Sunday, February 29, 2004
107808355811148516:: 11:39 AM

Whoops. I didn't really blog for a month. Things have been going alright. OK/C is a finalist in SXSW interactive, and KC and I have been invited to Vienna to talk and cover CHI2004 as "press"... Exactly how I became a member of the media is unclear.

I also got my wacom drawing tablet. It's really fun and considerably more natural than drawing with a mouse. As a result, I've been a bit inspired to work on visual things of late... from a time sequence flying through a cloud, to a mini photo series on night, and a new drawing of lucille.

On Saturday I spent a couple hours playing pianos at the Sherman Clay. There was a wonderful grand made in Stuttgart in 1910... Anyway, after playing 6 or 7 pianos I started to think about how much more similar humans are to complex mechanical systems than to electrical/computational ones. Each piano's character is defined by the flaws... the ringing of a key, the tiny scrape when the dampers move, the character of the soundboard. Different instances of the same piano made in the same year can be noticably different to play. With electrical systems, each instance produced is exactly the same. Another similarity is that mechanical systems fail incrementally. A piano string will break, or a key will stick, or the case will get dents, but most of the system continues on and is still functional. When electical systems or software sustain damage, you're pretty much hosed. If wires come loose, or the software gets into a bad state, things soon come to a screeching halt.

I'm not sure what value this sort of analogy has, but it runs counter to the now generally accepted idea that we are more and more like our computers and that our computers are more and more like us.