West Portal Reflections #2, August 1, 1997
West Portal Director of the MSU Communication Technology Laboratory
West Portal Reflections document my experiences as I try to open a portal to Northern California for Michigan State University. They are targetted to my teams in the Comm Tech Lab and Virtual University, to my close colleagues and bosses throughout Michigan State University, and to close friends and family. These pages serve as ethnographic documentation of my participant-observation research on TeleRelating ("using technology to sustain and enhance close personal relationships"). The contents mix professional and personal life because I am reaching out 2500 miles to people I care about and work with. I hope my reflections help you to keep me in your hearts and make San Francisco a place that is yours. Thanks for journeying with me as I think, learn and experiment.
Week 2 was a period of settling in and working bugs out. On the technology side, spent a day upgrading to Mac OS-8 in hopes of solving conflicts with my serial ports. (Trying to use printer, wacum tablet, modem, Casio camera and Newton all through 2 serial ports, and none of them care to relinquish control without a fight.)
Next week I am at SIGGRAPH in LA Tuesday through Thursday, where I will begin the process of making contacts with professionals, to follow up on throughout the fall, exploring partnerships, guest appearances in TC 446 and collaborative projects with the CTL//VU.
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Fun with OS-8:
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Fun with digitizing in OS-8 with a TrueVision card. Initially the digitizing card would show full screen the image, but would grab only the upper left quarter of the screen. My video camera seems to be dead, and the Connectix QuickCam is yet another object fighting for my serial port. So, I am using the black and white Panasonic videophone to grab still frames or send motion video. However, attempts to send video have so far failed, so I have not yet been able to transmit this image... |
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Connectivity so far is disappointing, but these things take time to work out.
IChat Pager
We are trying to use IChat (http://www.ichat.com/) for a sense of online community and connectedness. It is a pager system you have open all the time, so people can send pages and URLs. The system seems flakey still. You need to "Search for Friends" on their database to be able to send and receive pages. However, that feature often does not work. Without it, you can't connect. You find and store "friends." You can tell which friends are online and which are not, and you can send pages to either. Unfortunately, each time I log in, I lose all my friends and have to re-search for them. This happens more to me than to others, which is normal. Things just go more wrong when someone is distant. When Brian and I would try to Chat, it would log me off. IChat will work better when I have regularly scheduled online times. For now, since I am on and off and it is on and off, it is not optimal. A continuous connection would be preferable out here.
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Here are a few exchanges today. They sound like a Chat Room, but these are person to person pages, showing up on the desktop when sent, or received later if the person was away when it was sent.
Heeter to Tellschow: Heeter throws a plastic bug at Tellschow, landing on her shoulder. Tellschow to Heeter: Tellschow scrambles through drawer, finds dart gun, and a dart under the desk, and during conference call, wings a dart part Heeter, which stick on the window above her computer. Heeter to Tellschow: Heeter's eye is accidentally put out by the dart Tellschow shot, but no one can see Heeter's new eye patch because video transmission is not yet functioning. She tries to shoot back, but the dart misses ( it is hard to aim with one eye) and hits Devries instead. Devries to Heeter: ouch Tellschow to Heeter: Carrie takes advantage of missing eye to have Borg eye implanted in it's place . Now armed with laser scope vision, Sanna finds rubber bugs hurled with deadly accuracy! Heeter to Kurtz: Heeter walks by Kurtz and gives him a hug, on her way to look for Brian. Greene to Heeter: We do need the visuals! I missed the page when it came in. Sanna, Andy and I were giving each other shoulder rubs in a row. When I invited Jeff to join in, he said it was not his project.
These messages are silly -- but the emotional aspects of telerelating are important. It is common in multimedia labs for people to throw things at each other periodically, to break the tension and to connect. Here we try doing it virtually.
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Desktop Speakerphone System
Brian located an audio conferencing system that includes speaker and microphones with echo cancelling that works over telephone or over computer: The phone for ordering is:
USRobotics/3COM ConferenceLink CS1055
The prices is $349 + $50 for additional mics
The company to order from is: Smoltz Distributing (800-795-5484)
We have one in the CTL. I will order another for VU and one for out here, so that when visitors come to phone in to MSU, they and I can participate in the conversation. It seems to work reasonably well. Unfortunately, I have not been able to see the system yet. It is odd not to know what I look like!
CTL and VU folks, I need you to be grabbing shots of things and posting them for me, so that I retain the visual connection to your lives and work. Please keep cameras handy and grab shots of things to post!
Computer Video/Audio Conferencing
Brian and Brian and I tried working with CU/See Me, Apple Videoconferencing, Netscape Communicator (audio only), and Internet Phone (audio only).
I was never able to get my video working.
Audio initially also did not work with CU/See Me, though later for some reason it began to work. It seemed that receiving video from the CTL took up bandwidth and hurt audio quality, so we ended up turning off the video incoming signal. Of the options we tried, Internet Phone seemed to yield the best quality audio.
Internet Phone is odd -- strange figuring out how to get connected to an intended user. There are hundreds of weird phone chat onversation rooms (i.e., "Horney Housewives") but they seemed to leave us alone if we left them alone. We had Internet Phone set to half duplex, which meant that the loudest side of the conference had the floor. On the CTL side, they said that the audio quality was poor. Here is seemed pretty good. Best audio quality comes from phone lines, but that costs lots more. Over the Internet, there is a lag, which is strange to get used to in conversation. I think that we will use this for a sense of presence with the CTL sometimes while I am working, but probably need to rely on actual telephone audio for important meetings.
I tried typing in text to the CTL webcam and having the computer speak it. Again, the lag was a problem, people asked me to repeat myself (which is a bigger effort than just saying something again. It involves switching applications back to Netscape, retyping and resending the sentence.) If I had 2 computers, I could turn to one to type in things for the computer to speak, while using the other for audio, chat, video, or even getting work done.
Having only one computer and one phone line is a problem -- it ties up everything. I think when I get the Windows machine out here, I will also get a second phone line, so that I have the option of voice plus computer video/whiteboard, or internet phone plus video, over separate lines and separate computers.
Fax
Could not get my fax machine working either, until last night. Now it seems to be doing fine. However, all of the steps and plugs between the modem and the wall have dropped my 56K connection down to 40K. Need new plugs and patches to be able to improve upon the bandwidth again. Again, this is almost too trivial to mention, but it is part of the hassel of starting up remote connectivity. Even the simplest things take extra time to get going.
Jeff Johnson is staying at a hotel in Novato (6 minute walk to work at the Broderbund internship) but is going to move to Berkeley.where he'll be working when he starts his full-time job at Tippett Studio (a visua FX company that's done work for Dragonheart, Jurassic Park, and the forthcoming Starship Troopers) as soon as he finshes at Broderbund. Jeff's # (for a few weeks at least) is 415-883-5952/rm 150, or 415-382-4516 at work.
Thursday is Sasha's last day at Broderbund, but I do not know where he is going.
Headline: Biking up hill is actually possible!
I am completely shocked and delighted to learn that with a new bike (and 21 gears) it is actually possible to bike up hills in San Francisco. There are grades too steep for me, and I go embarassingly slowly, but it's thrilling to be able to travel in this manner. The down shot is looking down at the ocean. The up shot is from the ocean looking back up the street (Ulloa). Biking along the Pacific on the trail that leads to Golden Gate Bridge is awesome. The street pictured below goes further up and further down than you can see here.
Movers showed up on Monday, at the exact moment when the conference call/meeting with Dave Skole, new Geography professor, began. Randy and Brian handled the meeting well, as I distractedly kept track of pieces of furniture on the checklist and said some official words. It was very interesting to get accustomed to an empty space and a place, and then to have our belongings arrive. It's even nicer with places to sit and sleep. Sharing these experiences with Sheldon is delightful. We adore the city together.
Then on Tuesday my car arrived, driven from Lansing by Matt and Karen (shown below). It was actually hard for me to drive the first time. I have driven rental cars in San Francisco for years and years, including last week. But driving my car on unfamiliar hills was very odd.
On the cultural side, Sheldon showed me the Paramount Theater in Oakland -- a gigantic, elaborately decorated theater. It may be the largest left in the U.S. I think it seats 4,000 people. Once a week, they show an old movie there, complete with a hokey giveaway contest at the beginning, newsreels from the 60's, and previews. We saw Some Like It Hot after traveling on the Bart under the SF Bay to the stop right outside the theater. Bogart is next in The Big Sleep.
Our Muni fastpasses take effect today. Free travel on Muni streetcars, subways and busses for the month of August, for $35. The "L" line streetcar stops half a block from our house, and the L, M and K lines all converge at West Portal down the street. With a free pass, I feel like I should be getting on and riding just to see what is at each stop. The Herbivore restaurant is an excellent vegetarian restaurant near the bike shop on Valencia.
Below is the West Portal stop for the Muni. Until it reaches West Portal, the Muni is an above-ground streetcar. At West Portal, it goes underground and zooms along at fast speeds (up to 70mph) straight to the downtown Embarcadero stop at the end of Market Street in 9 minutes. San Francisco State University is 6 minutes in the opposite direction. The portal is a futuristic looking structure barely visible in the left photo, shown much closer up as it turns underground on the right.
You can see the excellent Italian Restaurant, Bocca Rotis, behind the West Portal street sign... San Francisco. So much to eat, so little time.
Take care!
Carrie
