I have not written, you know, WORDS on this blog for a while. Apologies. I have been busy making a mobile app poetry game, which is SUPER FUN and yet a very involved process. I will post more about it once we deploy (September, hopefully). All you loyal VC readers (ha!) can reach me any time via Skype to offer to fund what will be a lucrative mobile industry startup launched by MOI, through which we will gain professional and commercial success and eventually be bought out for a 500% gain after four years.

In the meantime, I spent a great fun weekend in Prague, visiting my longtime roommate/friend BB who, after four years, is packing up soon to move to our nation’s capital. Hadn’t been to Prague in 13 years. We did yoga and made jewelry and walked down this road with mansions where all the ambassadors from other countries live. Their lawns are immaculate and some of them have statues or intricate plaques with cool logos (I’m looking at YOU, Saudi Arabia!). All have cameras. No one was on the street, maybe because it was very hot. A great time.

My team members at the lab are all on their way to Austin to give talks about gestural interfaces at CHI, so I spent the day talking about the irrevocably failed Irish economy over lunch with my we-could-be-related no-really-we-very-well-might-be I-know-nothing-about-my-father’s-side-so-anything’s-possible Irish colleague, S., and then helping rewrite all the English text of my Indian colleague R.’s v2 augmented reality mobile app and then discussing this other AR mobile app conceived by my Iranian colleague. I really enjoy working amongst other expats — smart, motivated technologists and computational linguists and psychologists and engineers and audio/visual experts. It’s quite inspiring. Am I the only woman research scientist? you ask. Very nearly, yes. One of a handful. Welcome to 1962. Oops, I mean 2012. Funny how long social progress takes.

I have a bit of travel coming up starting next week. This is exciting and I’ll talk about it later. Berlin is growing on me (the gorgeous blooming trees and pollution-less air and plethora of bakeries and parks certainly help; the xenophobia and low salaries don’t), but it’ll still be nice to cross the ocean for a millisecond.

Happy early Cinco de Mayo!

Go here: http://urbanlife.limeask.com/index.php?sid=25284

Filtered results would appear below as thumbnails for posts.

Specifically, I want to write summaries of conference papers highlighting key criteria and making it searchable, through a faceted search wherein I can drill down my results to papers on, for example, media spaces that include direct observation as a methodology and include touch screen interface prototypes deployed in public places and which mention user studies. That’s five different criteria.

I’m not a developer. My PHP skills are about as good as my German skills — that is, I can get a general sense of each sentence when I read it, but I can’t write it very well. So I think I could build something involving custom fields and custom taxonomies, but I just want a plugin that does it for me. I looked at the code under DocLab’s site and it seems that the filter is called “Carousel”. I looked it up under WP plugins and WP Carousel and Ajax Carousel both exist, but I couldn’t get them to work.

Anyone have a suggestion? Please let me know.

Danke.

William H. Whyte: The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces – The Street Corner from MAS on Vimeo.

The Love Competition from Brent Hoff on Vimeo.

The good thing about our modern era is that technology like Google Street View lets me be places where I otherwise cannot be. Or at least lets me feel like I am there. Here is where I actually am (though picture is three years outdated, and the building is now yellow and sans graffiti and there’s snow on the ground):

Relatedly, I hear it’s creepily warm in the States. Rest assured, it is normal February freezing temperatures here. I am off now to open a bank account and buy a prepaid phone.

WORD TO THE WISE: even if you’re off contract and successfully manage to jailbreak your 5.0.1 iphone, it will NOT unlock even with ultrasn0w and Sam configured if your model firmware is 05.16.05. So don’t waste three days trying to do it! Ugh.

I love modern telecommunication. And yes, those are identical t-shirts.