Cianna was mooching my pasta shells and feeding water to mom this morning at eatzi's.

- mike lee - rockville, md

I met up with co-workers Janice and Kathy early Friday morning so that I could take them to see the Frank Gehry-designed Stata Center (1). We entered the [Bill] Gates wing and walked around the ground floor. Then back outside and around to the top of the amphitheater to look at the wacky metal clad geometric solids at the core of the building (2). A short walk from the Stata brought us to the lab, where we grabbed breakfast before John started

the day's program (3). Lab sponsors presented products or visions of the future and three student panels prepared critiques of the sponsor talks during lunch. Pictured here is one of the student panels led by Ben Dalton (4), and John listening from the front row (5). Two things that we particularly interesting to me were Tod Machover's work at Tewksbury

State Hospital is using music to help Alzheimers patients retrieve their memories, and Chris Csikszentmihályi's screenings of hilarious advertising videos of the

50s available free from the Prelinger Archives.

After the workshop program, we got an impromptu tour of the lab from Sarah Page, who among other areas, took us to the Robotic Life Group to see Leonardo, the sociable robot (6) and some huggables. We had to end the tour quickly to catch a taxi to the airport, and we were lucky that there wasn't any bad traffic or bad weather--we had an easy flight home (7).

- mike lee - wheaton, md

Earlier this year I had the honor of sharing the same stage with Joe Jacobson at the Media Lab. Joe is the scientist behind E-Ink, a product from a company of the same name that embues paper-like qualities in electronic displays. Joe updated lab sponsors on current enhancements to the technology (full motion graphics, better color, insane military applications), and also re-capped the concept of "bi-stable" displays. Microcapsules filled with oil and dark particles are printed on to an electrically-addressable surface that can deliver an electromagetic field to each of the microcapsules to turn them black or white. The displays are said to be bi-stable because after a microcapsule is switched, it doesn't need power to maintain its black or white state. Imagine something that works like a Magna-Doodle board but the microcapsules are packed together at close to 200 per inch.

Joe talked about the first consumer product to use E-Ink, the Sony Libre e-Book reader. Well even though they are only sold in Japan with a Japanse operating system, thanks to a couple enterprising importers and a hack popularized by Phil Torrone of Make Magazine, we now own one!

While I was photographing Jessica this afternoon, Wife Amy was using Cianna's nap time to run the hack to convert the device's firmware to english. We haven't converted and loaded any of our own e-books yet--tomorrow--but the display is a joy to behold even with Japanese content. I can easily read the super high contrast display in very dim light.

More to say after we get some more books loaded...

- mike lee - wheaton, md

Jessica modeled for me in my back yard today. This is the kind of yard work I love.

- mike lee - wheaton, md

After looking at some cool results from some eyetracking tests of our web site, I hopped on a plane for a quick flight from DC to Boston for another MIT Media Lab workshop tomorrow. I actually haven't been here since March. I'm with Janice and Kathy from work. Boston got the same break in the heat that DC did, it's a smooth 70-something here under clear skies. We headed straight to the lab for a brief research advisory board meeting. Now after checking in at the hotel, we're going to dinner with a bunch of lab people at the Summer Shack restaurant which Professor Maeda describes as a blend of Legal Seafoods and TIKI. Interesting as always...

- mike lee - cambridge, ma

A line of severe thunderstorms just rolled over us on our drive home. There was lots of spot flooding, downed trees, and a 25 degree drop in temperature. Looking at weather radar when we got home, we realized we missed the heavest piece of the storm front. Our yard faired well, with only a few small twigs to pick up.

- mike lee - wheaton, md

The morning sun spills through the treetops at the end of our street to be rendered visible by humid summer air.

Congratulations to NASA on today's successful launch of the Space Shuttle Discovery! I was in meetings all day and didn't get to see the video, so I'm catching up tonight with a replay of a NASA TV post-launch press conference on C-SPAN (1). Most of the questioning was around debris seen flying in the engineering films of the launch. They'll know a lot more about possible damage to the Shuttle tiles in couple days after the Space Station gets a look at the Shuttle. There was an especially cool video captured by a camera strapped to the external tank (3).

NASA's web site has a good digital image gallery. And I'll be loading Spaceflightnow.com's text updates on my Sidekick browser over the next few days.

- mike lee - washington, dc

Our new house is on 1/2 acre of lawn, much of which is under a canopy of old tall trees. People tell me I will have a six week blizzard of leaves this fall, but they didn't say I would be picking up leaves almost weekly. I'm filling a trashcan a week with twigs and leaves--two cans this week after some big thunderstorms. So today we bought our first leafblower, a Toro 275 mph Super Blower/Vacuum. I have to say it blasted the lawn clear of debris pretty quickly. The other great discovery is that because our grass seems to grow slowly, we are getting away with six weeks until we have to mow the lawn this coming weekend. I can deal with mowing just three times a summer.

- mike lee - wheaton, md