Steven Dean

September 2, 2009

At last night’s NYC QS Show&Tell we gathered in the very cool tech floor of the Tisch ITP program at NYU. Thanks to Dan O’Sullivan and the rest of the faculty and staff for hosting us. We had all the best equipment you could ask for. What we didn’t have was a very good camera operator: me. Someone, me again, pressed the red button one too many times. So, sorry no videos for this Show&Tell unless you count Nick Bilton hamming it up for the camera before the fatal button press (I may post that to Vimeo).

Graffito
Dustin Dolginow from the Graffito Data Project showed us how he’s built a storyboard and timemap of all the places that show up on his VISA statement by simply uploading an XML file that he downloaded from his credit card site. This morning I was almost up and running when I got the message “Transaction **** is too large. Oops, was Graffito subtly telling me to cut down on spending? But check out Graffito and let us know what you think.

Byte. Snack. Meal.
Nick Bilton, co-founder of the Brooklyn hacker space, NYCResistor, first showed us a gorgeous image of the 49 cappuccinos he’s had in the past two months. Then he walked us through his Daytum page where he’s keeping track of time spent working on a new book Byte. Snack. Meal. – The New Business of Storytelling.  21,959 words written so far.

What good shall I do this day?
Designer Joe Dizney got inspired by Maira Kalman’s piece on Ben Franklin in the NY Times and gave us a history lesson on this fascinating 18th century self-quantifier. Looks like Joe is going to attempt to live Franklin’s daily schedule for a prescribed time of 90 days or more. Everyone encouraged him on.

Hallelujah!
Artist Laura Nova used her time to walk the group through her Crescendo Project where Handel’s Hallelujah will be sung in their name as each athlete crosses the finish line in a 4K run in late September. The talk got all techie with great tips on RFID, timing chips, mats and readers.

Facet of Life
Borrowed from Gary Wolf’s title on self-tracking in Wired, Yuri Niyazov has built a very simple Web app to track chronic pain and other conditions like anxiety and allergies using txt messaging and email. Check it out at FacetOfLife.com

We’ll schedule our next Show&Tell for October but if you’re in the Bay Area in a couple of weeks, make your way to Palo Alto at the Institute for the Future for the 8th Bay Area QS Show&Tell.