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Robots are Freaky

Robotic babies and toddlers
the “Kissinger” could be just the love bug needed to bridge human-robotic relations

Looking up to the sky from the Brooklyn Botanical Garden

It’s hard for me to believe that in a few months I’ll be married to Mike for 5 years. My wedding was unbelievably better than I thought it would be, but here I’m going to discuss one of the lovely events that took place before my wedding – my bachelorette party in Brooklyn.

I lived in Brooklyn for a combined total of 3 years, but those three years impacted me more than my 4 years in college. I felt it only natural to hold the bachelorette party in Brooklyn after having lived in Florida for 8 months because I still felt such a strong connection to the friends and places I got to know during my time living and working in NYC.

Let’s go a little further back to when I was working at Forbes. I met a CSS wiz that was getting married in a few months, and she asked me to go to her bachelorette party. There were a few things that happened at her party that impacted my notion of the golden rules of what not to do at my bachelorette.

a) Don’t impose expenses on your guests, especially if they don’t know ahead of time.
b) While we were waiting to eat our dinner in Times Square, we saw a different veil-clad bachelorette scream out of the top of a limo’s sunroof “I’M GETTING MARRIED, WhoooooWHOOOO!” while waving around a gigantic dildo. My first thought was ay, she’s so silly! Second thought was, that will not be me.

Here was the itinerary for my bachelorette:
1) Picnic in in Park Slope’s Prospect Park (complete with white wine and Hello Kitty picnic ware).
2) Walk around the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens (lilacs and cherry blossoms on a sunny spring day, does it get any better?!)
3) Tea and Coffee at the Tea Lounge
4) Dinner at a French Restaurant called Quercy
5) Belgian Ale at a friendly neighborhood bar
6) Electronica show with my sister in Williamsburg (where did we go again? I don’t remember, but we danced a hell of a lot!)

I made it clear that nobody was required to go to all the events. People were free to show up and attend what they found interesting or what was convenient for them to go to. Aside from my sister and good friend Liz, who bravely stood by my side for most or all of the events, most people just went to 2 or 3. Did I tell you that my Mom and Grandma went to half the events too? I dig older ladies, it’s true. It was cool, and perfect, and worked out well.

What I didn’t get. I didn’t get advice about dildos or fishnet stockings from a strange middle-aged saleslady. I didn’t get grinded by a stripper with a sock in his underwear. I didn’t get a suitcase full of sex toys or wave a dildo from the roof of a stretch limo. I didn’t wear a veil or tiara while handing out condoms or chocolates to strangers. Most of those things either weren’t me or reeked of college silliness. A woman I worked with in Florida who thought she was cooler than cool said that she needed to show up to my bachelorette with her friends and “save it”. Reality TV show in the making or something like that. Bitch, please.

I was a satisfied bachelorette, doing what I thought was fun and totally me with a bunch of people I loved. Ladies, that’s what I believe you should do for your own bachelorette. Be who you are, be considerate of your friends and family.

Finally, if most of you love doing the things I didn’t do, more power to you. Just don’t tell me I didn’t live it up!

I have a map of San Francisco circa 1963 hanging above my living room fireplace. This map is very sentimental to me, as my father passed away recently and I sorted through all the maps he saved the last time I was at my parent’s place. I became attached to this particular map due to a few things:

• The San Francisco of the 1960’s just feels romantic and wild and new to me. Call me a fan of beat literature.
• My Dad’s handwriting is in the corner, detailing a couple of restaurants he wanted to check out.
• Every time I visited San Francisco Dad was very interested in all the details.

One of the restaurants that is listed in the corner of the map is “The Golden Spike”. I decided to look it up online and it turns out Dad probably meant “The Gold Spike”, a family-style Italian restaurant that closed its doors in 2006.

The restaurant was named after the last spike driven into the transcontinental railroad across the United States. According to the National Park Service, the Golden Spike Ceremony took place in 1869. One side of the spike bore the message “May God continue the unity of our country as the railroad unites the two great Oceans of the world,” likely a reference due at least in part to the fact that the civil war was still so fresh in everyone’s memory.

Part 2: The Golden Record

My feelings on staying at home for the first two years of my daughter’s life are something I have no regrets about. There are things that I learned and experienced that I treasure more than anything. However, I recently got the feeling that it’s time to move on a bit with my personal ambitions, so my little girl will soon be going to school 3 full days a week. I am revamping my websites, refreshing my memory on technical details, looking for contract work, and thinking more about how I need to earn money and want to exercise my mind again.

I’m a fan of Jessica Hische, and saw that she recently read a book from A List Apart. I checked out their current offerings, and decided on a purchase of the CSS3/HTML5 ebooks as a refresher and to check if I know what I’m talking about. I’m still at the beginning of the CSS3 book, but I just want to highlight a section where the author Dan Cederholm makes a great reference to the Golden Record on Voyager spacecraft. In case you don’t know, the Golden Record is a gold-plated copper disk that has artifacts about the human race encoded on it for the aliens that might be outside our solar system. It also has cool graphical instructions on how to play it. So, Dan said that web design is like the golden record, because you create something and you don’t know who’s going to view it. It’s a message in a bottle. Maybe the person will have the right browser version to see what you created, or maybe not.

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“If we want to solve problems like hunger, poverty, climate change, global conflict, obesity,” she said, “I believe that we need to aspire to play games online for at least 21 billion hours a week by the end of the next decade.” from Jane McGonigal’s video Gaming Can Make a Better World

one-MISSISSIPPI.

Leila was asleep.
Mike was working out.
The sun was out, I was looking at some trees out my window.
I had coffee next to me.
Life was perfect, for one second.

Halloween’s over, but check out Maggy Mason’s nautical-inspired costumes for her family: Masons of the Sea

Life with Leila can be difficult sometimes, but I’m nowhere near here yet. Is life with a toddler really that bad? I guess it puts troubles with a 3 month old in perspective.

Skorpions Project, “Skwrath”

I got a look into a unique mashup of fashion and technology at this year’s Seamless 2008, held at the Museum of Science in Boston. Designers showcased ideas that wove together traditional textiles with solar panels, wifi, bluetooth, and LED’s.

Some ideas appeared to be in their infancy, but were great concepts. Barbara Layne’s tornado dress had “three small photocells (that) detect ambient light” which merely made the dress flash. A more in-depth approach may have been to read in data from a website to judge if certain criteria met those for extreme weather. Hard to demo, of course, but perhaps a bit more useful. Of course this notion fabric displaying information is partially borrowed from the Project Peau d’Ane, in which Valerie Lamontagne and her co-designers actually did use scientific information to change the behavior of the dresses. The moon dress, for example, had “thermochromic painted flowers embroidered with resistive silver threads”. Take that, lunar fashionistas!

Perhaps the grandest of the pieces was the Project Party Dress, architectural in its scope and definitely a way to bring a different feel to any event. It’s basically a tent worn by 5 women that look like a troupe of killer waitresses, and when it expands you get to see those same ladies stand at the corners like beautiful living gargoyles. I am curious what this party dress would look like done in white or red gauze, to give more of a lightness to the tent and make it more inviting to step inside.

Finally, in possibly the most controversial mix of technology and religion, the Charming Burka by Markus Kison stands alone. It’s a simple idea – give a woman with a burka the power to decide how to show her true identity. Via infomation embedded in the cloth, a woman could choose to send her real photo to anyone around her with a bluetooth-enabled device. Although the designer claims that “no rules of the Koran are broken” on his website, I picture it being just the type of thing a rebellious teenage girl would use to do what she could to show her individuality.