Over at the Phi Council, I created an interesting chart that I hope galvanizes people into thinking about our prison population and what it means about shaping this country into something that reflects our values:

I decided I wanted to adapt Rave Light to the new Compass features of the iPhone 3GS. While as the original Rave Light had a RGB model (Red was acceleration in the x-axis, Green in the y-axis, and B in the z), Rave Light S uses a HSV model, where the Hue is a color wheel with magnetic North being Red, SouthEast being Green, and SouthWest being Blue. The amount you shake it for adjusts the value.

Click here to check out this app on iTunes ($0.99)

Now, most people don't have iPhone 3GSs, but at the very least you can enjoy this video:

I really enjoy rhetoric, and if anything motivates me about being a political-news junkie it's seeing how different groups tweak their messages to control the agenda.

My blog features some catchy suggestions for message control on healthcare reform:

• Stop talking about Europe. Start talking about Australia.
• Call the opposition profit-driven, unregulated, capitalist medicine.
• Pose it as a David-and-Goliath battle between Obama and the robber-barons of the healthcare industry.
• Talk about how expensive and inefficient capitalist medicine is.

There's many more ideas to come, and I hope that you will eventually become an evangelical for healthcare reform.

I created a new project wherein I take the Twitter search feed for the word "overheard" and return the results. Here's a sample of some good ones:

"Kennedy was an overrated white guy. Like many white guys of his generation."

"humans are better than monkeys and dogs arent as adaptable as wolves."

"y'know what's the best? Setting aside 15-20 min and watching cat videos on YouTube."

"i can't go antiqueing without my sunglasses."

"There are a lot of people here. A lot of people like cats. I hate cats..."

"I wanna have a menage a trois with Ben and Jerry!"

"Mommy, cream cheese doesn't work as glue."

"Don't sit on my hand." "Move your hand then, I'm on my period."

"Hey, man...let me call you back. I've got a hamburger in my pocket."

"Ted Danson is NOT a C-list celebrity. He's a B+. Maybe even an A-."

Here's a music playlist that I put together of almost every song sampled in Girl Talk's seminal mash-up hit Feed the Animals.

I've been enjoying Grooveshark, which is the latest in a long line of sites for making music playlists with shady legal implications.

Click here to watch a play-through video and connect to the App Store

This is the coolest project I've worked on. It's the Creative Whack Pack for the iPhone. It's based on the best-selling deck of cards, the original Creative Whack Pack, which has changed my life in meaningful ways. The product is 64 cards with creativity strategies to stimulate your thinking. Here's the story of how I came to this:

In 1996, I went to a Key Club convention in San Jose, and the president Patrick, held a session with around 200 of us student representatives from our local Key Clubs. He then handed out a deck of cards from the Creative Whack Pack, and told us to all take a single card and pass the deck around. He then told us to use the cards to come up with a strategies to help our local club. Within 10 minutes, my little group was just coming up with all sorts of new ideas. This lit a light bulb in my head. None of us were necessarily "creative" types, but with just one device we could temporarily make ourselves that way.

I quickly saw the potential of this, and when I came back home, I bought a deck of cards from Amazon. Since then I've used the deck of cards at least once a month. Most of the time, I've used them to unblock me when I've been working through a life challenge. Other times, I've used it to come up with new business ideas. And I will say that some of the readings that I've given myself have moved me in directions that have altered my life in meaningful ways.

When I traveled over Winter Break recently, though, I forgot to bring my deck of cards with me. Being at a loss, I tried to search for the cards online and couldn't find them. And so I e-mailed Roger von Oech, the creator of the Whack Pack, and asked him if he had an iPhone app coming up, and if not, that I'd love to help him make one. He replied right away and said that he'd been thinking that very week of looking for an iPhone developer. What followed was a good 3 month working relationship where we iterated over every little detail to make this a great port of the Whack Pack to the iPhone. We did everything we could to take advantage of the medium, playing to its strengths, and I think this app could change your life.

This little app has continued to do amazingly well on the App Store. It almost makes me think it's gone viral. Check out this new promo video I made:

Click here to download Rave Light from the App Store.

So I finally finished making a book. The title of it is: Life-Altering Experiences: How a Single Question Tapped into the Soul of MetaFilter.

The free eBook version is available here.

The hardcover version is available here.

Here is the description:

"I helped it die quicker."
"Go pick some doves off the telephone line."
"This thinking was really not normal."

These are voices from responses to one question: "Life-altering experiences. Can you point to a single experience in your life, as a child, which you can define as having contributed to the person you are today?" This simple question generated one of the most fascinating threads from the Internet community MetaFilter. This book serves as a compilation of 56 of those stories. Tap into the soul of MetaFilter and see what changes people.

MetaFilter is one of my favorite places on the Internet. While the rest of the Internet social spaces look like bathroom graffiti walls (cf: YouTube), MetaFilter has such a high density of good conversation. Maybe it's because of the $5 sign-up fee that Slate cited as being the "jerk-zapper."

For anybody that spends a lot of time on Internet social spaces, you can appreciate how amazing of an event the Life-Altering Experiences thread is. So many stories on there are of such high literary value. Constantly people kept saying, "someone should turn this into a book." And so I did.

This is not the first time that I made a tribute to a great hive mind. My compilation of the "perfect album" on Plastic is a good example of that. Another example is Meta-Life-Change which became the genesis of this book.

In summary, I agree with the headline of that Slate article:

People seem to dig this post on socializing I wrote over on self-programming.

I dabble with self-improvement writing, and sometimes I put it on self-programming.com.

The idea of self-help sounds silly to most people, and for good reason. Most self-help just gives you the sensation of inspiration.

Having said that, there are a handful of books that will create authentic, long-lasting change in your life. I have compiled a short list of the ones that have truly changed mine. These books are giants in their domain. I have added this list to the menu of this site and titled it "Bookstore." I get a little commission on the sale of each book, so it's a way to support this site.

This is a project I did in 2005 that attempts to untangle the connections in George Clooney flick Syriana. I forgot to post this on my blog, so I'm re-posting here just for kicks.

Some of my favorite bloggers, like Matt Howie, linked to it, so that was rewarding.

AppCraver has an interview with me discussing iPhone development.

Just got a new application approved into the iPhone App Store! This idea came from my friends Cory Butler and Tim Attuquayefio. I then took it from idea to implementation.

It's a Palm Reader. Very simple, you point the camera at someone's palm, snap a picture, and then a tutorial guides you on how to read the palm.

Click here to check it out on iTunes. Be sure to add a review!

This is a fun little app I just made. Cheaper than pair of glow sticks. Click here to download Rave Light from iTunes

This App uses the built-in accelerometer's x, y, z values to make r, g, b combinations.

I perceived on the App Store the emergence of an inside joke in the form of the "Flash Light app." One of the launch apps was a "flash light" that simply was a white screen. Thereafter I saw a bunch of other "light" apps appear on the scene, with a lot of comments ranging from "WTF" to "LOL." So I thought I'd throw my hat into the ring.

UPDATE: If you have an iPhone or iPod Touch, click here to download Party Tarot. Please be sure to download it, rate it, and review it!

A few weeks ago I mentioned that I started developing iPhone applications. Well, I have some stuff to show for my work!

I created a Tarot reader for the iPhone. Here is a video of the application:

This started out as a personal Tarot reader, but then I brought it to a party and saw its true potential. People lined up to have me do their readings. And I invented things like having my listeners close their eyes and touch the iPhone to pick their cards. Here is a marketing image I put together that shows the kind of use-cases I'm imagining:

So if you have an iPhone or iPod Touch, click here to download Party Tarot. It's starting out at $1.99.

It's going to be marketed under the name Nuclear Elements, my current solo freelance company. I got the card images from a 1909 public domain Rider-Waite-Smith Deck on Wikipedia

A couple months ago I stumbled upon the most fascinating discussion thread on the Internet. Jeremias from AskMetaFilter asked the community the following question:

"Life-altering experiences. Can you point to a single experience in your life, as a child, which you can define as having contributed to the person you are today?"

The result is over 200 amazing stories. Many of these stories are of high literary value and deserve to be published in a book (which I'm currently working on). I decided to analyze and transform that entire thread into an infoviz (Information Visualization Project).

Here is a link to the project: Meta-Life Change. Just click on any of the underlined words, such as "lost confidence in authority" or "withdrew from others" and you will see the page re-arrange itself to show you how many stories were related to that story.

My goal with "Meta Life-Change" is to find patterns, make connections, and simply geek out on life-change. I condensed each story into a two-sentence cause-n'-effect summary that you can interact with.

What I've discovered is that, at least in that community, the most frequent cause for life-altering experiences was reading a book. And the most frequent result or consequence of a life-altering experience was finding a lifelong passion.

If anybody reading this wants to submit their own story to be included in a book or re-published on the Internet, please visit this story submission form

I was pretty inspired by the Bluesfear Worm, which has been dubbed, "The Longest Page on the Internet." While it's not the longest, it is 71,400px wide. It's basically like the old children's game, telephone, except with graphic design: I draw a picture, then you draw the continuation, and then your friend draws the next frame, and so on and so forth. The resulting "worm" is 119 frames long, and its amazing to behold. It kind of creates a Long Zoom effect.

So I turned it into a screensaver using just a few tools:

1. The handy "File -> Save Page As" feature in Mozilla Firefox in order to extract the conveniently numbered worm segments.
2. Macromedia Flash to string the images together.
3. And InstantStorm to convert the flash file into a screensaver.

Here is a preview:

Download:
- The Screensaver Itself (6.5 MB)
- Flash Source Code (5.8 MB)

Disclaimer: I didn't ask for permission to use these images, and so if bluesfear wants me to take it down I will. (all adsense money goes to paying my ISP).

Sprint, as part of their Sprint Ambassador Program, sent me a free cell phone because they've identified my blog as being influential.

Thank you Sprint, this is an amazing gift. For six months, I get unlimited data and voice, plus free purchases from their store. What this means is that I was just able to buy access to the Daily Show and Cartoon Network's Adult Swim. In addition, a USB cable was provided, and so I'm blogging this entry from my laptop using the cellphone as a modem!

I've constructed a visualization of the spread of anti-Semitism in Europe. The map compares different countries' responses to anti-Semitic statements such as, "Jews still talk too much about what happened to them in the Holocaust."

Click "Continue Reading" below for some background information on how I came up with this project. Click here to view the project.

Continue reading...