Dave Kellam

The NYTimes is running an article about life hackers. This quote sums it up perfectly, “Information is no longer a scarce resource – attention is”. A large portion of my HCI classes were spent discussing how to notify people without actually interrupting them (aka attentive user interfaces / more). It’ll end up being one of the larger problems facing the computer industry for at least the next 10 years.

We’ve reached a threshold in terms of information availabily and devices to interact with that information; be it iPods, cellphones, laptops, whatever. What we need are devices that work for us. A microwave is pretty convenient, but wouldn’t life be a lot easier if your frozen dinner had an embedded RFID chip that told the microwave exactly how to cook it? What about that punk kid on a skateboard listening to music? Should you hit him with your car, or have it send a message to his iPod? The ability to invade music devices probably isn’t that smart, but you get the idea.

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The time has come for me to write a book. Yes, you heard me correctly and no, it’s not crazy talk. The reason: Seth sent me an email about the NaNoWriMo challenge. I was going to dump it in the trash, but the brain started ticking away. Basically, it involves writing 50,000 words over the month of November. I remember Wes trying to do it a few years ago. It’s doable if you break it up in managable chunks.

I haven’t done too much on the creative writing side of things since my tenure at Golden Words ended a year and a half ago. So, there’s no point half-assing things with a few short stories, may as well dive right in.

There’s a large community aspect to the challenge (if you’re into the workshopping sort of thing). I probably won’t do too much of that, it’ll be hard enough for me to avoid distractions long enough to pump out a few thousand words every day.

This announcement is mostly to prevent me from jumping out of the frying pan before this shindig gets started. Now, I need to finish off some work that pays the bills. Stay tuned for further details.