That’s it for me techwise for 2011. As for 2012, well, I’m getting married, so that will be my new big adventure. Thanks for reading.

3. Speaker at IgniteNYC - Speaking of Keynotes, I gave one of my own. In the last month of TechStars, I was chosen for IgniteNYC, thanks to Kristen Taylor for encouraging me to submit myself as a candidate. I tried to do something out of the ordinary, so my talk was a LA Survival Guide. I spoke in front of ~800 people and it was a blast. It was a thrill to meet Alexis from Reddit/BreadPig and, and…well, all of the speakers that night. Truth be told, I slept on the couch for a wondrous 3 hours up in the TechStars office cuz I had a tight deadline the next day.

2. HackStar at TechStars - TechStars is incredible. The people selected for it are incredible. David Tisch is incredible. Adam Rothenberg is incredible. I was brought on as a “HackStar”, which ultimately meant I was a floating designer working with the 12 selected companies. I worked with some ridiculously well-credentialed people and, while I was still working 14-16 hour days again, it was well worth it. I certainly got wrapped up in the startup scene and fell in love with the spirit, the potential to be on the ground floor for something huge. Another thing became very clear. Within this world, I was a visual designer, ui, ux, front end code, etc. Plus, if my Keynote skills were not strong before showing up, they certainly were afterward.

After the Summer program ended, I interviewed with quite a few startups. However, as luck would have it, I ended up at a company I met with before all of TechStars…yea, perhaps tomorrow.

1. Graduated from ITP – I successfully graduated with a Master’s Degree from New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program. My thesis was entitled BookBridge.me – an exploration of literature redistribution utilizing low cost online dissemination and corporate philanthropic marketing opportunities. Former President Clinton spoke at our graduation ceremony. Both of my parents, my stepparents, and my brother came out to New York and saw my final show at ITP. It was remarkable and I was grateful.

I came out of ITP not knowing how to present myself. I spent my months leading up to graduation trying to line myself up with a job. It was a bit of a mess. I didn’t get the first job to because I didn’t have enough coding skills and I seemed more interested in design. The next interview said I didn’t have enough design skills and seemed to be more interested in coding. I believe this is a theme of many in the ITP realm, where you have grown accustomed to a multivarious approach and no one knows where to put you. I was not able to line up a full time job by graduation. However, the ITP community is incredibly supportive. I had new connections for work and advice from colleagues and former professors and alumni even before I graduated. My freelance work was great for me to sink my teeth into the real world before I became a HackStar…which I will talk about tomorrow.

We had to create something for in 3D for our Digital Fabrication class. I initially made a jewelbox, as per the instructions gave us and it took an excruciatingly long time. However, it allowed me to really sit with VectorWorks and figure out the ins and outs of the program. After which, I saw a quick sketch I made in my sketchbook and decided I decided I wanted to make this a full blown character.

PegLeggy is a former swashbuckler and war hero, having lived through the war. He is fed up with the current generation’s inability to remember the past. That’s why he’s so irate.

The majority of the build for this character is using ‘Extrude Shape to Path’ and then ‘Fillet Edges’, however, I am quite happy with the result. Most people will tell you that you should not try touse VectorWorks for organic shapes, but for this particular model, I think it came out quite nicely.

Getting it printed at AMS involved surprisingly few issues. You may be able to see there is an issue on the right side of it’s neck, where it fillets up into the head, but aside from that, no real issues. When you use an additive powder process for building your 3D model, at least in the case of NYU’s AMS, you need to infiltrate the build with a bonding agent, to make sure it doesn’t crumble in your hand. I bought Corrie a burrito and used her Cyanoacrylate and it holds well, but it still feels fragile.

Here are a few images of the process, from the Spring Show and my own documentation, care of Jeff Howard.

Original concept

The original idea for the class was to quickly make a chair in 2 or three weeks, so we threw together a design for a skull chair.  Yes, the idea for a skull chair was unsurprisingly my idea.

After we had a full sketch figured out, we decided we should do something more difficult and artistic.  We decided upon a bidirectional rocking chair with an organic pattern.  I sketched out the design and then Shahar imported it into Rhino for Mac.  The original design was incredibly fun, but there is an inherent issue with building a bidirectional rocking chair, namely…it wouldn’t rock.  Our design would have hit the opposing direction edges.  We scrapped the bidirectionality and just went with a chair with an organic voronoi pattern.  Shahar did a tremendous amount of work in Rhino and tried a bunch of organic interpreters and plugins.  In the end, we liked the design I hand made in Illustrator.

Process

The cutting of the chair was what the Heugenots would call a total freakin’ nightmare.  For the sides, we used 1″ plywood and for the seat and back, we rounded the seat, so we laminated two 4x4x1 plywood boards and left them overnight.  We spent over 3 hours for each side, 5 hours for the seat and 7 hours for the back.  This does not include the hour of sanding and routing the edges or the cleanup.  We had an issue with the seat, where our cutting depth was set at .05 and apparently the seat was not exactly 2″, but a bit more, so we had to hand route the rest of the seat.  The back had a depth cut of 1″ or so, so it chipped in random places, which we will need to replace with wood glue(yes? no?  Any suggestions are appreciated.).

Final Build

Has yet to be done, but you will see the final result if you come to the Spring Show!

1.  Much to learn: Rails and Polymorphism

We hit a ton of walls regarding when using Sinatra and DataMapper.  Specifically we were trying to build a system where any sentence could have comments and finally, comment on comments.  Everyone we spoke to on a technical level mentioned that we should use Rails as it’s modular structure allows you to call on comments in a smarter fashion than we built it.  Complementing this idea, enabling polymorphic databases structures either in Sinatra or Rails is where we crashed and burned.  If we had the ability to call comments that belonged to other comments, that would have been half the work.  When we introduced the partial, it allowed us to wrap our comment sentences with a tags and organize if they were long or short comments.

2.  Learn from your Competition

About a week before we had to present, we learned about websites that achieved a similar goal to our project.  RapGenius.com is a fascinating site that allows users to explain rap lyrics for those who are less versed in the world of Lil’ Wayne or Kanye West.  They have a smart user interaction; when you highlight a given text, an ‘Explain’ button pops up and you can write in your answer.

3.  Future features

There were so many features we wanted to implement and never got a chance to add them.

1.  Mute and Solo – We hope to add a list of the commentors on the left side.  Each commentor can be soloed, so as to see only their comments in the article.  They can also be muted, in the event you don’t have to read their responses.

2.  Commenting Functionality – The current system is clumsy and I believe most users would never find ways of reading the comments.  Instead,

3.  Paragraph specific data – Included on the side, we would add how many comments are on any given paragraph.

4.  The balance of comments – By allowing people to react on any given sentence, most users ended up commenting in the first two paragraphs and the comments thinned out the farther you went.  I’m not sure how to incentivize commenting throughout and perhaps there is no need, but for writers who are looking for analysis throughout their work would appreciate the analysis capability.

4.  Thank you

A huge thanks to Greg Borenstein, Rune Madsen, Oren from Heroku, Clay, and everyone who helped us through this project.