Sandy, a co-manager from AARP, and I had a quick breakfast in the atrium of the Media Lab. We registered and received our conference booklet. The theme of this semi-annual sponsor consortium meeting is See & Seek with a series of talks generally related to data visualization.

Our name badges hang around our necks and incorporate the symposium schedule and lab map printed upsidedown for easier reading. A student told me a little usability funny: this year, they shortened the badge's lanyard so that for the men, the tag would stay out of the way in the urinals.

Nicholas Negroponte is kicking off the day with a little history on the lab. He's saying Asia is the next big frontier. Though the economic transformation of countries has gained momentum, Negroponte says that the factors that drive economic growth are different from what drives cultures of creativity and that's what's needed more in Asia.

- mike lee -

I just remembered that I had some baby pictures stored in the MIT Treehouse Studio, an experimental art creation and community platform I've been testing. My PowerBook is on the lab's WiFi network, so I logged in and pushed a picture to the iMac cluster video wall. Yes, that's my little girl Cianna's face diced up in software and displayed across a bunch of refurbished computers. It's nice to be able to refresh the screens from anywhere in the world, but even nicer to see it in person.

- mike lee -

While the lab boys were re-arranging their workspace, I went downstairs to the first floor art gallery to take in Son et Lumière, a show of multimedia installations. Of the six works displayed, I was most taken with Listening Post, a 30-foot diagonal, 21x11 array of digital text display modules that derives its visuals and audio from a continuous sampling of online discussion board text. Segments of the seventeen-minute experience feel like the green shower of glyphs in the opening credits of the Matrix movies. Follow the link above for background information and high-qulaity stills and video.

- mike lee -

Here on the third floor of the Media Lab in the student area of the Physical Language Workshop, I'm relaxing on a big leather couch by the iMac cluster video wall. The couch is surrounded by munchies which are no doubt fuel for many recent late-nighters. Carlos just walked me around the floor and showed me the Filterfresh machine. The students call this hell week because it's mid-term exam time, and they are preparing demos for the lab's corporate and institutional sponsors' open house. Next, the team has to rearrange the computer desks to accomodate tomorrow's visitors.

- mike lee - cambridge

Carlos and Noah took me past the lab and then down the (nearly) infinite corridor to the student center. I'm braving a lunch of turkey and cheese crepe.

- mike lee - cambridge, ma

After a quick hop from BWI to Logan, I'm checked in here at the Cambridge Marriott. I'm hooking up with some students from the MIT Media Lab's Physical Language Workshop, who will give me a tour of the lab. Tomorrow, I start two days of sponsor symposia as a representative of AARP's web development team. In addition to some of the usual lab luminaries, Ed Burton, inventor of Sodaplay, and Dr. Martin Wattenberg, creator of the Smart Money map visualization of the stock market will be speaking.

- mike lee - hi SXSW!

And here's a one-minute QuickTime audio file of baby babble that my wife recorded with her Palm.

- mike lee - baltimore

Leave the hotel at 5:30am in Chicago on a taxi to O'Hare Airport ---> Fly to Baltimore-Washington International ---> Take a taxi from BWI to downtown Washington, D.C. ---> Back-to-back meetings and conference calls from 12noon-5:30pm ---> Take the Metro subway from Judiciary Square to Union Station ---> Take the MARC commuter train to Baltimore Penn Station ---> Take a Metrobus the 20 blocks to my house ---> Kiss wife and baby ---> Eat ---> Collapse in bed.

- mike lee -

I'm once again on the moving walkway between concourses B and C at Chicago's O'Hare Airport enjoying Michael Hayden's 744-foot-long kinetic neon sculpture The Sky's the Limit. It's billed as the largest neon sculpture in the world.

- mike lee - chicago