I’m scheduled to give a book review on Matt Pearson’s Generative Art book at the next Boston Artist + Coders event. Here’s the preso:

Next week, is reportedly the 1st ever “robot film festival” in NYC put on by Heather Knight and creator of keepon – beatbots, marek michalowski.

Here are some quotes from the cnet article from @heatherknight:

“Our goal with the film festival and the expanding community that we’re building around it is to explore modern relationships between mankind, technology and nature,” Knight said in a release.

“The films include stories about real and fictional robots, depicting interactions between robots, nature and society. They’re created with consideration of overall entertainment value, inspiration of future technologies, creativity and robot design.”

Here’s an example of what you might expect to see:

Read more and/or register for it.

Looks like there’s a new online training game in town and it’s called “codelesson”.

I haven’t done any (yet), but occasionally, if I don’t have time to invest into reading about a topic (i.e. WordPress plugins), I’ll do an online training video to fill the gap.

There appears to be a free etsy course right now, which might be neat to sign up to see what codelesson has to offer (and of course the ETSY API).

Last year, right around this time, I was giving my own workshop on Flash Mobile at Flash and the City.

This year, because of numerous factors (which I won’t talk about here), I decided to forgo FATC and travel to New York to participate in some workshops offered by some other folks I know and respect within the interactive community.

This past week(end) I had the chance to travel to NYC to partake in two really great workshops: Seb Lee Delisle’s (aka “seb_ly” on twitter) Creative JavaScript and HTML5 training and Jer Thorps‘s Processing and Data Visualization.

Here are some thoughts poured out about the excursion, in no particular format. I’m going to save up my “story telling” mode for after eyeofestival in a couple of weeks.

Travel
Jet Blue worked out pretty well. No snags except for a return trip delay.

I’ve taken the Train to NYC before. I haven’t worked out all the math, but it might be slightly cheaper to take the train, if you’re willing to do the 4hr RT commute versus the 1 hour plane ride from Boston.

Lodging
I stayed at the Ace Hotel, something recommended by a friend. Not bad. It wasn’t exactly downtown but it was close enough for both venues. The single rooms are more than adequate for a couple nights stay. I’ve had smaller rooms.

Since I only stayed a couple nights I didn’t really have a chance to explore more of the area around the hotel, nor the amenities. Definitely on my list for next time.

Workshops

I’m a big fan of slidedeck and have been using it for years to “host” my presentations over the years. It’s an excellent service, I recommend checking out.

As a user, however, the challenge there is that it’s more difficult to find material I’m always interested to hear about or learn more about. Search brings up a lot more material than I care to sift through, and of varying levels of quality, completeness, or correctness.

Lately, I’ve been using lanyrd to keep abreast of upcoming conferences and connect with industry professionals like myself.

As an off-shoot, I noticed that there’s a handy tie in to video, audio, blog postings, photos, and even presentations now. Very cool.

If you’re interested to read the latest and greatest conference material relating to mobile, be sure to check out lanyrd.

P.S. By the time you read this, “49″ might mean more (probably not less).