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Flying with Mark

Posted Fri, December 21, 2007, 5:06pm EST

I hate flying. I have expressed it many times before. And, I mean, I hate commercial flying. Although I am getting better: I've got five travel days in December alone and in order to maintain health and sanity I just can't freak out each time I get into an aircraft.

So. It was a bit of a personal challenge to get it together to fly with Mark out in Alabama. The last time I had been in a prop plane, I jumped out of it (with a parachute). That was back before the Fear set in, though — I think I was 19. Anyway. I did it! Last Friday afternoon, December 14th, Mark took me for a short spin around Huntsville, Alabama. It was a beautiful day — mostly clear (as you'll see) with a nice evening sun casting shadows and really throwing everything into a nice relief. Between moments of feeling extreme peril, I managed to get off a few shots. (Note: Mark did an excellent job flying — any sense of danger came from my own miswired brain.)

Here's another shot of the plane. Mark owns a 2007 Diamond Star XL, apparently the plane in its class with the highest safety rating. And a nice looking vehicle, to boot. It's a four-seater, but it seemed like three is really the practical limit.

This surprised me. Maybe it shouldn't have. It shouldn't have surprised me. But the majority of the instrumentation existed on two flat-screen monitors — one had the artificial horizon and various metrics, the other a GPS-tracked map of the area showing landmarks and, optionally, weather. There were redundant analogue gauges, as well, in case of problems with the digital systems. I mentioned to Mark that it made the whole thing feel kind of like playing a video game — you really could do basically the entire flight just by watching those screens. And pilots do. It's called "IFR" — "instrument flight rules." If you're in a cloud or something, that's what you use. (As a novice, even what's probably extremely entry-level information is still pretty novel.) The opposite of IFR is VFR: "visual flight rules." Anyhoo.

Here's Mark talking to the tower. We both wore big headphones with mics to speak to one another and to the ground.

The Digium building is the L-shaped building about 3/4 of the way down and 1/3 of the way from the right. It's angled like a "V" in the shot. You can also see a Saturn V rocket in the distance. NASA has a large research facility in Huntsville and there is quite a bit of aerospace business happening.

A nice sunset out of the side window.

Okay. So Mark buzzed his Farm so I could take some shots, but the tilting of the airplane really freaked me out. 30 degrees really does seem like a lot, especially if you're more-or-less encased in a glass bubble. I tried to get good shots, but, well, I was hanging on for dear life. You can see Mark's barn in the far lower left-hand corner, poking out of the trees. We could see the rest of the property quite nicely — the main house, the ravine, the open patches where we rode ATVs — but I just couldn't get a good photograph off. D'oh.

Heading home, now. This is a shot just straight forward out of the cockpit.

And, finally, the Tennessee River.

So. I had a really good time and would probably go up again if invited. Though it spooked me, it really did feel more comfortable than your average commercial flight. A couple things probably contributed to this: 1) Mark sat there and gave me the play-by-play as things happened. So no surprises. 2) Flying slower, lower, and in such an open cockpit just felt generally more relaxed and pleasant than being wedged into a small seat with a foot-wide window to look through. Very nice. Thanks, Mark!

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Newfoundland Trip

Posted Wed, November 14, 2007, 4:21pm EST

Life got hectic, so I haven't had a chance to blog about my trip to Newfoundland, Canada in August. It's been almost three months — wow. Regardless I thought it'd be worth sharing a bit about it.

Newfoundland? Yeah. So. Many Americans of my generation have a shared experience of grandparents who served in or had other direct experiences of World War II. WWII was intense and surprisingly poetic, especially upon reflection — I think explaining and relating how you as an individual fit into this huge, overwhelming narrative became an important part of the identities of, especially, people who were young during that time. And as people such as my grandfather related their experiences of World War II, their stories became Stories that became cemented over time into legend. My grandfather on my mom's side was stationed in Gander, Newfoundland during most of the War. And my mom and I have both heard stories of his time there for the the entirety of our lives, so the area has a bit of mythic significance, exaggerated somewhat by the remoteness of the place and the fact that (as far I know) know one I know has been anywhere near rural Newfoundland.

So my parents — Texans — took a trip up to Newfoundland for the first time a couple of years ago. Just to look around. Besides the grandfather connection, they also like remote places. Alaska. Kenya. Wilderness. And then they decided to buy a place to spend half of their year in (the Summer half). They got a place in Elliston, a hamlet of maybe thirty people out on the end of a peninsula up the east side of the island, just miles away from where John Cabot became the first Englishman to reach the New World in 1497. (St. John's, the capitol and largest city in Newfoundland is the oldest English settlement in North America.) And not too far, actually, from Gander.

I got to go out August 16th through 21st. I stayed with my parents in St. John's (above) on the first and last nights and in their place in Elliston over the weekend.

The bay in Elliston. My parents' place is on the far coast a bit to the left on the waterfront. Apparently icebergs float along here until the late spring. Those buildings on the far left are downtown Elliston.

Foggy cliffs near where my parents live. Also home of a huge puffin population. Every summer Elliston has a Puffin Festival to celebrate these goofy little birds.

Puffin rock during a sunnier day. You can see puffins speckled about. This is, by the way, in the bay from the photo above.

One surprise about the area: Blueberries were everywhere. On the sides of trails. In the yard. By the road. Everywhere. My mom carried around a little container and grabs handfuls here and there which wound up in pancakes and cobblers.

My dad picked berries, as well.

This is an old boat (or replica) in Bonavista, where John Cabot landed.

Newfoundland is very rocky and craggy, not unlike Ireland or Iceland.

Lobster's big.

Above is a lighthouse at King's Cove, on the north side of the penninsula. Below is a church in the same town.

I could go on. But I won't.

For something interesting, read about the collapse of the cod fishing industry. It's a good "tragedy of the commons" sort of story.

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Video: Slow Day (2007)

Posted Wed, November 7, 2007, 4:08pm EST

Slow Day (2007) from Josh Knowles on Vimeo

Here's another video. It was shot using an Apple iSight camera trained out the window of my bedroom in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. You can see a few famous buildings out there in the haze. I caught one frame each fifteen or thirty seconds (I forget which) and then composited those into this video!

The audio track is an old one of mine from around 2003. The video says it's called "Game Over." It's not. The name escapes my mind at the moment, but I rendered the video with a different audio track that didn't really fit. So I switched music later.

Anyway, I put this video together for the ITP end-of-semester video screening in May.

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Video: Winterforms (2006)

Posted Tue, November 6, 2007, 5:45pm EST

Winterforms (2006) from Josh Knowles on Vimeo

I have a collection of videos I've made for various reasons over the years which have been languishing on my laptop's hard drive for too long. So. They're going online. I've never used a video sharing site to host my own videos. I don't use image sharing sites (like Flickr) to host my images because, well, they're my images. And I can put them online just fine, thank you. It's not complicated to share a .jpg. Video, though, is a bit different. It's not as trivial a process to share a video as you would an image. Too many codecs to worry about and, I, at least, have to fight the desire to encode everything into gigantic files no one would ever download. Blah.

I poked around a few video sharing sites. YouTube is horrible — the MySpace of these sorts of sites. Ugly. Crap community. Vimeo I kind of liked, though. It's simple. Not too many frills. But it appears to work with the least amount of hassle. And that's what I want: The least amount of hassle. And a bit of good interface design. My criteria. (They also support full HD, to note.) So I've posted a few videos there, and I'll embed some here on occasion, as well.

So, this video. This is my final project for two classes at NYU's ITP, Dan Shiffman's Nature of Code and Luke DuBois' Algorithmic Composition. Fall 2006. They both dealt with the same sorts of concepts centering on the algorithmic creation of art. Nature of Code tended to be more visual-conceptual. Algorithmic Comp was about music. Both great classes, by the way.

The visuals are forms created using math that models the natural development of plants. Phyllotaxis. L-systems. And such. (Much good info came from Algorithmic Botany.) The audio is based on temperature data during the winter of 2005. You'll hear it slowly cascade downward and get darker in the middle and then brighten at the end as the temperatures rose and fell.

So that's it. Enjoy!

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Maker Faire Austin

Posted Thu, October 25, 2007, 5:49pm EST

Yup yup yup. I got back from Austin a few days ago. Monday. After an obnoxiously bumpy pair of flights between Austin, Chicago, and here. So I'm finally back in New York. And after a month of solid traveling I get a nice five week break here before jetting out to Seattle. I'm sick of flying. Sick of flying. I watch too many movies like Alive and United 93. I spend too much time reading Wikipedia articles about famous crashes. Commercial air disasters fascinate me. And the more I feed that fascination, the more I feed my phobia so I can't do anything while airborne except listen closely for that creak or pop or lurch that will cause the wing to tear off and result in the disintegration of Northwest flight 895 into small crater somewhere in eastern Ohio...

So I went to Maker Faire. The event took place over the weekend of October 20-21st out at the Travis County Expo Center, back a half mile or so east of where I went to high school in east Austin (LBJ High: go jags).

Highlights:

Above, the main indoor portion of the Faire. Here lived the more hacker-techie sorts of projects. Normally this area's a bit more sawdust-and-horseshit: They do the rodeo here. Yee-haw.

Kate, Gabe, and Rob (not pictured) showed off a handful of ITP projects and pitched the program a bit. Good call, although I kind of feel like Austin's digital arts scene has kind of fallen apart over the past couple of years. Maybe I'm just out of the loop.

Life-size game of Mouse Trap. I remember playing with that game a lot as a kid. (I'm an only child so a game with lots of fun parts entertained me much more than a game like Monopoly which necessarily required other people to play.) Mason came with the people who put this on — SF-area Burners. Very Burning Man. The night previous we all went out to check out a Haunted Trail in south Austin. Which was fun. Lots of pale zombie chicks wandering around and people with axes jumping out from behind trees. Boo.

Another construction of theirs, part of a series of bike-powered amusement park rides. (Which also included the rolling ferris wheel vehicle in the top picture. More about that in a moment.)

Mike on a bike. They had several "funny bikes" around. Including a few double-deckers like this. And some other various wobbly bikes. One with a hinge right in the middle I found essentially impossible to ride.

Mason on a subwoofer sofa.

Guys playing music with fire. Where, like, the sounds of the fire were the musical sounds. Perfect outside on a hot day like this! But nifty. I only caught the last few minutes — I would've liked to have seen more.

More bikes. These were decorated as large praying mantises and scorpions and such.

This guy etched art into dirty car windows.

Battery-powered hotrods. Nice.

Some drummer guy on the Cyclecide stage. Apparently the whole stage ran on solar. I didn't get to see anyone actually perform on it, though. This guy was just messing around and I liked the shot.

The wheel, again. Yeah, so Mason's sister's boyfriend (maybe husband?) makes these things and then has a crew that helps him haul them around the country for fun (although I think they're primarily Burning Man sorts of constructions). I rode in this with Mike and some other dude for about a hundred yards. Slightly down an incline. It doesn't move very fast at all, and it's really not that high. But for some reason it freaked me out. Maybe the creaking metal sounds as it lurched along. My legs also felt slightly too long, like I might slip and get hit by the chair in front of me or something. Or I just have no balls. Whatever the case, I enjoyed it, but wasn't ready to buy one for the morning commute. We attracted quite a crowd, though. The thing grabs attention. Very fun. And very clever design.

I went home and dawdled about for a bit afterwards and then the lot of us — Mason, Mike, the ITPers, and some others went out for drinks. Tried to crash the Good magazine party in the Hotel San Jose parking lot, but got there a few minutes too late (though I did catch the end of a good blues set. So we went up to Mohawk (ugh — bad, loud indie rock whatever) and then finally landed at Club de Ville. Which has kind of expanded weirdly into their own parking lot. There we mingled with various folks, including Mr. Make Vlogger Bre Pettis. I meet him every few months but he never remembers me. I'm so unmemorable. I need a popular vlog.

So that's about that! Perfect warm weather. A nice final send-off to the summer — now I'm back in a cold, soggy New York. Mm.

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Amsterdam / Picnic '07 Conference

Posted Mon, October 1, 2007, 5:55pm EST

It's night. Not late. About 10pm local time. I'm back at the apartment by myself. Christin left this morning. I'm leaving Amsterdam tomorrow morning.

It's been good. Kind of exhausting. Yesterday was really the first day I've had in a while to just goof off. And the only sunny day we've had out here. Christin and I spent a lazy early morning and early afternoon around the apartment (watching lots of BBC World — the English channels we get are BBC World and MTV, uh, Europe (I guess), which is sort of like having a cupboard full of nothing but raw potatoes and blow). Anyway, we lingered about and then took a slow, meandering walk down to Centraal Station to rent a bike for me. She had rented once pretty much the entire week, but since I had been at Picnic most of the time, I hadn't really needed one. Turned out quite nice. We got the bike around 5pm and cruised west out from Centraal Station down to Westerpark and Westergasfabriek (where Picnic had been held) and then just straight west along Haarlemerweg, a big highway that connects Amsterdam to, well, Haarlem. We didn't get to Haarlem, but we did get far. About halfway to the North Sea, I estimate. It's all very flat, so it's quite easy to go long distances, even on a zero-gear bike like mine. We biked out about an hour. Got to see one of those tall, modern generator windmills up close — I thought that was cool. Otherwise that area is kind of a mix of scrubby natural areas with the occasional patches of trees and large, new industrial complexes scattered about. Plenty more spindly white windmills and the occasional smoke stack. And a constant rumble of aircraft flying, I guess, in and out of Schiphol. An historical marker we passed showed a map of the area from back several hundred years ago. Back then we would've been biking right along the coastline, more or less. (See here.) Today it's landlocked. All below sea level, as well, I imagine.

After the bike ride we stopped in a small bar in the Jordaan district to refresh with coffee and some food and then caught our reservation for a canal cruise at 9pm. Pretty nice. They give us all the wine we could drink and we spend a couple of hours zipping around the various navigable canals in a dimly-lit boat with a bunch of people while our tour guide, a Polish guy who has lived in the Netherlands for nine years and appears to speak very fluent Dutch, English, German, French, and (I suppose) Polish. Whoa. He pointed out the usual sights and, I mean, you know how tourist guide things go — he had plenty of little tales about this or that location and answered questions about Amsterdam. I've been here a few times, so I kind of get the gist of it, but I did have a new experience in that we spent a good amount of time cruising out behind Centraal Station, in the wide waterway (IJhaven) that separates main Amsterdam from North ("Noord") Amsterdam. My perception of Amsterdam (and most tourists', I'm sure) is that there's a kind of north wall on the city at Centraal. You can see stuff back there, but it's kind of industrial and new and functional in a sort of non-interesting way. Like Amsterdam's kitchen, or something. Or Amsterdam's Jersey (as I described it to Christin). But there's some neat stuff up there. For one, North Amsterdam seems like a relaxed little suburb of Amsterdam. Anyway, it's not really crazy awesome compared to other parts of the city, but interesting, nevertheless. Moving on. Other sights: The houseboats! The canals are lined with houseboats when you're out of the downtown areas. Apparently they first appeared during the post-World War II housing crisis (Amsterdam was mostly left alone but Rotterdam and other places in the Netherlands were bombed flat). Now they're apparently quite luxury and, apart from having wine-sloshed tourists zipping past your windows all night, quite cozy. (The Dutch: not into pulling the curtains on their windows.) They looked mostly larger than the apartments and very nicely decorated on the insides — no different, really, than any normal apartment. Very nice. Expensive (though I bet my sense of "expensive" is all screwy thanks to living in New York — I bet I could get one for less than what I currently pay in Williamsburg). Yeah, so our tour lasted maybe two hours or so. Very nice. If you get to Amsterdam, I recommend it (especially as a nice intro to the city because you'll see pretty much all of the landmarks outside of the Rijksmuseum and Museumplain area).

Another tourist trick: avoid the Stedelijk Museum at its temporary location out on the IJhaven near Centraal. Oh, gracious. Christin and I went down there on Wednesday. One: It's a mess getting down there. The whole area is in the process of being built and is currently, thanks to all of the rain, a dumpy concrete mud-puddle. That takes a long hike to get to. And then none of the permanent exhibit stuff is up. Mondrian? Ha! Picasso? Whatever. Here, watch this mid-tier video art from eight years ago, instead. It's edgy. Blah. They had one exhibit called "Frustrated Bonsai" (or something like that) which featured these colorful sort of melted-plastic crazy tree-like formations. That was okay. But everything else felt like warmed-over new media fine art crap which I feel fully justified in crabbing about because the stuff at your average ITP Spring/Fall Show could beat the shit out of it with one perf board tied behind its Zigbee.

So, okay. Today, then, I had the day to myself. I didn't move too quickly. Did a few small work things at the apartment and then went out and biked around town for a while. Biked around Vondelpark. Biked down to Centraal to return the bike. Walked back to the apartment to check some stuff. And then I just went out to get some dinner. Found a very good Nepalese/Tibetan place called "Sherpa" right in the main nightlife district, whateveritscalled. The meals seemed surprisingly Italian — I had what basically amounted to angel hair spaghetti with tomato sauce, a few extra veggies (green beans, squash bits), and dough-covered meatballs. Very, very good. Recommended. I just quietly ate by myself (reading Harry Potter — I'm doing a straight read-through, all seven at once, and I'm on book five — but the post about that will come later). And now I'm back here.

So that's my past couple of days.

Picnic '07.

Why am I in Amsterdam? Well, I've been steeped in game design lately. Designing unconventional big games and social games — not "video" games, exactly. So I submitted a variation of my thesis project to Come Out and Play, the big games conference, which happened to be in Amsterdam this year (New York last year) as a part of Amsterdam's new annual Picnic digital media festival. And it got accepted: So I came to show my big phone-to-screen games which use the software I have now christened PhonePlay#. You call in and your phone turns into a game controller. Sweet. So I made a couple of games for Come out and Play. Okay.

The Come Out and Play event itself was really fun. I, unfortunately, didn't get to do quite as much as I wanted due to technical issues with my game, but I played a round of Bocce Drift, a couple games of OMMRPG, and Safari. And watched some people play other games. A good selection. Go look at the website — I'm not going to describe them all here, except to say that Safari had us all running around at dusk in Westerpark with face make-up trying to tag one another and occasionally freaking out the locals who were just out for a jog or stroll with a baby carriage. I got all sweaty and make-up ink went everywhere. And OMMRPG was probably my favorite game of the conference. It was almost like laser-hockey: Two teams. Each with one person with a high-powered laser at the ends of the fields. The goal: run around with mirrors and try to get your laser light to reach a small goal on the other side — while making sure to block your opponent's light. Really fun. Kind of futuristic, with the lasers, but also satisfyingly low-tech.

And if I had to peg one thing that I really appreciated at Come Out and Play is was the low-tech-ness. It's the same reason I really enjoyed Frank Lantz' Game Design class back my first semester at ITP. The kind of software design I do is all about interaction design — creating interesting, compelling, and fun new ways for people to do things using technology as the intermediary. But that so often gets bogged down in the technology (as my game did for this conference) that it can become difficult to explore the human interaction part of the equation. Which is way it's nice to concentrate on designing fun games that involve just running around in the park or bopping people with balls: You get to sketch and explore how people enjoy interacting with each other and with things. Also. It's nice to fantasize about what cultural impact these games might have and when games involve simple tools like balls and laser pointers, it's easier to see how these interesting game designs could be absorbed by kids or whomever and really affect culture. Hide-and-seek. Tag. Red-light-green-light. These were all "invented" somehow and seeped out into mainstream culture and people love them. Maybe the same could eventually happen with some of these.

So my project took the exact opposite route. I'm interested in telephony and connecting voice telephony with the larger connected world of the internet and mobile devices to see what's possible. Great. So I'm exploring different ways to get on to and off of the handset. So I designed some simple games — clones of familiar 80s computer games, essentially — that use this system I built for turning a phone into a game controller with a normal voice call. Just to see what's possible with the tech, but also to explore what happens when people use a familiar device such as their own phone and can participate in a public game with it. Works great in the States. But I had a very difficult time getting the telephony stuff in the Netherlands sorted out. I won't get into it, but it proved difficult to get the number of simultaneous calls connected for the games to be successful, and I found it very difficult to actually keep people on the line — their calls kept dropping. Argh. So I worked at it for quite a long period of time and made some very good progress and even would up making my codebase quite a bit more robust, but I just couldn't get the stability issue solved and had to yank my game. We got about a total of maybe 15 minutes of gameplay in, so anyone interested got to see kind of what the whole thing was about (and I did get several very excited people hovering about, disappointed that I couldn't get it up for a longer period of time). Blah. Oh, well. That failure sucked, but it actually felt like a relatively minor glitch.

On the whole, Come Out and Play was amazing. I believe there are plans to bring it back to New York in the Spring. And next year? Don't know. Amsterdam's nice but it would be nice, as well, if it would drift from city to city a bit.

So there's more to say about the Amsterdam trip and Picnic. I'm not going to be able to get to it tonight — hopefully I'll wrap up on the plane or when I'm back in Brooklyn.

I brought my camera but not — ugh — my battery charger. So no photos from me (though I did take some on Christin and Dennis Crowley's cameras). You know what Amsterdam looks like. You can use Flickr to find photos tagged picnic07 and comeoutandplay or whatever you would like...

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