The Coming-of-Age of the Living Room Computer

The "entertainment center" in my living room is a Mac Mini hooked up to an LCD TV, with a couple of nice computer speakers. I don't have cable or even an antenna; I grew tired of regular television years ago. Everything I want to watch is either online or available through Netflix.

I certainly enjoy sitting back for a couple hours watching a good movie, but I'm also intrigued by the many other possibilities posed by a computer in the living room. This is part of the inspiration behind Gimme Shiny, and this is why I'm enjoying Boxee. These are just single points in a broad spectrum yet to be explored, strange new experiences that are part game, part TV, part screensaver, part web, but also new unto themselves. I'll continue playing in this area, and I'm looking forward to seeing what others come up with!

Caitlyn on Life

I've been meaning to write this up for, well, a year and a half now. An exchange I had with Caitlyn when she was two left an impression on me:

We were talking about her quilt, and how all of her relatives and friends of the family had made squares, and she asked where were the squares that Mama and Papa had made? I explained that we didn't make any squares in the quilt because we had been busy making her.

She said, "You made me?"

I said, "Yes, Mama and I made you together."

She thought about this for a moment and said, "Thank you."

Happy 2009!

It's been a while since we've done one of these year-end wrap-up things, but so much has been going on, I figure we're due (never mind that it's already February). So, let's see, where to begin?

The short version: I've been exploring and creating in the world of Web art and technology, Christina has been diving deeper into her role as techno-pagan urban homesteader, and Caitlyn is growing up fast! We are blessed to be part of a number of a thriving communities, from the many wonderful people in our local neighborhood to the international network of ideas we call the Web.

I'm managing a small team now (still in the Seadragon group in Microsoft Live Labs), and together we've released several projects: Seadragon Ajax gives you smooth zooming on the web in pure JavaScript. Seadragon Mobile for iPhone is able to seamlessly serve up hundreds of huge images over the air. Infinite Canvas allows you to create and view comics unconstrained by page boundaries. I also helped put together this year's Photosynth release, and of course we've got exciting things in store for 2009! You can keep up to date on my Seadragon adventures with the blog Dragonosticism.

I've been keeping myself busy outside of work as well, creating and releasing a JavaScript version of the Figure Ground puzzle game from Heaven & Earth, and Gimme Shiny, a dynamic slideshow of popular images on the web (also done in JavaScript). I'm still posting random bits to Thoughtsam, though no longer everyday.

Christina's year has mostly been about food. She's taken up regular bread making (nearly one loaf per week), yogurt making and the occasional cheese making, with ambitions of her own homemade cheddar in 2009. The garden gave us several quarts of peas and nearly 30 lbs of potatoes, and it taught us that corn and shelling beans are best gotten from the farmers' market. She also put up 70 lbs of tomatoes, 20 lbs of peaches, 18 lbs of raspberries, 11 pints of applesauce, and a dozen half-pints each of dried tomatoes and bell peppers.

Christina continues with her usual web design antics. New projects this year include intentional and recycled jewelry from PeaceLoveEarth, Peruvian inspired sweaters from Inca Textiles, poems and images from Veita Jo Hampton, and a promotional site for elder care mediator Marcia Haber, as well as all the usuals from previous years.

She's also doing more sewing this year, exploring sewing clothes (shirts, dresses, hats, shoes (!)) as well as non-disposable sandwich and lunch bags, a self-designed laptop sleeve, and the usual assortment of quilts. Sadly, the pictures of these items have yet to be taken in most cases; maybe she'll get to that sometime this year.

In the Major Life Events department, we saw the passing of Christina's father this fall. His decline over the last 17 years due to fronto-temporal dementia has been brutally slow and painful for Christina's family, so the closure of this chapter is a time of both grief and relief. Christina occasionally blogs about her grieving process (as well as many other topics) on her website.

Caitlyn is 3.5 and is enthusiastic about her first year in preschool. She's learning to write (she's pretty reliable about writing "mama" and "papa") and can tell you the letters in her name, even if she wants prompting when it comes to writing them. She's also attending a circus class where she's learning to walk on a tightwire, balance on a globe, climb a rope, and do "seat drops" on the trampoline. Caitlyn loves her books and her various projects (folding, cutting, gluing, glitter, painting, writing, coloring), as well as animals, storytelling, yoga, helping around the house, Legos, the "little computer", and going on "adventureders".

You can see photos of her (that we don't seem to update very often) on her site. I've also started collecting her quotes on my Twitter stream (as has Christina); hopefully we'll add that to her site one of these days.

We have, of course, continued to explore the wonderful world of music. This year's best are collected in our Tunes 08 playlist.

So that's us, how about you? What have you been up to?

Best wishes for the new year!

What about failure?

Failures and mistakes are part of life. The question is, what are you going to do about it? You either try to avoid failure, or you learn how to recover from it. The difference is that avoidance paralyzes you into an action, whereas failure recovery keeps you moving, ever more nimble with each new experience.

Infinite Canvas

Inspired by the "Infinite Canvas" chapter in Scott McCloud's book Reinventing Comics, and building on some of my earlier work that led to Seadragon Ajax, I used our recent Out of the Box Week to create a new comic layout and viewing web app, Infinite Canvas. Scott himself was kind enough to contribute one of his pieces, Brad's Somber Mood, and Jouni Koponen has provided The Day the Saucers Came, a collaboration with Neil Gaiman. This is just the beginning though... What can you create, on a canvas with no limits?

Remember the customer?

I've been hearing a lot of talk lately about what's good for business or bad for business. As far as I'm concerned, the only question you need to ask yourself is, "What's best for the customer?" If the answer to that question doesn't align with your business plan, you're in the wrong business. If you're not serving your customer's needs, someone else will -- it's only a matter of time.

Government Coming Alive

I'm terribly excited about all the stuff going on at change.gov. He's so engaged, it feels like he's our president already -- even more so than our previous presidents, who felt distant even when they were in office. Much has been said about the democratic nature of the Web; it's great to see it being applied to our government.

Here in Seattle, in the midst of a week of snowstorms, I've discovered some of that great government Web energy at the local level: the Washington State Department of Transportation has a blog, a Twitter feed, and a Flickr stream. The blog is remarkably friendly, the twitter feed is highly engaged (filled with responses to other people's questions and comments), and all of the Flickr photos are Creative Commons. Pretty amazing, and wonderful to see... it's got a lot of people talking, excited about government for the first time in, well, a mighty long time.