[Reposting from previous so that this appears in my main RSS feed.]

Right after my coffee talk with Leigh Saturday afternoon, I walked over to the park in front of Palo Alto City Hall to compose the post of the photos I had taken that day.

I struck up a conversation with a sculptor named Sam Yates who was busy constructing a public art installation in the park. The Palo Alto weekly describes Sam's prior claim to fame:

The Sacramento native has some experience with world records, having created the Guinness-endorsed world's largest filing cabinet in 2000. For that project, known as "Minuet in MG," Yates shredded an MG sports car, flattened and measured all the pieces, and then placed them, from heaviest to smallest, inside the drawers of a 65 foot-tall filing cabinet.

What Sam is constructing in the park is a cube-shaped solar garage/office called The Color of Palo Alto Project (site not live yet) that will appear to visitors to have landed and raised its four sidewall solar panels. The panels open to reveal a transparent-walled room about 10x10 feet sqaure. Inside is a desk on a desk and a red scooter. Starting in January, Sam will systematically ride the electronics laden scooter across all of the city's GIS-mapped parcel locations and photograph them. Each photo will be stamped with GPS coordinates and a custom software application will average all the colors in the image into a single color. Sam thinks he'll end up with 20,000 photos. All of those will go onto an interactive map and then be averaged again to arrive at one ultimate signature color for the City of Palo Alto. The color will be offered as a brand element of the City. People will be able to buy the city color as a custom mix of housepaint. Sam will also sell poster collages of the photos and hang them as a giant mural on the facade of City Hall.

Until the site is up, you can read an article at the Palo Alto Weekly.

- mike lee - washington, dc

Cianna models her new purple penguin Pro Fleece Sleeper, which we bought at Baby Gap today. While the little penguins in the print don't exactly match the Linux Tux, I still think this outfit qualifies as baby geek chic.

By the way, you generally can't tell from the photos, but usually when I photographing Cianna from up close, she's swatting at the phone cam or trying to grab me for a hug. This really challenges one's photo technique.

- mike lee - baltimore

I've documented the large boba tea in my hand and e-mailed the photo. Now I'm waiting for my Boba Fate.

- mike lee - at towson maul, md

This morning, I stopped at Stan Edmister's mushroom stand at the Waverly Farmers' Market for a grilled portabello mushroom sandwich. The yummy sandwich is made of ingredients from this spring stirfry recipe plus a little hotsauce--all dropped into a pita pocket. Beyond the ingredients and good taste, the other joy of this sandwich is the aromatic smoke from the grill that surrounds you as you watch your sandwich being made.

- mike lee - baltimore

I'm home in Baltimore after being away for eight days. The house (pic 5) feels inert now that our dog is away. For the first time in 10 years, there was no fuzzy silhouette in the front door window, and no dance of joy by a blur of fur when we walked in. But she is apparently enjoying her vacation with my in-laws in Ohio and getting five walks a day.

And starting this week, we're spending most weeknights in the basement apartment at my mom's house to cut our one-way commute to D.C. down from an average of 90 minutes to 40 minutes. On bad traffic days, we were in the car over two hours one way, and we haven't seen snow yet. Because Amy and I work in the same office, the time together in the car was doubly lost. Since June, we've been bleeding an average of 30 person hours a week worth of time in the car, which wore us out. The hours saved in this new arragement will let us spend more time with Cianna, catch up on rest, see movies again and more. We'll live this way until we move to a house closer to D.C. in the spring.

- mike lee - baltimore

One memorable story I heard from Joe Britt on my tour of Danger, Inc. was on the origin of the highly distinctive flipscreen of the Hiptop/Sidekick devices. It turns out that Joe Palmer, the Danger team member who concieved of the flip idea, blogged his story in a post way back on August 8th, 2002. I excerpt it here:

Okay, here's my story:

On the Friday before my first day at Danger, I was standing in the shower, looking at the bar of soap in my hands. I'd learned about the Danger device / hiptop / sidekick during my interviews, and I was thinking about all of the ways that a keyboard could be exposed from an object the size of a bar of soap. (1) I'm not sure if that's where Mr. Mossberg got the soap idea....

I imagined sliding out the keyboard in a little drawer, but that puts all the weight out of your hands. (In an odd way, a wet bar of soap is an ideal model, since the slightest imbalance will cause it to slip. After about 10 minutes (Or two gallons, your mileage may vary) I fell on the idea of a single axis rotation of the hinge to reveal the keyboard.

Later that morning I went up to the Danger offices to sit in on a meeting -- just to get a feel for the place, and sitting on the table in the glass conference room was a post-it note pad. (No soap.) I peeled off a chunk of sheets, then drew a keyboard on the remaining pad, then demonstrated the idea by rotating the top of the pad. The room got rather quiet...

ANYWAY, that's my story, and I'm sticking to it

For fun, I re-enacted the Post-IT flipscreen in the photos illustrating this post.

This brilliant concept was refined by many, won a Wired Rave Award and was recently granted a design patent.

To this day, a swift flip of my screen still draws gasps of wonder from the uninitiated.

- mike lee - baltimore

Cianna has been standing up on her own for the last three weeks. She stands up for a minute or more and either claps her hands or waves both hands while laughing. Tonight, with my two helping hands, she took her first steps! She would have gone on for a couple more paces, but she was distracted from a teardrop that fell on her head.

- mike lee - langley park, md

While killing time at Atlanta airport, I spotted the new oversized illustrated edition of Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code at Simply Books in terminal C. I haven't read the book yet, and having an edition with photos and drawings of the artifacts and locations in the story would make everything more vivid in my mind.

Not wanting to pay the full $35 price and carry the heavy volume home, I decided to shopshift it. I just used my Sidekick to load the Amazon Mobile site so I could look up the book by ISBN number. The product page came up and I simply selected my office address via the dropdown menu and pressed the One Click(TM) button. On takeoff from the airport 90 minutes later, I looked down on the Atlanta skyline knowing that someone down on the ground was pulling the book to load on a UPS truck and that it would be on my desk by Tuesday.

I dream of the sure-to-arrive day when I can take a phonecam photo of the barcode of a book or DVD, submit it to a server app that extracts the ISBN from the photo and then talks to the Amazon API to return the product page and One Click button to buy.

- mike lee - atlanta airport

Here's a cool looking Pin Clock that's at the airport's SFMOMA store. The price was $110, so I checked Google and sure enough, someone has blogged about finding it for $70.

- mike lee - sfo