William Lyon

I'm very normal @lyonwj lyonwj.com

[lyonwj]

The fifteen Moai of Ahu Tongariki on the coast in Rapa Nui. This is the largest Ahu (stone platform) on Easter Island. You can see the quarry where these were carved at the end of video.

[lyonwj]

OpenGL 3D scene makes the Github purge cut

I’ve been trying to purge projects from my Github page. Most are projects I started with the intention of fleshing out more or simple demos. Here’s a project that I just couldn’t part with: OpenGL-3D-scene. It’s just a simple OpenGL project written in C++ that loads a 3D golf ball model I created in Blender. It started out as a golf course but quickly turned into some sort of modern art golf nightmare.

[lyonwj]

Tetris+Jenga = GanjiStreet

I've been trying to clean up my Github repos recently and have really enjoyed revisiting my old dead / half-started projects. There are some good ideas here that I never got around to.

Example #1: what do you get when you take Tetris, Jenga and 3D WebGL gaming? GanjiStreet (anagram of Tetris Jenga) was an idea for a 3D game I had started a while ago but never built out. You can see a simple three.js based static view of the game starting state I had in mind here.

[lyonwj]

An example of why Periscope is awesome

I’ve been playing around with Periscope for the last week or so. Periscope allows anyone to broadcast live video from their phone and interact with people watching their broadcast through on screen comments. The technology that enables this is pretty amazing and I'm optimistic that we will find interesting use-cases for Periscope but I've been rather disappointed with my Periscope experience so far. Until this morning...

One of the potential benefits of technology like Periscope is that it can connect almost anyone. Last night Amelia and I were planning a trip to Easter Island - a remote island 2000 miles off the coast of Chile - when she asked, "Do you think Brad Feld has ever been to Easter Island?". We've been reading some of Brad Feld's books so he was on our minds. I've never met Brad Feld. He lives thousands of miles away from me. I don't have his email address. Realistically I had no way of contacting him, but I replied half-jokingly, "I dunno - I'll ask him on Periscope." Well, today I got my chance!

Brad did a short Periscope broadcast this morning and I got my chance to ask him if he had ever been to Easter Island. His reponse? "I'm not even sure where Easter Island is. Sounds like somewhere in the South Pacific."

[lyonwj]

The power of network analysis strikes again. The tool mentioned in this story is available to anyone here: https://immersion.media.mit.edu

[lyonwj]

Lobos at Isla Damas (near La Serena, Chile)

[lyonwj]

After much delay finally getting started with Coursera’s Principles of Reactive Programming course.

[lyonwj]

Despite living in Chile for six months now my Spanish is embarrassingly poor. At the Paseo Agua Negra border checkpoint a fellow traveler asked me "de donde va?" Thinking he had asked me where I was from, I replied "de estados unidos". His response was great - he pointed up the road to Argentina and said "no se puede llegar desde aqui" - you can't get there from here.