Dave Kellam

I’m impressed that this sentence was published:

This suggests that without human evolutionary pressure, the singing dog lost its ability to read human minds.

That’s how the article ends. That’s all reporters do to spin stories though, take a quote out of context and run with it.

Here’s an article on the the design and implementation of the TiVo remote control. I find it amusing because this was essentially the project I had to do for my human-computer interaction class last year. We were essentially told to redesign television — to come up with some sort of system, be it redesign remote, settop box, whatever.

My group came up with a remote that had a little screen on it, kind of like a pda, that could receive data about whatever channel you were on or channel that you’d like to be on. It was essentially taking one of the preview type channels and putting it onto the remote, so you could continue watching your show and browse at the same time. The biggest problem would have been cost. The other thing that we came up with was a page button, something all remotes should have, so you can page your remote when you lose it.

I was about to click away from this relatively boring article about the US debt being over $7 trillion dollars when I notice the ad on the page. The ad is for some sort of credit card/debt reduction thing. It’s too bad there wasn’t an option in the selection box that said “sluggish economy, security and defense.” I guess it’s irony or comedy or whatever you want to call it. Regardless, it amused me. Oh, the US debt is also at $7 trillion, that’s a lot of money. Now, it’s all imaginary money, but it’s still a lot.

I’ve been sifting through some of my older stuff lately and trying to get more things onto the site. I remembered the design community we had at suffocate.org. The site died, but we had a semi-active mailing list for awhile. Cedric Dewulf paid for the hosting and stopped doing so at some point a year or two ago. I hadn’t backed up the third version of conform (old backups: v1, v2). Whoever owned the domain (i think it was nick) also let it go. It was a lot of fun. I’ve been planning on getting conform back up for awhile (I almost did last summer), but never got around to it. That’s on tap for the near future, although there’s a fair bit of school work left to do. If anyone knows how to get in touch with Cedric let me know, or any of the crew. It would be nice to know what people are up to now.

Some notes: an old article I just found about suffocate, old shift.jp issue, conform was coolstop site of the day in august 2000, suffocate in march i think.