brightly colored food

I saw Minority Report here in Pittsburgh with a classmate from the Interaction Design program and another from the HCI program. It was a good film compared AI or any of the other recent Spielberg stuff. Plenty of nifty future gizmos too, interfaces and gadgets and all that. There’s all the stuff you see in the previews with gesture recognition, plus a scene that incorporates voice recognition, and another that uses iris scanning to trigger customized ads. As we were driving home, one of my friends mentioned the voice recognition research she was currently involved in, and the other said that he had worked on very similar iris scanning technology at a previous company. And I thought of that Gibson quote: “The future is here, it’s just not widely distributed”.

From what I’ve seen of it, Pittsburgh is actually quite a nice city. Property is cheap, the architecture is consistenty beautiful (lots of brick), I’ve eaten at several good restaurants already (recommendations?), there are some cool cultural happenings, and I’ve seen more than a few cute girls in my neighborhood. That’s not to say that the surrounding areas aren’t standard issue suburbia, but the city itself doesn’t seem too bad. Right now I’m staying with a friend a block away from where Michael Douglas lived in the movie Wonder Boys.

After my little recent leave of absence from Brightly Colored Food, I’ll hopefully be writing here more often. Expect a bit more personal stuff, some more design stuff, and more stuff on technology in general.