Between the Spaces

I know that this is the first time I’ve mentioned this here.  It’s only due to the fact that I wanted to tell as many people as I could before they found out on my blog!  Nevertheless, it is true, my wife is pregnanat, around 9 1/2 weeks so far as we have been told.  Wendy sent me this beautiful picture of a baby at this very age.

“The baby is about 1 1/4 inches long from head to buttocks, heartbeat detectable by ultrasound. Between the ninth and tenth weeks the baby swallows and squints. If the child’s forehead is touched, he may turn his head away and pucker up and frown. By now the child can bend the wrist and elbow independently and has the full use of his arms. By this time the entire body is sensitive to touch and is also capable of spontaneous movement. (Thumb sucking has been observed by the eleventh week, and x-rays will disclose clear details of the skeleton.)”

Feel free to visit my Flickr account on the right to see the ultrasound images of our little one.  Thank you, God for this gift.

I have been using this wonderful service called Meebo for about 6 months or so now. It basically is a web version of Trillian with no IRC feature. Once can connect to AIM, Yahoo! Messenger, MSN Messenger, ICQ and now Google’s chat service - Google Talk.

Alike many other services on the web, Meebo’s front page have an enslaught of different languages to choose from in case the visitor does not speak English as their primary language. Awesome - catering to the world. Works for me.

A closer look (why I looked closer, I could not tell you - it’s actually a rather busy day today - maybe I’m just in analytical mode) proved to be well worth my time. One of the languages presented in the list was simply labled “l337“. Oh yes… it’s exactly what you think.

My interface now shows things such as “5CЯ33ll ll4[V]3” instead of “screen name” and “#31l*” instead of “help“. Props, kudos, whatever you want to call it, to Meebo for being so creative in their efforts to stay profession-looking but still have a personality which is completely essential in the business of web applications these days. I applaud you sirs.

Have you ever had a feeling like your cell phone is vibrating in your pocket but you know darned well that it’s across the room? Or maybe you start thinking about a console or PC game which you recently played and notice your hands tensing up in the same way they did when you had to perform a drastic move in the game, again with obviously no controller in your hand. It is a rather interesting phenomenon.

When it comes to computers, we normally use a mouse and keyboard to let it know what we want from it. The above described stimulations from our mind are from precicely the same concept! In order to move our bodies, we must tell different parts of our bodies what to do. Sounds obvious, right?

As a culture, we have decided that the method for interfacing with devices in our lives will be through the movement of our bodies. Pushing a button is caused by us telling our finger to apply pressure to a surface; moving a mouse is caused by us talling our arm and wrist to move around while our fingers grip the mouse. It may sound obvious to you, but we do have many methods by which we could interface with devices. Our culture has simply not pursued those methods aggressively enough to make them work. Why? Because the method we have chosen works just fine. Thus is the nature of money. We won’t invest in something which provide immediate results up and over what we currently have. Research and Development is a touch subject and rarely gets the attention deserved in most cases.

A few of the other methods we could use (no matter how far-fetched they might sound):

Voice Control
This is obviously stating a command while a computer receives, interprets and acts upon it. There are as many uses for this input method as there are for the normal keypad entry method.

Mind Control
This is, by far, the most far-fetched of the methods presented, but my goal of this article is to present possible interfacing methods despite the time period in which they might exist, not to convice you that they are possible.

This really isn’t that different from what we are currently doing. The obvious problems are that we don’t have the technology to allow this type of interfacing nor are we aware of any negative side-effects. Some fear that since the only thing our minds

Visual Control
A little confusing, but pretty flipping ingenious! An example of this is a small application called Dasher which is used to enter text more effiently than a stylus (in some people’s opinions) on hand held devices. Check it out. The awesome part of this is that when the eye-tracking part of this software is implemented, one’s eye can move to the next desired letter in the array of possible letter and that letter will become larger and eventually (within less than a second) will be selected as the next character entered.

No Input
“What, huh?! Okay, I was following you up to that point.” Right, me too. ;p Kevin Warwick, the professor of Cybernetics at the University of Reading, England. I’ve followed some of his work for a while now and I must say that it looks pretty interesting. As much as I cringe as the thought of having any sort of implant, he had one which triggered doors and lights as he came near. That is pretty danged neat!! Also, a television that comes on when you sit on a couch. There are probably more ways to implement this method than any of the others!

Once the world is able to move past the stigma that is the mouse and keyboard that we use now, we will be able to move into some pretty interesting interfacing methods, even more that we have not heard or thought of yet!

I have been coding in HTML since I was 16 or so and have been intrigued by the way that humans interact with graphical user interfaces (GUI) for as long as I can remember. Human’s rely on experiences with which they feel comfortable in order to logically navigate through new, unfamiliar territory.This science can really by applied to most anything: building layouts, car dashboards, department stores, magazines. As long as people have lived a normal social life here on planet Earth, they most likely have encountered something which introduced them to the basic idea of a table of contents or central point of navigation. This just seems natural to most people.

More recently, the Web 2.0 movement has begun to develop the Internet into a node-based navigation system instead. With the introduction of tags, users can simply state what they are looking for (i.e.: “cooking” or “pets”) much like a search engine except instead of being directed to a website which may or may not have what the user is looking for, the user is (in most cases) presented with a list of items that meet their needs which other users have added to their own respective accounts. The idea of a social network being the content provision instead of a Russian-roulette style search means that users will be able to get to what they are looking for a lot faster since other users are extremely unlikely to add junk to their own accounts from which the results will be drawn.

A few sites which use tags are del.icio.us, a social bookmarking system, 43 Things, a collective list of goals which users have added and Digg, a technology news website. All three of these websites utilize tags to organize their content in one way or another. A user can search for whatever they are searching for by searching for one or more tags (i.e.: “dog” or “politics”). The website searches through it’s database of items (links, files, articles, etc) that other users have listed and tagged with the same tag and returns the results to the user. It’s logical, clear and obvious how to look for something. Most human’s can understand how to do this.

This only covers navigation around the Web. What about navigation around a web site? Links have always been the obvious method by which a user moves from one place on a website to another, but how and where links are presented have changed dramatically over the past five to ten years. Primary navigation menus have moved from a pure vertical form into other forms such as a horizontal bar across the top of a page or a navigation bar whose methods only become obvious when you begin to interact with it (such as Chipotle’s website).

Once again, a human needs some concept of the navigation or layout of a web site’s interface to be fashioned, or at least similar in some way, to something else in life of which they have internalized the process of. For instance, if someone has been locked away in a basement for all of their life and have had no other literature except for 3-fold pamphlets, they would know how to get around a 3-fold pamphlet pretty well! That’s the navigation system which they are used to. They might expect a front page with a title and possibly a general description as to what is inside as well as a back page containing contact information and maybe a map, if that is applicable. They would then expect to open the pamphlet to find their first taste of real information regarding the subject. One more unfolding reveals everything else. They know to expect anything from a really disappointing layout or possibly to be blown away by a wonderous view of a mountain or maybe even just a lot of data that might keep them occupied for a few more minutes. The general idea is that they know their way around such a piece of literature.

Think about hopping into a jet. Yep, a jet. Go ahead and take ‘er up. What’s that? You don’t know how to fly one?! That’s just because you have not yet used the system of navigation which that jet uses. I would be willing to bet that if you had flown another plane before, at least some of the controls would look familiar to you. That’s the power of familiarity!

Now, I understand that there is a vast difference between flying a jet and opening a 3-fold pamphlet, but the idea is the same. That person who has been in the basement all of their lives will most likely know what to do with a book within a few minutes of pondering, don’t you think?

Thus we return to navigating around a web site using a GUI. As a web designer, it is my job to ensure that nearly anyone who visits a web site I’ve created would be able to identify what the different parts do. I could go on for pages about examples, but try it out. Look around the web for a control for your experiment. Find a page that you’ve never been to before and try to see if you can identify what all the various components do without clicking on anything. If you’ve been using the Internet for long, you most likely will be able to label everything pretty accurately. Then place yourself in the mindset of a mid-15th centrury nobleman. Books and possibly scrolls are all you’ve ever seen regarding any sort of information delivery system. Chances are, that Web site does not look so obvious to you anymore. There is no “click,” no “scrolling.” Starting to get the idea?

Only recently have I really begin to mature in my understanding about how incredibly large the difficulties regarding this topic are. It’s most certainly a philisophical point of debate and consideration. I’m just curious to see how the Web 2.0 movement continues to evolve the Internet.

There is something wrong when we as consumers pay around $7 to $8 for a movie ticket, $5 to $10 for concessions, after which we are subjected to 15 to 20 minutes of commercials (the average amount for an hour long television show in the US). We’ve paid how much money to be shown an hour or two of video only to be advertised to more?!

I understand that a theater makes almost no money from the ticket sales themselves and rely mostly on the concession sales to stay afloat. I can live with that. Okay, sell me consessions that would normally cost a quarter of what you’re selling them to me for if I were to purchase them myself. For the sake of the arguement, say we’re all going to accept that. Now, they’re not making much off of any individual. That does suck. Why are they not making much? Is it because they’re not receiving much revenue from each customer? Not at all! We know that an individual pays between $10 to $18 for the ticket and concessions. That’s by no means cheap! So where’s the leak?

There has to be something wrong in the movie theater industry when a movie-goer is paying that much money and the theator industry is still not making a large enough profit to keep commercials out of the theater. The problem seems to be obvious: give more from the ticket sales to the theater. The whole thing is not quite right. But what can we do? I personally only go see the movies I wish to promote regarding box-office numbers anymore. I hate paying to see commercials with a passion. My wife and I even have a DVR so we can fast-forward through commercials. Are there enough of us out there to make a difference if we spoke out through our actions? Please, make your opinion known!

I try not to judge other people as a general rule, but there is one thing that just gets to me without any hope of me getting past it. If you use the rest room, you get germs on your hands, right? Especially in a public rest room!! So why do some people walk over to the sink, turn the water on, put their hands under the water for maybe 2 seconds, turn the water off and dry their hands?!

Were their pet germs thirsty?

If you do this, not using soap when you wash your hands, I’ll tell you right now: you might as well stop. You look at silly as a bald man trying to cover the baren spot on his head with the hair which chose to stick around! It does nothing for you to do what I described above, so why bother? To those of you who look just as silly by using a paper towel to open the door instead of touching it with their hands directly: have at it! It’s better to look silly and be healthy than to look silly and have your own germ colony.

I just saw this on my way into work this morning. You really can’t see it, but that pile on top of this van was litterally as tall as the van was.

Physics can’t describe…

A Psychological study was recently done by the University of Liverpool regarding the level of understanding which human beings have regarding how mirrors work. Apparently, the level is not very high. There are two points which I found to be of particular interest regarding this subject. The first was the Venus Effect which was mention in the article.

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This is supposedly an image of a woman, namely Venus, looking at her own face in a mirror. The problem? Well, this is actually a representation of what it would look like if she were gazing through the mirror at the viewer of the painting, not her own face. Since we can see her face in the mirror, she cannot since we’re not viewing from the same angle. If the mirror were at such an angle that she could see her own face, we would be looking at that back wall through the mirror.

Next, and in my mind, the most interesting, when looking into a mirror, one sees depth. Naturally, one then assumes that if the virtual world into which we gaze really existed, we would be able to reach into a three dimensional world. This, surprising to me, is actually how I thought until I read that article and contemplated it for a bit. If you’re familiar with stereoscope imagery, then you are aware of how two three dimensional images can appear as one three dimensional images when viewed appropriately. We don’t normally think of mirrors in this sense since we are using no special technique nor any special equipment to view it such as is used when viewing Anaglyphs. To this affect, we don’t think twice about seeing the image in a mrror as being a tangable vision; a truely three-dimensional thing.

The aformentioned study also brought up the fact that when people were asked how large the reflection of their heads were on the surface of the mirror, most answered that they thought it would be the same size. This is another reason why we see the “mirror reality” as a real environment. Things change size, just as they do for us in the real world.

In order to step out of the bad logic which most of us have, try this in order reset your paradigm regarding mirrors: Stand in front of a mirror. Close one eye. Consider the image in the mirror, understanding that it is litterally nothing more than a flat, two-dimensional picture that changes, like a computer or television screen. The image does reach behind the centimeter under the glass nor is the perceived depth a reality in any context, but only perceived due to the stereo view which our two eyes afford us. Let me know how or if this changes your perspective.

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I sat in line a few minutes for a friend who has been waiting since 9am the day that the Xbox will be released. Mind you, it will be released at midnight that night. The first guy in line has been there since midnight, 9 hours before.

Better be worth it… (more…)

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Yeah, a thing I could have done without. Except for getting a really good picture back of my beautiful wife and I as well as seeing some family. (more…)