OK… this is for all of my American friends who still need to figure out a) whether I am Scottish, British or a United Kingdom citizen, b) what NOT to call me!

I went to the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) yesterday to see their new exhibition, Design and The Elastic Mind. This exhibition has a vast array of really cool concepts and visualizations that is absolutely fascinating. From “Extreme Visualizations” to “Mapping The Internet” to “Nanofracture”, they did a nice job of presenting how modern design and technology impacts our lives in many different ways. For example, the Nanofracture section demonstrated the advances in nanotechnology in terms of design of modern structures and materials, as well as the modeling of the human brain. They even had a design section of how origami can be used to model everything from DNA to a Fresnel Lens used in space telescopes. There were also various static and dynamic visualizations of global internet traffic & telephony around the world and in/out of New York (see pictures on New York Talk Exchange), as well as a model of all the flights in the sky across North America in a 24hr period. All in all, a very creative and insightful exhibit that beautifully marries design, art, engineering and computational power. Most of the exhibits are online at the URL above.

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Daniel finished up his coverage of Mix08 in Las Vegas last week by posting some other podcasts:

• Guy Kawasaki - Managing Director at Garage Technology Ventures - Technology evangelist, entrepreneur, Apple Fellow, author of over eight books and frequent technology consultant, Guy shared his thoughts with Daniel about RSS feeds and how competition in software companies has moved beyond operating systems.
• Eric Zocher - Microsoft’s General Manager for Design Tools - Eric discussed with Daniel what makes Microsoft’s Expression such a great tool; his thoughts on Microsoft’s importance to the web, and how a user can adapt to Expression when coming from backgrounds with other suites.
• Robert Scoble - tech-head, super-blogger of Scobleizer fame and the host of two new online shows at Fast Company - Robert discusses Microsoft’s relevance on the internet, quick and dirty vlogging procedures, and how aesthetics now play a part in what hardware people choose.

In a previous posting, I mentioned that we had been using Google spreadsheets to track iteration backlogs and to create burndown charts for our agile projects. At the same time, we had been using our wiki for capturing all project-related risks, issues, dependencies, decisions, designs and documentation. Well, the good folks at Google now allow chart publishing (to a URL) such that we can now keep our burndowns “live” in the project wiki for clients to see. All I need to do now is find the right confluence plug-in to allow me to keep a live product backlog in the wiki (Google also allows spreadsheets and cell/named regions  to be published to URLs in various formats).

The third installment of the CEP Podcast series has been posted here. This podcast is the first part of the interview I conducted with Brad Bailey of the Aite Group and Daniel Chait of Lab49. In the interview we discussed many of the market, client and technology trends that are driving the CEP marketplace. The second and third parts of the interview will be posted in the next week or two.

Lab49’s Daniel Chait has been busy at Mix08 in Las Vegas checking out the latest from Microsoft. In conjunction with Zoom In Online, he is blogging his observations and has posted a number of interviews he has recorded (so far) with Christian Schorman (Director of Program Management for Microsoft Expression), Anson Tsao (Senior Program Manager for WPF), Bernardo Castilho, (Chief Technology Officer of ComponentOne).