I just started my graduate education in UCLA’s Design|Media Arts program. I’ve been doing lots of things to prepare, including moving from San Francisco. When I first got here, I tried to get a feel for the city around me. In addition to hiking and seeing the friends in the city, I have been visiting locations that are part of Peter Lunenfeld’s Summer 16. The list includes four places ‘unique to southern California.’ Here are some photos.

Schindler House

It took about 45 minutes to bike out to the Schindler House. Along the way, I passed the Modern Institute for Plastic Surgery and Anti-Aging, where I spent a few moments getting my bearings.

Bradbury Building

I rode the bus downtown with Becky. After a quick stop in the lobby of the Bradbury Building—which was packed with people sketching—we grabbed a kimchi taco at Grand Central Market and toured some more of downtown LA’s historic architecture.

Forest Lawn Cemetery, Glendale

Becky drove us to Glendale, which would otherwise have been incredibly difficult to reach (or get around). The entire cemetery is crossed by wide roads that directly abut the burial plots. Artwork is presented in a bizarrely theatrical fashion. The stained-glass reproduction of The Last Supper stood out, with it’s literal unveiling to a booming narrator and dramatic music.

Museum of Jurassic Technology

The museum is a collection of strangely presented, delightful artifacts. You should go.

I have a habit of picking up new things to try when I want to do things I could accomplish with the tools already at my disposal. This weekend, I spent a bit of time with ruby-processing. It runs everything in Ruby, and uses JRuby as a bridge to run Processing. I used it to visualize some data about web developers after parsing the original .xsl file into .tsv files and cleaning up the data using Python. I’m going to do quite a bit more work on the visuals above, but I wanted to put in a good word for ruby-processing now.

The first thing that I liked was that I wasn’t writing Java, a language lots of people seem to hate on, the source of which hate I am coming to understand as I learn about other languages. Ruby’s syntax is cleaner, even if it seems strange at times (welcome home ‘@,’ ‘$,’ and ‘:’ prefixes).

The next big improvement over vanilla Processing was writing the code inside of TextMate. This isn’t inherent to ruby by any means; I could probably write Java inside of TextMate. However, ruby-processing made it really easy to launch sketches I was working on, and also to edit them in real-time.

I also spent some time messing around with field on Saturday. It looks like really exciting software, with a lot of promise. Unfortunately, it bogged down and became unusable while running through the examples on their site. I’ll probably give it another go, but ruby-processing is letting me make what I want to for now (and that’s what is really important).

This morning, I learned that Time Spent Alone was nominated for a Webby Award. It is a collection of explorations of personal themes using, not surprisingly, the internet.

Check out the project, and consider giving it your vote for the People’s Voice Award in the NetArt category.

We at the San Francisco Barbarian Group office had an incredible holiday party on Friday. After a full afternoon of shooting assorted handguns, we reassembled at the office. A great spread of holiday snacks and beverages was laid out before us, ready to help us recover our strength spent on the range.

For the party at the office, I had set up a photobooth of sorts. Motion in front of the camera caused it to begin capturing frames which were then turned into animated gifs. You really should check out the photos from the party.

While on the plane to Boston, I got a little frustrated that I can’t program my iPhone directly. No simple, scriptable terminal or anything. Since I’m not of the skill or inclination to quickly write a python interpreter or processing development environment as an app for the phone, I went a different route. I decided to use the icons on the home screen as a low-resolution display matrix.

When adding a page to your homescreen, the iPhone creates an icon for the page by rendering the whole thing down to a square format. I took advantage of this to create half-filled dots on the screen.

Naturally, I had to write something with the pixels I was making. It being party time and all, I decided to encourage celebratory behavior with my downsampled display. Keeping with the spirit of lo-res, here is a video of the display in action, converted into an animated gif.

In the end, I rather like the simple visual weight of the 50/50 webpages: 01v 01h 10v and 10h. They are flexible minimalist works; they scale to fit any size real-estate. Use them to create your own iPhone cum lite-brite or just enjoy your monitor’s ability to crank out pretty, high-contrast black and white pixels.