I never eat at chains much but we got two gift certificates for it at Christmas and the commercial for their noodle bowl looked tasty so we decided to check it out.

(e:terry)'s suggested we go to a suburban one to avoid being seen, but we decided that was a waste of gas.

At first I was no thrilled because the place was freezing. Everywhere seemed to be freezing yesterday.

The noodle bowl was actually quite tasty. (E:Joe) seemed to like his vegetarian quinoa bowl too.

It was no Sato but it was totally reasonable for lunch food.

I hate half done artwork. I hate half done projects. I hate, shitty, expensive, media art projects that pretend to be something they are not the most.

<big_freaking_lie>The sweeping zinc facade of the Burchfield Penney Art Center is no longer just a wall. It’s a projection surface. Buffalo’s seasons are no longer just the weather. They’re curators. Elmwood Avenue at Rockwell Road is no longer just another street corner. It’s the Front Yard at the Center—the world’s first permanent, environmentally-responsive, 24/7/365, outdoor audio and image experience. And on October 18, (2013) it turned on forever.

Here is another description of the project on the Cycling MAX-MSP site

And the launch story about Front Yard Launch written in Artvoice

And launch story about About the Front Yard project on WBFO

And from the Buffalo News Article about the Front Yard project

Here are some pictures I took on launch day for clarification about which project I am talking about.




The idea that you get from the articles is that the system somehow reads the weather from sensors and decides what to play and that it will do this forever and ever, making an environmentally sensitive video projection wall.

Back in late summer, early fall 2013, the artist Brian Milbrand first asked me to get involved with the Burchfield Penney Front Yard project. At that point just about nothing was working and they were crunching up against the golive date. I hate coming into projects like that and was very busy but I was interested in the concept and was a friend of Brian's wife so I decided to help out. I also was interested that the system would need a 24/7/365 uptime - something I am used to working as a systems architect in a healthcare facility.

The basic system works like this:

Brian Milbrand's group created a sensor reader that would feed weather sensor data to Max MSP which would then process the current temp, sky color, humidity, wind speed, etc and pass that data to my system which would in turn select which media to play based on a formula we agreed to and reply with the playlist. For example its freezing and windy, a video tagged with that info that incorporated those ideas would be selected. I didn't make the choices about which videos played, we agreed on the formula and the videos were tagged accordingly.

Then when starting to project the video on the front of the museum, MAX-MSP would send a confirmation response back to my server which I would forward to the Burchfield Penney site via an API some developer created so they could display what is being played. Not sure where that data is ever displayed.

Something like this, sorry just sketched it out quick on my phone screen.


The whole system entirely depends on accurate real time input from the weather and environmental sensors. The system was supposed to "work forever" but what I found was that even just a few months after the golive, the weather sensors started to fail and report back data in-accurately. They are supposed to give feedback 1400 minutes a day. Most days it works not even a fraction of that. Since last November (2014) it hasn't even sent back one day of accurate weather.



It kills me because I wasted so much time trying to help them out when I was really busy with work.

I've tried to contact the artist Brian Milbrand, many many times. In fact my system literally emails him at his work and personal email every single day to remind him of the issue because I got tired of reminding him personally.



I even wrote a personal email to his wife asking her to tell him in case somehow gmail didn't deliver the mail, which I thought was pretty impossible as I would have it CC my gmail and I would get them.



Here is an export of what played everyday since Nov 2014 since it has been stuck on the weather of that day since then when the system last reported weather. You can see the list is kind of limited for something that is supposed to be responsive.

MEDIA TITLE	TOTAL	REASON
Burchfield On Location Zoar Water	1902	temp = 20-32
Burchfield On Location Zoar 1	1877	temp = 22-28
Homespun	702	temp = 20-50
Pyroglyphs	684	temp = 0-48
Adrift/Removed/Steadfast	658	windspeed = 3-15
Geomania	656	humidity = 0-70
Wonderful Body Electric	655	temp = 20-50
Tourist	653	temp = 0-48

I'm sure they can find some way to turn this into an artistic statement about how all things rust and die in buffalo or that theme that the weather is not reliable. Really for all the money invested you would think they could find a way to make the weather sensor reliable or just have taken my offer to scrape the weather data from the internet.

It was my mom's birthday dinner so we headed over to Oshun. We pretty much ordered one of everything. The food was amazing and the dining experience was great.

I think she really enjoyed eating every kind of seafood at once.

Afterwards we headed over to (e:mike)'s for dessert and cake.

I can't believe this is a thing.

This one is so much bigger but the material looks so awesome. It still fits.

(e:Joe) and I toured the Junior League show house this afternoon with my mom. I actually prefer to see the "before" version although both version are interesting.

The last time we toured this house it was crammed full of stuff by some horders. They had knickknacks upon knickknacks. I think I even remembered them having stuff stacked on top of their blender on the kitchen counter.

The house is interesting but the 1.5 million dollar asking price seems so extraordinarily out of proportion to the current market. I mean it's nice but it's not 1.5M nice. I guess we will see. I think it seems more in the 800k range.

















This is the exact flooring I want for our porch instead of the plain concrete.

Small fish taste so good but they are such a time sink to gut and there are so many freaking bones. I wish I lived somewhere near the ocean that they just had them precooked for like $2.00 at a stand.

We spent two late evening doing triad programming (like pair programming but with three people) with (e:terry) on the big screen. It was fun watching him learn. I think he could be a great programmer. The program converted a file from one accounting system export to another accounting system input format.

The first night we had we had him programming in the terminal. One evening two we switched to a text editor. I think text editor was a better approach but it's neat to let him so how it worked at the most basic level.

I hate how they plow the sidewalks with a pickup truck. It wrecks the grass and the sidewalk so bad.

It's so damn cold out there. We walked to the coop and I was wearing dress clothes clothes still. I think I got frost dick because my pants were so thin. I hate winter.