RazrGrl: 'K. I went to the parent/teacher meeting.

fotogeek: oh good

RazrGrl: Ms Deborah said:

RazrGrl: 1. It's time for some serious potty training.

RazrGrl: 2. She needs some focus on her counting skills

RazrGrl: Otherwise, she's a joy to have in class.

RazrGrl: ...and is a bit of a bossy tattletail.

fotogeek: i should blog all that for her future enjoyment

I met up with Trixie and Monkey yesterday at the Hopkins Inn hotel in our old neighborhood in Baltimore for a photo shoot. Nikki V did some amazing hair and make-up. The shoot came togther in just a few days planning via e-mail. We were thinking about a film noir theme, but ended up more french/fetish. Some of the photos are on Flickr.

After the shoot, the fam came by to spend the night.

- mike lee - charles village, baltimore

We made our first visit to Atomic Pop, the sister store to Atomic Books, specializing in collectible toys. Pictured here is me with Lauren, who was running the store, our pile of goodies at the checkout counter and a close-up of the plush boob mini keychain I bought. There are some more pix on flickr.

- mike lee - baltimore, md

I visited the Josephine Baker exhibit at the National Portrait Gallery yesterday at lunchtime. The gallery across the street from my office. What an incredible collection of photographs, illustrations and artifacts from the life of a much beloved entertainer. The show runs until March 18, is free, and should only take about 30 minutes to see.

- mike lee - washington, dc

Photos of most of my group attending a lunchtime briefing on paid search engine marketing, Cianna and I stopping at the hotel giftshop after daycare to pick up cheese doodles for her and cough drops for me, and my new Brookstone/Ambient Devices 5-day weather forecaster.

- mike lee - wheaton, md

I had a great dinner and mind meld at Poste tonight with Heidi (memyi, heidils, hls), who is in town for a conference. We talked at length about our experiences with Hiptop Nation and about a hundred other things. Time to update the meet map again.

- mike lee - washington, dc

As a result of all the blue sky talk with LEGO's head of business development last week, I got the itch to buy some more bricks for the household. Tonight, I pulled aside my three-year-old daughter Cianna's big and chunky LEGO Quatro bricks and introduced her to a new set of the smaller, more versatile Duplo. The Duplo product line can be used with a baseplate, and introduces mini-figures to 2-5 year-olds. While she was busy affixing the eyeball stickers all over the bricks, I told her that we could retire her Quatros since they're for babies. She said to me, "but I am a baby!" Hmmm, maybe I'm pushing her too hard to upgrade her LEGO technology.

- mike lee - wheaton, md

It felt good to walk the halls of the Media Lab again, and to participate in another sponsor event put on by Professor John Maeda's Simplicity Research Consortium. These photos are from last Thursday and Friday.

We started the first day with a board meeting in the new (to me) Wiesner conference room on the second floor. They converted Walter Bender's old office. Outside in the hall was an array of Ambient Orbs displaying the state of world financial markets in various coded colors.

The sponsor workshop was titled "Eat Your Media" with guest speakers doing talks on food and media in the Bartos Auditorium on the first afternoon. Speakers included Professor Dan Ariely on ir/rationality in food choice and perception. Dan has recently signed a book deal with Harper Collins to write Predictably Irrational, which will encapsulate for the popular audience Dan's experients in behavioral psychology--most fascinating and often bizzare stuff. Dan's book will likely be a best seller in the tradition of Freakonomics when it is released at the beginning of 2008. And noted blogger Meg Hourihan presented on the ills of industrialized food production as well as trends in food innovation such as molecular gastronomy. John's blog off the first link above has some re-cap.

The students and some of the sponsors were grouped in teams to do a project about food and technology Thursday afternoon and evening. Pictured are some food sculptures done for warm-up. I stopped in to grab some of the buffet dinner, but didn't go to the happy hour or join a student team as I was still nursing a cold and decided to go to bed early.

Friday morning, I met Erik Blankinship and Bahktiar Mikhak (former lab people) for breakfast at The Kendall Hotel. They showed me the hours-old first functioning build of the main digital camera activity on the OLPC Children's Machine XO. Kids will not only be able to take photos on their laptops and store them, photos can be shared to a Flickr-like picture stream consisting of any images submitted by kids nearby on the wireless mesh network.

The rest of the morning were presentations of the student/sponsor team projects. As always there were some wildly creative results. iPod shuffles were awarded to the top winners. John will also re-cap the projects in his blog.

Lunch was with Walter Bender, who brought his XO machine to show off the camera app and the music synthsizer. He was checking and answering Google mail pretty easily on the laptop's browser via wifi. After Walter, I had a fantastic mind meld with guys who worked on LEGO Factory. LEGO is a relatively new co-sponsor of Simplicity at the lab. With my brain quite beat up on radical new ideas, I called back to my office to join in on a two-hour design meeting. I had a good nap on the flight home...

- mike lee - enjoying our icy inch of snow - wheaton, md

Here's my early morning series of hops yesterday to travel from DC to Boston back to the MIT Media Lab. After crossing the chasm that was 2006 during which our sponsorship lapsed, it is good to be back. It was fitting that a glory followed the plane for a while between Philadelphia and NYC.

- mike lee - at logan again for a return flight home...had some great meetings with some of my lab friends

I was in the doctor's office again today because Cianna's throat culture from earlier in the week came back with strep throat and I wanted to be checked for that. My swab came back negative so I don't get antibiotics like the child. The doctor told me to take more Aleve. I'm still be a bit out of it today, but the rest of the fam is fine.

When I'm in examining rooms, the transparent plastic "sharps collector" always catches my eye. The jumble of spent syringes and scalpels inside looks like needle salad. Since I was waiting a while, I searched Google on the product, and found a detailed article on health care workers' risks of getting stuck handling needles. There are 800,000 accidents in hospitals every year!

Tonight, with the extra dose of Aleve taking the edge of my fever off, I'm enjoying a funny blog post on the comments great photographers would get if they posted their work to forums like Flickr.

My bedside book is photojournalist Dirck Halstead's new illustrated autobiography Moments in Time. Halstead's 50-year career spanned the globe, and he holds the most Time covers of any shooter.

- mike lee - wheaton, md