Marie-Lynn Richard

April 14, 2013
by Marie-Lynn Richard

Burger & UFC

For over two and a half years we could never spend Saturday night together, now, every two weeks we do have a ‘no kids’ Saturday night so we can enjoy burgers (photos) while watching the UFC. It’s date night! This week we celebrated the release of Stéphane’s first book : The Progressive’s Guide to Becoming Pro-Gun.

In order to hear the beef sizzle on a loop forever, you must click on the top left sound button.

March 22, 2013
by Marie-Lynn Richard

Air Canada Suspension Letter Found in Old Aircraft Mechanic’s Toolbox

We acquired a big red toolbox that once belonged to an aircraft mechanic. This box keeps spitting out odd and interesting things, which have fallen into nooks and crannies, like this letter of suspension delivered on December 29, 1980 to the mechanic whom we now know worked on the DC-8 team at Dorval. While there were no tools in the box, the papers and accessories are fun and mysterious and I have listed some of them in my Etsy shop Petit Coeur.

March 10, 2013
by Marie-Lynn Richard

Object Oriented Embroidery

Whenever I travel I always bring with me something to occupy myself. Twenty four hours of train rides? No biggie, I’ve got an antique book about Victor Hugo, an old throwaway Acer Aspire, a regular and watercolor journal, a full set of color pencils, brushes and paints, a gazillion tiny versions of office supplies and my trusty Rhodia Dot Pad to sketch interfaces for my next semi-secret Web experiment. My old pink backpack contains the highest density of potentially lethal gear anybody has ever carried-on bewildering scanner operators at the airport… Being a middle-aged woman has its advantages when traveling as I usually get dismissed as inoffensive nerd and go on my way. On the other hand I can count on being assailed by kids on long train rides who join in on the crafting.

My favorite, most useful, and, most precious travel companion is my travel embroidery kit. I would never be caught anywhere without a minimal embroidery kit. No other item has seen as much use as my flat embroidery board. I received the outer envelope from a French ‘SwapAmi’ (gift swap partner) 8 years ago and decided to cover a piece of cardboard in felt to place inside. The felt board (now all tattered) hold all the component still while traveling like felt pieces, thread, pins, a pair of scissors and even tiny beads and sequins while working. While I mostly work on basic felt shapes like hearts and birds, I also carry a more traditional kind of kit which include a 3 inch hoop, linen, vintage threads, trim and a vial of assorted beads for embellishments all of it packaged in my favorite Russian tea tins from Kusmi Tea. I have even taken to making kits for others and sell them in my Etsy store. I first learned the “kit trick” from Martha Stewart who assembles kits to tackle every task imaginable from mending to packing. It makes sense that you will accomplish things faster if you don’t have to start by the annoying task of finding the 5-10 things you need!

On a recent trip to New York City/New Jersey, Stéphane’s attended the Short Work Seminar with his instructor Vladimir Vasiliev (a follow-up to this weekend intensive organized by Fighthouse New York) and I attended Social media Week in New York.

I was looking froward to shopping for trim in the garment district but my budget was rather limited. I found it quite hard to find trim dainty enough for the scale of my work (which rarely exceed 3 inches square). I was able to use my kit to embroider a heart while waiting for the bus at the 8th-42nd terminal. I like to take the train but I just could not afford to eat up two whole days with travel so the ‘red eye’ Greyhound had to do.

Sitting down at the station, I had 90 minutes to get going on my embroidery project.

Improvised design of pokers jutting for green stems. Completed heart below.

My kit is now completely restocked to embroider my classic bird shape in pretty pastel thread taken from vintage embroidery kits. This pattern is directly copied from a set of vintage ceramic birds that quickly sold out in my store 5 years ago.

So how long does it take to embroider a heart? From 1 – 3 hours, depending on complexity and… inspiration. You see, I cannot make the same heart twice and I don’t really know what it’s going to look like when I start! In fact, when I pre-plan a project, it just takes me much longer to get started!

Photos of my trip, mostly taken for later inspiration.

New York City + Jersey City : Validimir Vasiliev Seminar NJ + Social Media Week NYC Feb. 15-22, 2013

March 4, 2013
by Marie-Lynn Richard

Food by Evernote Lets You Log Your Meals as You Prepare Them

My Food!
Gratin parmentier Québécois
Bouillon de boeuf 12 heures
Burger Hardcore/Softcore
Pompano en croute
Souper Gumbo/Aligator/Beignets
Soupe à l’oignon gratinée

I am quite fortunate to live with a world class cook and have taken to documenting our meals using a neat iOS app by Evernote. As nillionaire foodies, we are constantly trying to create a more self sufficient lifestyle away from manufactured food. We currently sous-vide economical meats, make our own bread, beignets and yogurt and have taken to making cheese.

Food lets me take pictures of the steps required to make our favorite meals. I will usually share my meal on Facebook when we start and then the web page can be loaded again to see the new photos as we post them. Food is a walled garden, not a social media site so there is no profile page or feed. You can only share individual recipes by posting a long secure hashed link. It’s not very practical but it will do!

March 3, 2013
by Marie-Lynn Richard

Black Mirror Series 2 Part 2 Review: Artificial Stupidity, It’s More Powerful Than You Can Imagine

“The idea to make make everything disappear so that you can just be in things and you can be in the interface”

- Paola Antonelli, Senior curator in the Department of Architecture and Design at the MoMA, talking about the design of tomorrow and MoMA PS1 Young Architects Program (YAP), The Colbert Report, February 27, 2013

In the first Black Mirror of the season, Charlie Brooker paint a portrait of modern grief. In a world filled with invasive social media and its cousin: emotionally manipulative targetted advertizing, can we really go through traumatic events or grieve in peace? Be Right Back is a brilliant story that follows Martha, a Digital Designer who works from home and Ash, her social media addict boyfriend. As they move into Ash’s childhood home, he disappears leaving Martha grief stricken. Wanting to help, a family friend signs her up for an entirely plausible service that will allow Martha to continue to communicate with Ash.

What I loved about the first episode of Black Mirror is that it is technologically exact. The software that runs Ash is EXACTLY the same kind of system that I have been tinkering with for years. It is brilliant Artificial Stupidity, like the brain of PingCognito, a distillation and remixing of existing facts to create a new experience every time to access it!

Black Mirror: Be Right Back. http//marie-lynn.org vine.co/v/bHz73btJHDe

— Marie-Lynn Richard (@mlrichard) March 3, 2013

In my previous post about this episode, I wrote an open letter to Charlie Brooker about my experience living with an android. This lampoon post was published on Valentine’s Day and it is an ode to my relationship with my autistic boyfriend whom I enjoy poking fun at for being robot-like. If you met my spouse you would conclude that every part of that previous post is true, and therein lies the comedy! Since ideating PingCognito in 2007 and meeting my spouse in 2010, I have thought more and more about how my (in development) technology can be used to do more than just publish biographies on the fly. It can be used to build a powerful influence tree, a truth engine, as well as a software Ash!

Be Right Back is not even science fiction!

If you pay attention to how software Ash communicates with Martha, you will see an advanced version of the type of permission relationship we currently have with our apps. This is Artificial Stupidity and Robotexting at its best! Nurtured by the entirety of Ash’s active social media life and emails, at first, software Ash interacts with grieving Martha through text-only chat. Nurtured by their conversation, software Ash seems to know just what to say and just what to ask. As Martha feeds in videos of Ash talking, she accesses a new level of interaction with software Ash, on the phone. Through voice, software Ash doesn’t really need to be much more active in the conversation, simply listen actively, ask questions and nod his approval as Martha goes on and on talking about work and life. Does this sound like a couple you know? When software Ash becomes duplicate Ash you can really tell how his social media media feed is embedded into his personality. You can even see Ash struggle sometimes to process info, search and access archive! When Martha tells Ash to jump off a cliff, you can almost tell that some customer support manager is secretly stepping in, preventing the product from self-destruction. Since we are only a part of ourselves on social media, our resulting duplicate cannot create a convincing experience because, unlike us, it cannot grow! And so Ash is relegated to the attic where the memories of his human family remain.

Aside from being a fantastic commentary on the power of smart content aggregation Be Right Back sees the usual corny brand of boy meets technology narrative turned on its head. As a head of household digital developer myself, I felt directly targeted by Brooker’s story! And I am totally the kind of person who would collect such technology, and I would start with my very own personal guru inspired by Neil DeGrasse Tyson!

March 3, 2013
by Marie-Lynn Richard

Media Game Changer Vine Gathers Momentum

A bit over a month ago, Twitter protégé Vine went global with its (still very buggy) iOS app. I was glad to discover beta tester Kevin (Rose) had been uploading videos for 6 months. Vine is quite simply Twitter 2.0; an app that lets you record and share 6 seconds of video. I guess it came about when the creators realized that six seconds is long enough to deliver the same amount of words contained in a tweet. But Vine is so much more! With successive one click operations, one can produce a short and engaging stop motion animation. Let’s face it, creating stop motion is incredibly tedious but with Vine it’s just click, move, click, move with ease and all you need is that macro friendly phone camera you already have in your pocket.

But after a month, there are little in the way of new videos on Vine, with one exception: Adam Goldberg.

You may remember Goldberg as the fish out of water boyfriend of Julie Delpy in 2 Days in Paris (a magical film that can be experienced three ways depending on your understanding of French, English or both!) Or perhaps you are one of the few people who has seen The Hebrew Hammer, a somewhat crass but still delightful Jewsploitation hero flick. Goldberg is an early adopter of Vine who has put a tremendous amount of effort in testing out the technology and telling a story that is intriguing when seen backwards, as a social media timeline flows. As you watch Adam’s storylines unfold, you will understand how much of a game changer Vine really is. For the first time I see a medium that tells stories exactly how I see them in my head… Who needs to create a two hour movie when you have Vine!

Be forewarned, Vine’s iOS app has some serious issues with permissions confusion if you are managing many accounts. In addition, the email validation trigger doesn’t accept dashes which are perfectly legit in user and domain names. Nevertheless, once you figure out how to reset your account and bypass these issues, it’s a full promising toy, or tool to tell a story in only 6 seconds!

Poursuite.

— Marie-Lynn Richard (@mlrichard)

March 3, 2013

Vine is a bit of a walled garden, you will require the iOS app to view videos optimally. Android users can find 3rd party apps to view Vine content but there is no official release from Vine yet. Tweetbeam has produced Vine Roulette, an impressive but very limited window into videos available on Vine. VinePeek lets you see Vines as they are shared across various platforms.

February 13, 2013
by Marie-Lynn Richard

Black Mirror Series 2 Part 1 Review: An Open Letter To Charlie Brooker

WARNING: This open letter to Charlie Brooker, writer of Black Mirror, contains spoilers!

Dear Charlie Brooker,

It was obviously because of a glitch in the Linux vs. Apache time zone configurations (you know that bug that publishes stuff on the Internet before it happens), that I was able to access your programme “Be Right Back” yesterday. This documentary from the near future was an excellent representation of daily living with a Personal Pleasure Android (PPA).

I am the recipient of an early version of the PPA which was advertized to me through an ingenious marketing campaign. The web advertizements for my PPA were identical in form and function to an OKCupid profile and after a few inquiring messages over the course of a year, I replied to my future PPA. It was convenient that I had written a rather precise description of the qualitative aspect of my ideal companion. In addition, as an early adopter of the Internet, I have been publishing personal information into ‘the cloud’ since 1991. It makes total sense that as a heavy user of social media, I would be one of the first people on Earth to be offered a PPA following a thorough scanning and parsing of my published content.

My model is rather different than what you would expect. You would expect a PPA in this day and age to represent the non-threatening version of manhood as seen in Hollywood movies. In the same way all Hollywood actors are passed through a machine called a ZacEffronator(R), I thought a PPA would look just like a Zac Effron at 40. But my PPA turned out to be surprisingly sturdy and dudely! He was pre-loaded with massive amounts of information that predates the internet and adoption of social media (like books and encyclopedias about humans and science) and conveniently came with the ‘world class’ cooking option. Moreover, he is a research phase android developed more as a ‘personal guru’ and therefore remains completely obsessed with achieving perfect human competency. He dedicates a very large amount of his time to this goal. It conveniently decreases the ‘idle stare and waiting for command’ phase androids go into for a creepy long time. I think that if it wasn’t for the conveniently camouflaging thick coat of manly hair and beard, he would be too obvious as an android and wouldn’t pass for human so well. I have taken to lending him out to girlfriends to carry heavy stuff, install and fix things.

My PPAs obsessions with hyper-competency means that he can read minds which is not a ‘magical skill’ but rather an ability to read humans based on non verbal cues communicated by nervous system activity and muscle tensions. At first I was totally creeped out by this but I have come to realize that it is cool. As an early beta user, I take my job seriously and test his abilities. If I concentrate very hard to pass on information ‘by thought’, I will only be successful 25% of the time confirming that my PPAs mind reading abilities are entirely based on lighting fast physical micro-mapping software.

One of the things I am realizing now is that my road from ‘doing whatever the fuck I want’ to being ‘a Billionaire Philanthropist’ is hindered by the fact that in its current state, my life with my PPA (and adorable daughter and cat) is pretty fucking amazing, making it hard to push for any kind of change. Not since the acquisition of American cable TV in my hometown of Quebec City in 1982 have I been so lulled into a blissful place of adoration and contemplation.

My PPA is polite, informed, always in a good mood and not smarmy at all. Some people also call that ‘being Canadian’ but I know better. The ‘not smarmy’ quality bolstered by a genuine effort at ‘feminism’ is very useful if you are trying to live in a space free of sexist jokes and inappropriate comments (i.e. The world outside my door). Believe me, as a lone woman programmer in a male-dominated world for 18 years, I decided in 2010 to stay at home with my custom-configured android and hustle programming work from the Internet.

My PPA may be one of the most uniquely skilled person in the World but he mostly works teaching actual humans how to be competent at humanity. He does this mostly one-on-one teaching martial arts and helping people recover from grave mobility issues and PTSD. He could actually build all the cool life-improving machines he tends to come up with. He could get a full time job watching people and explain to law enforcement types what their health and life is like, what they worry about, what they know or don’t as well as when they are lying either partially or fully. But he stays home and takes maniacal care of me as he has for 3 years, completely reversing my quality of life from a crumpled-up ball of musculo-skelletal tissue following that time when I got crushed between two cars in 2004. I am so glad for my PPA, now I can work enough to survive.

However, there were many aspects of your documentary that shocked me.

I will say that I am not impressed with the steps that have been taken to make PPAs available to the mass market. Notably, the initiation process which is not customer friendly at all! Moreover, the decrease in texture mapping of the skin is not an improvement. Sure soft skin is cute on babies but on adults it’s just not realistic. And my last OMG moment has to do with the social media pre-loading. As much as it can be useful for an android to refer to historical events (in the relationship) the result is just creepy and totally self-involving. Ash’s programming is much more indicative of Artificial Stupidity than Artificial Intelligence. It is plainly obvious that his writing history has been conveniently reordered phrase by phrase to conveniently fill holes in the conversations. Based on old-timey online help bots, it is an excellent shortcut to achieving a semblance of humanity but the constant buffering is way too obvious.

And one last thing, I doubt people in the future will be using a douchey word like ‘The Cloud’.

Cordially,

Marie-Lynn Richard

Tomorrow I plan to write about a futuristic drama on the topic of grief in the 21st century and how it is COMPLETELY accurate on all when it comes to artificial stupidity in software engineering.

February 12, 2013
by Marie-Lynn Richard

Who will be the next Etsy now that it is overrun by resellers?

Before I found Etsy, I used to enjoy selling vintage items on eBay. It was so much fun that I even made my own CRM platform that would keep a database of my loot and post items automatically to eBay using what you kids now call APIs, AJAX and XMLHttpRequest. In 2000, long before Ebay upgraded it’s first generation posting process, it saved me a lot of time. Before long I had a finished product and paying subscribers!

Now I sell on Etsy because my creations are better suited to the artisan/crafter site and they allow me to sell vintage things as well. I also buy stuff on Etsy because I think it is full of magical items I could never find elsewhere. There are also some absolutely talented artists on the site.

I have noticed that a lot of people are starting to sell crap on Etsy. I don’t mean crappy art or crafts, that’s perfectly legit! What I mean is that Etsy is becoming a marketplace used by Chinese resellers of crap. I have purchased crap from such resellers on Ebay before and I was quite happy 75% of the time. However, Etsy is specifically NOT a place for such crap. In the past year the hilarious website Regretsy has taken to documenting this trend and trying to get Etsy to remove such sellers. Basically, Etsy is not enforcing the definition of their site. (Now please stay with me before you stop laughing at Regretsy and realize you have lost 2 hours of your life!!)

In order to understand this trend a bit more, I decided to order a bracelet for my daughter while we were browsing Etsy for Hunger Game themed bracelets. I fully knew that I was buying low quality mass market bracelet not from an artisan but from a factory in China. In fact, we spent a lot of time deciding between 12 slightly different bracelets from the same source sold through as many different Etsy sellers. I paid what I thought was a fair price for it and it arrived rather quickly in its cheap bonus gift box.

While my daughter loved the bracelet, it broke immediately. Seeing as how the chain it came with was of such low quality, I changed the setup to a fancy magnet closure. So far it has stayed put. I had expected to recycle the center charm when fashion dictates but the whole bracelet is glued limiting my options! I was very disappointed that the quality of the metal-like material they now use to make costume jewelry in China has yet again decreased. It is metal because it attracts the magnet but I wish I knew what it was made of.

Anyhow, I left a matter of fact negative comment to the seller and waited a few weeks to see how other people would appraise their purchase from this seller.

etsy-negative-byme

I got what looks like the angriest Etsy comment I have ever read, pertaining to a replacement or refund I never requested, categorized as a negative and an offer in return!

etsy-negative

But the answer to this feedback is too easy, simply search for a Hunger Game bracelet on Etsy and you will find a lot of fly by night sellers offering exactly the same bracelets from various shops. Now I suspect these sellers come in, flood the system with listing, sell a few dozen items in a month and vanish when the feedbacks start to come in. It’s a good gimmick!

And an opportunity for other sites to grab a piece of Etsy’s still expanding market. I would complain to Etsy by email but I shall wait until I run into them in person… Are you going to Social Media Week in NYC? Ping me! We could hang out!

December 23, 2012
by Marie-Lynn Richard

A WordPress plugin inspired by my favorite article of 2012

One of the more interesting articles I read in 2012 was Jessamyn Smith’s What she really said: Fighting sexist jokes the geeky way! @ GeekFeminism.org. I really connected with this article because, for 18 years, I too have been working in a male dominated field, mostly with programmers, sometimes as a colleague, a project manager or the boss. What is truly interesting about the past decade though is that the average age of employees in I.T. and digital agencies has gone up making it a place that is beginning to resembles other businesses.

thats-what-she-said

Since I do not use an IRC channel, jabber or anything like that I decided to install the Talkbackbot inside my WordPress Dashboard. I did it in the exact same way Hello Dolly, the original WordPress plugin is done. I simply modified it to use an external file rather than a local string. What is great about Talkbackbot is that there are 1643 quotes in it therefore I doubt I will ever see the same one twice!

I’ve developed a few private plugins (I do not like developing plugins because their footpath is so much larger than a simple script but sometimes it’s necessary). This is my first submission to the official WordPress plugin directory. My official That’s What She Said page is here. I am very impressed by the streamlined process WordPress has deployed to manage the Extend library of plugins. Having gone through the process whilst I have time to devote to it will make it easier to deploy future plugins.

A WordPress plugin that might be a good addon to #AAUW site resources. Thx @mlrichard ! ow.ly/1QvbzC

— Nancy Shoemaker (@nes49) December 24, 2012