All posts by MattK

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I like you.

Someone walks past me, on the corner of Mercer and Prince in the brilliant morning sun, wearing Google Glass, and I instinctively step back and into an alcove, away from the machine vision. Stray photons have taken seven hundred and seventy five thousand years to reach New York City from the outer halo stars of the Milky Way, and SoHo’s lone Googlenaut hoovers them up with his weak extra eyeball. I can’t help but feel a bit sorry for him. I’ve never seen Glass in the wild before. The thing sits on his shades like Minimum Viable Science Fiction. Toy future.

via Warren Ellis’s Morning, Computer.

I had a similar experience recently. We went to the NY Tech Meetup, saw the launch of Electric Objects & The Satellite.

I also saw my first Google Glass – what do I call them? Glasshole sounds so aggressive, Glasstronaut too kind – wearer. He looked like the kind of young rich white guy who has the cash to spend $1500 on a tiny computer you strap to your face. I had reaction of revulsion, so of course I started seeing him everywhere. How do I express kindly and firmly that I don’t want to be recorded by him? I don’t mind if he looks at me, but I don’t want him pointing a camera at me – I’m not a public figure intentionally. I don’t want to confront him or shame him, but I really don’t like this. He’s not doing anything wrong, not anything you couldn’t do with a smartphone – but it feels rude to not do it publicly, for my consent or notice to not be involved.

Of course he jumped into the elevator I was in. I grabbed the door and excused myself.

“I think I’ll wait for the next elevator.”

Review: Against a Dark Background

Books, Pals, Reviews,

Against a Dark Background
Against a Dark Background by Iain M. Banks

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This was good – but not as amazing as his other books. It felt like it fell apart more and more at the end, so many great ideas scattered across the field and then never explored, so many plot twists that meant nothing…

It’s kind of the Transformers: Dark of the moon for good thoughtful SF. Does that make sense?

View all my reviews

Press for Orbital

Dev, wordpress

Two new reviews for Orbital bring a smile to my face!
WordPress Plugins A-Z gave Orbital a 4/5 rating:

This is a great feed reader especially if you are doing research for a post or if you are like many people out there who write additional articles based on what they read. This make it easy to get a pull quote from an article and drop it right into a post. While the layout and functionality is a little raw in its appearance it seems to work very well and to give it a good go I added it to my secret blog site as a place to test some ranting on article and stories. And it seems to work quite well..

That’s great feedback and I feel like I do need to work on the style and appearance – it’s tough and I need help.

Jeff Chandler over at WPTavern also reviewed Orbital, comparing it to Feedly and Google Reader. It’s a lukewarm review – he doesn’t like the interface and feels like Feedly plus PressThis is find for him. Still, he’s offered to help me by looking at revamps of the interface.

Being interested in something is not the same as doing something

Art, Pals, ,

Steve Lambert wrote a really good essay on the foggy artist phrase “I am interested in” and how that hides the lack of actually doing things.

It doesn’t matter what the effort changed, how many people it reached, what those viewers believe as a result, or if there is an outcome at all because the goal has been set so low and can be achieved too easily. When we state our intentions so ambiguously we’re cheating ourselves.

When goals are stated explicitly, it brings a sense of clarity and purpose. Goals give you focus. When you articulate to yourself and your friends and family in concrete terms “I am going to complete the Bay to Breakers Marathon this year” that is fundamentally different focus than saying “I am interested in running.” The former means you need to start training and if you don’t, you know you won’t be able to complete the run. Whereas, if the most you’ve said to yourself and others is you are “interested in running,” you won’t accomplish much because you haven’t decided you aspire to anything more ambitious.

It really resonated with me – I hear the same bells ring as when I read a book by Derren Brown (courtesy of Cyber Security Expert Robert Pritchard) that pointed out no one knows or cares what you are thinking or who you really are inside. All we know is what you do. You are what you do.

I am the good things and the bad things that I do. All the joy and sadness and bravery and fear that I feel is interesting mainly to me – it’s the things that I do that are who I am in the world.

For artists, being interested in things is easy – doing things is so much more important. Also for non-artists.