MeetJennings

The following is a response to a reading assignment for my class “Self and Society in Virtual Contexts.” We are to publish journal entries on a public blog found below. They must all include a haiku.

http://www.tumblr.com/tumblelog/virtualselvesrealhaikus

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Present yet absent
Augmented reality
We will be cyborgs

Baym spends the first two chapters summarizing the current state of technology in society. People on cell phones are annoying, dating happens online, the world is changing. Technology is a large part of our social lives and people are scared. We’re devoting tons of attention to our phones, and it’s hindering our social interaction. How can we be in two places at once?

There are thousands of engineers working hard on this problem and the answer is only a few years away. Technology is about to take an even larger part of our lives.

Phones just took the leap into the future, and now we’re constantly connected to the web with mobile data and push notifications. We have megapixel cameras, location awareness, video chat, and the entire internet in our pocket. These features are constantly chirping for our attention, and we are more than willing to oblige. Augmented reality removes the distinction between online and offline. No longer is our attention split between one or the other.

Baym asks “how can one be both present and absent?”

He uses the example of how rude it is for one to use their phone while at dinner. One is physically present but devoting their attention to a phone.

What actually defines where one is? I agree that one is splitting their attention between the real and virtual world. If you take your eyes off the phone and look across the table, you’re back in reality aren’t you? The phone is the underlying problem. Physical limitations mean we can only choose between one world or the other. We can’t attend to both the phone and our date.

Augmented reality combines the technology of your phone with a display in your eyesight. This could be glasses, contacts, or even an implant. Think of it as putting your iPhone screen into a pair of glasses. All of the things you normally see on your phone are now in your face. You can still see the world through the camera, but now your reality is going through one phase of post processing. It is augmented.

Now imagine someone sitting with a date at a table with augmented reality implants; both parties. Attention is still divided, but the consumption of information is more passive. Now SMS pops up in the corner of your vision like a Growl alert, but nobody else can even tell you’ve been pinged.

This kind of situation requires a new social norm. If it were alright to take your phone out at dinner, then I wouldn’t be writing this article and we probably would never see augmented reality. The idea that this screen is a window into a separate world is the limit, pulling out a physical object that represents “somewhere else” is rude.

What if “somewhere else” was here? What if we were both “somewhere else” and here together? What if we were always in two places at once?

If adopted, the merge of real and virtual worlds will overcome the current social dilemmas. In fact, I believe that these problems are merely an artifact of our iteration towards augmented reality. Technology is offering us great advantages and we’re having a hard time ignoring them.

With the adoption of augmented reality everyone will exist in both dimensions all the time. There is no comparing online identity with your offline identity, because now they are the same. You would see the world as you normally do, but with the aid of a computer. We will all be cyborgs navigating the real world yet consuming a virtual one.

Jennings

It was Sunday, just one more week before I was set to return back to NJ. I don’t remember how Ben told me, but sometime on Saturday Zuck decided that September 22nd was the final date for f8. That meant the prototype registration page than Tim, Ben, Rob and I were playing around with was going live on Thursday. The launch was early on Thursday, so it would have to be in it’s final state by Wednesday. That meant it had to be launched internally by Tuesday mid-day. It was Sunday.

I was going into work.

Earlier in the week I took over the second floor of a conference room named “Turkey.”  The name comes from the group of rooms named after “small countries of which the number of facebook users has surpassed the population”. Turkey was special, because it had a wooden loft built on the inside, accessible by ladder only. It was built by the games team some time ago. I’ve heard a lot of good tales of it’s construction, but that’s not my story to tell.

I pushed a desk, a chair, a whiteboard, my monitor and MacBook over the ledge late night during a hackathon. I forget who helped me push the desk over the ledge; it always seemed like everyone was willing to help out in whatever shenanigans were taking place at Facebook.

I worked out of the loft for the last three or four weeks of my internship, often sleeping over. The ladder upstairs was directly across the room from the doorway, and the design team was actively working out of the bottom floor. I had to bust through meetings to get to the ladder across the room so I could climb it up to my desk.

Sometimes I would wake up to Cox and the entire design team holding an emergency meeting on the bottom floor at 9am.

I spent the next two nights at Facebook working on f8 launch page. I slept at my apartment on Tuesday night for a few hours, and worked with my mentor to get the page live Wednesday. After a late night on Wednesday the page was in a permanent state for the announcement of f8 Thursday morning.

Because I built the page, I had the honors of “flipping the switch” during the launch routine. This meant sitting in a conference room for hours, waiting for the precise time to hit the big red “LAUNCH!” button for the page. I had to be in the room the next day at 9:00am. Tomorrow was also my last working day at Facebook.

I could barely sleep.

I woke up the next day at 7:30 anxiously. I tested the page only to find out that it was not resolving on the internal network. I pinged the engineer I was working with to get the sub-domain working properly, and he assured me it was working externally. I believed him, but I had to test this myself. There was no way I was flipping the switch without knowing for sure that the page worked outside of the company network.

I ran outside with my macbook in my backpack wearing a blanket around my neck like a cape. California has cold mornings and Starbucks was a few minutes away. I hopped on a campus bike and pedaled out down toward California ave. I got to starbucks and whipped out my macbook. I hid the screen with my blanket and tested the page once.

… It loaded! I threw the macbook back in my bag, threw the blanket around my neck again and cruised back to Facebook.

As I biked over some of the speed bumps in the parking lot I saw Ben arrive to work in his car. I made it to the the second building about 5 minutes early for breakfast. I paced back and forth, back and forth until the giant garage style door lifted off of the counter. The normal eggs, hash browns, sausage, bacon, and extra-crispy bacon were on the menu. However, today there was a bowl of bacon and cheese hash browns. Things were looking up.

As soon as I finished loading my plate I got an email telling me my coffee was ready upstairs. One of the members of the launch team was also at starbucks earlier this morning getting coffee for the team. I frantically searched for the room; scarfing down my breakfast while on the hunt. I finally found the office and sat down to meet the rest of the f8 launch team for the first time.

I was tired. I hadn’t showered in a few days. I flipped the switch. It felt great.

One of the comm-d team, skip, tested video ideas around the office all the time. He asked me one time to “describe my life right now in one sentence” holding a camera passively by his side.

“One hundred miles per hour”

I said. It was true, I was on full blast while in California. The energy is high, everyone is excited. It was awesome to be a part of such a fast paced environment.

A big thanks to the UIE and Comm-d teams at facebook, and cheers to Camelot and the rest of the interns who I hope to see soon.

Techcrunch did an early writeup on bit.ly bundles, a new product from bit.ly that I worked on all summer as an intern at Betaworks.

There is a simple rule on the Internet when it comes to passing links around: the easier it is to share links, the more links will be shared. Bit.ly and other URL shorteners proved this with their billions of links repackaged for a 140-character world. Later today or tomorrow, bit.ly will be introducing a new feature called bit,ly bundles which lets you shorten a bunch of links into one single bit.ly link. Don’t pretend like this isn’t your dream come true.

http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/15/bit-ly-bundles/

A couple days into my internship I was asked to help design a new product to share multiple bit.ly links. A couple days before my internship ended, I was demoing an early prototype of what you see here. 99% of my time in the betaworks office was dedicated to bundles. I feel like bundles was my baby, though I was not working alone. The prototype team consisted of Jason Morrow, Neil Wehrle, Nina Khosla, and myself. After my internship ended, the prototype was passed off to production.

If you are a social media enthusiast, you probably start your day with logging onto your computer and finding out what the trending topics are. But what if you could do this while you were waking up in bed? RoosterAM helps you do exactly that.

http://www.makeuseof.com/dir/roosteram-latest-social-media-trends/

My initial move from PHP to C# almost killed me. In C#, arrays are just a simple structure with a static size and numeric index. In PHP, arrays are the duct tape of the universe!

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/61401/hidden-features-of-php/64475#64475

An awesome email fresh from my inbox.

This email address was created solely to register automatically at thousands of forums for the purposes of spamming forums like yours. Remove my account and any other account registered with my email address!

You should also consider making the password requirements for your forum much more stringent.

Sincerely,

A Random Digilante Who Is Sick Of Forum Spammers From Russia

The sender is right, 22pixels has had an abnormal amount of Russian spam recently. Glad someone is doing something about it.

A new project I’m working on favors Flex over AJAX and other web technologies. So what is a PHP developer to do? Well, its time we take a step away from the comfort of PHP, and try something different. Luckily, my project manager got me started with  the krait snake book, Flex 3 by Oreilly, and there are tons of docs online. However, I’ve also found an article written for stingy PHP developers, in contrast to most Flex articles which are written for people familiar with Flash or previous versions of Flex.

This article introduces you to Flex through basic examples and comparisons with HTML and PHP that you are already familiar with. Each section includes a stand-alone, working example that you can review. I’ll begin with the basics like layout and then move on to more advanced topics such as form submission. The goal of this guide is to show you how easy it is to get started using Flex to build Rich Internet Applications.

The full article can be found here. Although the article won’t teach you to program Flex from scratch, it will definitely help an experienced web developer migrate over to a new platform.

My 360 fell off my dresser last night, went vertical, and then to the floor. Luckily the Xbox is fine, but as most people know by now, if you move your Xbox 360 while a disc is spinning in the tray, it leaves a nice round scratch around the disc, leaving it unreadable.

However! You may get lucky! In my case I was only left with a partial, shallow scratch. My game will load, but I can not read from the disc to say, load a multiplayer map.

I solved this by borrowing my friends game, and installing it to the hard drive. I then gave my friend back his game, popped my scratched cd in the tray, and fired up multiplayer. Everything has been working fine so far. Below is a more detailed guide on solving the problem.

1. Get another copy of the broken disc
2. Pop the good copy into your xbox hard drive
3. On the Xbox dashboard (where you would normally launch the game), Press Y
4. Select “Install To Hard Drive”
5. Wait for Xbox to finish copying the disc to the hard drive
6. Pop out the good disc
7. Put your scratched disc back in
8. Try and launch game
9. Celebrate
10. Give old disc back

I have been wondering why none of my printers work after the haul from school to home. I borked my second printer last week during the move back home for Thanksgiving.

After some research, it turns out that if you keep the ink cartridges inside the printer during transport, the cartridge contacts will rub from the car vibrations, and permanently damage the ink cartridges or pinter itself.

Easy solution: take those babies out before you bring your printer in the car.