Coffee, Rain, the Colors and Bricks of Austin

So, I've been living in Austin a while, long enough to pick out a few haunts in which I feel that endless entrepreneurial hope I've spent a life in the attempt to capture. Among these, I find myself frequenting most of all Cafe Medici on The Drag, near the Co-Op (where most students buy their books and school supplies, a sort of native institution supported despite moderately high prices).

Medici is a classic coffee shop in all the unshaven, beret-wearing glory. The local angelheaded hipsters (catch that poetical reference?) congregate here (I'm currently on the second floor overlooking the constant street of Guadalupe) to do homework, chat, Facebook, be seen, and occasionally drink delicious espresso-charged beverages. The ubiquitous mix of hip college girls wearing scarves and TOMS shoes, headphoned 20-something guys with goatees, and the older crowd of professors' wives killing time and reading the paper gives this 2-floored, brick-walled cup of java a friendly jingle of collaborative discussion, cups and silverware clicks, personable rushes of drink preparation, and baristas calling out for the drinks they've just prepared.

The urgency of the homework-workers mixes well with the careless discussion of recent news. ("Did you know Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize? What do you think?" and other such semi-informed discourse)



Why yes, reader, I can insert images! (Though I am unsure if they will transfer to Facebook. Never tried.)

Of course, I would love this place nearly so much if the coffee sucked. Which is why it is fortunate for Cafe Medici that their concoctions (call them philters) are wonderful. Among the best I've ever had, truly. They pride themselves on their so-called espresso art, something I cannot help but be tickled by. (...something by which I cannot help but be tickled, for the grammarian in me and the pedants out there.)



As you can see, this is a picture in a cappuccino (my leisure drink of choice) drawn in the foam (formal:, crema) and which can function at once as a sign of acute professionalism and as a marketing tool. It really is nice to see, all snide aside (rhyme), at a consumer's price (like $3.50 or something like that). It's generally reserved for people who, like me, have an ungodly love of caffeine.

I'd like to, for a moment, comment on the soundtrack of this place. It seems to change eclectically from day to day, and today it is graciously set to some blues/jazz playlist, which I believe is the perfect complement of the brick-clad atmosphere of dynamic lighting and wooden bookshelves. Other days, it has been wacky indie or industrial light dance. I've yet to see a pattern, which I suppose is a good thing. Just more jazz, please, maestro spinner of disks.

One last note. The furniture here is... For lack of better (more accurate) terminology, interesting. The chairs (admittedly only comfortable for the first couple of hours) seem to be welded from very low-grade, almost salvage, aluminum. Same for the tables, save the glass tops. But, the spirit of this coffee shop is still in the forefront: you won't find similar chairs anywhere else.

I hope I've given a fair description to this interesting (there's the vagueness again!) place. I do love to sit here and do homework, read, people-watch, car-watch, weather-watch, coffee-drink, and blog-write, and I hope that other residents of Austin will check it out if they haven't done so already. I know the coffee-and-book environment isn't everyone's cup of tea (or coffee, I suppose) but it seems the University is almost solely inhabited by drinkers of said tea.

Here's a picture of my office, complete with actual homework and shoddy penmanship:



Brooks G. Eakin

Web 2.5

Every year, Google holds a software developer's conference known as Google I/O, where they give demonstrations of the newest applications under development. This year, the Day 2 Keynote covered an extremely interesting topic that I've been following for a while: Google Wave.

Google Wave Preview

The above link will take you to Google's preview of Wave, and I encourage you to watch the video if you have an hour or so to kill. If not, here's the basic premise of this astounding new software:

Wave is a messaging tool, a sort of email/IM/board/blog hybrid with an element of social networking. Think of it as the best of gmail, AIM, twitter, facebook, and a community potluck combined.

Email is an old system based on the primitive concept of snail mail, in which a person writes a message, licks a stamp, addresses an envelope, and sends the message to point B. Google wanted to update this form of communication so that it would reflect changes in the way people interact over the internet. Wave updates in real time, and I mean true real time: as someone is typing, you will see the letters sweep across the screen, and if they delete, you will also see that. But it's much more than an IM service. Think of it as a community bulletin board, where people can post notices, and others can amend them as necessary. Use it to track a party invitation, with everyone amending the original message to add their name to the "Coming" or "Not Coming" lists.

The possibilities for Wave are truly endless, and it would be a waste of time to try to list them all here. Again, I encourage you to watch the video. The real time aspect of Wave made me begin to think about the direction the internet is turning.

"Web 2.0" is a term referring to the aspect of the internet concerning social networking and the facilitation of communication. The facebooks, myspaces, xangas, orkuts, and twitters of the world are all a part of this. But they all suffer from one key downfall: they're not real time. They are based on the old system of send-a-message, get-a-message. You also are given a static web page that (more recently) gives you a frozen feed of all your friends' activity, such as the one on your facebook homepage. In order to see if anyting has changed, you must click 'refresh' on your browser.

Wave is part of what I'm calling Web 2.5, where communication and interaction occurs in real time, as it does in the physical world. We've already seen the arrival of such an appeal with services such as FriendFeed. It is little more than a microblog aggregator, a tool to pull together my twitter and facebook feeds, but it updates the moment a change occurs. I can stare at my FriendFeed page and it will continually run, like a television show, giving me updates from assorted corners of the internet.

Is this the future of the internet? To the unitiated, this whole thing about real time updating seems trivial, but imagine the difference between television and a series of related pictures. Technically, you'd be getting the same information, but not in as smooth a format that mimics the natural pattern of the human mind.

So, does this mean anything? Or am I just getting excited about another Google product? (I am an unabashed supporter of all Google's exploits!)

I welcome your thoughts.

Video Games, Art?

So, I've been watching the coverage of the Electronics Entertainment Expo (E3) all day while waiting for my gums to heal. For those of you who're unaware, E3 is a huge convention every May in California to show off the best upcoming video games. Think of it as a World's Fair for nerds.

One of my earliest memories is playing Super Mario Brothers on the small television in my parents' bedroom. I had it in my head that if I jumped when I hit the A button, Mario would jump higher. So I got a lot of exercise playing Mario. Back then, games were simpler; generally, it was just a basic story with side-scrolling action. But it was fun.

Games soon evolved to feature more complex stories and systems of gameplay. One popular series is Final Fantasy, which is known for engrossing plots and compelling characters. I've always loved to read, and as a child I'd play video games with the same sense of story-telling.

I could make a compelling argument that I became even more attached to the characters in video games than in books because, obviously, I became the characters. I did not watch Link strike down Gannon; I did. Fox McCloud did not fly an Arwing; I did.

Yet, despite my love of these games, I always felt that they were looked down upon. People didn't seem to view them as a valid form of media. They were little more than animated board games, diversions fit for children.

So here I am now, 18 years old, and I still love video games. I believe that they accomplish the same artistic tasks as do books and movies. But, you tell me. Are video games art? Can they move people? Are the objects of creativity, or just playthings?

I welcome your thoughts.

Return of the Blog! (take 2!)

So,

Google now owns Blogger, which (I believe) is a wonderful thing. I love and appreciate Google and all associated acts. Due to my heavy usage of Google-related apps such as my Google homepage, gmail, my Google profile, and Google news, it is very easy for me to network my Blogger account with everything else.

This brings me to an interesting observation. Web 2.0 (the term given to the social-oriented aspect of the internet) has given everyone the opportunity to contribute to the world as a whole. What I see is the breaking down of borders and barriers; the world is slowly becoming one community of intelligent, interested people.

I think it is absolutely fantastic that a kid in Africa with access to a computer can uncover more information in a minute than a librarian at Oxford, and that a high school student in Mississippi can attain as great a readership (by way of blogging) as any of the large news syndicates. Isn't the world stunning? Right now, I have 400ish friends on Facebook, many of whom I haven't seen in years. When I go to college in the fall, I'll continue to keep track of all my high school friends, even though I'll never see some of them again.

What does all this mean for the average citizen? Of course it is an exciting time, and we can all benefit, but what do we need to do? How can we contribute, with few of us being programmers and computer experts? My idea is just to contribute: write a blog, tweet on Twitter, connect old friends with Facebook. The more people use these things, the more they'll grow and evolve.

Of course, that is just my opinion. Tell me what you think. Is this focus on a social internet a good thing, or does it detract from "real" life? Is there a way to contribute to this new world, or should we ignore it?

I welcome your thoughts.

Art

So, what is art?

A painting on a wall? A poem on a page? A song on the radio?

Over the years, I've learned to define art in two ways:

1) Anything that one person can create that has the capacity to move the emotions of another.

2) The process (and result) by which something extraordinary is created from the mundane.

I've also learned that there are three types of art: bad, good, and great. Bad art is something that draws no emotional response; a song you hear in an elevator, or a useless painting on a dentist's wall. Good art makes you feel an emotion that's familiar to you; a painting of a lake that makes you remember the last time you went fishing with your dad, or a poem about Christmas, prompting memories of cinnamon and snow. Great art is the sort that allows you to feel an emotion you've never felt before; Michelangelo's Pietà, which can make you feel the loss of a child, even if you've never had any.

These labels are opinionated... For some, a song is simply "elevator music" while others may hear something more important in it.

Art is the only true worldly mystery left. For all the studying, science has yet to catch up to it.

-Brooks

The First Music

The earliest I remember of music... Good music... Is in the early-nineties Disney movies. "Beauty and the Beast," "Aladdin," "The Little Mermaid," and "The Lion King," just to name a few. Alan Menken, the man responsible for these films' soundtracks, is an absolutely astounding composer. The songs in question are extremely well-written; they tell a story while still being great out-of-context. They're harmonically complex, but still sing-along-able.

This is the music I grew up with. I had all the casette tapes (remember those?) for these soundtracks, and sat in the back of mom's van, singing "Hakuna Matata" at the top of my lungs. Menken wrote melodies that, to this day, are instantly recognizable. This goes pretty contrary to most of the other cartoons I remember, which took classical or folk music and re-packaged it. (It's because of this phenomenon that no american can listen to Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries" without fighting the urge to sing "Kill da waaaaaaabit, kil da waaaaabit" a la Elmer Fudd)

The point I'm trying to make is that all my love for music stems back to one man, one composer, who found a media through which his music would greatly impact a generation. Today, the popular Disney movies are produced by Pixar. For all it's achievements, Pixar uses little music. I'd be interested to see the results of this sad development.

-Brooks

Introductio

That's Latin for "introduction," for all you dead language haters... ;-)

I had a blog like this a while back, but it fell into disuse once I began using xanga. Sadly, no one really uses xanga anymore. It was my favorite of the peer-to-peer networks... ::sigh:: ... Oh well!

This is my attempt at blogging again. I'll post my contemplations about things I find contemplatable here... I've found that my own conversations with myself are rather humorous at certain times, and brilliant at others. Unfortunately, these usually occur at odd hours of night, and I'm not smart enough to write them down before I forget them. This blog (hopefully) will give me an incentive to take these contemplations, adaptations, and revelations more seriously.

-Brooks