Let me begin by painting an insightful, revealing picture of just how much I love coffee: not that much. On the love spectrum, I would put me and coffee in a place that doesn’t really belong on a love spectrum. I’m just not one for coffee. I don’t require coffee to wake me up in the morning. A cup of coffee after dinner just isn’t my cup of tea. Were midday “tea” breaks as common here in the US as in other areas of the world, I likely wouldn’t participate.

That’s not to say that I will not drink coffee. And when I do, I rather enjoy it. I usually prefer a nice, cool drink to a hot cup of coffee, but I’m one to mix it up on occasion. And I don’t imagine such a preference is limited to me. Someone actually took note of casual coffee enjoyers like myself and came up with a bright idea a long time ago– iced coffee.

Not that coffee, even iced coffee, is a new idea, but it seems more and more restaurants are finally realizing the appeal of coffee that’s already cold, made colder with ice.

McDonald’s, which has been selling iced coffee in our area for quite a while now, has a billboard advertisement on a road I frequently drive by that shows off their new sugar-free iced coffee as well as their regular sugar-full iced coffee. But I was a bit confused by the tagline they had. The ad says: Twice the Ice

Twice the Ice? Twice as what? Regular coffee? Nothing twice is still nothing… Twice as they used to do with iced coffee? Because they already fill that cup up with ice. I’m trying to find the application but I just can’t. Did they say twice because they have two drinks on there? But why would one get two drinks, two differently presented drinks at that (one w/sugar, one without)?

Whatever, all this talk about iced coffee makes me want one now. But those hazelnut-flavored cups of cool, liquid genius are expensive. Maybe they meant Twice the Price.

All of us at sometime wished that we really had Jedi Mind Tricks where we could lift a starfighter out of a swampy mess. We can’t do this yet..but about a month ago the game Mind Balance was demonstrated for the first time at MIT Media Lab Europe in Dublin (everything awesome happens in Ireland now).

Mind Balance is based on a new wireless headset with six different types of nodes positioned over the occipital lobes (on the back of the head just above the neck) which are resposible for processing light, vision, and hallucinations. The cap is able to monitor electrical signals from the surface of the scalp and basically create a direct connection to the eyes from the brain’s optical nerve. The Mindgames Group was able to take the brain activity into a C# signal-processing engine that can analyze these signals in real-time and decide which way the player is looking.

They have created several different games and the most effective is Mind Balance. Here the player must help Mawg-a cosmic tight-walking crazying frog looking guy that’s suppose to represent a Behemoth. The player helps this Scottish bloke keep his balance by a brain cap.

If Mawg totters to the right, the player can shift him to the left by staring at an orb on the left hand side of the screen. So that the blinking orbes produeces a signal that can be detected, the orbs have to render a consistent 60 frames-per-second or more.

Mindgames have developed several other games like Peace Composed- where the player must relax to fully enjoy a piece of Phil McDarby’s orchestral music. The more the player relaxes: the more intricate the music becomes. Also, Still Life was developed by physiotherapists at the Central Remedial Clinic in Dublin. It uses a movement interface designed to reward the player for practicing a movement over and over again correctly. Still Life turns boring exercises into a ‘engaging interaction’. The program is able to monitor the improvement of patient/player’s exercise.

Today, we might be taking Mawg for a walk on a cosmic tightrope or making pretty colors while we exercise, tomorrow we could be pulling an X-Wing out of the icky swamp mud!

Okay. I’ve got my almost used up chisel-tip Sharpie. I’ve got my poster board. A stick, some tape. And I’ve got my gung-ho rebel attitude all worked up because I heard that some Chinese people are the bad guys because other Chinese people don’t like the Olympics in China…or something. Whatever. I just want to add my voice of protest to the latest clamor.

Oh! I almost forgot my complete lack of knowledge of hard-to-miss political and world events in this past century’s history! What kind of uninformed embarrassment of a protester would I be without that?!

OK, time to make my sign:

http://www.sondrak.com/index.php/weblog/todaze_deep_question1/

OK. I can say without much expectation of negative feedback that the Nintendo Wii has universal appeal. The realistic demographic of this system is probably quite similar to the age range found on those Yes & Know invisible ink books.

Video games used to be a relatively focused territory of adolescent/teen/20 something boys. Rarely would parents or grandparents or girls venture into this button-mashing pastime. When mom or sis would somehow get reeled in for a game of Sonic the Hedgehog or MarioKart, we would laugh as they’d gesture emphatically with their controller in an effort to assist whichever character they were controlling. As if Mario would jump higher if you thrust the controller upward at the moment of your jump…how silly!

Fast forward to now. All those amateur game maneuvers have become an essential part of playing many games on the wii. They’re putting wiis in nursing homes and these old people are digital bowling their liver-spotted heads off. Moms, sisters, girlfriends and wives are all waiting in line for their turn to play wii tennis.

But there’s more to the wii than just extreme overall likability. The wii and its components have huge potential for abilities beyond what they already can do. Thankfully, there are people who realize this and are doing their best to take advantage of it. Take, for example, Johnny Chung Lee. He’s put together a number of different projects using the Wii Remote. Here’s a quote from his website:

“[The Wii Remote] happens to be one of the most sophisticated [computer input devices in the world]. It contains a 1024×768 infrared camera with built-in hardware blob tracking of up to 4 points at 100Hz. This significantly out performs any PC “webcam” available today. It also contains a +/-3g 8-bit 3-axis accelerometer also operating at 100Hz and an [expansion] port for even more capability. These projects are an effort to explore and demonstrate applications that the millions of Wii Remotes in [the] world readily support.”

Here are his projects:

Tracking your fingers…think, Minority Report

Multi-Point Interactive Whiteboard

Headtracking (3-D)

www.johnnylee.net

Many of us abhor public restrooms. I really don’t care as long as there’s not feces everywhere. When I have to go, I’m not too picky. On the opposite side of the spectrum, I have a friend who WILL NOT use public restrooms no matter what. I have been with her for trips where we will be gone all day long and we’ll get home in the dead of night and she can finally go to the restroom.

Irish director Paul Walker has a new view of public restrooms. ‘Let’s show a play, not just in a public restroom, in a New York public restroom at that’ (not to diss New York but the average public restroom in the city is pretty bad, even to me).

The 40ish minute thriller, Ladies and Gents, is shown in a restroom in Central Park. The acting actually occurs amidst the sinks and urinals and accompanying yellow stains and curlies. It’s suppose to symbolize the decrepit side of Dublin in the 1950s with slick politicians and prostitutes. The director states, “When you take the audience out of their comfort zone, there’s a different energy to the production”.

As a former ‘drama buff’ (or, Thespian-but I try to avoid that term since it’s linked with worship of the Muses), there are many difficulties I can see from staging a play in the bathroom. Obviously, it would be cramped, it probably wouldn’t smell too pleasant (depending on the sanitation schedule) and the many rehearsals in a bathroom would be tiresome.

Also, a performance in a public area, especially a bathroom, makes for an incredibly thin fourth wall; at one point, one guy came in and did his business in the middle of the play (they cannot close some restrooms or deny anyone access). Apparently, it was a huge success in European bathrooms, but there was much more red tape to ‘rent’ a public restroom in the United States.

Hopefully, there are enough people crazy or curious enough to see it, and these brave actor/actresses’ careers won’t go down the toilet.

In the hyper-competitive world of speed eating, it doesn’t get much better than this.

“Quick Lips” Lathan