West Portal Reflections #8, September 13, 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.
This report will be short, as mostly in week 8, in addition to the usual hundred+ urgent VU emails, CTL developments and grad student research, Lynn Rampoldi-Hnilo and I wrote a paper about our User Interface and Memory study of the Virgin Islands project for submission to the ACM Computer Human Interaction '98 conference. Despite the distant collaboration, we both managed to stay up most of all of two nights. Lynn also had a fun trip to the Detroit airport when we missed the 7pm FedEx deadline. However, the draft arrived in time, and is up on the web for your perusal and comments.
Tuesday night I attended a talk at Xerox Parc by Rick Smolan, photojournalist and creator of the Day in the Life book series, Alice to Ocean book and CD-ROM, Passage to Vietnam and 24 hours in Cyberspace. Passage to Vietnam has won numerous awards for its high quality photographs, innovative interface and fascinating content, including Best of Show - 1995 INVISION Awards and Best Interface Design - 1995 Communication Arts Design Annual. I suggest we order a copy for teaching multimedia design and to learn ourselves from the interface: 1-800-558-3388, Dept. 100: Passage to Vietnam CD-ROM - $39.95.
The designers developed an algorithm for adding shadows onto background photos for blue-screened digital video characters. Four photographers appear "inside" their photographs taking you on a tour of their work. A fun interactive sequence features photo editors choosing photographs for the cover in a Siskel and Ebert debate. The user selects any of five photos for the cover, then the commentators argue over the choice and discuss merits of the shot. I noticed Passage to Vietnam did not incorporate a zoom tool like we created for IAH and thought it might be because photographers don't imagine letting people see any other framing for an image than the way they shot it.
Smolen's company is Against All Odds Productions P.O. Box 1189 Sausalito, CA 94966 USA Phone: +1 415 331 6300 Fax: +1 415 331 9400.
Also on Tuesday I had dinner only one mile from Jamie of Netscape. Unfortunately I ate at the Hobbee's restaurant on El Camino in Palo Alto one mile from the Hobbee's restaurant in Palo Alto on El Camino where he was eating. Next time we will try even harder to eat at the same restaurant and probably the same table.
I connected successfully with MSU alumn Sasha for a strawberry pancake breakfast in West Portal. He continues to work on contract multimedia jobs while interviewing for a longer term position. Most recently he interviewed with AOL. Interviewing for jobs is an informative means of getting to know politics and state of industry and the kinds of jobs being filled.
Jeff Johnson phoned Saturday after another exciting week at Tippett, to say he was coming to SF to check out the piercing scene and to get a new pierce. We went to the Cuban Port Cafe restaurant for a light lunch before his procedure. I left him at the world renouned (so they say) Gauntlet for an ear pierce lengthwise through the ear rather than perpendicular to the lobe. Even the Gauntlet had never performed such a pierce. He will attempt to capture the new look on an SGI at Tippett on Monday and compsite the new image with the ones below. (What else are high end SGI machines for, anyway?)
(Reports like this will greatly encourage parents to send their kids to work with me in SF.. However, Jeff's piercing adventures became extreme while he was in East Lansing.)
Some business deals get made on the golf course. At lunch before the piercing Jeff and I discussed possibilities of getting Tippett to participate in Internet 2, using a high speed link to the Hollywood producers they develop special effects for.
Bob Matson's birthday cake was presented at Friday's potluck, and I used the Webcam computer voice to wish him a happy birthday. More VU people have joined IChat Pager, making it a more useful medium.
Racing to prep for the VRML MIG meeting on Monday, to prepare for being gone for a week (or is it back for a week) and to pack.
I expect to arrive at the CTL by about 2 pm on Monday.
