I have a peculiar problem with telephones. When ever I pick up a ringing phone, and say “hello,” there is invariably a long pause, and then the other person says, tentatively, “Hello? Is this Jim?.” It turns out that many people assume that they are listening to a recording when I answer the phone. I […]

I guess you know your blog has arrived when people start offering you free stuff. Sprint contacted me a week ago to tell me that they wanted to give me 6 months free service and a free phone. This is part of Sprint’s “Ambassador” program, in which they are giving phones to bloggers. I assume […]

Lately, I’ve been on the receiving end of a lot of customer interaction scripts, you know, those little bits of canned dialog that people who represent large companies are required to say to you. I contacted my cable broadband provider on Thursday night because my internet connection, which has been increasing flaky the last few […]

The Jesuit Polymath Athanasius Kircher is a personal hero of mine. I constructed this Kircherian coverpop, which contains a collection of images from his books, which covered such varied subjects as geology, magnetism, architecture, music, egypt, and china. Stanford University Library’s Department of Special Collections has graciously granted me permission to use these images. The […]

Yesterday I did a lecture for the USC chapter of SIGGRAPH entitled “Interactive Art & Toys,” in which I demonstrated how to build a Karl Marx Paddleball toy in Flash. As a gift, chapter president Pamela Fox presented me with this really cool book: Timeless Toys : Classic Toys and the Playmakers Who Created Them […]

This blog is intended to be lighthearted and fun, and it is not normally my policy to fill it with angst and invective. But sometimes a guy has to rant. Today’s rant is directed at lazy programmers. We know who we are. Computers are labor saving devices, so it is natural that the programming field […]

I’ll be giving a free lecture-workshop at USC tonight. Most likely I will be demonstrating how to make a Karl Marx toy in Flash, but I may change my mind. Come by and say hi! Here’s the official blurb: Interactive Art & Toys in Flash Tuesday, Feb. 28 7:30-9:30 @ (USC Campus) SAL 127 Jim […]

I’m working on some new coverpops, and here’s the first one out of the gate. This is a collection of Star Trek Comics, from 1970 to the present. The images were provided by Mark Martinez, at the Star Trek Comics Checklist. Thanks Mark! The images are arranged horizontally by time (older comics on the left) […]

Kakuro Puzzles, for the uninitiated, are numeric crossword puzzles. If you like Sudoku, you will probably like Kakuro too — they both can be quite addictive. There is a collection of free kakuro puzzles in my puzzle section. Last year, I wrote three inexpensive Kakuro puzzle books for Ulysses Press. They can now be pre-ordered […]

I really like Processing, the programming language. I’ve been using Processing for about a year and a half, and I use it fairly frequently. I use it almost exclusively to do quick and dirty tests of ideas where I want graphical feedback. Because very little of this work has been seen by the general public, […]