Thursday, September 17, 2009

¡Hola DMS!

Well, I've gone and done it. I'm now a grad student, which means I automatically have a craving for Ramen Noodles In A Cup, beer from a funnel and women that can recite poetry from memory. Or something like that.

Actually, I'm a week in and already I'm finding it a mind-expanding experience. Last night, in a design class, we ended up chattering about semantics - and specifically the verbage used to communicate the expansion of meaning for an idea. Hard to explain in a blog, but it was inspiring and fun - thanks mostly to the interesting and embracing style of the professor (Rafael Fajardo).

Today, in our Introduction to Technical Foundations (!) class, there was a discussion about the origins of HCI (Human Computer Interface), going back to the dark ages of Douglas Engelbart and the original mouse. It's hard to believe how close I am in age to that group of Big Brains, but it was great to get the review. Also, it was interesting to see how many of the original "gestures" obviously resonated with the human brain, leading us to embrace the very first methods for graphical selection, movement and alteration.

I leave you there, but beg that you take the opportunity to check out The Demo, a page dedicated to the original demo of the mouse (and some other, not so successful bits) on this Stanford page.

[ddg]

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