Changing Tides - Brenda Moon

I’ve been trying out the  MSAFluid library by Memo Akten for Processing.  Starting from the example program that comes with the library, I’m making a wind tunnel.  I’ve seperated adding force to the fluid, adding particles and adding dye so that I can add each where I want to.

Processing is fun because the sketching approach means that you see the results at each step, and this often provides weird / interesting visual results.  These images show my wind tunnel with a ‘fan’ emitting dye and then a set of dye emitters half way down the tunnel.  The particles are distributed through the fluid to show the flow.

WindTunnel Frame 60

WindTunnel Frame 177

WindTunnel frame 456

WindTunnel frame 1069

Please see the response below from Mark Rowland from Wagamama, he has sorted out my problem!

I am cross at Wagamama’s implementation of their “Frequent Noodler” program.  It is a bit silly really because the points I’ve lost only work out to about 1 main meal or $20.  But the Wagamama moto is “positive eating + positive living” which I don’t think is matched by their behaviour in this case.

After the last uxbookclub meeting in Canberra, a few of us went to Wagamama in Civic for dinner.  Some of the other people were members of the Frequent Noodlers club and suggested that I join.

So I grabbed a Frequent Noodler Card and I  paid for the meals.   The Frequent Noodler Card needs to be registered online – so I asked one of the others to do that using their iPhone.  The person at the cash register said that the registration takes a while, so instead I should just pay and then register at home and send in the details of my receipt. That’s what I did.

The next day (12 May) I registered and sent details of the receipt through their feedback form.  On the 19th May I got a response back from Wagamama listing the rules from their website, in particular “you cannot have points added to your account for receipts dated before your frequent noodler registration date”.   And asking me to provide details of the server from the receipt so “they can be notified immediately”.

I wrote this back:

Dear Tina,

Your loyalty cards need online activation and the person at the register said they take a while to activate (when I asked my friends to do it over their iPhones) so I should just pay and then write to marketing.  I was there with a group from the UXBookclub and one of the other people could have used their card, but suggested I do it so I can start having some points and go more regularly.   So their attempt to get you another regular customer seems to have meant losing those points.

So are your rules saying that when I got home late that night if I had activated it I would have got the points?? Instead of doing it the next morning?

Some rewards program – I guess I won’t be going back.

regards,

Brenda

On the 25th May I got another response from Tina, saying that it would not have mattered if I registered the same day or the next day, you have to be registered before you dine to be able to claim points.  She again asked me for the name of the server from the receipt so they can make sure it doesn’t happen again.

I’m fairly sure there was nothing in the restaurant where I picked up the card about having to be registered first because if their had been, one of the other people with me would have used their card.

I can’t see why they have it set up this way – it would not be hard to let the points be added to that card immediately – even thought there were no customer details recorded – computers are good at keeping track of things like that.  If the person never registered, then the points would not get used.

I find it ironic that they expect their customers to register in advance, but take 7 days to respond to the first feedback message and 13 days to reply to the second.

I haven’t provided them with the name of the server as I don’t feel comfortable with doing that.

I guess that I won’t be going back to Wagamama any time soon.

At CPAS we have an afternoon seminar on Thursdays and everyone brings some food or wine. I felt like making some bread, so I made enough for the seminar and to make a pizza for dinner tonight.

Coffee Scolls:

Cheese Scolls

TED Talk – JoAnn Kuchera-Morin: Tour the AlloSphere, a stunning new way to see scientific data

The AlloSphere uses two 5 metre radius half spheres made from optically opaque and acoustically transparent perforated aluminium. They are housed in a three story anechoic chamber. The viewers stand on a bridge that positions their heads near the centre of the sphere. The images are projected onto the inside of the hemispheres from a projector positioned in the seam between them.

The examples in the video seem to be fairly low resolution, at this stage there are only two projectors in operation (one for each hemisphere). They are installing multiple high resolution projectors around the seam between the two spheres to be able to do ‘eye limited’ resolution in 3D. The audio uses multiple speakers to achieve 3D audio.

More information is available on their website: The AlloSphere at the California NanoSystems Institute, UC Santa Barbara

There is an interesting article on the Information Aesthetics blog about two talks given by Eric Rodenbeck last year:

Eric Rodenbeck (Stamen): Information Visualization is a Medium
This post contains 2 recorded talks from Eric Rodenbeck, founder and creative director of Stamen Design, the visualization design lab known for projects like Trulia Hindsight, Digg Labs, SFMOMA ArtScope and Flickr Clock. – Information Aesthetics

The first talk argues that Information Visualization is more than a technology, it is becoming a medium with its own culture. As well as showing examples of visualisations made by Stamen, Eric uses a series of Venn diagrams to describe visualisation as working in the overlap between various elements, in particular between Analysis vs Spectacle.

“It is not enough to simply analyse and it is not enough to simply entertain, but as this thing moves out into the medium we can start to approach this way of looking at the world and thinking about the world that is beautiful as well as useful.” – Eric Rodenbeck.

Both talks are excellent!