Michelle Bachler

Design Camp participants

So, the Cohere Jetpack was one of the 10 winners of the Mozilla Labs Jetpack for Learning competition and I got to jet off to Austin, Texas for a week attending a 3 day design camp, following into the SXSW interactive festival.  Another KMi entry also made it through to the design camp, Mupple, so I got to travel over with Laurian. I am easy to spot in the photo as I was the only female there and Laurian is in the red top.

Intensive coding session

Basically, the 10 winners where ‘trapped’ in a conference room for 3 days from 8am to 6pm. Breakfast and lunch where brought to the room, so we had no reason to leave! The mornings consisted of various discussion groups and brain storming sessions around the Jetpack technology and the future directions it could take. The first two afternoons we had intensive coding sessions to make final adjustments to our Jetpacks.  It was all great fun and there was a real group dynamic. The third day involved rehearsing and giving the final presentations of our Jetpacks.

Design Camp dinner at Mexican restaurant

In the evenings we were let out from the conference room and taken to various restaurants around Austin. The food was really quite outstanding.

The Mozilla SXSW Party

Three Jetpacks where then chosen for special awards which where announced at the SXSW Mozilla party. Sadly, Cohere didn’t get a special award, but Laurian got one for “sharing knowledge with others”.  There was an exciting vibe at the party with lots of people interested in the Jetpack concept. It was our job to act as Jetpack ambassadors for the evening.

Me leaning on the Mozilla car

The three winners of the special awards got a ride in the Mozilla car. I got to lean on it!

Collecting our SXSW festival badges

After the design camp was over we went to collect our festival badges courtesy of Mozilla.

Over the following three days everyone attended various panels and talks that where happening around the festival.

Some of the things we went to that I can recall are:

REWORK by 37signals

Wikipedia Gets an Upgrade: Collaborative Video

Design Fiction: Props, Prototypes, Predicaments Communicating New Ideas

Moon 2.0: The Outer Limits of Lunar Exploration

Mozilla SXSW Happy Hour

How WebHooks Will Make Us All Programmers

Beyond Algorithms: Search and the Semantic Web

SXSW Web Awards Pre-Party

13th Annual SXSW Web Awards Ceremony

Open Science: Create, Collaborate, Communicate

The Semantic Web Austin Meetup during SXSW

No Touching! Truly Invisible Interfaces

Plutopia 2010: The Science of Music – A Future-Focused Audiovisual Extravaganza

I did manage to fit in a little site seeing. Laurian persuaded me to to try a segway tour of Austin. It was really fantastic fun and I thoroughly recommend it.

Me on a segway

Posted on March 19th, 2010 by michelle
Filed under: Cohere | 1 Comment »

For the past few months we have had the builder in doing a rear extension and an attic conversion so we can gain some more space for our growing family without moving home. I just wanted to write a post about how great they have been. Having had to deal with various builders over the years I know what a nightmare they can be. So it was a refreshing surprise to find someone who would listen to what I wanted, be open to suggestions, be prepared to try new things and put up with my endless questions.

So if you are looking for a builder in the Milton Keynes area of the UK I wholeheartedly recommend you try McGlue Construction – enquiries@mcglueconstruction.co.uk  tel: 07794 5645466.
They specializes in attic conversions, but can do any building works and has a skilled team of people working for them. They did a great job with our rear extension and I love our new attic room. Everything is currently being decorated and I can’t wait until we can finally move into the two new rooms and use them. It is going to make such a difference to our lives to have two extra room to spread into! I wish I had taken some before and after shots now. Here are a couple of now shots of the attic. It is being painted and looks a mess and they don’t do it justice, but they are all I have at present.

Posted on July 8th, 2009 by michelle
Filed under: General | No Comments »

E-Dance session over the Access Grid

It has been a while since I made a post, so I thought I would add a quick note about e-Dance. Last week we had an e-Dance project research session in the KMi Podium area. The project is researching the use of the Access Grid for distributed dance.

We used the Access Grid to connect with our colleagues at Manchester University. We had Helen Bailey from Bedford University dancing here at KMi and Sita Popat from Leeds University dancing at Manchester. At each location there was a camera on the dancer and then the camera stream of both dancers was projected up as two semi-transparent over-layed windows. In this way, the dancers could experiment with dancing together when they where actually not co-located.

It was very interesting to watch the way the dancers tried to interact and the way they played with their spacial positioning to each other. I look forward to the next session greatly!

Posted on January 23rd, 2009 by michelle
Filed under: e-Dance | No Comments »

My brother and I have spent about 8 years trying to persuade our father to get a Computer. He is Swiss and lives in Switzerland and we only see him about once a year, so if he had a computer it would obviously be great for keeping in touch. He is the sort of person who really likes to mull things over for a good long time. You can’t rush him into things. Since he retired a couple of years ago he has had no excuse for his procrastinations.

Last week my brother Steven was in Switzerland for business and went to visit dad. He asked again about him getting a computer and got the usual response, ‘I’m thinking about it’. So he decided to drag him to a shop and buy him a laptop and an internet connection. He gave him a crash course in how to get online and he setup a yahoo email account for him. He bookmarked the websites I have with photos of my kids, which my dad had never seen before. He also showed him how to open the Windows card game (my dad plays a lot of cards!). Then he went home and left him to it.

So I am now imagining my dad, thrown in at the deep end. He has never really used computers before (he was a mechanic before he retired). Steven said he was having trouble using the mouse and getting it to click on the things he wanted. I have used a computer so long I find it hard to image what an alien environment it could be to someone. My brother persuaded him to look for a beginners computer course in his area. I do hope he does. I am going to go and try sending him an email and see if I get a reply!

Posted on September 8th, 2008 by michelle
Filed under: Family | 1 Comment »

I have just started work on the e-dance project and I spent an interesting and unusual first week working with some dancers at Bedford University. Not something I have ever done before and very much an alien world. We spent the week working in the theatre and experimenting with various pieces of software.

Manchester University have been working with the dancers using video projection. They have written software that can put together combinations of live video, remote video, pre-recorded video and still images with dancers dancing at more than one physcial location. Recently they added the ability to overlay these combinations as transparent layers which produces some amazing effects. It was abolutely facinating to watch.

Last week they added another transparent layer of live drawing using a digital note pad. I really, really want one. It can hold 900 pages of drawing/writing in it’s memory or you can draw/write live to your computer (and therefore project it on the wall, as the dancers did – see image above). It only costs £94!!! Which I think is cheap for what it does.

I was there because the choreographer, Dr Helen Bailey, wanted to experiment with capturing the choreographic process so she could analyse how the verbal and physical interactions of the dancers with each other and the herself actually produced the dance pieces. We tried using Compendium to map the conversations that the dancers and Helen where having. It quickly became apparent that this was just not going to work. There were too many separate conversations. I couldn’t really hear what they were saying most of the time. If Helen had been mapping and not me, (which would have been the long term plan) the laptop would have been a physical barrier to her interaction with the dancers.

In the end I suggested that we investigate the use of small microphones worn by Helen and the dancers to capture their speech and that I would look into writing software to convert the speech to text and then ultimately into Compendium nodes. It might even be possible to use a spoken keyword system to indicate the node types to create.

I believe the compendium maps I did produce last week, (which ended up being mostly photographs I was taking!), are going to be put up on the e-dance website soon. It is going to be a very interesting project to work on for the next year whatever we decide to do with Compendium in the end.

Posted on August 13th, 2008 by michelle
Filed under: e-Dance | No Comments »