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After many months of work, I finally finished and displayed my “Beating Heart” piece. You can view the video below.

It was shown at the American Heart Association’s 2008 Heart of New York Gala yesterday. Everything (thankfully) went perfect and the responses ranged from disgust to joy.

(UPDATE: Thanks everyone for the great replies! Also, please digg this if you like it )

I love exploded diagrams of objects where you see every piece of the thing. I had the idea to try and make a real life version of one, and picked my iPod to be the victim. The catch was, I wanted it to work even in its exploded form.

I was a bit unhappy with the result because of the clarity of the resin. There were too many bubbles (and was an error on the last pour). At first I was just going to shelve it, but yesterday decided to at least put the photos online.

The most incredible thing about it is it still works perfectly. I encased the internals of the dock too, so it can be controlled, charged, and listened to, by a wire underneath (that sticks out a bit, hence the lego support legs).

Front view:

Side view:

Closeup side:

Bottom view:

Turned on:

I added 3 new feeds to fichey

They are:

• New York Times Top E-mailed articles - a pretty nice roundup of interesting articles on the times
• Random pages - randomly selects pages from everything fichey has captured
• Random pages (just today) - limits the randomness to just today

More soon!

I recently received a coupon to get any drink I wanted at Starbucks. They do this if something goes awry with a previous experience as a nice gesture.

I decided to use the coupon for an experiment: What is the most expensive drink I can order?

Luckily (or unluckily), I happen to live in Manhattan and that makes Starbucks prices expensive. Yup, they fluctuate from region to region (and even store to store). The first thing I did was call a dozen Starbucks stores around Manhattan to see who had the most expensive prices. I used my regular order of a tall soy chai to make the comparison. I figured a Starbucks in Times Square would be more expensive than where I live on the Upper East. It’s even a cool idea itself to create a Starbucks heatmap of Manhattan.

Boringly, most Starbucks in Manhattan (no matter where located) rang my drink up at $4.23.

My next problem was I needed to find out the most expensive stuff to put in a drink. I called up my sister Lauren who happens to work at a Starbucks. She told me that I definitely need to go with the venti white mocha and to add as many shots as possible.

I then went to Starbucks to make my drink. I told the barista that I was there as part of a contest to make the most expensive drink. She played along, trying to squeeze as much as we could into a venti cup. She thoroughly enjoyed the problem at hand (although other customers on line were getting peeved).

And the ultimate yuppified result: A 13 shot venti soy hazelnut vanilla cinnamon white mocha with extra white mocha and caramel. It cost a total of $13.76 (with tax).

After she rang up the amount, I then presented her the coupon (which I didn’t reveal beforehand). She laughed, comped the entire drink, and I left.

At first taste, it tasted just like a shot. The 13 shots in it were just too strong. However, when I got home, I mixed it more with a spoon and it became drinkable (even enjoyable to my girlfriend). It was very sweet and I’m still shaking a bit. I didn’t attempt to drink the entire thing since I’d like to sleep tonight.
 
 
Here is a shot of the receipt (note: 2 shots come with the drink, so she only rang up 11):

 
 
And me wincing at first sip.

 
 
Think you can make a more expensive Starbucks drink? I challenge you to do it and post your shot of the receipt here. Bonus points if you do it with a comped drink coupon too. (note: you can inline images or link them)
 
 
UPDATE: We put it in the freezer and it’s delicious frozen!
 
 

Check out fichey.com, my newest project.

Fichey saves pages from some of the top websites and shows them to you in a static “microfiche”-like format.

Therefore, your computer doesn’t spend time rendering a page, requesting lots of separate images, running javascript, etc etc. You just get to see the content and move on (since most of the pages we see, we’re not interested in.).

Then, when you see that magical page that you want to interact with, you can just double-click into the page from fichey and it’s just like a normal page at that point.

Anyway, check it out, play with it, and of course, bugs/suggestions are always welcome

I was a bit bored today, so I scripted up the Hollywood Movie Generator to help out those poor producers out there in movieland