Friday night Jonathan and I went to see The Sinus Show’s Snakes on a Plane at the Drafthouse.

Let me explain a bit. The Sinus Show is a live lampooning of a movie. It’s inspired by Mystery Science Theater 3000, and indeed was originally called “Mister Sinus Theater” until Best Brains, the creators of the original MST3K, set their lawyers on “kill”. As a long-time fan of the original, I’d been quite eager to check out Austin’s take on the concept, but had never gotten the chance until Jonathan organized a Guys’ Night Out for Friday. In spite of the 6 people who RSVPed in the affirmative (and the 72,000 or so that were invited but didn’t respond), Jonathan and I ended up being the only two guys in attendance. So we settled into the dark confines of the Alamo Drafthouse , Austin’s movie-lovers’ movie theater, and wondered if the Sinus guys could possible live up to their inspiration.

The answer in short: definitely. I actually found the Sinus show funnier than MST3K tends to be. Part of that was simply good comedy — the guys doing the commentary were excellent, and pretty consistently funny even when just improvising. Much of the difference, however, was due to a different set of restrictions they put on themselves. They were, of course, quite a bit more vulgar than the MST3K guys ever allowed themselves to be, which gave them a broader palette with which to work. A more subtle difference, however, was that the MST3K guys always tried to maintain the illusion that they were seeing the movie for the first time; the Sinus lads made no such pretensions, and were therefore better able to mock continuity goofs, establish bad patterns, etc. As Jonathan said, the MST3K writers seem more clever, pulling esoteric references from all over the place, but the Sinus guys get a lot of mileage out of fart jokes.

And in case you’re wondering: Snakes on a Plane is a bad movie. Really, really bad. Gut-wrenchingly bad. This isn’t interesting or surprising in and of itself, but becomes more so when one recognizes that this film, more than any other to date, was created by fans on the Internet. The scriptwriters incorporated a good deal of feedback from fans, and even went so far as scheduling an additional 5 days of shooting to incorporate the new material (which would incidentally bring the film’s rating from PG-13 to R). While James Surowiecki may maintain that groups are smarter than individuals when it comes to game shows, we can consider this conclusive proof that the same does not hold true where scriptwriting is concerned.

After getting excited about Mologogo, I broke down and bought a cell phone. Then, being a geek, I went out and started reading up on J2ME, the development system for it that would allow me to create my own applications to carry around with me. Then, still not having filled my nerd quota, I got to thinking about what sorts of interesting apps would be enabled by the combination of GPS and web access in a mobile device. By this morning, I had worked up the following application design (mostly in my subconscious while sleeping). I’m excited about the idea; if you’re interested, please feel free to chip in ideas. If I get around to coding, the current plan is to make it open-source so other people can help with the hard math. 🙂

Abstract:

Cacher’s Apprentice (working name) is a tool for geocaching from a mobile phone. It will provide facilities for locating nearby caches and for helping the user to find them. There will be an operating mode to support each of these tasks. (Note: geocaching.com doesn’t provide web services currently, but does have a lightweight interface that should ease working with their site a bit, though it still relies on session data more than would be ideal.) The ideal user is someone who enjoys geocaching and is traveling, finds herself with a bit of spare time, and wants to see if there are any caches nearby to seek out.

Location Screen:

• When started up, application will be in location mode.
• App will query the GPS receiver to get current location.
• App will then query geocaching.com with the current latitude and longitude to find the 10 caches nearest the user.
• Caches will be displayed in a list, with the closest at the top.
• User can scroll through the list and get a summary (size, distance, type) on each of the caches.
• Selecting a cache moves to the display screen for that cache.
• List can be refreshed with a “Refresh” command.
• App can be exited with “Exit” command.

Display Screen:

• Queries Geocaching.com for and shows all details (description,etc) for a particular cache.
• Commands are “Back” to move to Location Screen and “Track” to move to tracking mode.

Tracking Screen:

• Application will display the name/ID of the selected cache, and distance to it. The GPS will be queried and this information updated continuously.
• App will also display a “hotter/colder” designation based on whether the distance is increasing or decreasing.
• Hotter/colder may also have an audio cue — an ascending tone for hotter, descending for colder. (The absolute pitch might rise as you get closer, too.)
• “Found it” command will shut off audio notification and allow logging the find on geocaching.com.
• “Back” command will bring user back to location mode.
• “Hints” command will retrieve hints from Gecoaching.com and display them.

We’ve had a small group at Texas State exploring the educational potential of games and simulations for about a year now. A few months back, our director became very interested in Second Life, a virtual world with entirely user-created content. Emin, one of my coworkers, has since been building a lovely virtual space for use by the University populace within Second Life.

In preparation for a conference this weekend, Emin put together a tour of Texas State’s island. Behold, the Bobcat Village tour:

I’ve fallen woefully behind on posts here of late. Sorry about that — just lots of real life going on. Recent highlights:

• Watching 20 million bats come boiling out of Bracken Cave with the rest of the family. The critters form a vortex as they emerge, looking for all the world like a mammalian tornado. Especially striking were the occassional albinos spiraling upward, startling in their whiteness amid thousands of their brown fellows. Great experience.
• Saw Edward James Olmos speak. As a huge fan of Stand and Deliver and his more recent work in Battlestar Galactica, I had high expectations. Suffice it to say, however, than this was another proof of the maxim that expertise in one area does not imply expertise in another.
• Played at church and Cheatham Street Warehouse last Sunday. Good times, both.
• Liam and Maggie enjoyed a weekend at the beach with Mom McMains, who graciously offered to include them on a fishing/swimming/sandcastle building trip.
• Maggie caught her first fish at the San Marcos River while we celebrated Frisbee Dan‘s birthday with him.
• Had a super double-date with David and Elizabeth last Saturday. Also bumped into some old friends from my high school while we were out — what a great surprise!
• Closed out the season at Schlitterbahn. Abigail and I were the last people to ride the Family Blaster for the year.

I’m a long-time cell-phone hater. This stems partly from the fact that I don’t like phones in general, and partly from the dropped calls, intermittent signals, and latency that causes me to always feel like I’m tripping over and interrupting the person on the other end of the call. I have, however, thought for several years that there is one application that might pull me into the late-20th century cell-phone toting world: a GPS-enabled friend tracking service where you could see the location of your designated buddies on a map and get alerts if you happen to wander close to them.

I had seen an early research project along these lines a few years back where a grad student had hacked together a system to keep track of friends on ski trails. It showed good promise, but wasn’t really robust and friendly enough for wide use.

This morning while listening to NPR, I heard about Mologogo, a new effort that is much more polished and complete. It combines geolocation, chat, and social networking functions into what looks like a rapidly evolving, pretty feature-rich package — very interesting, indeed. I found myself for the first time this morning actually looking on cell phone providors’ sites to check out their service offerings. Mologogo, what have you wrought?