This afternoon at a gather I had chance to speak with Tarah Wheeler at some length, and she noticed that I spent most of the discussion reading her lips. As part of the discussion it came out that I'm a synaesthete and was having great difficulty understanding her because I was unable to pick her voice out of all of the distracting visual phenomena due to all of the other discussions happening around me, but I was able to focus on her lipstick and pick her voice out of all of the static. The discussion turned to synaesthesia as I …
In my last post I said that I'd describe in greater detail how to set up the software that I use as the core of my exocortex, called Huginn.
First, you need someplace for the software to live. I'll say up front that you can happily run Huginn on your laptop, desktop workstation, or server so long as it's not running Windows. Huginn is developed under Linux; it might run under one of the BSDs but I've never tried. I don't know if it'll run as expected in MacOSX because I don't have a Mac. If you want to give …
Some time ago I was doing a longform series on Exocortex, my cognitive prosthetic system. I left off with some fairly broad and open-ended questions about the implications of such a software system for identity and agency. Before I go on, though, I think I'd better define some terms. Identity is one of those slippery concepts that you think you get until you have to actually talk about it. One possible definition is "the arbitrary boundry one draws between the self and another," or "I am me and you are you." A more technical definition might be "the condition or …
As the title implies, I think I need to take a break from blogging for a while. Just a week ago I had plans to write up my notes from DefCon and then go into all of the neat stuff that happened, like pulling a Charlie Brown at the locksport contest (okay, that wasn't so neat but at least I can laugh about it after the fact), the InSoc concert, and all of that happy stuff.
Unfortunately, I've just returned from the east coast. Mid-last week I got a phone call from my mother while walking to work and was …
Back from DefCon. Don't know how I'm still on my feet right now. Went to lots of talks, went wandering more than is usual for me at DefCon, attended some incredible shows. Still smarting from how much even a lousy meal costs in Las Vegas. Had an incredibly lousy pair of plane flights to and from Vegas.
And now, back to figuring out how to reacclimate with workaday life.
It's mostly been radio silence for the past couple of days. If you're reading this you've no doubt noticed that Switchboard (one of my constructs) posted the slides from my talk earlier this week. As sophisticated and helpful as she is, Switchboard can't yet pick thoughts out of my wetware to write blog posts. And so, here I am, my primary organic terminal sitting at Windbringer's console keying in notes, saving them, and then going back to turn them into something approaching prose. I've just now had the time to sit down and start writing stuff about HOPE XI, largely …
For starters, thank you everyone who attended my talk at HOPE XI. I know it was on Sunday afternoon when a lot of people were either getting ready to go home, spending their last bits of time with friends they don't get to see often, or fried from partying the night before. Your attending means a lot to me, and I can't thank you enough. That said, here are the slides from my talk as a single HTML page to read online and as a PDF document to read offline (both were authored in Markdown and generated with Landslide).
