EyeO Festival, Day 0

    I'm not even going to try and quote Zach Lieberman's excellent keynote, it'll be up on Vimeo anyway.  I can't do it justice, but he really did say some things that lit a fire under me, especially when he called out people who spend their time building corporate demos for tradeshows and posited that CEOs shouldn't be the ones onstage telling the world what the future's going to be.  It's true, and I urge everyone, especially any of my colleagues in Perceptual Computing to keep an eye on Vimeo for when it's released (or just my facebook, since I'll be posting and reposting it probably a few times an hour).

    Watching the Ignite talks at EyeO tonight, I realized a few things:

• I'm total weak-sauce for not submitting an Ignite talk, since I wouldn't have been the only first time speaker.
• I haven't really given a talk on anything I REALLY care about since I spoke at Ringling.
• If I want to do an Ignite talk next year, I need to start prepping now.  Holy jeebus those speakers were GOOD.

In fact, the last sorta public speech I gave, I was doing the exact opposite of that, i.e. I was being made to champion a cause I absolutely didn't believe in and tell a story that...wasn't really a story.  Seeing all those folks just KILL IT during the Ignite presentations really reminded me of what I love about public speaking, and that's telling stories I care about that give me an opportunity to connect with my listeners and inspire them.  I need the opportunity to do that again because, "Without Change, Something Sleeps Inside Us and Seldom Wakens."

I feel like I've been sleepwalking for the last month at least

    But enough positing!  There was actual content today, so let's talk about interesting things instead of listening to me spew opinion.  The first of two workshops today was a great intro to D3 from Scott Murray.  I'd been looking at d3 earlier this year and getting to play around with it reminded me of why I liked d3 in the first place and why I wouldn't mind doing a bit more javascript work.  I don't know if it's proper to say I want to do more javascript work, I think it's more that there are certain libraries that let me do certain things that just happen to be javascript, so really what I want to do is more work with said libraries and if that means a particular language, I guess that's it.  I mean, if it were about a particular language/toolkit's available libraries, by that logic I'd be much more of an ofx fan than a Cinder fan, yeah?  I'm really excited about the idea of using d3 and Three together, hadn't really thought much about that but the idea popped up today.  Could be fun.

It's kinda nuts how easy it is to make these in d3, even with animation and interactivity

    The second workshop was an applied math tutorial from the man himself, Memo Akten.  This course just reinforced to me how we really need to rethink the way we teach math in this country.  It also confirmed my suspicion that Memo is a machine.  Seriously, the way he talks about numbers and math, you can just tell he processes all that stuff differently than normal humans do, like...he SEES in linear algebra and trig.  I'm totally jealous, hopefully it'll come with practice.  The two things that I feel made this class work were a) the fact that the information was presented in such a way that concepts either built on top of each other or were otherwise shown in relation to each other and b) PRACTICAL EXAMPLES!  Honestly, I've always been comfortable-ish with Trig, but seeing some practical examples, like projector-to-camera mapping, for example, really just locked it in.  I put some notes online, they're probably only useful to me, but you're welcome to take a peek anyway: EyeO 2013 Applied Math Notes

...they're useful and make sense!

    Day 0 wrapped up with Zach Lieberman's amazing keynote and an incredible round of Ignite talks.  I really can't do them justice, so keep checking Vimeo for them, they're all worth watching.  Onto Day 1 for talks and hack-a-thons!