Dear twitter friends…
Dear twitter friends I have deleted my main account due to tired I am with twitter and it’s poor performance. I am in other places. I’ll catch you there.
Minsh is launching tomorrow and I will be meeting with them to record an interview with them about the website. They’re university students who did this as one of their projects.
Minsh is a 3d virtual environment in which twitter users are represented as fish swimming in the ocean. Each fish is a different twitter user. I saw this project in pre alpha and it’s an interesting idea.
Tomorrow I will see how it’s evolved and I hope to have a video up by Friday lunchtime which will help you understand what the website is about.
On the 6th day of FIFAD two films stood out. One looked at a wheelchair bound woman who still had the urge to go climbing and the second film looked at a woman who went from riding snowboarding lines in winter to base jumping in summer. By having these two documentaries the FIFAD event promoted women who appreciate and enjoy extreme sports.
A few weeks ago I wrote about superhuman climbers, it explored how differently abled people were empowered through the efforts by climbing centres to allow wheelchair bound people, people with mental issues and others to climb despite the challenge. Rêver sous les étoiles was a documentary exploring this topic from another angle. Vanessa François moved to the mountains with the goal of becoming an Alpinist but was paralysed from the waist down after a block of ice damaged her spinal column. Thanks to the people she surrounded herself with she was able to continue climbing, cycling and doing other sports despite this disability.
In the film we see how friends set up a route on El Capitan for her to climb and how the CRS in France prepared the equipment for her to spend a night at over 4000 metres near the Aiguille du Midi. We see how a woman, surrounded by the right people could, despite her injuries, keep living adventures.
There is a moment in this film where we see that she is given the opportunity to act in a play where actors in wheel chairs and conventional actors could interact to provide people with a show. As I watched this documentary I thought about how technology could be adapted to be invisible in the performance. At the moment wheelchair bound actors need to rely on conventional systems to move the chair around. Imagine if engineers from EPFL and other tech universities designed a wheelchair control system that would allow wheelchair bound actors and performers to control the wheel chair with arm and head movements. Imagine if the movement of the chair did not rely on a joystick but rather a harness or sweater which controlled the chair’s movement. In future I expect that technology will become invisible, to provide these people with wheel chairs.
The documentary is great because it shows that injuries are an opportunity to adapt new techniques to conventional sports rather than to give up and live a life that is more limited. This empowering documentary should encourage people not to give up on their passions and to continue striving for more.
This documentary is about Géraldine Fasnacht, a snowboarder from Verbier who won snowboarding competitions in winter and then moved on to base jumping after friends invited her to jump. In this documentary she introduces a doctor to skydiving and explains the parallels between snowboarding and base jumping. She talks about some of the principals of base jumping and how technology has allowed the sport to improve and become more interesting. As with many extreme sports documentaries and films she speaks about the importance of safety norms to make sure that dangers are avoided.
In diving, mountaineering, base jumping and other sports there is a common philosophy to minimise risk. She speaks about the importance of knowing when to call a jump, to cancel it if there is doubt. This is an important aspect of many conversations in extreme sports films. Goals and ambitions are important but it is just as important to know when to say “Let’s try again next time”.
Sommets de Vie by Sebastien Montaz Rosset illustrates this effectively. The film maker, along with Jordi Tosas, who had been on 37 trips to the Himalayas arrived just two days before the earthquake. When the earthquake struck they abandoned their original projects to help with search and rescue efforts. They went in to more remote valleys to scout what areas were affected by landslides, where bodies could be found and to find whether people who had survived needed help. In this film they walk along footpaths. Occasionally they had to cross multiple places where landslides had occurred. When they found corpses or possessions they took pictures along with GPS coordinates in order to provide search and rescue teams with information to help with the repatriation of remains to help provide families with closure. This documentary is nice because it shows Westerners working along with Asians, UN organisations such as the World Food Program and others to help people cope with and adapt to the new situation.
At some moments we see that landslides are taking place as food and aid are provided. We see how although the Himalayas are beautiful they are also a dangerous place. I like that the film concludes by saying that Jordi still wants to set up a ski school, so that people in the relevant countries can enjoy the mountains differently. It is nice to see that people who travel to these areas give back and integrate with locals.
Yesterday’s walk, as seen by Sportstracker. Pictures to come soon.
Yesterday after work I was meant to meet a friend in Geneva but after a phone call changed my mind. I decided instead to walk to the apple store. What I saw in the apple store was quite interesting. As you walk in, where you used to have iphones and macbooks on display you now have ipads. Walk into the main hall and you have at least three more tables dedicated to the ipad. There were many more ipads than there were people interested in playing with the devices.
The geniuses were standing around, with nothing to do. Does that mean that everyone who wanted to get an ipad got one, that everyone was tired from work or does that mean I went at the right time to play with a few devices.
Of course I didn’t. I’ve had my own for about a week now so it doesn’t matter. There’s no need to go to the apple store to play with the device as I have mine with me most of the time.
What is interesting is Apple’s current move away from laptops and even more so with desktops. When the macbook air came out everyone said that it was a piece of crap in relation to specifications and they were right.
Steve Jobs and Apple have taken the netbook concep and skipped it. Instead they provide the Ipad, a device which you expect to have limited capabilities but great potential. What other manufacturers have been able to sell a display without a keyboard after all.
You have over two million units sold for over a billion US dollars in spent currency. That’s two million units without a keyboard. That’s a theoretical two million people that are discovering that life without a keyboard works just as well. There’s just one set back ladies. You’ll have to cut your nails if you don’t want the clackety clack as your nails touch the screen.
I love the iPad. I love that it’s light, that it’s versatile and that it’s so flexible. Imagine editorial meetings where you have an iPad and the content you’re discussing is in h.264. Drop into the meeting, say the item is interesting and show the editor in chief.
There is no need to go to the edit suite, there is no need to go to the computer. There is no need for power cords, adaptors and dedicated bags. We’ve come to what I would call the iPad age. This is going to change the way we discuss and share content.
Now what interests me is to see what happens with Apple laptops. Will the touch screen now come as standard and will they release dual screen laptops without a physical keyboards or will they come out with touch screen displays on the screen portion and a keyboard and mouse on the bottom part?
Apple have effectively demonstrated how well touch screens can cope with our current demands. The question is how far will this progress? Will we see applications that are specifically designed for a touch screen interface. If so then we are going to a virtual interface that resembles the paper and scissors of our childhood. The computer itself is becoming transparent. What we do with it is changing.
What we do with it is no longer local, no longer requiring the same type of data storage and sharing. We are no longer working on one machine. We have decentralised everything. Look at what the android platform can do. Look at Mobileme can do.
It’s an interesting time. The computer is the simplest it’s ever been. This means that more and more people, from all ages are able to intuitively interact with the device in front of them. Configuring is as simple as a username and password these days. Everyone understands this method of configuration. It’s a democratisation feature. That’s why two year old children can use the devices as easily as 70 year olds.
When you ask the revolutionary and evolutionary question in relation to technology I would go so far as to say this is a revolutionary device. It’s doing away with the keyboard, the mouse, the idea that things have to be configured. It’s the simplest interface yet. I don’t think everyone can justify getting one but it goes one step further in helping people always be connected, never be offline. It helps make facebook, twitter and e-mail be more pervasive in the way we live our daily lives.
Look up Dziga Vertov and his ideas, then look at this video. Thinking of the documentary makers and their discussion about catching life unawares, getting real life to happen without the person knowing. It’s the creative treatment of actuality. That’s more Griersonian (if I remember right).
Everyone has a camera on them and certain of us stream it from where we are. Now it’s time for the documentation of a society through audiovisual means for future generations to puzzle over.
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Thought it was a joke but you really did it!
Impressive somehow…
I was on twitter for two years with an average tweet rate of 72.6 per day. And from one day to the next it no longer exists. Too many superficial people on the site. It was time for me to move on. I am using a secondary account but twitter is going to be a far smaller part of my life. So small that I will only go to check on twitter when I have replies or a new follow.
It's like that relationship you see going nowhere. It was time to break up. I made sure there was no going back and I'm happy for that.
I thought it was a joke at first as well, but I did see this coming.
Sounds like you've been pretty frustrated with Twitter lately. I followed your secondary account, but won't be offended if you don't follow back 😉
Best wishes,
Mark
It's no joke, I did delete that account. I have a backup of my last 3800 tweets on that account and thousands more are backed up on various portions of the web, either through tweetbackup, greader or others.
One of the reasons for my frustration has been how people speak and profess their knowledge of social networks yet are to conventional to actually use them to their full potential.
As a result I am still on twitter, but with a far reduced presence.
🙁 My nights aren't the same without your tweets. I understand your thoughts completely though. How many of your followers ever bothered to subscribe to this feed? [raises hand]
I thought I was better at using the social nets to their full potential, but Twitter and other places have exposed me to so many of them, that I use a lot, but none to full potential, something I will try to address in the coming weeks and months.
I'll be trying to keep up with you elsewhere now, keep us updated on the Twitterless life. 🙂
~Shawn K (@thattalldude)
I still tweet but just warza, rather than warzabidul as a twitter name and I am still following you from that account. Those who were following me, in large part were friends. Too many of them took too long to aknowledge my tweets so they were devalued.
Now it's a new twitter account and friendfeed. On friendfeed I'm one of the two hundred most active users of the site at the moment.
Follow my new twitter account.