October 11, 2000: the molecat mambo
[Hunh. Check this out. Maggy's writing again.]
Yesterday, I went to a Edward Tufte seminar. To people who design information structures, Tufte is basically God, come down from the mount to tell you just how much your stuff sucks.
I left yesterday with three books and the memory of one of the videos he showed. It was a deceptively simple-looking visual represntation of music. Each "voice" on the piano was represented by a different color, and pitch and duration were represented by height on the screen and legnth of the colored bars.
Watching it, I was amazed; nothing before has ever so accurately captured how I "see" music. Bursts of color, height, relationships expressed by the space between voices.
Oh, yeah, and I now own three of the most amazing books ever written: Visual Explanations, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, and Envisioning Information. I did enjoy myself, and I think I even learned some stuff of which, much of which was stuff that I knew instinctively.
*happiness*
So Chris' parents are here for a while, and i'm going out to dinner with them tonight. This ought to be interesting. I have no idea what they think of me--for a really long time I was the evil ex-girlfriend, and now I'm not, and if you think our shift in gears confuses us, you should see everyone else's reaction to it.
So I drove over to Chris' place this morning to leave the car in his driveway, so I don't have to go home and pick up the car and drive over to Queen Anne this afternoon to pick all of them up (because I am the only car-enabled one of the four of us, and am the driver, by default). It was very strange to be using my car in the morning, as I never drive to work these days; the car doesn't particularly enjoy running on damp mornings, but I told it to cope.
Then I bussed down the hill and went to work; and now I'm finishing up and getting ready to go exercise, and after that I'll go up and we'll have dinner.
I'm kind of nervous, oddly enough.
I'm certian I'll live, of course. Still.
