The flight was uneventful. I read a chunk of Peter Morville's new book Ambient Findability. Catchy subtitle on the cover: What We Find Changes Who We Become. This was a fitting read under the glow of the real-time GPS-driven flight progress map. The flight arrived 30 minutes early, but my main luggage ended up on a later flight. It won't arrive at the W Hotel until sometime between 10:30pm and midnight. Nice. And despite the hotel's slogan, "Wish. Command. Whatever/Whenever," they won't call my room when the luggage arrives. Policy is no calls after 11pm. Hey, there's a purple Etch-A-Sketch on the desk in my room. I wonder if it's metered.

- mike lee - foggy about san francisco

...from Dulles.

- mike lee

Here are a few photos and links from last Thursday, my second day at the Media Lab. This day consisted of three workshops put on for the small group that sponsors John Maeda's Simplicity research consortium. Sponsors and guests split up into groups, each going to two of the repeated sessions of three workshops. 1-3) My first workshop was with Mitch Resnick of the Lifelong Kindergarten Group (where LEGO Mindstorms originated) to play with Scratch, a NSF grant-funded visual programming toolkit for kids. Mitch also showed the prototype of the Playful Inventions Company'a (PICO) PicoCrickets. Mitch says it is like LEGO Mindstorms, but for adding intelligence to crafts and art projects. The ten or so workshop participants were each given a plastic baggie with the Scratch software installer and the serial interface board (2). My second workshop was in the Physical Language Workshop where John Maeda's team, along with research scientist Henry Holtzman, were ready to deliver a breifing and two demos of ZigBee technology. ZigBee is essentially a lower cost, less complex and more flexible version of Bluetooth with a focus on applications in automation and data sensing. Using the Tagsense ZigBee Evaluation Kit (4), our group of workshop participants each used unique battery-powered ZigBee tags to wirelessly activate musical instruments. The volume of each instrument was increased by holding a temperature sensor on each tag. We used another set of tags to register to bid in a real-time art auction on PLW's Openstudio (5) platform. Not on my tour was a hands-on with Hyperscore, a drawing/gesture-based music composition system, but I had seen that the day before. After lunch at Legal Seafoods, my colleagues from work and I walked over to Akamai corporate headquarters to tour their network operations center. Akamai's global network of 15,000 servers handles something like 95% of the streaming media traffic, moving 860 terabytes of data daily between 13 million unique IP addresses. You really feel the pulse and enormity of the Internet in front of all those status displays.

- mike lee - wheaton, md

I took the fam up to Monkton, MD today to meet up with Trixie Little and Monkey to photograph them posing in costume with a pony. My camera's CCD was tickled pink!

- mike lee

Some sights from today's open house at the Media Lab: 2) Interactive 3D data visualization of personal telephone call traffic 3) Visualization used to analyze the flow of advice and the diffusion of innovation in social networks 4) A model of Negroponte's $100 Laptop 5) Smart Architectural Surfaces (me visible in one of the panels) 6) Cognitive Machines Group 24/7 Total Recall Project 7) Leonardo the sociable robot with its skin on for a change 8, 9) Real-time synthetic holographic video images with commodity PC hardware. Note to self: read up on the NEC Personal Robot PaPeRo 2005 Childcare Robot.

- mike lee - cambridge, ma

After dinner tonight at the Kendall Hotel, I walked over to the Frank Gehry-designed Stata Center and did some camera tossing. It's fitting that a radical architectural design would produce some nice camera toss images. Feel free to use any of my Flickr set for your desktop wallpaper.

- mike lee - mit, cambridge

...but you'll have to take my word for it since the phonecam couldn't even begin to capture the view of full Moon and Mars over a shimmering Boston Harbor as we approached the runway. Seeing all of DC at night on takeoff was a treat too.

- mike lee - cambridge, ma

I'm heading out for the big sponsor event at the Media Lab for the next two days. This time I have Ebony, Jake, Joseph, and Josh with me from work. I think I'm about 60% of my way to getting everyone from my office to experiencing the lab.

- mike lee - usair 2046 from reagan to logan

We had a small family reunion of sorts today when my 103-year-old grandmother's niece came from San Francisco to visit her at the nursing home. My cousin Al decided it would be a good time to bring his mom over from her group home too. So, after many years, an 83-year-old daughter was reunited with her centenarian mother with much of our local family looking on. The first photo shows when grandma (in red at left) first recognized my aunt after 10 minutes of holding hands. Then grandma burst into tears of joy. The hugs and kisses were captured with my DSLR, but these phonecam pictures will trickle a little of the joy into the digital ether.

- mike lee - wheaton, md