FeedBlast (previously OPMLove)
I am about to post my Rhizome proposal for FeedBlast, the project that I’ve been dreaming about for a while now, so stay tuned for that. Posted here is a little collection of logos that I put together as inspiration for the logo that the talented Jerry Juarez is going to make for the intro sequence.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fr8TYxd9qbU]

Also while in Atlanta, I was able to meet with Jason Freeman, a professor at the Music Department at Georgia Tech and creator of the iTunes Signature Maker. He gave me a crash course on the Quicktime API for Java. This will be an essential part of the FeedBlast application.

Earthify
I’ve set my sights on menupages.com for the next Earthify script. However, with my discovery of ScrAPI and the gloriously easy scraping that it allows, I am now considering moving to Ruby with the entire project. As a result (and because of the Internet Famous project mentioned above), I have been studying Ruby in my free time. It’s a very interesting language with lots of new syntactical peculiarities, but I think I am getting the hang of it.

Future Projects

Second Life/Overheard In New York Machinima mashup
My good friend Nate might have fond the missing piece of the Overheard in New York-inspired podcast. He has been involved with a few machinima projects at Georgia Tech, headed up by the delightfully german professor Michael Nitsche. I was lamenting to him that the thing that makes the OHINY bits funny is the fact that they are so out of context. If you knew what had come before and after the overheard remarks, it would probably just be another banal remark. And for some reason, this seemed like a dead-end to me in terms of making it into a podcast.

So I was sitting there complaining to Nate, and he started telling me about some machinima stuff he was doing, and the answer came to me. The absurdity of many of the settings and characters in Second Life is the perfect compliment to the absurdity of OHINY posts.

This morning I was also reading the wonderful site whatshouldisay.com – the so-called “metafilter of giving advice”. People post their problems and then other people who have had the same problem write in with advice as to what the person should do. So I was just reading along when I come across this post

A few days ago, my girlfriend came home early from work. I wasn’t expecting her, so when she came in to the apartment…

It gets much worse from there, so you’ll have to click to read the rest.

So I decide it would be funny if my girlfriend told a few of her friends that I was the one who had made that post, and that she was completely crushed and confused. Unfortunately for me, my girlfriend has some gullible friends, and before I knew it, three of her friends were disparately trying to console her and I was the biggest asshole in the world.

Anyway, that is beside the point. The point is that I think that these posts would also make great machinima re-enactments in SecondLife. I can imagine cutting to one avatar, re-enacting whatever horrible thing he is writing in to ask for advice about, and then to several other avatars who either scold or offer advice to him. I think it will be great fun.

Google Docs synchronizer
I need a tool that synchronizes all of your Google Documents and spreadsheets to a folder on your local machine. Maybe I will make one.

Hit! or Sh!t for Feeds
In my ongoing effort to streamline my information intake, I decided that I would like to abstract Hit! or Sh!t so it can be implemented in many contexts. The first thing I want to do is implement it for feeds. The idea is that there is a script that you run your RSS feeds through, and it does 2 things.

1. It adds two buttons at the bottom where you can vote on the feed item.
2. Based on how you have rated feed items, it re-sorts your feed items and puts the feed items that will interest you most at the top, and filters out ones that you definitely won’t like.

It’s like a social recommendation system for RSS feeds.

HopStop distance map

In a recent episode of This American Life, a Chicago man was talking about his recent move to New York. New Yorkers, he said, only like to talk about 2 things: subway routes and cell phone reception. And god forbid I betray the stereotype.

So, my proposal is to create a map of New York where users input their location and their transportation preferences. Based on those parameters, the map warps itself so that the distances reflect travel time accorgding to HopStop.com, my new favorite site. HopStop is kind of like GoogleMaps or MapQuest, except that it tells you how to get around New York using your feet, the subway, and busses. If it weren’t for HopStop, I probably never would have taken a bus in New York.