GregSchwartz.net

Two weeks ago I attended iPhoneDevCamp in SF. I don’t have an iPhone and I didn’t have any ideas for what to work on for the hackathon; I went figuring I’d meet people, make a team [with an iPhone], and go from there.

Rode CalTrain up to SF, walked to the building, got my swag bag, and then walked around a bit. Met a guy from eyeFi with some cool ideas around his product, and then ran into Nicole Lazzaro (XEODesign) who had a couple different game ideas. She introduced me to some others, and we proceeded to brainstorm game ideas. By the end of the night we were a team.

So we built a prototype, turned that into a rough version of the game, play tested it, changed the game a bit, play tested it more, cleaned up … and presented!

The game is called TattleTalz (only works on Safari & iPhone). It’s basically an online version of the party game “Two Truths and a Lie”: there are three statements, two of which are true; you guess which one isn’t. It integrates with Facebook, which it uses to find questions your friends have submitted. The purpose of the game is to let you strengthen your friend network (since many “friends” on Facebook are people you don’t actually know well) by learning things about those “friends”.

People liked the idea a lot, and we’re going to leave the game running for a while. I actually just put up version 2 of the game, which has Facebook integration working, as well as question submission. Go play!

In fact, it was so well liked that our game won the Best Game category! The prize was a 17″ MacBook Pro with 4GB of RAM and a service contract. Obviously you can’t split a computer three ways, so I talked to the rest of the team and bought them out of their shares. Mwahaha, it’s all mine!

Thus: I’m going Mac! Although I still have a windows box, and I got a free copy of VMWare Fusion, which will be good for running WinXP (games, utilities, Win-only apps, etc). It’s going to be interesting, but I’ve been trying it out on a work machine all summer, so I’m starting to get used to it. (No, I’m not gonna be a die-hard Mac fan boy. For one thing, there are far fewer of my beloved keyboard shortcuts!)

I’m working at Venrock over the summer. As Wikipedia explains:

Venrock, a compound of “Venture” and “Rockefeller”, is a pioneering venture capital firm formed in 1969 to build upon the successful investing activities of the Rockefeller family [...] Venrock focuses its investments on early-stage and start-up companies in information technology and emerging technologies.

So why is an HCI guy working at a VC firm? Well, I’m an intern here, and I can’t say much more than that!

One downer is that the office I’m working at is in Redwood City. I had planned to ride to work everyday, because I thought I’d be at an office close to campus. I might have found a decent solution, though! A combination of CalTrain and riding my bike look like a reasonable alternative to driving (and about the same cost per trip). I’ll give that a try in the next week or so.

While we were editing our final paper for CS376, Steve mentioned Zeugmas to me, but had a hard time explaining it. We looked it up on Wikipedia, and here’s what we found.

Zeugma (from the Greek word “ζεύγμα”, meaning “yoke”) is a figure of speech describing the joining of two or more parts of a sentence with a single common verb or noun. A zeugma employs both ellipsis, the omission of words which are easily understood, and parallelism, the balance of several words or phrases. The result is a series of similar phrases joined or yoked together by a common and implied noun or verb.

There are a number of geeky examples:

• Star Trek: The Next Generation: “You are free to execute your laws, and your citizens, as you see fit.”
  (I have no idea what episode that’s from, and I’m quite curious.)
• Numerical Recipes: “Come the (computer) revolution, all persons found guilty of such criminal behavior will be summarily executed, and their programs won’t be!”

And a number of funny examples:

• Charles Dickens: “[She] went straight home in a flood of tears, and a sedan chair.”
• Groucho Marx: “You can leave in a taxi. If you can’t get a taxi, you can leave in a huff. If that’s too soon, you can leave in a minute and a huff.”
• Flanders and Swann, “Madeira M’Dear”:
  • “He said, as he hastened to put out the cat, the wine, his cigar and the lamps…”
  • “She lowered her standards by raising her glass, her courage, her eyes and his hopes”
• Bob Kanefsky: “Did she turn down the wrong hallway, his advances, or the sheet?”