Rick Reifenstein

Lately I have been hearing from many of the visitors to our exhibit and who sit down at the Surface table and look through the documents, that they are more interested in the material on Surface that the same document that are behind glass and on display. Why I ask? Mostly what I hear is that they can "touch" it. Obviously we are all tactile creatures that take more interest in those things with which we can interact. I think it also has to do with the senses. As I and my wife teach our children we have learned that the more senses you can engage while teaching the more they retain. Microsoft Surface seems to first grab the users interest because of it's re-creation of reality with it's multi-touch and physics modeling; in other words it's "cool" aspect. Then the user starts to engage with, in our case the rare material, the material and start a more scholarly experience. I tell the story of hearing from a student who was leaving the exhibit say that h...

Last week I gave 3 interviews about the applications i wrote for the Microsoft Surface computing table that we have in the Declaration of Independence exhibit at the Special Collections Library. Today I gave an interview for one of our local news stations NBC29. It went well. Your never as prepared for the questions as you would like to be. You think you know what the interviewer may ask, but there are always questions that take you by surprise. Interviews for TV are always more difficult because there isn't that nice news editor like for print news who is going to make you sound like you know what your talking about. TV shows you in all your stuttering and fumbling for words, glory. I've thought back to my music and theater career interviews and one thing is always the same; they never print or talk about what you want, they always focus on something different than you think you should and they almost always misquote you. Sticking with the subject of Microsoft Surface; I recei...

Summer plans include Microsoft Surface and Music CD’s I’ve been working on plans for summer projects both at the University and in the Studio at home. Projects at the University are of course centered on the second phase of the Microsoft Surface application development centered on the Declaration of Independence exhibit. As I have mentioned before the second phase of applications will be showcasing the new additional Elements introduced in Service Pack 1 for Surface. This includes among other thing new ElementMenu tools that allow for some really cool menu options for the applications. We also want to exploit the ability to hook into Live Earth; allowing the patron to see where the signers lived. I’ve started working on the ElementMenu parts but have run into some snags with how to get a Menu Element to work with an image with ScatterView attributes. I admit part of the issue is my newbie status as a WPF programmer; so classes are definitely in the near future. I’m planning on updatin...