The big FIFTY

It's my last blog entry and I have honestly no idea what I should talk about.

I guess I can start off with pointing out the fact that I had to type in a verification word for my previous blog. It happened before, during September or October when we had a deadline for the first 12 blogs and it's happening again. For obvious reasons, people are just like me, rushing through the 50 blogs to get it away during finals week or before the due date.

Next... well, I hear people screaming outside and it's 12 midnight. I forgot this happens every single night during finals week.

I'm also trying to focus on studying for my finals tomorrow but I just can't concentrate enough so I started doing these last 3 blogs. I was in the library earlier and I was more productive there with a study group than here in my room.

I'm, once again, binge eating on m&m's as I usually do during these times. I don't know but I developed this habit of not only taking in caffeine but also sweets to get my brain fully-functioning.

Lastly, although this course is so different from other courses and required a lot of things, I learned a lot from it and I believe I'd be able to make use of these new skills at some point in the future and then look back and tell myself, "I'm glad I took this course."

After the show

After the show, my friends and I went to Shake Shack off 44th St -- a block away from the venue. It had a really long line and we were thinking whether we should wait half an hour to eat there since we didn't have lunch. We decided to and, after paying for our food, we looked around for seats. Nothing was available so we took the food out and headed off to Bryant Park a couple of blocks away. By the time we got there the burgers and fries were cold but they were good nonetheless. It was funny because I had the feeling people were looking at our bags as they passed. One pair even asked if there was a Shake Shack in Bryant Park.

Saturday

Finally, the show and final is over. I got there right on time which allowed me to, thankfully, get a seat. I would've been uncomfortable if I sat on stage or stairs, or stand outside at the back looking in.

Before the show started, I can't help but notice the way the actors warmed-up because it was so "out-of-place". One did a hopping kind of thing which I initially thought was going to be part of the show, while the actor playing Hamlet did push-ups. I don't usually see actors do that on stage right in front of the audience so I was really surprised; nevertheless, it was entertaining.

So here are some pictures I took of the show:

Today's the day

I went back home to the city yesterday and I woke up in my comfy bed for the first time in a while. I'm here, writing this blog, multi-tasking in preparation for the show in six hours. There are all sorts of things going on in my head right now like: 'What am I bringing that I absolutely can't forget?', 'When should I leave the house?', and even 'What am I wearing later?' I can't help it because this is a first for me; you know, this whole gig in Manhattan.

To help myself, I'm making this to-do list--right now. I've done these so far: download TouchOSC and Bump, bring the camera, and uhh... wait, that's it? I thought I was almost ready... Anyway, this day will be very busy as I juggle with this and trying to figure out the best possible way to study for my first 3 final exams on Monday and Tuesday.

More Max

I was playing around with Max/MSP again and I found this app named, "CRUMBLINGMOVIEFORTRESSES." I loaded the Max project and then added this video of excerpts from The Matrix. I played around with the set-up by entering different number values (as shown):



I was just looking at the video at first and I thought it was plain but when I realized that it was supposed to be 3D, I clicked on the projected image and dragged my cursor, and there it was -- the 3D cube. I included the original and transformed video for comparison.

It's over!

It's Thursday and that means the last day of lectures for me this semester. I was supposed to have another class tomorrow but my professor cancelled his last two classes with us because we finished the material early (I wish it's like that for all my classes). However, this happiness is obviously short-lived -- it's the dreaded finals next week. I have five final exams and this class would have been the sixth if it wasn't for the non-written final (i.e. show at The Tank). And, oh, I'm so thankful for it -- I mean, who would wanna take 6 finals in a week?!

This may be sounding like a rant, and it really is -- only in text form. I'd have done it in a video but it's just so weird, especially with people in this room. Anyway, first things first: finals. Well, I talked about that above so moving on. Second is: Wolfie-Net. I'm so annoyed because it's been so slow since last night. It started when my friend texted me saying it takes forever to load a single page in her browser. So I told her to come over to my room because I had a perfectly working WiFi. Turns out, after 3 hours, the WiFi in my room started acting up so bad I couldn't even open my email. And now, it's keeps on fluctuating that I had to write this entry on notepad and hopefully, later, I'd be able to post this.

It's so difficult without having a stable internet connection because most of the things can be found online, and I'm not just talking about Facebook, Tumblr, or Gmail. I'm also talking about Blackboard and the course sites outside Blackboard. It's finals week and some of us have the notes online; the practice exams online; and, of course, the schedule of exams online. It's plainly ridiculous to have this kind of access to the internet, and there are no emails whatsoever from ResNet addressing this problem. I may seem like I'm whining but with the stress towards finals week, they shouldn't add more to it by giving us crappy services on campus.

14 Weeks After

It's almost over--this semester, that is.

(WARNING: May contain melodrama lines)

It's been 14 weeks (I know this not because I counted, but because of the weekly posts I need to do for my other class; I entitled the posts by week number) and I feel like it's been only yesterday... that my summer vacation was disrupted (yes, 3 months and a half is not enough for me). Time flies so fast after the first week of the semester that before you know it it's time for a week-long coffee chugging in preparation for finals.

To be honest, I didn't expect this course to be so tech-oriented. In fact, I didn't expect much at all; after all, it's a 100-level Theatre course, right? The course itself is easy but the time it takes to do each work makes up for it. Take SketchUp for example; I probably spent over 10 hours on each piece--more than the time it takes me to finish a programming homework. And this is why I've had a constant love-hate feeling towards this course: hate because it takes up so much of my time, especially on the weekends; and love because for every work I completed I had this sense of accomplishment, not only because I finished it but also because I know I've learned something new.

It's amazing, really. The things I learned about the virtual world (i.e. computer applications) throughout the semester would've taken me probably 5 years to discover and learn on my own. And in the list are: SketchUp, Bryce, foldit, Second Life, Max/MSP, Screen Encoder, and even blogging.

Bryce

It was flurring yesterday. Meaning, it's my first snow this season (they say it snowed during Thanksgiving but I didn't see any, so that's not counted). So I thought that maybe, as my first Bryce work, I should make it snow-inspired... with a mix of Hamlet. Hamlet has a darkness to it so I chose this sunset on a snow-covered, inhibited island theme.

Binary image

It's the first time I've heard the term "binary image" (considering I'm a programmer, well, that's a shocker). I tried it out with the fighting robots video I ripped from YouTube and the effects are quite cool. In coding, you can only have values within the range of 0 and 255 for things like the RGB values to get a desired color. Apparently, the binary image also works that way. As you can see from the video, the "brightness" is decreasing due to the values I'm using: 0(all white) -> 50 -> 100 -> 125 -> 150 -> 200(almost pitch black). Can you figure out when I changed the values?

Mixing of 2 videos

Here's my first Max/MSP texture application. I used the one that mixes 2 videos and gives you control how much they overlap each other. The second video is fun because I managed to find two videos that create the (almost) perfect illusion of a person walking on a pedestrian. I'm still surprised how I recorded the videos in perfect angle with each other not thinking of applying it like this.

Taking art to a different level... once more

A couple of weeks back we talked about the performance artist Stelios Arcadiou ("Stelarc") who pushed the human body to the limits. Today, I found a similar guy who did a crazy thing to live up to "having eyes in the back of the head": he installed a camera in the back of his head. The camera will take a snapshot of his daily life every minute for a year. He's not just doing it out of a whim, but he's doing it for the sake of art: he'll be presenting the photos to the Museum of Modern Art in Qatar. I don't know what will come out of his gig, but he's definitely defining a new way to invasion of privacy (though I can't really say that because it's his own doing).

Kinect: the making

Here's a video I found about the conceptualization and the production of Kinect. With the endless possibilities of Kinect application, I think it's interesting to know what's behind the technology: the skeletal tracking, the 3D camera, and the software. As a programmer myself, I caught on what one of the guys said: "It's 50% hardware, 50% software..." because it shows the amazing capabilities of a truly unified hardware and software. And it's not just that; I was surprised when different kinds of people with different occupations actually made Kinect possible.

Screen encoder

Much of the MAX/MSP applications include video manipulation so I was thinking of how I'll be blogging about MAX/MSP to show the effects of the manipulation. I thought of simply taking screenshots but I suppose it won't be as good as a real video. I thought of just recording the video with my phone but it gave the ugly lines you get when you try to video a screen or monitor.

I knew there was some way to take a video off a computer screen; I've seen people do it on YouTube, gamers especially, showing walkthroughs, raids, etc. So when I tried searching for it I found Windows Media Encoder, but apparently Windows is retiring it and replacing it with Expression Encoder. I thought I had to pay for it but thank goodness it's freeware (though you have to pay for the professional version).

It took me about an hour to figure out how to record a screen video, edit, then encode. So once again, this course made me learn something new.

How to remove your digital footprints

I found this article on ways on how to protect ourself from unwanted snoopers. It lists of ways to remove our digital footprints.

1. Physically go into sites and clean them up.

2. Don't give any information you don't need to. (e.g. age)

3. Go to sites and ask that they remove information. The problem is that it can only be done site by site, and you can never tell how far the initial information has spread.

4. Start a professional blog to hide the old stuff. And hope that your old stuff gets buried.

5. Don't leave evidence of your Internet activities on public browsers. Come on now, don't click that 'Remember password' button.

6. The newest Firefox and Internet Explorer browsers have a tool that allows you to easily cover your tracks before you leave a computer. Basically, delete all browsing data, including page history and cookies.

7. Don't use the search engine offered by your Internet provider. They might connect your account to the cookies you have.

8. Use a specialized company to protect your information. Paying for someone to clean up your tracks?

--excerpts from article by Michele Alperin, Jan. 30, 2008 issue of US 1 Newspaper.

Going incognito

I've been using Chrome as my browser for more than a year now. A few months ago, I found the feature it offers to surf the Web "secretly" via New incognito window (Ctrl+Shift+N). When I opened the window, I first noticed the suspicious-looking man icon on the left hand side (reminds you that no trace of your web browsing will be saved):



The page contained a short explanation of how the incognito works: browsing history and such won't be recorded (basically what's within Chrome) but any external parties might see/take information. Seriously, the last two at the bottom made me laugh:



Anyway, it just goes to say that it's really hard to keep our digital footprints (I prefer calling them cyberprints) hidden. You have the popular story of a man who applied for a job; job employer does a quick search on him and finds a photo of him smoking marijuana. There are also cases of impersonating, hacking, and stalking--which of course includes the infamous Facebook stalking (less suspicious but creepy nonetheless). But in any of these cases there are people and/or computers out there that will eventually look up/stumble on information about us.

I recently read an article about some users on Facebook who don't just simply logout after use--they disable their account. It's obvious that they want to take extra precautions against other [unwanted] people seeing their profiles, but would doing that really ease the problem? With the Internet's concept of information sharing, it's nearly impossible to use it without leaving our own information, whether we like it or not.

Kinect hack

Video I found about the current status of the hacks done on Kinect. Around 2:34 it's talking about the application of Kinect on Windows 7 (something related to the 'Kinectified' I wrote earlier). I think it's kinda cool though I'm not sure if the demo on the video is real or not. There's also the KinectBot from MIT wherein they placed a hacked Kinect on a mini robot to function as a 3D mapping environment tool. On a side note, I recently learned that the term 'hack' was an MIT slang to describe a college prank, but the Railroad Club used it to describe any puzzle-solving project undertaken with wild pleasure in mere involvement. Sounds weird but that's where the 'hacking' we know of came from.

"Kinectified"

A week ago, a friend of mine posted a link on my wall of an article about a new hack done on Microsoft's Kinect just hours after it was released. The article contained the same video shown in class last week and apparently, the guy who hacked it won a bounty of $3000 to whomever could give an open source driver for Kinect (according to the article anyway so I don't know if the guy really received the prize or not).

So as I was reading through the page I noticed a bunch of related articles and one of them had the title, "Kinectified PC ... not yet." (I kinda like that word, 'Kinectified.' Who knows, maybe a few years from now, it might be in the dictionary.) As the title suggests, it's about whether Microsoft will soon be adding the Kinect capability to the PC. It's possible but there are still a lot of problems to be taken care of: like how to cram all that hardware into the laptop, the expense, and even the problem of "Gorilla Arm Syndrome" where one's extended arms get tired after a long period of time.

So if not the PC, how about somewhere that's not meant for people to use personally... like a grocery store check-out? Will using the Kinect technology to recognize the items and charge them to your credit card as you walk out, work? How about instead of security cameras we have this technology to accurately recognize a person as he/she walks into the building? These ideas may be far-fetched and may be against the right to privacy (in some ways) but it's not entirely impossible. It's efficiency we're talking about here. However, with this, are we gonna lose yet another sector of job like the cashier? Solutions are being made in the name of technological advancement but new problems arise too. And with the speed we're going, it's hard to predict what's gonna happen next.

Cyborgian Texture

About 2 weeks ago, I went on a Matrix Trilogy marathon on a whim. I was randomly searching for films to watch in Netflix when I saw two Matrix films available for online streaming. I saw the first of the series but never went to see the next ones. I thought of watching the sequels then and there when I realized that it's been over a decade since I saw the first. Vaguely remembering it, I rewatched the film before proceeding to the next ones. At the end, I thought it was a really well-made movie with amazing CGIs (especially the third installment), considering it was made more than half a decade ago.

So came the time when the professor asked us to find cyborgian textures. The third movie (Matrix Revolutions) immediately came into mind. I searched YouTube for Matrix videos and ripped a video or two there. I edited the videos to only show the cyborgian parts (i.e. just-machine-scenes). I removed the audio for easy Max/MSP application. Here are the videos:

Plant & Wind

This time around I have wind and plant movement. It's not an exact example of texture but I consider this one because it portrays movement through time like the video of the plant with the wind picking up and dying down. I'm amazed by how such a simple thing can show the beauty of nature in movement.

Sunset Yin & Yang

This is one of the snapshots from my sunset video. I think it represents the concept of yin & yang in a way that you can see the distinct separation of land and sky but then you find the atmospheric effect by the setting sun combining the two. Since yin & yang means opposite objects, the sunset is partnered with the sunrise but in this, I saw that the sunset became the link between 2 opposing elements - land and sky.