Idle Thoughts

Been thinking about posting for a while now but I haven't gotten around to doing it. Why? Been busy! Ditching one job, gaining two more, along with dishes and holidays and children and a million other excuses not to blog.

I'm not even sure where this article came from - K was looking at something, and it linked to something else, which linked to something else - but it made me think. It's a neat little article, comparing looking at web pages ultimately to eating - not just web pages, but media in general - and creating something for other people to read to exercising. Which made me think, aw heck, why aren't I blogging? The idea of getting these ideas out there in a place where they might help other people is awesome, becoming a part of the new social media is fantastic. But I never know what to talk about.

This article is what I was reading that pointed to that one, so I think I'll start there. The amount of technology, no the level of technology, that we have now is incredible. The ability to read another person's social cues with a simple camera. Measuring heart rate without any physical contact. This is stuff I know I heard about when they were talking about 'project Natal' before it was Kinect and I thought it was fascinating then, but it seemed a little out of it. Doing all that stuff with an xbox? 'Come on, it's not even as powerful as your average computer,' I thought to myself. But apparently it is possible.

Along the same lines, augmented reality has fascinated me for a long time, too. I remember seeing a movie about a guy holding a little tablet and watching as zombies attack the town he drew on the table, helping to defend it by placing skittles on the board in different colors to produce different effects. Well, I found it again but the program isn't released yet, they say that there aren't any handhelds powerful enough to run it yet. But a quick search found a whole bunch of neat looking augmented reality apps for a cool phone like mine. I'm going to have to check some of them out.

All of this wraps around in my head to the comic I discovered the other day, A Girl and Her Fed. While it does take a while to get into that part, it covers quite a bit of augmented reality, and what a savvy group can do with it, which to me has been simply fascinating. The ghosts don't hurt much either. (Seriously, read the comic. It may seem slow going for a little while but it really picks up and it's kinda attached itself to my head, and to K's too. Really makes you look at Ben Franklin in a different light.)

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