solutionizing

[solutionizing]

Info Anarchy

It’s been a goal of mine for a long time to automate the process of making this SXSWDB. My ideal solution would be something that:

crawls the SXSW website, music section only

pulls back: artist name, hometown, genre, bio, mp3 or soundcloud link & related sites

script runs periodically and updates with new artists, date added or notes missing artists and dates they are no longer on the site

I tried playing with scrapy a bit while at SFPC but got pretty distracted by life and lost interest in this project however, the need to screen scrape sites keeps popping up in my life. Sometimes you need information and sites just don’t give you the flexibility to get the info you need.

<rant> It’s usually in their best interest to keep you clicking anyway and if it’s a data set (like fortune 500) they’d rather sell you a feed of the data which makes sense from a short term $ perspective but something I really believe to be a bad decision in the long run since the types of users who want this access are creating their own content and will expose your data and subject matter expertise to a wider audience then you alone could do. If you give access to the same data that is available on your website in a flexible way, for free, on the condition users provide linkbacks and credit you as the source you grow your audience and brand. </rant>

SO ANYWAY. I recently learned you can easily scrape info off websites with Google sheets - i know right?! Here’s a nice how-to which is enough to get you up and running. The thing is, if you’re going to do additional cleaning of the data or comparisons (like was here on an earlier import and now that band is gone) you’ll soon get frustrated with Google’s IMPORTXML functionality. So then, its a good idea to learn about XPath’s so you can get at the data you want.

So I got most of the data I wanted populating in a spreadsheet which is what I wanted ‘yeaaaa’ then realized there was a limit to the amount of information the google sheets would let you pull back ‘booooo’. So I know there are services that do this for you at a cost (blockspring) but i’m poor so i’m going to investigate Google Scripts now and probably dive into Beautiful Soup soon.

If anyone has fun tutorials to share or ideas for what to do with this sxswDB, lemme know!

[solutionizing]

JPEGs from old floppies AKA ‘mad Photoshop 4.x skillz from 1996′

I found my old external floppy drive while cleaning. I haven't used it in over 10 years. Curious, I plugged it in to see if it still worked. It did!

I got all nostalgic with the sounds.

The only problem I had is when the floppy opened, the files were recognized as unix executable files and I was pretty sure they were image files.

I opened them up using TextWrangler (which is amazing) and confirmed they were JPEG files and check out that last edit date of 10/96. ;-)

So I added a '.jpeg' extension to the files and tried to open them up but they still weren't recognized by any image software on my computer. If anyone has recommendations let me know.

The funny thing is TextWrangler would open them up and display them as images except it doesn't seem to support the full size of the image. From here i'm just grabbing screenshots and stitching them together. Pretty sure I didn't save these at more then 150 dpi anyway and... whatever.

***UPDATE*** Now using imagemagick to convert the files and it works like a charm plus it does a HECK of a lot more that i’m sure will be handy when I work on other photo projects!!! Thanks for the command line suggestion Howard!

So this is all homework from a digital photography class I took at Sam Houston State when I still thought I'd be a double Radio, TV, Film/Photo major. That ended after I realized I picked the two most expensive majors for lab equipment (tapes, film, cameras...). But check out my mad 1996 Photoshop 4.x skillz!

A friends band:

A Dallas band we'd happily drive to see:

A friend from high school who could shoot hella 3 pointers. Pretty sure this was taken at the state playoffs:

me (probably an image on my 1996 website):

If you enjoyed my embarrassing digital ephemera I send this out as a Tiny Letter here

[solutionizing]

No art is original

I’ve been working on a curation for ThoughtWorks of emoji art. Because it’s been on my brain so much I had to make something as a release. 

I re-made Cory Arcangel's ‘Super Mario Clouds’ using emoji into an animated GIF:

I posted it to twitter - no attribution just saying 'so much emoji’ eluding to the fact that it’s been on my mind a lot and quickly got an enthusiastic and endearing response of “OMG, I made this!”

SO it turns out the 3x riff of a gif i made that was a riff of Archangel’s riff of Nintendo’s Super Mario Bros was actually a 4x riff of an existing animated gif following the same lineage. 

Kind of amazing.

[solutionizing]

New rule: try to make zines for all the digital installations you work on.

#zine #gif #art

[solutionizing]

How to Make a Website for Your Dad and Have Fun Doing It

I was the kid that fixed everyone’s blinking VCR clock’s after a power outage, now I’m the grown up who, over christmas vacation, sets up my Mom's iCloud and Dad's time machine backup. I'm also a Product Manager for websites so when someone I love needs help with theirs, I feel the same pride as fixing that annoying blinking VCR and I answer that siren song. 

Projects like this get complicated with last-minute changes and CMS tutorials. Add the kid/parent dynamic to the mix and you second guess your desire to help out. You want to come home for next year's Thanksgiving dinner and arguments over which font to use is not a good reason to miss out on pumpkin pie.

My father needed to migrate his current Ecommerce photography portfolio over to a self-hosted WordPress option and I broke this out in a way that caused less stress, builds understanding and empathy and is even a little fun. *promise*

I broke out building his website into three parts:

Content (text, photos and design)

Tools (host, CMS, domain registration)

Tweaks (design & content updates)

He owned the Content, I owned the Tools and the Tweaks were something we would work on together.

I started by dividing tasks and laying out a game plan:

Dad, you look here and find the template design you like most. Then put aside the photos you want to display in a separate folder on your laptop and then finally write the text for the 'about' page. 

I'll set up the site and the CMS and when I am done... 

Together we will go through how to get everything up on the site and looking good.

Once WordPress was up and running I kept repeating this mantra "this is how it looks right now but we can always change it” and “let's get all the content up first to understand what we need to make room for, kind of like doing an inventory before you buy a storage shed." This helped us focus on the bigger picture and just keep that ball moving forward. 

Next - prove your words! 

It is very important if you are postponing some of their asks, you must come back and address them. Empathy and trust building takes two participants! Once you get all the content into the CMS, this is your time to revisit the conversations you postponed 'till later. Walk them through how to create new pages, how to update the navigation and hide things they don't want to show. Repeat these words with every tweak (and mean it) 'is that what you meant or did you have something else in mind' or 'did what we do make sense or do you have any questions?'

My dad bought one of the first personal computers on the market and had me programming text adventure games in BASIC in the 80's. Technology has changed a lot since then and sometimes the biggest hurdle in mastering something is understanding the language and just feeling comfortable looking for information and interpreting it.

Maybe I'm trying to pay back the "favor" of learning BASIC before I could play a computer game ;-) but I hope it's more of an opportunity to teach an old hacker new tricks. Good luck with your adventures making websites for your loved ones!

[solutionizing]

Thoughts near the end of school

SfPC asked us to answer a few questions to introduce us to our mentors we will be talking with on Tuesday. Here are my responses

What questions are you leaving the school with?  What questions did you come in with?

I came to school hoping to find my voice and make something by myself. I’m not really sure what that meant but I figured in order to be viewed as a successful (fill-in-the-blank: artist, product manager, person) I needed to have a strong unique opinion about something and express it in a creative way - like developing my own brand. If I was really lucky I’d figure out how to do it well enough to melt minds. That’s success right?

Ironically at SfPC, instead of focusing on exercising my voice I found that I got more inspiration out of exercising my ears and brain. I learned more about myself and my ‘voice' by actively listening to and learning from the teachers, students and visiting artists. I connected more thoughts and ideas especially when I put myself in uncomfortable situations where I knew little to nothing about the subject and I’m leaving now with a lot of stretched out grey matter.

Did I find my voice? Yes, in a a way… It is a work in progress and a life long exercise (if I am lucky). I also reaffirmed the creative experiences I most value are when I work with others to create something bigger then oneself or our individual thoughts. I think my voice is best when it can help amplify.

What would you tell the person you were a year ago?

Don’t spend your energy on people who don’t energize you.

Do something new and uncomfortable (frequently) because you are lucky enough to fail comfortably.

Cook dinner at home at least 4 nights a week, drink lots of water, ride your bike every other day and get lots of sleep 'cuz you’re a damm grownup.

What would you'd like to teach and share after the school? and how would you like to teach? 

Everything and anything from crafts to code to soft skills. I’m not sure how I’d like to teach just yet but it’s not stopping me. I’ll be spending the next few months at Babycastles focusing on creating a workshop/class program with others that will include a diverse curriculum and a healthy positive earning environment. Any ideas? I'd love to hear what you think.

What would you like to be doing one year from now? And five years from now? 

One year from now i’d like to be in school or at least working on a personal project that is still stretching my brain. I’d like to have simplified my life so that I don’t have to work 60+ hours a week any more so I can dedicate time to other projects that are important to me.

Five years from now I’d like to have helped developed a successful enough financial model for Babycastles so that it still exists. I’d like for the ‘computer feelings’ program to have grown into a school or building of its own and for more conversation around the humanitarian and social impacts around technology and our responsibility to shepherd positive change to not only have taken root but be at the forefront of conversation in our industry.

#sfpc

[solutionizing]

How to create Nyan cat in PostScript (not sure why you'd want to do this though)

For week four's “Radical Computer Science” class Ramsey gave us an optional assignment to play with PostScript. 

I love that we get to play with languages like Brainfuck, PuzzleScript and PostScript and see what we can make with it. It gets you out of your element and makes you think more creatively on how to make something out of tools that aren’t slick. I mean, it’s a poor artist who blames his tools.

With that I present to you how to make Nyan cat in PostScript...

So in looking through this basic tutorial there's an example on how to create an icon. Awesome! You can make out that the letters represent the colors using a shorter hex value.

It's just greyscale so NBD, let's try to make a cat. It will be easier to start with an image of a cat then draw one from scratch so lets use Nyan cat!

Using the same code from above I just replaced the "image" with the cat head and filled all the blank space with white. To do this I broke out the cat head pixel by pixel using an image editing tool. (like this)

Replaced the code in a text editor like this (I know cute right?)

Save your file with a .ps extension and then open it and tah dahhhhh

A totally pointless exercise if you think about "OK but how will I apply this to *insert_cool_new_programming_language_name_here*?" However, if you just try to solve problems your own way you'll learn something new and unexpected that will no doubt relate to some future project.

The icon wasn't enough for me so I went ahead and created the full nyan cat in color (...in retrospect I should have stopped at the cat head).

The thing I learned that will stick with me on future projects is when making a key, use a character that is not utilized by the values you will be replacing with that key. For example...

To create nyan cat in color I had to use full hex values (like 'f8ce80'). Because they were so long it made the code unmanageable so it was easier to start with a simple key like this: (where a character will represent a hex value)

Because you can see the outline of the shape easier when its just one character vs. six. (like this)

And if you use a letter for keys (like a, b, c...) then when you do the find replace to insert the hex values you'll start finding those letters in the hex values and insert hex values into other hex values - messy messy!

Well, I did it - here he is...

And this is what the code looks like:

Ridiculous and awesome.

Speaking of which... if you ever want to do some ridiculously awesome things with PostScript check out the guru Don Lancaster!!!(http://www.tinaja.com/post01.shtml)

#sfpc #postscript #nyancat

[solutionizing]

The business "culture" pegacorn (it's OK to be dumb)

I woke up this Monday with a buzzing feeling in my brain and an uneasy feeling in my chest. It left me optimistic and a bit freaked out.

The robot is School for Poetic Computation, the laser is all the awesome stuff they are teaching us and well the girl with the brain exploiting is me.

My brain felt like a sore muscle that I hadn’t worked out in years. I haven’t stretched it this much since I was in college and now it felt like I was making new connections - like it was actually growing. The uneasy feeling in my chest is harder to explain.

In school you are expected not to know things. School is a space designed for you to learn and explore, to ask questions and for you to feel ok about your lack of knowledge. Nobody goes to school because they already have all the answers.

If school allows that precious ability to be dumb while you learn and gain knowledge then work and building a career is about displaying that knowledge and not looking dumb. That uneasy feeling is me realizing work can have an unintended side effect of slowing down your learning process. That’s not a good thing.

When I look back at the jobs and projects I worked on which felt most successful they all had one thing in common, they were places that (at the time) valued and provided a safe space for exploration of questions vs. just prioritizing deliverables and answers. Unfortunately those times feel like the exceptions.

I’ll throw out one example, it was taking us too long to ship new features so the question became “how can we reduce our 8 month release cycle?” Thankfully the people I worked with knew there was no oracle who had this answer so I went exploring and with folks across a half dozen departments we figured it out and reduced the eight months to four without impacting our revenue. When asked why no one made these changes before the answer was always “nobody wanted to be the bad guy.”

This feeling of not wanting to be the bad guy, not wanting to make waves is so common because asking questions implies that either:

you lack knowledge and are therefore less valuable

you are being critical of the person who made the decision or the people who have been following that decision without question

Propagating a fear of asking questions creates a culture I’m not comfortable in. In these situations people tend to value answers over ambiguity regardless of the quality of the answer. 

While at SfPC it has been hard for me to reconcile these two worlds, the one I just left and the one I am currently in. I don’t have any solutions on how to improve business culture nor do I think it would be possible to combine these two cultures like a magic pegacorn.

My goal would be to figure out a way to make any space feel like a safer place to learn with people and I’d love to hear your suggestions on how to make that happen, maybe we can find that pegacorn together.

With that, this September venture capitalist and Y Combinator founder Paul Graham spoke to students in Stanford’s ‘How to Start a Startup’ class. He cautioned the students no to make the same mistake other young founders make which is to go through the motions aka "Playing House.” He attributes this behavior to the fact that so many founders have been trained their whole life to fake ‘performance’, to game the system. He asks that instead of looking for shortcuts to a successful business idea the students find their own inspiration.

Strangely enough the optimal thing to do in college if you want to be a successful startup founder is not some sort of new vocational version of college focused on entrepreneurship. It’s the classic version of college is education its own sake. If you want to start your own startup what you should do in college is learn powerful things and if you have genuine intellectual curiosity that’s what you’ll naturally tend to do if you just follow your own inclinations. The component of entrepreneurship, can never quite say that word with a straight face, that really matters is domain expertise. Larry Page is Larry Page because he was an expert on search and the way he became an expert on search was because he was genuinely interested and not because of some ulterior motive. At its best starting a startup is merely a ulterior motive for curiosity and you’ll do it best if you introduce the ulterior motive at the end of the process. So here is ultimate advice for young would be startup founders reduced to two words: just learn.

Get in touch with me if you’d like to try to find a pegacorn - @poohlaga

Followup 11/3

* great blog post on how being dumb facilitates creative thinking

* and a short exercise about how sharing our fears/concerns at the start of a project builds trust and an environment where people are more receptive to collaboration

#sfpc

[solutionizing]

"School"

Tonight some of the teachers and students from SfPC went to CUNY (city university of New York) for a meeting and conversation with participants and facilitators from IHEAP. IHEAP is an artists school in Paris similar to SfPC in that it exists outside a traditional academic structure however it is unique that it offers a degree recognized by the state in 'post education' *badass. Both schools did a quick overview to talk about how they are structured, their operations and what types of classes they offer. We also went around the room as 'students' and briefly talked about who we are and what we are hoping to achieve at our schools. SfPC definitely focuses on technology more but IHEAP sounded like they were more 'poetic' despite the fact that they said they banned that word from their vocabulary because it was overused. However they mentioned that 'poetic' from it's Greek root of poētēs, is a variant of poiētēs meaning ‘maker, poet,’ from poiein ‘create' which is pretty perfect for both schools. While we focus on tech and the other does not both really encourage participants to create work that is personally meaningful and create a supporting community. I think this is what the traditional academic institutions are missing the most. Critiques of your work only get you prepared for working with clients, these schools are teaching you critical thinking and how to be artists. My favorite conversation tonight was with one of the teachers from IHEAP. I told him that I liked the thought of having to write out your work instead of presenting it in a more traditional format as a finished project (which they do). I said I should really work on that, writing about my work. He said don't, don't write about it at all. Writing about your work makes you dissect it and then try to re-organize it in a way and put structure around it. When you get in the habit of doing that you tend to be more critical about your ideas before you make anything. Writing more means you're making less, you should just make more. *brain explosion... Really interesting conversation!

#sfpc

[solutionizing]

Testing NAND truth table

[solutionizing]

Homework for last weeks electronics class was creating different types of logic gates. Assignment here.

#sfpc

[solutionizing]

What Was the Vision? - Day 13

For class today Toru and I read/watched the following and then presented to class what resonated with us.

Mindstorms by Seymour Papert 

Alan Kay - "Face to Face: Alan Kay Still Waiting for the Revolution"

Steve Jobs - "Bicycles for the mind"

The two main points for me between these examples were the complexities in teaching how to use the tools and then teaching what to create.

Obstacles of teaching tech:

Labels placed on kinds at an early age act like "cultural toxins" preventing people from feeling comfortable around subjects. ex: I'm not a math person, i'm a 'creative'.  

People understand what they have experienced for example growing up with a car means you are more likely to know how to change a tire.

I still consider the fundamental fact about learning: Anything is easy if you can assimilate it to your collection of models. If you can't, anything can be painfully difficult. (mindstorms)

Teachers need to be trained and also inspired to teach

Of course it's (educational CS living up to his vision) taking forever—because the adults are the intermediaries, and they don't like math and science. (kay)

Goals: 

Tools (hardware, software, learning structures) should focus on the empowering and encouraging aspects of learning, not skill mastery

Consideration to socio-economic background must be given there are different needs in different situations and one lesson plan will not work universally

De-mystify a subject. Say "it's ok, programming is hard" then the teacher can start with the basics and build mastery.

Teaching what to create:

Teaching mastery of tools may not be as important as teaching to think critically about what we are making with the tools and why

"Literature is first and foremost about having ideas important enough to discuss and write down in some form."

Says Kay, computer literacy defined by most schools is too weak - it is how to use basic software like word/ppt. It is the equivalent of knowing which end of the book is up and how to turn to chapter 3. 

Allison @irl's class right now @poohlaga and @torutoru presenting What was the vision? Week 2 http://t.co/v0OCk1p6Ck pic.twitter.com/RJuTB0mkTt

— sfpc (@sfpc_school)

October 17, 2014

My experience:

In high school we got a video toaster in the 90's and created a broadcast journalism program. Knowing how to use this complicated hardware/software gave me a feeling of mastery over something most grownups felt powerless around and made me feel fearless, it gave me a feeling of 'i've done it before, I can do it again'.

Also, working within a journalistic framework taught me how to present a news story vs. an opinion piece - bias, research, multiple pov... We learned that you have a responsibility to viewers to be upfront with your intention, not misleading.

My vision:

More humanitarian. I'd like for there to be more discussion and though put into the benefits and unintended consequences of what we build BEFORE it is built.

Extreme example - Oppenheimer was ambivalent (say his co workers) about the manhattan project and upon the first successful test he simply said "It Worked." However after the bombing of Nagasaki he was very upset and traveled to Washington to hand-deliver a letter to Secretary of War expressing his revulsion and his wish to see nuclear weapons banned.

Less extreme - How do I want to measure the success of this thing? After I launch it, how will I measure it? How will I update it to make it more 'successful' and ultimately how can I open source this thing/idea so it can be successful in other places and w/out me? 

#sfpc

[solutionizing]

Making fractal patterns with Zach, Jonas and Franc at SfPC. Bjork worked well but this was just Zach playing with the audio cable.

[solutionizing]

Today we taught crochet to some if the SfPC students. I made a ‘diamond’ ring. / on Instagram http://ift.tt/1EQVOHg

[solutionizing]

I like to think (it has to be!) of a cybernetic ecology where we are free of our labors and joined back to nature, returned to our mammal brothers and sisters, and all watched over by machines of loving grace. / on Instagram http://ift.tt/1vXqhiF

[solutionizing]

Brainfuc**d - Day 11

You know when someone tells you lack of mastery on a subject can be a blessing - that you have the ability to see things with fresh eyes and may think of more creative ways to solve problems.

If you want to try it out for yourself play with brainfuck. Brainfuck is an esoteric programming language that is turning complete with only 8 commands.

After an hour hacking around spelling my name and doing a few counting exercises I looked at my classmate and said "i don't want to be a programmer, this isn't fun" to which he said "no, brainfuck isn't fun".

Another classmate stayed up till 3am working on writing out his name - he then told the teacher he was a sadist in branfuck.

@ra, I think you may be a +++++++[>++++++++++<-]>+++++++++++++.> +++++[>+++<-]>-[<<+>>-]<<.+++.+++++.++++++++++.+. :) cc: @sfpc_school

— Nathan Rosenberg (@RosenbergNathan)

October 15, 2014

So yea, go loose yourself in brainfuck and have fun. No matter how much you think you know about programming it will be easier if you forget what you think you know. ;-)

#sfpc #poetic computing #brainfuck #programming

[solutionizing]

I don't know what to do but I know I want to do something

Much of what I am trying to focus on while at SfPC is trying to find my voice.

Issues around sexism and misogyny (overt or subtle) in the workplace and tech community at large of are personal interest and important to me. I find my project ideas and passions leaning towards this subject.

When there are bad weeks in the news it is hard for me not to feel affected. This was one of those weeks.

I have curated some of the stories that have resonated with me during the week.

This week I learned...

About the Glass Cliff

That Intel pulled its ad dollars from Gamasutra over criticism from GamerGate dudes

Fortune confirms that yes, there is a culture problem (despite the pithy 'math is hard' joke headline)

That an all male panel had a hard time finding insightful things to say to a room full of women in technology and a bunch of attendees got to yell "BINGO" thanks to #ghcmanwatch

At the same conference, the Microsoft CEO told women not to ask for a raise because karma will take care of them

That Kathy Siera has put up with a lot - 'Trouble at the Koolaid Point' aka Why the Trolls will always win

So has Adria Richards

Anita Sarkeesian spoke at XOXO and explains the types of attacks she and others receive online

Social networks don't really give a shit about your safety 

An editor at the Pakistan Observer tells BBC that Malala Yousafzai does not deserve the Nobel Peace Prize and just sounds like a jerk “It’s a political decision, a motivated one, and a conspiracy to invoke [sic] people in the Muslim countries. And the father of Malala and Malala have done nothing at all. Her father is a good salesman, that’s it. And the daughter has also become a salesgirl. And they are dancing on the tunes of West."

Things that aren't as depressing as the list above

Grimes' straight up advice for the rookie girls on how to be a boss

Yes, it is a shorter list and her advice isn't a super pretty picture but it is honest. I think this is where my head is now at. To acknowledge that it is not perfect right now. It is going to be a hard problem to fix but try to keep an open line of communication and build empathy.

#sfpc #poetic computing #misogyny #women in tech