vanderwal.net

Two New Categories that May Have not been Noticed

In yesterday’s post (A Rainy Virtual Walk Sparks Reading) I had a couple friends reach out today and comment that there was a new category, Calm :: Category :: vanderwal.net, that appeared. This is correct, I added “Calm” as a new category (today I went back and added it to past posts were it applied as well, a few more may be added as I discover the need).

But, I also made another addition in categories and used it on yesterday’s post as well, Ambience :: Category :: vanderwal.net.

The Two New Categories Have Long Been Central as Perspectives

The idea and ideal of calm has been something central that I realized I seek and have noticed for more than a couple of decades (and in reality, much longer). In 2000 I had a moment where this really struck me as I was leading a skunkworks / innovation project, but also writing code and coordinating the design to code, data interactions, and interoperability to other services. There was a lot going on and it needed focus. I hadn’t noticed that my desk phone had been quite for months. The assistant to the Executive Director came into our office to find me and apologize that somehow my phone number had been routed to the bureau’s fax number. I no longer had a working phone at my desk and hadn’t had one for months.

The apology came with a promise to get a phone working for me again. I realized the focus and lack of extra disruption this provided me with a calm environment to get things done. I asked for a promise to not turn the phone back on. My preferred method of communication was instant message, which I would read and reply to when I cleared my head of what I was concentrating on or email as an alternative. The phone ringing meant I should drop what I’m doing and respond.

But, I had long been aware of the need for calm environments. I like the loud, chaotic, and erratic, but in limited doses that have a known end. I learned early that severe silence also is a trigger alert for the brain for trouble. There needs to be a little something, but often something minimal so one can focus where they need to focus.

Calm and Atmospheric Ambience as a Criteria

I’ve long had a preference for calm interfaces and interaction models in design. I tend to push things out that scream for attention. But, with user testing I’ve found most people get distracted for heavy motion interfaces that are there to wow, but the motion isn’t the focus, it is the content that goes with it, which utterly fails at designing for use. This is often from people who don’t understand good design, nor what a product should actually do as the product’s purpose.These are basics, not good to haves.

For years I’ve had my devices with the sound off, or a light ambient sound that is just noticeable in the background. I may have something in the background playing as music or atmospherics (like the background sound of a damp Paris walk for a few hours or a calm cafe). That ambience is akin to calm, but also provides something that is in the background and not screaming for attention. It is an atmospheric layer that can mute or numb the jarring cacophony.

When I’m writing to capture things as notes or writing to understand things a little light ambient sound helps. But, when getting to the honing of that output I need the focus on that task at hand. One of my workflow passes for things I write often goes through iA Writer app, which I bring up a fair amount, a it is focussed on your words you are writing. It is an interface with a calm interface, but can fade to your words you are writing and little more, or further fade further to the line you are writing in context of a few lines around it. The calmness and ambient focus pull everything else away.

There is a kindred relationship between calmness and ambience / ambient environments that pull one into focus and regard the task at hand with the care and attention it needs.

Calm and Ambience are Attributes Worth Noting

In my notes on environment, gatherings, but also apps and services the term “calm” shows up a lot. These are often things I deeply enjoy and appreciate. I equate ambience with atmospheric essence and ambient qualities that don’t overwhelm, but are just noticeably there to augment, but not take the focus.

As I think about adding definitions to the category pages, these two terms, calm and ambience, are ones that are a little squishy. I also realize but I’m realizing I need to call out more as the are often central to getting things with the focus in the right places.

A Rainy Virtual Walk Sparks Reading

This weekend trying to get some fiction reading in and wanting a good café, but none reliably close with the vibe I was currently looking for, I resorted to another trick I use. The nice thing about a café is the ambient noise in the background and the “feeling” of people around. I often can get a lot done in a comfortable café or on a train with work, but also reading.

I resorted to popping open YouTube and searching for Amsterdam, Paris, and London city walks in the rain. YouTube has an abundance of 1-hour to 5-hour ambient walks through the cities with a little background noise. Adding rain into the mix also helps keep the streets more quiet from conversations, plus adds the wonderful sound of vehicles sloshing past.

This time around the option that looked best was a rainy walk through Paris in 4k and getting the volume just right. I turned on the reading light and got cozy on the sofa and it worked well. Every now and then I would look up and the location looked rather familiar, but I couldn’t sort out where it was and that was a little more distracting than I expected. I really enjoy this with physical books.

With ebooks or needing to do a little focussed with and wanting a quick step into another environment like a train, I’ve thrown on the Vision Pro and opened the fantastic app from the French high speed rail service, TGV. The “TVG Inoui” app provides an immersive 3D simulation of riding on the TGV and with an Apple Developer account, that immersive environment can be used as a backdrop to your work in Vision Pro or using the Mac Virtual Display. The sounds and peripheral vision in the environment work well enough to get my brain convinced it is working on the train, even if it is virtually.

A Vision Pro Perspective

I have used many different VR headsets at hackathons and studio labs, but the visual quality was less than desirable. Reading in them was far less than optimal. I had found the 3D immersive capabilities somewhat interesting for training physical tasks and heightening awareness skills. But, the quality of the headsets’ visual quality and rough interaction models were large hurdles to overcome.

A couple years back (or so) I had tried the Apple Vision Pro out of curiosity at an Apple Store, after its launch and impressive walkthroughs. I was blown away with the visual quality as it was generations better than other options out there. But, the interactions with the apps and interface were incredibly simple to understand and became very quickly intuitive.

The Apple Store demo really piqued my interest. I could see its upsides for consumption. But, I could also see the potential for using it for remote work and interaction environments. That work potential became a large curiosity. The price of the Apple Vision Pro was a huge hurdle to go digging for the sake of curiosity. But, when Apple added the capability for a virtual monitor for your Mac with wide and ultrawide options, that started nudging the viability for curiosity. But, the price was still a bit too steep. I started looking at used Vision Pro models and prices were around $1k off new purchase prices. The friction there was knowing how to find one in good shape. I asked in an Apple forum I am part of how to purchase a used Vision Pro and someone in the forum had one they were thinking about selling. We chatted and worked out how to meet and purchase the device.

I figured if the two big things I had interest in it was worth the investment in the used AVP: 1) Viability for virtual meetings; 2) Virtual monitor. If it didn’t meet my interest or curiosity waned, I figured I could sell it on and get close to what I paid.

Before the Two Use Cases I Care About

The questions many ask are around:

Quality?

The quality of the hardware, visual displays, and interactions are seriously impressive. Opening web pages and reading ebooks is really nice clean and really impressive. There are no jaggies nor glitching.

Does it feel heavy?

I picked up the Annapro 2 add-on that is a brace that is padded and used at the top of the forehead area that takes the weight off your face and balances it much better. I regularly will have 2 to 5 hour sessions with the Vision Pro on and it doesn’t feel heavy nor cause neck strain for me.

How much do you use it?

I used it at least once a week, but many weeks around three times a week for tasks, virtual monitor use (more on this below), and some content consumption.

App availability?

There are apps for most things I do (many of my regular apps are available as visionOS native apps, and most other are available as iPad apps that are made Vision Pro capable), but not all apps that I really want are available as native visionOS apps. Two of the apps I really want on the device are the Drafts app (this is how I capture and surface quick notes across devices, not having it natively is a pain) and iA Writer as the Vision Pro a great device for focussed work (the input side is something). Having native Obsidian would help a lot as well, but that is more difficult as it is an Electron-based app.

I really want data visualization apps for larger data sets or data with a lot of complications, so that scaling the interface allows for better examination and interrogation of the data.

I really want Freeform as a solid whiteboard option, but it is so close and yet so far.

Isn’t it mostly a content consumption device?

The consumption capabilities of the Vision Pro are amazing, but for a consumption primary device the price is a bit much. The immersive environments to work in or consume content in are insanely well done. The immersive video content is stunning to say the least. Watching movies or other video content is a really good experience in 3D or regular viewing.

Curiosity Around Virtual Meetings

The Apple marketing pitched the Vision Pro as a good virtual interaction device. It used personas that were your face and hands. But, the big question I had around this was the ability to have meetings with colleagues that normally require hopping on a train or plane to get in the same room for 2 to 4 hours, or a couple days. That in-person interaction around plans in documents, presentations, spreadsheets, and whiteboards with a few people seems really viable. I really wanted to test it out that interpersonal interaction capability.

People that work together are most often rather distributed these days and there is no getting around that and travel isn’t cheap. But, if you can shift two or three fly-in meetings to Vision Pro you have basically paid for the device. But, if you can have more solid interactive meetings between the fly-in meetings that have better value than Zoom or Teams or even augment them with greater interaction and fidelity, that is a great win as well.

When I picked up my used Vision Pro it was still the first version of visionOS. The personas were decent and far better than other VR / AR providers, but could be better. Within a few months a major update was made and the personas really became good. Within a few minutes you forget you are interacting with a persona, and it feels normal with great facial gestures and hand and shoulders captured too.

Trying the interaction around documents and presentations with friends has been incredibly good. Once you open a document the person(s) you are interacting with shift from in front of you to arranged next to you and can point and touch what is being shared. This was and is incredibly good. I’ve done 2 and 3 hour sessions in the virtual meeting sessions and for most things it is really good where showing, talking about, interacting in shared documents, and editing is quite good.

The two limitations of this model are: 1) SharePlay is used for the interactions so it is capped to 5 people in the virtual interactive environment at a time; 2) The whiteboard with Apple’s Freeform (Apple launches Freeform) is their virtual whiteboard, which is similar to a Miro or Mural. The 5 person limitation isn’t bad and it is fine for many fly-in meeting needs for planning and check-ins, but 10 for in the same space and then have 5 person breakout sessions with much better interaction would really go a long way. Freeform in Vision Pro really need an input device and the best option is an iPad, which is rather good, but really needs a few more improvements. The iPad Pro with the Pencil Pro and the virtual shadow and the shadow for bevelled orientation seems like it was designed with Vision Pro in mind. But there needs to be some sort of pass-through to take some of the friction out of this. You can get rather proficient with a little time using the iPad Pro as the Freeform interface to do detailed work. The dedicated virtual pens lose fidelity and detail and from my perspective are a poor option.

A great advantage of using the Vision Pro virtual meetings is the focus of participants. In regular meetings most participants aren’t focussed on the matter at hand. For fly in meeting with distracted participants that is a very expensive problem. The distractions are normal and viable to keep on top of projects and problems that happen no matter if a meeting is happening or note. The advantage of Vision Pro is it puts the meeting front and center and the interactions with others in the shared virtual meeting, which is an amazingly strong value.

For virtual meetings this is a good option, but almost there and there needs to be some focus on what is needed to get there. There have been small steps, but the steps need to be more frequent and a bit larger. The other downside is a network effect problem (network effect as the converse), as there aren’t enough people who have Vision Pro devices to have ad hoc meetings with partners and clients at the drop of a hat. I have a few friends whom I interact with that I can test the advances around Share Play and different shared interaction capabilities.

Virtual Monitor

The other added value functionality I was curious about was the Virtual Monitor for Macs. I use the Vision Pro as a virtual monitor for my MacBook Pro quite a bit. The ability to use regular width screen (roughly equivalent to my 16 inch Mac Book Pro or a bit bigger), wide screen (about two screen widths), and ultra wide that wraps (about 3 screens) is really impressive. I most often use the ultrawide option when I need 3 or 4 apps open to have a screen I’m working in, one screen size for my notes, and one or two for reference.

There are two upsides for the Virtual Monitor mode. One is the ability to have Vision Pro apps open around the monitor mode as sticky notes, MindNote mindmap app, Safari floating with a page open, OmniOutliner lists open, and Apple Music. When I’m at my desk I have an external monitor to the left of my laptop stand, so I have two screens. The real life two screen setup causes more neck strain than the wide or ultrawide screen (by a long shot) and that is including the weight of the Vision Pro headset.

The quality of the pass through was a big question. The quality isn’t the same as the amazing screen on the MacBook Pro, but it is two 4k monitors with one in front of each eye. It sometimes is a little less than optimal, but if I move the virtual monitor either closer or farther back it gets to a sweet spot for really nice clarity. I don’t use the virtual monitor or ultra detail work or color precision work as the MacBook Pro screen is superior (similar for my 4k external monitor on my desk).

Two things I really enjoy doing in the virtual monitor are working on system mappings as I can go really wide and tackle and working in Freeform as a virtual whiteboard (it would be so much better were Freeform inputs much better in Vision Pro in its native app). I use Canvas in Obsidian for some capturing of systems and models, I also use OmniGraffle (the Mac version, as there isn’t an Vision Pro version yet, nor a working version of the iPad app for OmniGraffle 8 - I’m moved most of my OmniGraffle work into the beta of version 8 over the last year). In OmniGraffle I don’t use paper size, as I only use it for digital work, so I can go quite wide and tall.

One other advantage of the Virtual Monitor is that for the price of three good 4k monitors the Vision Pro is around the same price.

Vision Pro Impression Today

I still have the Vision Pro and I still get a lot of value from the device and regular use. There are some weeks where much of my use in the device is consumption, but pure consumption weeks are fairly rare.

One of my favorite uses is to put it on and just focus on work and tasks. Dropping into an immersive environment or the TGV app (a virtual TGV train trip that can provide a train focussed environment through the developer capabilities). I find trains are a great focus environment to get things done for me and this app works really well to resemble that.

I am really happy I picked up the Vision Pro, particularly used, as the price point felt it was quite on target. I really would love for Apple to take larger and more progressive steps. There are times I don’t know that Apple understands the full impact and focus of all the use cases, but I’ve virtually attended a few of the Vision Pro Developer full-day series and Apple is covering a lot of ground and covers many of the use cases well. I look forward to what is coming down the road.

Fragile Automation Systems

I have a set of early morning aggregation automations I run and in the last few months I’ve run into oddities with regular automated syndication of data streams. I have quite a few things that push to a Slack channel, but it something keeps changing with Slack and it isn’t capturing anything. Much of it seems to be on the Slack end of things where inbound connections route to a Slack bot and not to the hardwired channel in the instance.

Slack used to be the stable and solid endpoint for tracking data, but something has changed.

I have a few different services that have triggers for automating capturing, copying, and writing data in another service where I can more easily make use of it through pushing it to a calendar, spreadsheet, central messaging (where I control when I pay attention to it), and moving it into a format for review or to work with on some calm cadence. Slack is one of the calm endpoints, and sometimes midpoint where I pull certain things in the last day or two from Slack to be in full view with other related items working around.

My keyboard shortcut app of choice for more than a decade has been hitting odd security lockouts that keep it from working. The lockouts are from other apps or services and they lock it from working across the device. I have around 15 to 20 shortcuts I use regularly to insert templates, drop in URLs, add dates, and more. But, when it gets locked I type the three or four keystrokes and nothing happens. It is like being in a dreamworld and a door won’t open. After an hour or few the lock goes away and it works. I’ve contacted the vendor and they are trying to sort out what is now causing this.

When then the automations and silent systems break or an interface is empty, but should have quite a few things in it and there are only a few, it is a little disconcerting. Fragile services aren’t new, but many solid services for years are now increasingly fragile and that trend needs to reverse.

Grantchester Comes to a Close

I’m a fan of cozy mystery series, well British Mystery, and Grantchester (TV series) - Wikipedia has been a gem. It is a calm and cozy mystery series set in the 1950s / early 1960s Grantchester, England just outside Cambridge. It has been on PBS as part of PBS Mystery for 11 seasons. This has been a wonderful collaboration of a police detective who befriends the local parish priest (actually, a succession of them) and brings him in to help with the mysteries. The detective is played by Robson Green, who fits the role of small town detective well.

The Cambridge countryside plays a large part as do the small town’s parish members. The series splits its time between the police station and police work and the vicarage and its dealings. The characters in the ensemble were really good. The Anglican priest is always single and their most often is a love interest.

Having the detective and priest has been an interesting mix of bringing the two stereotypical sides of the detective seeing the worst of people (or not surprised by it) and the priest seeing the best in people. But, it didn’t take long in the 11 seasons for this to swap and drift from the norm. There was a lot of this series that felt like it was treading into the footsteps of Foyle’s War.

This has been a good follow on from the decades of the succession of Morse, Lewis, and Endeavour mystery series that have also wrapped.

I’m going to miss this calm and gentle series that pulls at the heart strings of humanity.

Weeknote Considerations

One of the things I deeply enjoy reading each week is other people’s weeknotes. Well, not everybodies weeknotes. I have 4 to 8 different people who share weeknotes that I check in on. It is like getting the weekly catch-up and it is calm and quaint (in the good way). I really like them and I get concerned if they miss a week.

For a while I was posting weeknotes (found with the tag: Weeknote :: Off the Top :: vanderwal.net). I posted 25 of them. They were recaps of things I found of interest and wanted to share in that prior week (or so). I stopped posting them as the timing was tough at the end of the week, but the creation was getting easier as they just were things I’d pull out of my daily notes to myself in roughly the same categories.

Not Sure If I’ll Return to Posting Weeknotes Again

I am really not sure that I will return to posting weeknotes again, but it is a rather Ouroboros-shaped reason. In the past year or so I set up local (on my laptop) search of my own blog, which moved to the Lab - vanderwal.net, and then on to my blog portion of my site.

In searching my own content to see if I’ve posted on a subject before, I would find what I was looking for in a weeknote post. But, going to the post it was buried in the muddle with other things. I also was finding using categories to find related content when it was surfacing weeknotes and I’d have to dig in the weeknote to find the relevance it was connecting to. Both of these bothered me and from a finding, pointing to, and sharing with others perspective. I really think it is a less than good experience.

The weeknote for me was a means to get back to posting to my blog more regularly. I joked that Twitter ate my blog in 2006 (I’ve seen my data and it sure did). Then moving to a better note tool and note making daily that had me writing again in pretty much my old manner like blogging, but I just wasn’t posting. I didn’t complete the workflow for it to be a blog post. I would write and reuse locally, but the next steps in a blogging / sharing workflow did’t happen. A little over a year ago when I updated my blog management tool, that was part of the backend update, that made posting easier and I was posting a little more. But, when I’d look it was a week or more stretches between posts and I’d been writing like I was blogging, but I was my own reader.

Using Blaugust (Going in on Blaugust :: Off the Top :: vanderwal.net) as impetus to get the workflow back part of my habit of finishing the steps is a good thing for posting, I think.

My Notes to Post Workflow

I’ve kept notes in text in a directory since 2003. It started as plain text along with dash or asterisk bullets. That turned into using Notional and then NVAlt at some point. When NVAlt stopped opening I set Obsidian to watch over the directory in June 2020 and I’ve not looked back. I did a quick modification and the notes that weren’t in markdown (I fully shifted my writing to markdown in 2011 when I had a hard drive crash and access to application that wrapped notes made my notes something I couldn’t open for a few days and with my parents passing and needing notes, a proprietary container was no longer an option – actually it is a bad idea from the start).

I keep a Daily Dump markdown note that is structured with sub-headings as prompts and keep notes in there. One of the things I love about Obsidian is the ability to have transclusions, so when I am writing in my daily note, but it makes sense to have it as a stand alone note to reference, or to become a blog post, I just highlight the segment and right click to export that to a new note and it links to with a backlink (think wiki link), but putting an exclamation mark in front of it brings that note into the daily note to show it.

This means I can create a note that has a “blog-shape” to it that started in my daily note. It is in markdown and I have a title on it and other metadata. It lives in my note directory. I click the ellipses in Obsidian’s right corner of the panel to “Show in Finder”. The finder window for Mac opens with the markdown note highlighted. I right click on it (I don’t use a mouse, so double finger tap is actually what I do) and select to open the file in iA Writer. iA Writer is my longer writing app, but also what I review and edit something that I will post (or transform to a more formal document). When that is done I drag the proxy icon for the file in the titlebar of iA Writer to the icon for the Marked app (Marked 3) in my Dock and it opens and I select “preview toggle” and it shows me very well structured HTML (it matches the scripting I did years ago to do much the same, but is much less hassle) then I highlight and copy and paste into my site’s blog management tool, add the title and select categories and it is posted.

The multiple apps all are working with regular markdown all in the same file. I modify something in one and it changes in all the other interfaces. I own the files and they can be opened in any text app or any markdown focussed app. IA Writer I really like for calm focussed writing, reading what I’ve written, and editing. Marked (now Marked 3) just does a nice markdown conversion to very good standards compliant HTML, plus adds the sub-header IDs for anchor links, which I used to do mostly by hand when I ran my own convert to HTML scripts. Marked also can transform markdown to structured Word, well designed PDF, and more, yet I use it for the one simple task.

In my blog management screen, I manually trigger the build of my RSS and then trigger syndication notifications after I have run a manual visual check and test all the links. Once I’ve finished writing it is 2 to 5 minutes to edit in iA Writer and post.

Great Art and History Pairing

A week or two back while reading the Financial Times I stumbled upon a piece about The Metropolitan Museum of Art having added Alberto Giacommetti sculptures to the Temple of Dendur room - Giacometti’s fragile figures mingle with the gods at the Met.

I have a strong appreciation for The Temple of Dendur in The Metropolitan Museum of Art room. I think nearly every trip I’ve made to New York City / Manhattan and stayed, I have made a stop to visit this room. My first trip to The City in 1991 I stopped in to see The Met and gave myself around 45 minutes to an hour (yeh, I know) and I wondered through the galleries on a speed run looking for something that would match my (then) art appreciation. After about 15 minutes I went down and wandered into the Temple of Dendur room and was instantly amazed.

There are a few galleries and museums that bring the outside world and inside world into the same space. The Uffizi in Florence has a spot leaving the upper level of the gallery to exit where you look out a window and the Duomo is perfectly framed by the window. My thought was, of course this is included in the gallery, but yet it isn’t. The Temple of Dendur room to me is much the same, but at a much grander scale.

The temple room not only has the temple assembled in it with a water feature around the temple as an echo to the Nile, but the room with its floor to ceiling angled glass wall not only bring in natural light, but provide an amazing view of Central Park. I’ve been in the summer, but the fall and winter views out are amazing. In fall the changing colors come in and are a background blanket of colors and textures that add a wonderful glow to the pace. In winter, when the trees are barren the site is more stunning as the room pulls in the stark nature sketched remnants of trees as a backdrop and part of the exhibit with a bit more of a view of the architecture of The City and its artful glory.

From my first trip to each that followed, I’ve entered the room and been absorbed and it takes a while to get out. The room brings focus and often calm. But, it takes me in different directions with bring drawn in by the inside out gallery view, where the park and The City are fittingly part of the exhibit (as they should be). But other times it is the interplay of now and then across history and time, were I to blink (maybe really hard) would I open my eyes to an other time?

Now with More Elongated Forms

I have long been a fan of Giacometti’s works as the elongated forms seem fragile yet elegant, as well as whimsical as a giraffe. I’ve never sorted the how nor why they pull me in. They feel a little like alien form, but comfortably familiar like your long shadow from a low sun has taken more than a flat form and you can see it from many sides as you walk around it.

But the addition of Giacometti’s sculptures to the temple room seem like a magical fit - Giacometti in the Temple of Dendur - The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The pairing of the elongated forms and the tall elongated passage entrances to the temple and the gates seems like it would add to the magic of the room and space as a natural fit.

I’m really hoping to get to New York to catch the exhibit before it is gone. The bringing the now, to the nearly now, to the ancient versions of now into one magical space.

Swan Song's AR Design and Creation

I have a serious soft spot for the movie Swan Song (which stars Mahershala Ali and Glenn Close that is set in the near future in the Pacific Northwest. I was a fan of its soft and deep thought invoking exploration of life and replication, but also its near future view of technology. While others have been excited by the Minority Report’s manic augmented reality (AR) interface, the design and use of near future AR as part of work and personal life was really good. To say I was fascinated, may be putting it lightly. Swan Song (2021 Benjamin Cleary film) - Wikipedia was released in 2021 and Apple had yet to have announce Apple Vision Pro with its visionOS and really good graphics and workable interface. The visual and interaction design of what the main character (Cameron) worked in was incredibly good. Once Apple Vision Pro was out it felt like Cameron’s interfaces and interactions were part of the future road map.

The Design Studio Behind the Digital Interfaces and Interaction Design

Being that Swan Song movie was part of Apple Studios - Wikipedia I was believing Apple had a part in the creation of the user interfaces and interaction design of the AR in the movie. But, poking around in Vimeo I stumbled on the design reel for Swan Song - Territory Studio, so I finally found the studio that created the AR and digital design elements in the film.

Territory Studio’s Design Overview

Territory Studio’s page for the high level design overview of what they created for Swan Song is really good. I had been feeling like Swan Song’s design and AR team were more closely tied to Apple as their AR interaction design is very much like Apple’s sensibilities, with a more muted palette from a calm future. A lot of things that are in Apple Vision Pro’s user interface and interaction design patterns seem to have been hinted at, if not felt like they were previewed in Swan Song. But, I’m not so sure of the connection or how specious it may be.

The Territory Studio page has highlights of their visual / virtual design language, personal UIs, home office AR, AR home gaming, speculative hardware, smart watch UIs, and virtual mimoji. I really would love an even deeper dive, as this is much of the virtual interactive world I’ve been waiting for, and been hoping to see come to life for years prior to the film.

There is a whole lot in Swan Song that I loved from the time it was released, which was a couple years or so ahead of Apple Vision Pro being released. The headset-less AR and interaction design is one piece. But, I also was deeply taken by the whole story, cinematography, and feelings the film evoked, but also the keep thinking and consideration it evoked.

Swan Song Demo Video from Territory Studio

The show real from Territory’s work on Swan Song is in Vimeo: Swan Song Breakdown Reel - Vimeo

Weeknote - 17 January 2021

Busy, but not overly productive week. I’ve been battling getting a replacement laptop actually functioning, so battling and not being productive. That scenario drives me absolutely up the wall. Going through the battles reminds me of how fairly seamlessly Apple does this.

Evenings have been trying to run errands, but finding stores closing quite early due to Covid and complications around the attack on the Capitol and Inauguration. This has left me rather tired, but also not sleeping well.

Insights from

I just read about Foxsy shutting from their CEO’s blog post about the company and product and his and their lessons learned, Moved on from my journey Foxsy. I was introduced to them from an investor as they were hitting an inflection point and needed help smoothing out some of the interactions, user flow model, and some language areas. The product was rather ingenious as it was a cross social platform chat service using AI to match people. Jin was in San Francisco and the rest of the team at that point and time was in Japan. It was great to read they kept going as I shifted to another project.

The glimpse inside a San Francisco start-up is rather typical from the doing everything to scrape by to keep the product going and get to the next level. I heard some of these stories when I was helping them and hearing it from Japanese guys was interesting as the story wasn’t that different from American guys, the French teams I know, nor the mixed teams from Eastern Europe and the Middle East. The small companies I knew / know in Europe, Latin America, and Singapore were a bit different, but the dedication and passion isn’t.

While I hate to see Foxsy shut, I know whatever each of these people do will be fantastic. Only a very small percentage of start-ups make it through to launch, through a few years or use, and then making money to be self-sustaining, and getting the investors some profit. Here’s to whatever is next Foxsy crew!

Read

Every January I dig out the Saint Mary’s Jan Term Catalog and look through was is / was offered. When I was at St. Mary’s Jan Term was something I deeply enjoyed. St. Mary’s ran on a 4–1–4 schedule with four courses in a fall semester, one course in January, and four in spring semester. January classes typically met for 3 or 4 hours Monday through Thursday for an intensive course on a tight subject. There are usually also travel courses for Jan Term, like religious architecture in Ireland or Italy, or sailing course in the Caribbean. My first year I had a Sports Psychology course and second year was on charisma and public leaders (this was amazing). My last year I didn’t exactly get Jan Term as I was doing a full term in Oxford at the Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Centre.

Every year I find new intriguing courses with good reading lists and I add the reading list and often start digging into a subject of a few each year. I’ve long wondered what a full school year of one month one class would look like. The Oxbridge tutorial system is somewhat similar over two months with intensive tutorials used to fill in gaps through guided self-learning, with that guidance being deep and good.

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I stumbled on this article from a couple people, ‘Rent-a-person who does nothing’ in Tokyo receives endless requests, gratitude. This concept is an utter gem! The guy in Japan is selling his service of not doing anything, other than “just being there” for a round $96 a task. People using him to walk them to a court house as quiet support. Listening to people talk through something that they don’t want others to they know to hear or to judge them on. The service of “doing nothing” is somewhat akin to renting someone in a mature relationship that is years into that calm quiet support that gives the deep relief of not being alone and some togetherness.

Watched

Modern Doctor Who is on HBO Max. My two favorite Doctors are David Tennent and Matt Smith. There were a lot of the Tennent episodes I missed and being able to fill in the gaps is wonderful. But, also being able to watch favorite Matt Smith episodes again is something I’m looking for.

Listened

I tend to listen to a lot of music that doesn’t have lyrics or English lyrics. I don’t often listen to lyrics when they are in English, even though I will sing along or sing the song with out music. But, every now and then the lyrics stand out as they are creative. Twice this week I hit this.

One instance was going back something I used to listen to a lot and listened to driving across country with my dad, it was A.J. Croce’s self titled album. The music and production quality are really good, but the lyrics also stand out as they are witty and creative.

The other was Olivia Rodrigo’s Driver License, which was in my short list of recommended new music for the week and I had it playing in the background and the chorus of “’Cause you said forever, now I drive alone past your street” that really stuck out and I scrubbed back and relisten. That was insanely well crafted lyrically as well as musically.

Food

El Charro Mexican Restaurant in Lafayette, California Closed for Good, which may be one of the odd Covid maladies I’ve run across that hurt, beside the people it has taken from us. This was my first taco. It was also the accidental spark that got my parents and I obsessed with guacamole. When I was born this wasn’t all that far from where we lived and it was a favorite of my parents. I don’t remember going here as we moved when I was about 18 months old or so. But, we always stopped here when in the Bay Area.

I went to undergrad at St. Mary’s College of California in Moraga, which is sort of next door via back roads through the hills. When my parent would come and visit we would often goo to El Carro for lunch or dinner. One of the things my parents loved was the small dish of guacamole that came with tortilla chips, as well as salsa. From the time I was a baby my parents tried to replicate this intensely flavored guacamole. We learned many different ways of making guacamole and had a few favorites that are still really good. But, it wasn’t anything like El Charro’s.

So one day we asked about the guacamole, with my parents explaining they had tried to replicate it for 20 some years when we moved away. There was a bit of confusion, but the waitress understood and went in the back to ask. He head cook came out smiling. He explained it wasn’t guacamole, but blue cheese, a little garlic, and butter all mashed together until the blue of the cheese was a green-ish spread / dip. I’ve never seen this anywhere else. The cook had said the owner knew it from Mexico and was a special treat in a small town there. Thanks to the confusion I’ve learned many different guacamole recipes, probably more than 50, but also how to riff with the basics.

Productivity

I’ve been trying to put something in a daily dump note. The book notes and idea notes are getting to be a decent habit and being able to easily search and build on an understanding is really nice to have. Obsidian has been proving to be an insanely great augmentation layer.

Talking with a couple people using Roam this week about Obsidian has been interesting as both lost network access and didn’t have access to their notes. This also got them thinking about how to exit Roam, and the lack of API and a common framework they are feeling really stuck. There is now an option to scrape Roam to pull the content into markdown files that can work with Obsidian, and it seems it will also work with block replication. Roam is slick and what the people who love slick, but don’t consider function and the basic use cases for every platform: Do I have ownership of everything I put in?; Do I have constant access?; How do I exit?

I’m thinking through these as I have been looking at Craft, an Apple OS focussed note system that is quite similar to Notion. I somewhat like Notion and its capabilities, but getting to things, feeding them, and searching when working on things (I have to go to it and perform search and moving content in and out for writing and other workflows has a lot of friction. One solution around it is an API, which isn’t fully there. Craft being more native and sync with iCloud or other would enable what is in it being found in a search. Notion for personal use is now free and Craft is pay, but only about $4 a month.

Craft wouldn’t replace anything in Obsidian, but could help with some organization systems. I use Notion most for pushing podcast and YouTube links into them and then annotate them for refinding and reusing.

20 Years of Blogging and Wrapping Up the Year 2020

Happy New Year (the 307th day of March in the Year of Covid). As of December 31, 2020 this blog is 20 years old. It started sort of on a whim in Blogger. I find a lot of things that stick start on a whim around here, either as a quick experiment (there are a lot always running) or just fed-up to the point of just do something. Curiosity strikes hard, but it does for most of the people who I spend time with and who do well around tech and digital systems.

There are now 2,103 blog posts. All but a handful are still around. The first one is gone, as it was a “Hello Squirrel!” post (20 years ago I was already insanely tired of hello world and switched some where in 1999 or 2000 and it stuck. I’ve thought about running stats to look at years of activity (in 2004 or 2005 I started Personal InfoCloud as my more work focussed blog and vanderwal.net stayed as my random thoughts and rarely edited brain dump. The top 5 used categories for this blog since its start are Personal, Information Architecture, Web, User-Centered Design, and Apple / Mac. The whole list can be found at vanderwal Off the Top Categories List - By Use. I really need to get a sparkline placed next to each as that would be really helpful to see what is popular when and something I’ve wanted to do for 15 or so years, but never got around to.

I haven’t really kept track of analytics. I would look at analytics on a weekly or monthly basis, but I really haven’t done that in a long while. I do know some of the folksonomy posts drew a lot of attention (the main defining folksonomy post was moved to a static HTML page at the strong urging of academics who needed that for citation purposes. I know a few posts drew a lot of attention inside some companies which were posted here and cross-posted at Personal InfoCloud.

I’ve used blogging to think out loud so to make sense of things, but also for refinding for myself, but also to connect with others who have insights or similar interests.

Wrapping Up 2020

This also is sort of Best of 2020, or things that I spent enjoyable time on or changed me in some good way. I don’t think I’ve ever done a year end wrap as I always feel I’m in the middle of things and a wrap isn’t really fitting when in the midst of things.

Podcasts

Postlight / Track Changes podcast over the last two or three years has become the conversation I’m missing. It is the conversations I miss having and sort of work I’ve been missing at times (I’ve had good stretches of moving things forward to help organization avoid the missing manhole covers or recover through helping understand need, gaps, and pain points to create vastly improved paths forward. Paul and Rich, as well as when Gina gets to play along have been great moments of agreement and a handful of, “ooh, that is good!” as well.

Dear Hank and John from brothers (vlog brothers) Hank Green and John Green, was one of the Year of Covid’s great find as refinding the vlog brothers YouTube channel and their books was comforting and grounding during this odd and rough year. In 2007 time frame with Hank and John were starting out I saw them as Ze Frank copycats, which admittedly they were, and I was a big fan of Ze (particularly after meeting him and having some great winding down rabbits holes of philosophy around content, community, and connection). I was entertained with the vlog brothers 2007 to around 2009, but didn’t overly seek them out and they fell off my radar. This year during the start of lock down they came back into to focus and stayed.

99% Invisible is a weekly breath of fresh air that digs into just one more subject from beautiful Downtown Oakland California. I am continually learning from it and go digging for more information after their podcast.

Matt Mullenweg’s Distributed isn’t quite regular, but I make room for it. Matt has had some really insightful podcasts that also have me digging for more and really am happy to see all that Matt has built so far. It is great that Matt is largely open with his sharing insights and information about they do things at Automattic, but also the guests from outside are really good.

Dave Chang Podcast seems like has a ton of content coming out and I can’t keep up. My favorites are when he is talking with other chefs and restaurant owners. The podcast was really good to listen to during the pandmic as Dave and guests dug deep into the challenges and economics around the effects of the shutdowns.

No Such Thing as a Fish is often my weekend morning listen. Last winter I caught their live DC show, which was great to see after many years. A show where you can get informed and laugh like crazy is always a win in my book.

Newsletters

Newsletters are a love / hate thing for me. The hate mostly is that they are in mail apps where doing useful things with content in them in my information capture for refinding, connecting with other similar things, giving attribution, and coalescing into something new or an anchor point for exploration is tough when in any mail app or service. But, I love a lot of the content. The best newsletters have HTML pages that are easy to search, find things, and interconnect ideas in. The Tiny Newsletter newsletters do this fairly well, Substack does this quite well (and can be RSS feeds), some custom solutions (like Stratechery) do this insanely well, while Mailchimp is miserable with this in so many ways (sadly none of my favorite sources is in Mailchimp, which is ironic and also frustrating).

The perennial favorite for years is Stratechery and keeping up with Ben Thompson’s take and really well thought through explanations are one of the few things I intentionally track down and at least skim (some of the subjects I know really well and look to see where Ben has a different take or a better framing for understanding).

This year perennial favorite New York Times columnist David Leonhardtt (whom I in only recently in the past year or two realized I know and see regularly) took over the daily news summary, New York Times Morning newsletter and it has become what I read as I’m getting up. The insights and framing are really good. But, also pulling things into focus in the NT Times that I may have missed is an invaluable resource with an incredibly smart take no it all.

One added midway this year is the daily MIT Technology Review’s own MIT TR Download that is edited by Charlotte Jee. The intro section and daily focussed editorial is always good, but equally as good are the daily links as I always find something that was well off my radar that I feel should be drawn closer.

My guilty pleasure that I read each morning on my coffee walk (I walk to get coffee every morning as working remotely I may not make it out the front door that day) is the Monocle Minute and Weekend Edition newsletter. Which during the week is quick, informative, breezy in a familiar tone, that cover international business, politics, global focus, travel, and more. I’ve long had a soft spot for Monocle since the started. The Weekend Edition newsletters are longer and have a highlight of someone, which I deeply enjoy, and focus on food, travel, media, the good things in life. The recipes on Sunday are also something I look out for.

The non-regular Craig Mod newsletters, Ridgeline, Explorer, and general newsletter are a good dose of calm and insight.

One of my favorite voices on systems, design, and information architecture is Jorge Arango and his biweekly Jorge Arango Newsletter is a gem of great links. I’m always finding smart and well considered content from this newsletter.

Music

I changed up my listening setup for headphones a bit swapping some things around and now enjoying things quite a bit.

I’ve been writing a bit about music in my weeknotes, but Lianne I don’t think has made the write-ups as I seem to be listening to her music during work wind down as it draws my attention and focus.

• Snarky Puppy
• Lianne La Havas
• Tingvall Trio
• Construction
• Yosi Horikawa

Books

2020 was a year of picking up books, but given the state of things reading wasn’t fully functional.

There are two books, which I am still working through, or more akin to meditating through that really struck me in 2020.

The first is Violet Moller’s The Map of Knowledge about a stretch of about 1,000 years and how classical books and knowledge were lost and found. She focusses on nine different periods. The background for how books were copied to stay alive (with far more frequency than I imagined), how the big libraries of the world were kept, whom they served, and how they went away and their collections lost or destroyed. This book deeply challenged a lot of underlying beliefs and, looking back, silly assumptions about keeping knowledge and the vast knowledge we have (which is only a tiny slice of what has gone before us). Reading this book, sometimes just a few pages at a time, causes long walks and deep consideration. It has been a while since I have reworked a lot of foundations for beliefs and understandings so profoundly. A lot of this book also reminds me of my time at the Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies that also challenged me and pushed me in similar ways, but that was more of setting foundations and extending them than reworking them.

The other book, which I’m still working through is Eddie S. Glaude, Jr.’s Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and its Urgent Lessons for Our Own that I had been looking forward to it since I heard about it late in 2019. As we hit summer in 2020 and the murder of George Floyd sparked a deep reawakening of the realities of race issues in the United States it brought back memories of the 1980s and 1990s and thinking and working through similar ideas. That deep caring and belief that things were better and had improved were shattered as reality reared its head. I had stumbled onto James Baldwin after returning from living in England and France for the last semester of undergrad and a little bit more. I returned to the U.S. with really bad reverse culture shock and one of those challenging understandings I had was around race and very little in the U.S. felt right nor on inline with a united anything. This bothered me deeply for a lot of reasons, but part was being threatened just by hanging out with good friends who were running errands and they were verbally abused (and I feared worse was coming) by just walking in a store and I was a target of the same because I was with him. There were many times like this. After living in England and France this was clear it was mostly an American thing, particularly in educated circles where skin color wasn’t the first consideration it was who you are and what you believe and do. Baldwin echoed these vibrations of reality that trembled through me, it made me feel not alone in this, but he also gave urgings to stand up and be a different way. Over the years this faded, until the torch march on Charlottesville, Virginia and then the long series of murders at the hands of people who should be protecting not wrongly dishing out their perverted mis-understanding of justice. Begin Again has had me thinking again, believing again, and acting again, but taking it in small meditative steps and also reworking my foundation.

William Gibson’s Agency was a good romp and included a handful of places I know quite well, which really help me see it. I hadn’t finished reading Peripheral, but have it on the list to do.

John Green’s Paper Towns was a wonderful read and his view on the world and use of language is one I find comforting, insightful, and delightful. I have The Fault in Our Stars queued up. I also picked up his brother Hank Green’s An Absolutely Remarkable Thing and made it about a third to half way through and it was reminding me a lot of 2005 to 2010 or so and things I hadn’t fully unpacked, so set it aside for a bit. I really enjoyed the characters and storyline, but I needed something that was a little more calm for me.

Lawrence Levy’s To Pixar and Beyond which was an interesting take on one person’s interactions with Steve Jobs and Pixar, which I found incredibly insightful and enjoyable. I’ve read a lot of books on Steve Jobs, Apple, and Pixar over the last 20 to 25 years and this added new insights.

James and Deborah Fallows’ Our Towns: A 100,000-Mile Journey into the Heart of America has been a really good read to help understand and get insights into where America is today with what are the thinking and beliefs.

The Monocle Book of Japan is really enjoyable as it is beautifully make. It is part picture book with the great photography that is in Monocle(https://monocle.com) as well as brief well written insights into many different facets of Japan and life in Japan.

Games

Ghost of Tsushima is one of the best games I’ve run across in a long time. It is utterly beautiful, the transitions are quick, and the game play (while quite bloody) is fun and not over taxing nor complicated. I’ve really enjoyed prior Sucker Punch Production’s games, I the Infamous series has been a real favorite (although hearing a slow moving empty garbage truck with rumbling diesel engine still puts me on edge as it sounds like the Dustmen from the first Infamous game). The storyline in Ghosts is really good as well and has kept me moving through the game after taking a break. I love the open map as well, which sizable and insanely beautiful.

MLB the Show is continually one of my favorite sport sim games as the game play is quite good, the visuals are amazing, and the team management and different ways to play through a season are really enjoyable. It gets so many things right that most other sport simulations don’t. I quite like sport sims as they have a fixed time, which makes it easy to stop or at least consider how long you have been playing and then get back to other things.

Fifa 20 and 21 continued to be really fun and enjoyable. The graphics and game play improves quite a bit each iterations and this last entry was no different. Much like the Show I find Fifa really relaxing to play and fun to manage teams and work through improving them.

Others I’ve enjoyed and played Death Stranding, No Man Sky, Journey, and Grand Tourismo. Death Stranding I didn’t finish even though I was enjoying it, the theme wasn’t really working well with the Covid–19 pandemic, but I know I will return to it. I’ve sunk a fair amount of time exploring in No Man Sky again and really enjoy it. I’m still playing Journey after all these years and still like it a lot as it is calming, familiar, and time limited. Grand Tourimso is still one of the most gorgeous games and fun to just drive around in.

Watching

I’ve written a fair amount in weeknotes about these three. There is more I liked, but I I haven’t really kept good track of those things.
* The Crown
* Ted Lasso
* Mandalorian

Productivity

The big shift has been Obsidian, which has become the layer over my existing notes that are in markdown and already in directories. I looked at Roam Research, but quickly realized it is most everything I try to stay far from, which is the content isn’t in my possession (if anything goes south I’m stuck), there are no APIs to extend use, the subscription is expensive for something not fully built and not well thought through, and a whole lot of arrogance from the developers (this is something to steer very far from, particularly if things aren’t well thought through).

Obsidian has me not only finding things in my existing notes, but allowing for interconnecting them and adding structure to them. The ability to have block level linking is really nice to have as well, but I haven’t really made use of that yet. I have been writing a lot more notes and pulling notes and highlights out of books. In the past I have used VooDoo Pad wiki on Mac and loved it and Obsidian gives me that capability and with storing the notes on Dropbox I can search, edit, and add from mobile as well.

Obsidian may be my one of my favorite things from 2020 and one that will keep giving for years to come.

Weeknote - 8 November 2020

Happy 253rd day of March in the Year of Covid.

Work week was busy. Again not a lot of extra time for reading or moving this site. The election and the week of counting all the votes ate attention. One of my favorite clips from the week was of this Detroit pastor talking about protecting counting the vote and the impact of Black Americans involvement in the process with the great line, “we’ve gone from picking cotton to picking presidents”. I love a good turn of phrase, and this is a gem.

After four years not not believing what I was seeing and hearing coming out of the White House, change has come with Joe Biden being announced as the President-Elect of the United States with Kamala Harris as Vice President-Elect. Hopefully this we be a turn toward calm, getting ahead of Covid by following science and medicine, and getting the economy and environmental needs back in focus. It is so good to hear a President talking about being a President of “all the people” again.

Watched

The Atlantic’s “25 Feel-Good Films You’ll Want to Watch Again—and Again” list has been pointed to as a list of comforting movies to get through the current week. Some of my favorites on on there, like: Metropolitan (Whit Stillman movie which is one of my favorite movies, but not on my top 5 and I may need to rethink that or make my top 5 my top 10 - Barcelona I find to also really enjoy but isn’t quite as chatty and the dialog in Metropolitan is brilliant), Before Sunset (I really like Before Sunrise more, but after a couple watchings Before Sunset has grown on me and I still have the last of the trilogy to watch), High Fidelity (I really liked the book more, but I’m a big John Cusack fan thanks to Sure Thing that had friends as extras in it, yet when I think of the movie as separate from the book I like the movie a lot), Ocean’s Eleven (Soderbergh’s edition and the whole series I find to be fun), Ponyo (is still on my watch list and likely my next up of Miyazaki’s films, but I’m thinking of this as most any of Miyazaki’s films as most of them exude comfort, kindness, and a sense of peace in turbulent times). Two the list but I haven’t watched, but one I have it in this category is Julie & Julia, the other is Inside Man that I really would like to watch for more than just a few minutes at a time. One that I would add that isn’t on the list is Local Hero, which I have watched numerous times after watching it in the theater twice when it came out. I likely have seen Local Hero more than 15 times, and possibly more than 20, but there is always something new that surfaces and some missed humor or something in the background that is wort paying attention to.

I have a feeling by week’s end I may have watched one or two of these again, or for the first time… Well, I did watch Before Sunset again, which I liked much more this time. I also watched some of the additional content from the Criterion Collection edition.

I started in on the newest episodes of The Mandelorian with my son. My son has watched Clone Wars since the last series ended and was much more attuned to back story.

Listened

I restumbled onto the work of Yosi Horikawa, which the genre normally isn’t fully in my interests, but I found I really enjoy Fluid and Longing off his newest album, Spaces. I have had Bubbles in playlists from audio testing and sampling playlists, but back listening to it more closely as music not analytical sampling of equipment.

Also out this week is Construction’s newest, "We’re Great Thanks for Asking, which I really like. So far my favorite song is “Never Fail”, which is video of it and filmed in Venice (pre-Covid).

Food

A couple weeks back I shifted breakfast to smoothies from a fresh fruit and yoghurt stretch, which has replaced a black bean and mushroom bowl with egg on top, which replaced a long stretch of huevos verde with black beans. This was sparked by sorting out a working blender. The mix has settled into frozen banana, ginger root, turmeric root, a little under a cup or probiotic yoghurt drink, fresh orange juice, pineapple, and berries. This ends up being about 16 ounces and keeps me going to mid-afternoon.

The weekend, due to errands, turned into takeout, and finally did pick-up from a favorite restaurant, La Piquette, with a well packaged frisée salad with lardons and poached egg (normally a salad Lyonnaise) is one of my favorites and makes me happy. Also tried their cassoulet, which was stunning. I have had some poor to horrible cassoulets over the past few years and this put my faith back into cassoulets as amazing and really good comfort food.

Week Note 6 - 9 August 2020

The weeknotes have been, well, weekly since George Floyd was murdered. As that sunk in it took a lot of focus away from this restarting writing and sharing and put it to reading, supporting, and talking to others. I was utterly gutted, mostly because I felt like I looked away and had been feeling things had improved over the decades. But, I was somewhat blind to much of the issues I grew up in a Sesame Street world where everybody gets along and learns about each other, their background, and the wonders they bring to this world.

Much of this disappeared for me after high school as I ran an errand with a friend who I had just met in one of my courses. We went to get a couple tires from his car and went into a tire store in Stockton, California. There were people in there working and my friend and I were the only two customers in the store, but nobody was stopping to help. I finally said across the counter, “excuse me…” and it was like throwing a match on gasoline as the n-word started flying and one of the guys grabbed a tire iron and slammed it against the side of one of the large metal shelves and walked off. I just wanted to leave as it seemed like it was going to be more than nasty words thrown around. My friend said, “No, it is fine”. I really had trouble comprehending that. A couple minutes later a big sheepish guy walked up to the other side of the counter and apologized quietly and asked my friend what he needed. Tire sizes were shared and a couple minutes of walking away from counter and away from where the commotion had come from. When he returned he said they didn’t have that size, but they would have it in stock in a week. We left checking all around us in the mid-afternoon light.

This was the mid 1980s and the anti-apartheid movement and awareness was in full swing. Joining causes, writing letters, and going to concerts with an awareness focus was common. Our church was housing the Anglican Bishop of Namibia and some of his Deacons around this time. I enjoyed talking with two of the Deacons that were staying with my parents and I. They talked about the South African soldiers beating parishioners and the priests to drag them out of their church. They had dents on their upper arms where bones had been broken and one of them a good dent in his head from the butt of a gun. I said I would really like to come and help, but I felt my skin was the wrong color to do any good. They stopped and grew more calm and looked at me in the eyes. One gently took my wrist and turned it over and pointed to the veins and said, “You know the blood in your veins is the same color as the blood in our veins. We are all the same color on the inside. What really matters is what is in your heart.” That really stuck with me, as did their stories. I didn’t go to Namibia, but I did read everything I could about Africa after that.

In the late 80s I took my last semester of undergrad in Oxford and spent time in Lyon, France, and traveling a little. I read a lot of the broadsheet papers and Namibia was in the news in English papers as well as other African countries. But, one of the things that stood out was how people of color were treated around Oxford and France. It was quite different from than in the US. That difference stood out. Talking with other Americans of color whom I knew or got into conversations with on coaches or trains, I brought up the question of what they found. The difference in their perception was things were much more open and equal (this is far from everywhere in Europe), but the differences then was a sense of freedom to be who they were, more so than they felt in the United States.

When I finally got back to the US so I could go through graduation (I could have stayed and rowed in Oxford and travelled with the college boat I had an offer to stay for Trinity term and row with and I could have stayed and travelled with my friend in Lyon). When I left the US in the prior December to head to Europe I was expecting to have culture shock in Europe, but I didn’t experience much and I deeply enjoyed it. It was an amazing experience. Returning to the US I had massive culture shock, which I wasn’t expecting and it shook me. My perception of life and lives of others, the news, the size of cars (as well as needing a car to get around), and the lack of fresh produce and fresh bread within an easy walk. But, watching news on tv the racial tone of the news was something I had completely not seen before I left. It was really clear watching news of a conflict in Virginia Beach between young (mostly black) beach goers and police and CNN (in 1988) was framing those of color as the problem. It was something I hadn’t seen or noticed until being away and returning.

Somewhere over that summer I stumbled onto an interview and focus on James Baldwin and he was echoing a lot of what I was seeing and feeling as a difference between Europe and the US. On a trip to Berkeley I went to one of my favorite bookstores and picked up a couple paperbacks of Baldwin’s works and started reading. Having somebody else writing about things I was seeing and feeling, which I didn’t think I knew others around me I could talk about was comforting. Baldwin also wrote about other issues I didn’t have experience with, but it opened my eyes to things others dealt with. What I got with Baldwin was an understanding of America, Europe, personal freedom, equality, and living in one’s own skin. I no longer remember the essays nor which books (I still have them, but I picked up one or two more that I didn’t put time into and memories of them ran together).

As Black Live Matter marches and protests were fully under way I found I was thinking of Baldwin a lot. I picked up Eddie S. Glaude, Jr.’s Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and its urgent lessons for our own and have been reading it slowly. Reading bits and letting it sink in. It has been good.

The Year of Covid–19 it has been difficult to keep up with friends around my son’s basketball, which feel a lot like a home and family. My son is missing his team and coaches and the common goal of the team.

The next weeknotes I will fill in some of the past few weeks of other things I’ve been reading, watching, listing to, and more. There have been some good sparks that have me excited, entertained, and exploring again.

The Sidebar is the New Back Bar

Back in the days when I had time to hangout with friends for drinks, many places had a “back bar” that was more quiet and private.

I haven’t been in the habit of posting here as much as I used to, but I still am putting things into Pinboard and somethings I flag with “linkfodder”, which is my relatively unique tag to pull out favorites. I use the API from Pinboard to pull the linkfodder tagged items into the sidebar here. Occasionally I annotate them and that is brought here as well. This sidebar mini blog feels sort of like the back bar, which is a little more quiet and calm and you can see some things of interest to me (if that is of interest to you) and track them down.

Animoji Trains Future Interaction Interface

In the September 2017 Apple iPhone 8 and iPhone X announcement Keynote they demonstrated the Apple ARKit driven face emoji, Amimoji. This is similar to other platform’s and service’s offerings.

But, there is something I think a little different about what Apple is doing. One piece is the face identification system that Apple has in the iPhone X and the 30,000 dots it uses on people faces to ascertain an identity, which makes it difficult for someone to use a photo or mask of a person to gain access. The other piece is people interacting with their screens and the live face scans of muscles and facial features moving.

It is this second piece, the live interaction where I have a strong hunch Apple is seeding things for the future. People are learning to interact with a facial scan interface for fun and learning the capabilities so to be comfortable with it. This seems very similar to Microsoft’s using the Solitaire game in early Windows to provide a fun interaction as a means to train people how to use a mouse and get comfortable with it.

Look out a few years and start to see not Animoji, but people talking to Siri to bring up an app on their wrist, car heads-up display, or (rather banal) iPhone and use facial interactions to swipe, scroll, sort, etc. feature options and light contextual information options for simple / calm interfaces. A raise of the eyebrow could scroll up options, a side smile left moves to preferred options and side smile right moves to next screen.

I know nothing other than a hunch, but playing around with this idea for years, I’m seeing the potential could be around the corner. Finally. Maybe. Come on Apple, lets take that step.

Good Bye Elizabeth Randolph

This morning’s reading I came across Kevin Hoffman’s piece In Remembrance of Elizabeth Randolph and Elizabeth Randolph Memorial Service Details and Obituary. This caused the day to start with tears as I’ve know Elizabeth since the early 2000s as part of the DC and Baltimore information architecture community. I really enjoyed seeing her at events as she was always friendly and calm with great insights. I’m bummed as I didn’t know she was sick.

I will miss her at events and knowing she would nearly always be there.