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Kenton's dad is an architect and designed a vacation house in Arizona. Kenton invited me to go see it on my long weekend. It was impressively artistic (but I'm not going to post pictures of someone else's house on my blog, so you'll just have to believe me.) We had a wonderful dinner at a restaurant called "The Painted Horse", treat of Kenton's dad and stepmom. I tried foie gras for the first time (soo deliciously fatty!)

We spent Earth Day at the Grand Canyon. It's so expansive that the canyons have canyons (which have canyons). Like every national park I've been to before, it would be nice to go again and explore some more. (Before you ask, I still got work done that weekend, on the plane and on a much-softer-than-my-dorm-room-bed bed.) At night in an empty unlit parking lot in the park, I saw more stars in the night sky than I had ever seen before. It was amazing.

Arizona is a very sunny place for someone used to dorm room lighting (thus the squint).



I didn't blog at all the fall semester, and there are a lot of things to catch up on (interesting places visited, neat projects i worked on.) So Mondays from now until I'm caught up are back tracking days =P

Last semester I took a media lab class called Tangible User Interfaces (vs. GUI interfaces.) The point of the class was to rethink the way we interact with everyday objects. For the final project concept, my group wanted to attach tails to people and objects as a way of conveying their "mood". Implementing a person-sized tailed proved difficult, so instead our example implementation was a tail attached to a (totally functioning) old-style alarm clock. The tail wagged in panic while the alarm went off to wake you up, swayed happily if you turned off the alarm, and thumped in annoyance if you snoozed too often. I really like the idea of a world where every household object has a personality.