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Comics Cafe: possibly the best spot in Bangalore
As I think I’ve already said, it is hot in India. Bangalore is known for having the nicest weather. In fact, it was recently rated the nicest place to live for ex-pats. However, it is still crazy hot. There isn’t a day for the next few weeks that has a high forecast under 30 degrees…
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Indian Moments
“You are Christian, yes?” “Well, no…I’m not really anything.” “Oh. What are your parents?” “I think my Mom was Lutheran a long time ago, which is a type of Christianity.” “So who do you pray to?” “Uh, no one?” “Indians are very religious.” “Drinking is part of your culture, yes?” “Well, I wouldn’t say its…
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The Joys and Guilt of Servitude
After I got off the plane in Bangalore on May 3rd, 2010, I followed emailed instructions to look for a certain “Mr. Manas” at the gate. Exiting from the air-conditioned airport into the outside world was the usual tropical shock. It’s as if you are remembering again what hot is really like. When I recovered…
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Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are Dead and life has no meaning
One of the dozen or so books I brought with me to India was the script of Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are Dead. To really simplify it, its an absurdist play which follows the play Hamlet from the minor characters Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s point of view. I had seen the play before at Theatre Five in…
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My Morning Commute in Bangalore, India
This was too entertaining not to share: A combination of jet lag and a cold had me pretty shell-shocked after I took this trip the first time. But, now it has simply become amusing. For extra-awesome fans, you can follow along on this finely-crafted Google Map embedding with directions. I can definitely guarantee that the…
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Above The Surface Interaction
I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work. – Thomas Edison This past year, I’ve had the wonderful opportunity to work on several projects that did not go anywhere. I would started getting discouraged when it was clear a project was not going to arrange itself into a nice academic paper-sized…
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Tangible Actions/Replaying Gestures
Once the novelty effect wears off for a direct multitouch interface, interaction can be very slow and inefficient compared to the high-gain mouse interactions most users are familiar with. We developed the concept of Tangible Actions based on the broad idea of making the user’s previous actions tangible and manipulable. Tangible Actions are continually-created interactive…
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Fingerpainting on the Microsoft Surface
(with Julian Lepinski) For a course on sketching interfaces with Prof. Karan Singh, a colleague and I wanted to explore how to use the rich input available with the Microsoft Surface (grayscale bitmap input) as a suitable artistic tool. For our specific project, we were inspired by painters that use a wide variety of colour…
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The Keanu Effect
I have pretty crazy dreams. I’ll try to describe the one from last night using adjectives like “crazy”, “strange” as little as possible. In the dream, I was going through a sequence that repeated at least 10 times before it changed. I don’t want to say it was “like” anything that I didn’t actually feel…
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Journeying (inspired by The City and The City)
I finished reading China Miéville’s The City and The City recently. If you have read the book, you can skip down to Reactions. The book takes place in two separate cities, Besźel and Ul Qoma, that are in the same place geographically, while legally being in two different countries. A murder mystery is used as…