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| From Glasgow-Skye and Back 2011 |
This past Thursday (March 17th, 2011) I was invited by Julie Rico to speak at the Glasgow Interactive Systems group (GIST). My topic was “How Users Learn Wrongly From Ambiguity in Gestural Interfaces”. I basically talked about some interesting behaviour I’ve observed of the past couple years with gestural interfaces in a wide variety of contexts and platforms. There was lots of good feedback, and they fed me wine.
It was also St. Patrick’s day. I was kind of on the wrong island for that whole thing, but it was a nice night out. It ended with lots of whiskey while a band spontaneously assembled themselves in a nearby bar. I drunkenly recorded this on my phone:
It was the best.
My original plan after that was to head up to stay in a hostel in Loch Lomond the next day, and then head to Edinburgh the next. While I was figuring out transportation, someone in the lab mentioned I could just rent a car. And then I realized, if I just rented a car, I could just fucking drive all the way to the Isle of Skye. So I did!
I stayed at Skye Backpackers, formerly staffed by my friend Rich. One of my friends from India (Erik) also worked on Skye for a while. The main attraction was that it was so far north. Here is how north it was:
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| From Glasgow-Skye and Back 2011 |
Real north. While there, I climbed a conservatively-heighted hill:
There were real cloud-shrouded mountains, too. Nothing compared to the rockies, but still lovely to see after living in a flat place for so long:
And there was snow! Oh man, I missed snow this winter so much. Snow:
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| From Glasgow-Skye and Back 2011 |
The rest of the photos from the trip are here. Look at the little map of the photo locations! Taking photos with a GPS-enabled phone is the best!