Hey all, I’m Dan. PhD student in HCI. Research focuses on using geotagged social media data to better understand and engage with cities. I like riding and building bikes, drinking coffee, traveling to places that are remote, playing fast word games, and cooking Indian food. I want to use IACD to develop both tools to be able to go from idea to execution faster, and to practice coming up with ideas in the first place.

Twitter: @dantasse (or @sedatesnail for day to day lunch tweets that Golan would say should probably be on Facebook)

Github: https://github.com/dantasse

A project: Radiohead or Horse_ebooks? is a simple site that presents a cryptic snippet and asks you to guess whether it was created by megaplatinum world-conquering rock heroes Radiohead, or by Twitter bot Horse_ebooks.

They’re kind of similar, really, but one is among the highest pop culture created today, and one is a spambot. (Okay, was a spambot.) One is a cult favorite, the other is… a cult favorite.

What worked? The site did, technically. It’s still running, still grabbing a few more Horse_ebooks tweets to its database every day, adding in a few more Radiohead lyrics to balance them out, and, well, no obvious bugs. I built it in a few stints in cafes and bars over a week in Wellington, New Zealand, on a crummy eeepc, so I was kind of proud of that. And I’ve sent it to my friends and we all had a nice chuckle.

What didn’t? Well, I’m sure there’s something in there about semiotics or how we create signs that friends can rally around regardless of what they mean, but honestly I just thought it was kind of funny. And therefore maybe it’s less meaningful than some things I hope to build in this class, but it’s the only thing I can find that involved code, was mostly by myself, and was somewhat creative.

Credits: Google App Engine for infrastructure and free hosting. Green Plastic Radiohead for lyrics. Code’s here.

For the record, “The Pleiadian Mission, A time of Awareness” was Horse_ebooks.