Clever Co-Pilot drinks the koolaid
The Co-Pilot is one of two finalists for Western Australian Inventor of the Year 2007 in the Early Stage category. I’m very proud. He’s very low key.
His team has already won something, although I’ve never quite seen a prize schedule so complicated. He’ll know the result on 19th October. This ad was on p38 of our Saturday paper (the West Australian).
The project is Virtual Observer. There are cameras on buses in central Perth that take footage out their front windows. Things happen in Perth that the cameras see. Co-Pilot writes programs to index what is on the videos – so people don’t have to watch hours of footage to find notable events. He has set it up so that you can specify a place and time and see what any of the buses saw at that time – for example what the traffic was like at a particular intersection between 3 and 4 pm from the point of view of several different buses. Or maybe trace the path of a lost child.
His viddler clip of the Perth Webjam winner, ICCARUS was the viddler featured video last Friday and got over 1000 hits . I think he’s realised that there are some times when it is useful to have a site that lets people know more about you.
He’s finally drinking the blog koolaid and has spent the last couple of days registering a domain, crafting a blog and populating it with posts. Finally he decided on A Different Tune: Stewart Greenhill on life, music and the art of science.
There’s a link to videos of six presentations at Perth Webjam and he’ll be adding Perth Barcamp ones soon. If you are interested in audio cassette surgery, it’s the place. There’s a nifty post about how to use autostitch to automatically insert still images into a panorama. There’s also a description of how to use autostitch to automatically drop video into the right place in a previously recorded video clip – watch the video clip where he turns the little bouncing kid sideways but the program still puts it in the right spot in the video. They are work things, but feature a very cute little boy in a karate outfit and another one dancing on furniture.
I’m a little surprised to see this use of “drinking the koolaid.” I guess Jonestown didn’t register the same way everywhere…for some of us, the phrase means drinking something poisonous that seems to be sweet and nice. I doubt that’s what you intend. But then, language does change…
Hi Walt. Funny you should mention it. I was very cautious about using the phrase, as to me it seemed like an import from the US and with its Jonestown connotations rather gruesome and disrespectful to those who lost loved ones in Guyana.
A couple of days before I wrote the post, I checked with the hive mind that is twitter – not an authoritative source, however it did provoke quite a discussion. The origin was traced back to Tom Woolfe’s “Electric Koolaid Acid Test”, which I believe involved a mob of Merry Pranksters in a bus travelling the countryside blowing the minds of a generation with acid.
Another twitterer claimed to associate it with a sugar high – and that you get a buzz when you finally succumb.
I guess I feel a bit like I do toward the word “dyke”. I know a few lesbian women who reclaim the language and wear the term proudly. I know some others who find it abhorrent.
In the last six months or so, I have seen the term used more often to describe someone who begrudingly and bemusedly succumbs to groupthink….often a new technology.
I don’t know whether the term has evolved enough to be used without offense. I hope so, as I meant to cause none.
At the risk of raising generational issues again, … “drinking the koolaid” to me and my friends means buying in to the hype. Jonestown, if you’re my age and thus were 2 when it happened, doesn’t have much resonance.
Which might explain the Twitter hivemind’s response, actually.
Koolaid aside, very cool project, and congrats to the copilot!
Regarding th Kool-aid reference,
I remember Jonestown (though I was rather young) and better remember the Heaven’s Gate insanity. To me, though, the Kool-aid reference has always been a reference to the apocryphal acid-spiked Kool-aid stories of the 1960’s and 1970’s experience.
Lately, my impression has been that Kool-aid references refer to yet another person trying on (and becoming an advocate for, usually) social software / Web 2.0 / Library 2.0 technologies.
FWIW, I’m old enough to remember Jonestown, and think of “drinking the koolaid” as “giving oneself over to the charismatic leader” which stretches neatly to “believe the hype.” The Merry Prankster association never occurred to me, and it is interesting how similar yet different the connotations are.
So…by using the phrase “drinking the koolaid” I’m actually drinking the “drinking the koolaid” koolaid? Or maybe not.
Thanks everyone for your opinions. I’m going to revist this post in another 6 months or so and see whether usages of “drink the koolaid” have changed in that time. Should be interesting.