currently

Fall 2007

• Design Workshop
• MC Magazine Internship
• Redial
• Show/Tell Studio

Cocurricular

• ITP Radio
• Stuff for Kids
• The Half Hour Cozy
• Thesis

archived

Spring 2007

• Designing for Constraints
• GUI in AJAX

Fall 2006

• Physical Computing

Other Projects

• Graphics
• Video
• Web

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Stern Business Plan Competition 2007-2008

Anne, Pollie, Nick and I are working together on a business plan for Storyteller to enter into the Stern Business Plan competition. Yesterday we went to the teammate and mentor hunt meeting. Here, everyone had two minutes to pitch their idea with hopes that someone in the audience would be interested in working with them.

Pollie and I pitched, here is the video Anne took:

Storyteller is a project Anne worked on at ITP last year. She printed my Little Robot Story that I made in Shawn’s Participatory Media class. Storyteller works with RFID. When a child picks up the book, the phone rings and the child hears the story read over the phone. Through the business plan competition, we are hoping to expand the application of Storyteller to create a site-specific platform for interactive children’s media.

 

It is the end of my second day as a vegan. So far, I don’t really miss the meat and I am trying to eat a variety of things. However, I thought a lot about ice cream throughout the day.

For breakfast I ate some steamed broccoli with the black beans I made yesterday. I really like my beans, they are so tasty. (I will put the recipe below.) I went to school and picked up a falafel sandwich, lentil soup, and ginger tea from the tiny little falafel place next to the copy shop on Waverly and Mercer. I had a snack a few hours later, soy chips and some nuts and dried fruit. For dinner I went to a Mexican restaurant with Anne and Pollie, the place is called Pio Maya and is on West 8th between 5th and 6th Avenue. We started off with an appetizer of chips and guacamole, it was fresh and tasty. I ordered a spinach burrito, it pained me but I asked them to hold the sour cream and cheese. In addition I must confess that I was eying Anne’s beef tostadas.

Some other observations: I have been gassier than usual, which might have to do with the beans. They are really good but I might have to moderate my intake. Also, my movements have been ever-so-slightly explosive. Otherwise, I feel fine. Golly, after that delightful description of my gastrointestinal events, I bet you want to read my tasty bean recipe! What? You don’t? Well, here it is anyway.

Tim’s Tasty Black Beans

I boiled one bag of Goya black beans for 2 minutes, then I let them sit for one hour. Then I rinsed them and added about 4 cups of water and put the pot over medium-high heat.

Meanwhile, I quickly chopped up about 4 cloves of garlic, a tomato and an onion, and I pan fried them in about 3 tablespoons of olive oil. I cooked it until the onions got tender, then I tossed it into the beans. By now the beans were boiling so I turned the heat down to low. I then added a few more tablespoons of olive oil, a few cups of chopped celery, and I seasoned it to taste with salt, cayenne peppers, and oregano. I cooked it on low uncovered for about an hour, stirring a couple times.

Black beans, tasty and easy. Enjoy in moderation.

 

It is the end of the first day of my dietary experiment. I feel fine, albeit a bit hungry. I decided to do this after talking to a friend who was vegan. I asked how he became vegan, he said he tried it for one week and felt great as a result, so he kept with it. I wonder how I will feel after one week?

Today I did some food shopping. I bought broccoli, spinach, some fruit, and beans. When I got home from the store I cooked a big pot of black beans. I figured it will be nice to have prepared food handy being that there are few vegan options in my neighborhood.

Early in the day I ate an apple with peanut butter. At school I ate miso soup, an orange, and mixed nuts. I didn’t plan on eating the whole container of nuts in class, but I was so hungry and they were lightly salted mixed nuts, so good.

 

I have been working with Textpattern for the past two weeks to build a project documentation site to my liking and I am happy to report that it is 95% complete! (NB: robotim/projects calculates these figures with 5% accuracy.)

Over the past week I have:

• Finished my style sheet. It is organized and thoroughly commented. Therein contained are also some of my beauty secrets.
• Commented the code for the page layouts.
• Created a cool Error 404 page. Check out the inside joke for 8-bit Zelda fans.
• Styled the search results section.
• Created the footer and decided what to do with the sidebar.
• Had a minor panic attack because I thought I accidentally deleted my public_html directory. (I didn’t, by the way.)

Areas for improvement:

• I need to figure out how to make the descriptive blurb (the beige box that appears above all other posts,) only appear on the first page for each category. Right now, only 6 entries will appear on each page, and at the top of every page is the descriptive blurb, which I feel is unnecessary beyond the first page of each category. You will notice this once I have more than 6 posts in a category.
• AJAX-esque stuff: make the cute picture in the welcome blurb change when you select the different drop-down menu items. (Because I think this would be so friggin’ cute!)
• More stuff with AJAX: make the comment box on the article pages expand when you click to comment.
• I want to parse certain entries onto my robotim.net front page, such as articles that I categorize as “news” or maybe the most recent post for each category. That way only fresh and relevant content appears on my web site front page, and all the extra fun stuff stays back here for curious minds to explore.

But like I said, I’ve reached a point where I am happy to begin using /projects to start the documentation.

 

I have decided to use Textpattern to manage my project documentation. Previously I was using Wordpress. I prefer Textpattern because:

• It is not as blog-centric as other content management systems. This site is for my project documentation, it’s not my “blog site.” I am aware that to some this may seem like a semantic difference, but it is important for me to make this distinction because I do not consider myself a blogger. Or a frogger or a pollywogger for that matter. Although I like the way “pollywogger” sounds.
• It is simple, elegant and hard to break. I tend to break things… I’ve broken my iPhone twice now in my attempts to hack it.
• I like the backend structure. In addition to categories, sections can be created. What’s more, not only can articles be categorized but so can links, images and files.

What I dislike about it:

• Not as many cool plug-ins as with Wordpress. (Oh well, I guess I’ll have to just make my own… har har!)
• Backend could be a bit more usable when it comes to handling images. I want to see dimensions when browsing images! I want to be able to batch-upload images! I want it to spin straw into gold, dammit!

I didn’t like any of the templates so I decided to make my own. I have laid out the structure: a floating container that holds the title, a sidebar, the area for the article entries, and a footer. Now the styling madness begins…