Sleeping Outside the Box

It became habit to pick up a payphone whenever around one. We would dial zero and, quickly attached at mouth and ear to another human, recite a poem or a speech or, if feeling particularly inspired, deliver an improvisational rant, trying our best to express some lost consciousness hidden within humanity. Clearly the telephone operators were an easy target. Always available, quick to answer, confused when presented with poetry instead of requests to be connected. Certainly, as audio nomads, amidst a sea of copper static and brief interactions, we were outlaws, infecting phone networks with verbal virus.

Over the years, our repertoires have grown. Once recited Burroughs, several times Heinlein, often times Poe, a fair amount of Rives. Occasionally sung Lilium or Miserere Mei, sometimes e e cummings too–sung or spoken. The operators, constantly unprepared, continue to recite back the same response, “Do you need assistance placing a call…?”
One day, I know, some operator will respond in kind, serving back Rilke with Kafka, Ginsberg with Carrol, Oberst with Eivy.

Ok, I just spent the last hour kicking some ass on Wii Boxing. I love that game. I actually bought a Wii just for the Boxing.
But I really wish Nintendo would one up the boxing game with a full game dedicated to boxing. They could spend more time on it to make it more realistic and sell actual gloves with it (not like the wii-mote cozy style gloves currently on the market but gloves with real wii sensors). I would buy that in a heartbeat.

I finally joined an open source code project. This one in particular, my friend David recently began. There’s just the two of us so far, so if you like the game Go, own and iPhone, or just want to add some PHP, MySQL, Javascript, XHTML, CSS, Design, etc… experience to the team, check it out and join our project.

We are storing it on Google Code Projects under the name iShudan: http://code.google.com/p/ishudan/

So what is iShudan? Well, you could read all about it on the code project page, but to summarize:
iShudan is a web interface that makes it possible to play and record games of Go on the iPhone (or any other browser). We are specifically designing it to be compatible with the iPhone design standard. It is crucial that we take advantage of this new UI system, partially because it’s an opportunity to get experience coding for this new spec but also because it’s just the coolest usage of the software we could find. And, besides, David has an iPhone and he’s obsessed with the game Go

There is a working demo: http://intellectualpirate.com/iShudan

We are building upon Benjam’s fork of phpGo.

Well, I’m back from Thailand and I’m now working a regular 9-5 (or 6) day job at RIPL (www.ripl.com). Yes, it’s pre-beta and you can only see it if you get invited. It’s really cool though and I’m excited to get working on it. It’s gonna rock. I’ll post more about it when the next revision is live