FooPlot

I was just browsing Simple Spark and I came across a lot of neat software that I'd already used, some ok stuff, some interesting stuff and only (so far) one app that really stood out as uniquely awesome.

FooPlot is an exceedingly simple webapp that does it's job fantastically. It graphs. That's it.

It does what you'd expect from a TI-83 or such-like. It graphs functions, finds roots and intersections and not much else. IT also has some 3d stuff that makes you think 89. If you want to see all the functions it can handle look at the help tab.

The coolest thing is that you can tell it what to graph via URL. Check it out:

fooplot.com/3x+5
fooplot.com/e^x
fooplot.com/tanh(x)/((sin(x))^2)
fooplot.com/floor(2*sin(x))

Fabulous.

Using polarity in life

Steve Pavlina, one of my favorite bloggers, wrote a cool article about achieving peak motivation.

Now. I'll go ahead and warn y'all that Pavlina is pretty out there when he goes new-age on you. You'll notice this in his fear/love usage that just smacks of Donnie Darko.

That all being said, the man is quite insightful. In particular I like his two paths to the same destination viewpoint - I'll be adopting it with some major changes. Namely, I'll take off the rather large biases he puts forth and strip the new-age out of it.

Quick Summary
Here's the train of thought:

• There exists a point at which one has the maximum leverage to achieve goals
• In terms of one's self and one's relation to the external world, this point is the same regardless of one's goals
• This point can be reached in many ways
• It is easier to keep your eyes on a single goal than multiple balanced goals

• Thus, one should pick a particular goal

Polarity
So what the hell am I talking about?

//Skip this if you did not read the article I linked to
Pavlina's idea is that one should polarize and concentrate on either improving one's own life or improving the lives of others. In his view, people should work towards one of these goals relentlessly. Their overarching goal will help motivate them. In the end they will find that they end up at the same spot regardless of which path they took. The self-serving person will find that helping others gives them more interpersonal leverage and the world-serving person will find that they are in no position to help others if they themselves are in a weak spot. Apart from his new-agey views here I have some issues with the person who lives to serve others. That doesn't make sense. They are serving themselves - they just happen to enjoy serving others.

//OK. you can start reading again
My view is that there are two sources of motivation for people. These can be described as internal motivation and external motivation; however, it might be more accurate to say that one's actions can be measured against internal or external metrics. Let's call the person who uses external metrics an outworker and the person who uses internal metrics an inworker to signify what they are trying to fulfill.

The hypothesis here is largely the same as Pavlina's. Both inworkers and outworkers will find that they are maximally fulfilling their goals at the same point. Inworkers will find that they must compromise with the outside world in order to further themselves and outworkers will find that they need to maintain enough personal vigor to actively implement their external agendas.

Polarity applied to myself
So where do I stand?

Ok. I suck at this. I love improving myself. I generally have huge inworker tendencies. But then here's the kicker. The things that I love most are all outworker things.

Helping out a friend in need feels great to me - helping out a friend in want feels trashy. I'm not really sure why, but that's just how I do things. If you need a ride somewhere I'm not going anyways, do not ask me first. I'll turn you down merely because you asked me first. True story folks. But if you have to leave in 5 minutes and it's 02:30 and you're about to call a taxi because your friend who was going to give you a ride is nowhere to be found... well then I'd love to help you out.

I love how messed up that is. I'm not sure how I reconcile the outworker core I have with my predominantly inworker nature. Of course, there's no real need to do that, but I do believe that it's easier to be motivated about a single goal than a couple of goals that are often at odds. It's especially important in maintaining that motivation for an extended period of time. So what is a silly man like me supposed to do?

Well. I'm a stubborn dude. So I think I'll conclude that picking a path is the rational thing to do because it makes the rest far easier. And then I'll ignore that and continue to strive for this mythical point of greatest leverage with out polarizing. :D

Note: I e-mailed quite a few people about thsi article so my inworker/outworker concept is really just Pavlina's ideas filtered through a bunch of smart people's thoughts and processed by yours truly. Thanks to those that chatted with me!

Virtual World

I read a great article from the NY Times about Dr. Bostrom's theory that we might be living in a virtual world.

The great part was that it used a completely logical argument for this. Here's a quick run-through. Within around 50 years we will have a computer with the processing power of all of humanity's brains combined. Within 100 years such machines will be totally commonplace. A simulation of a complete human world will be as easy to run as something like the Sims or WoW is now.
For a number of reasons, future people are likely to simulate humanity. First, scientists will want to know more about the development of their ancestors. Second, playing with people, place or events you're familiar with is fun - witness the success of the Civilization series. Third, even if this was developed by some non-human race, they'd have fun playing with us too -witness orcs and elves in Warcraft, the aliens in Starcraft or even the near-infinite variability in the much-anticipated Spore.

What's the point? Well, if there are 9 million people playing WoW right now, it seems like a safe assumption that a similar number will play these new, more intensive games. So. If there's one 'real' world that hosts a million virtual worlds and all we know is that we're in a world, it's hugely probable that we're a simulation of some sort. Also, if computers start to be awesome enough, they'll be able to simulate things like worlds were simulation techniques are developed. And then you get a million squared. And the argument to cubed and more can follow the same logic. Basically, we are almost certainly virtual unless there is something else correlated with having this powerful a computer. For example, if we believe we'll blow up Earth earlier than this amount of technology then there will never be virtual worlds (assuming any aliens that could exist also kill themselves off before attaining this level of technology). He brings up other possibilities, but they seem sillier.

Near the end of the article, Dr. Bostrom says his gut feeling is that there's a 20% chance that our world is virtual. Personally, I'm thinking it's far far higher. Not that this affects anything for me, but it's an interesting thought. Please do leave thoughts. I'd particularly like to hear a religious take on this article if anyone's up for it...

Reading a book real fast-like

I just practice-read Stephen King's The Gunslinger. Practice-reading is when you try to read faster than you can actually handle. You get pretty bad comprehension, but it helps increase your reading rate. It took me 57 minutes to get through its roughly 300 pages. The first time through I went a page a second (this is to just pick up character names, a rough chronology and a bit of the novel's structure) and the second time I was going at around 1500 WPM.

This is actually a full 50% faster than my original goal for this whole speed-reading thing. w00t!
Also: it's about 4 times the speed I read at going in. Hooray!

It's hard to keep going at breakneck pace - having my computer yell at me every minute and louder every 5th minute helped a lot. I'd end up picking up the pace every time the 5th beep came along as I kept on falling about a minute slow. I ended about 3 minutes slow so I guess it was a bit shy of 1500WPM. Sadly, I don't actually have many books that are short and easy enough for me to read in one sitting like this...

It looks like a trip to the library is in order.

:-D

PS - The gunslinger series is pretty awesome. Not my all-time favortie but certainly in the top 10 and maybe in the top 5.

Neat magic trick

I just learned a fantastic magic trick. It's really quite simple. It's one of those tricks that depends on manual dexterity and quick talking instead of complex design. Truly fantastic.

I'll put up a youtube video when I give up on it. You can either see it there or from me (if giving up turns out to be unnecessary).

No big deal

So. I haven't written for a while. Partly because I'm on chillaxing at home and basking in profound depths of unproductivity an partly because my computer had some issues. Or, rather, I gave it some issues.

I was running some neat software I'd found that did diagnostics on all sorts of things and for part of it I needed to go into safe mode. No big deal. There's two main (read: safe) ways to get into safe mode. One is to hit F8 during the boot sequence. But, at the time, I couldn't remember which function key I had to hit. So I used the other method. Go to run and type in msconfig. Then check the /SAFEBOOT option in the boot.ini tab. No big deal.

I'll not that when I did this a warning came up that told me I didn't have priveleges to do that change. But then it let me do it anyways. This should've made me stop and think, but hey...

So I reboot and... realize that safe mode can't use my network log-in. Damn. No big deal. I'd just reboot and hit F8 (I looked it up) and select normal boot. Oh yeah. The boot.ini file defines what a normal boot is and I'd set that to be safe mode. Damn. Oh well. No big deal. I figure I can just log in locally and change it back and I'll be good to go. Well I couldn't figure out how to log into my local machine. Eventually I called IT and it was easy enough - I just had to use that password that they'd given us during orientation... yeah... OK. Now that I had that I just had to change it back and that'd be that. No big deal.

Sadly, I didn't have the privileges to use msconfig. No big deal, I could go and do it by hand (I just had to edit a text file). But I didn't have the privileges to edit that file. No big deal. I'd just change the permissions. Except I didn't have the privileges to do that either. Big deal. Well this sucks.

Then I came up with a solution. I could just use my linux partition to get at the text file and fix it. No big deal. Except that Fedora core 4 can't mount ntfs. No big deal - I could get the right package with yum. Except that I couldn't access yum off-campus w/o an ssh account. No big deal - I just sent an e-mail to helpdesk... and found out that Olin didn't have a yum repository for fc4 anyymore. No big deal - I could just change which repos were enabled and used the fedora-extras one to get me some ntfs support. Except they didn't have 3g-ntfs for fc4. Sad. Thankfully, a kind soul at IT suggested a Knoppix LiveCD with built-in ntfs support. Now it was definitely no big deal. Right? I mounted my windows partition. I found the text file. I opened it up. I changed the offending portion. And I found out that Knoppix only has read support for ntfs. Damn.

Then I found Trinity Rescue Kit (TRK). This aptly-named Linux distro booted from a LiveCD with built-in ntfs read and write support. Hooray!!

Now, Lappy feels much better and I'm back online and fully functional. And I even found a hot new program to blabber on about. You'll get that shortly I'm sure. ;-)

Home is so unproductive

Continuing my earlier line of thought, I've played far too much Xeno Tactic. But now I've got the 6th mission unlocked. I haven't actually been able to find anyone online who says they beat the 6th mission. It does not bode well.

Boris' Brain - This is stupid. This is a huge waste of time.
Boris - Yeah but it's only for until Olin starts... (yes "for until")
Boris' Brain - Ok. Ok. Whatever.
Boris: Proceeds to forgo sleep in order to get the most uhmmm... nothing(?) out of his time

I came up with a pseudo-compromise. I will now close the webpage and put my 'puter in standby. If the game is badly designed enough that I shouldn't be doing such things I'll declare it n00bish and ignore it for the rest of eternity.

A little post

I haven't posted in a long time. Well here's this to put an end to your brief respite from my evil online voice:

Uhmm... actually. Nevermind. I don't really feel like writing anything. I'm gonna go play Noidzor. It's a sweet breakout-ish game. You'll note the noid in its name. I'm glad they acknowledge the time-sucking awesomeness that once was.

Then I'll go hang out with friends. I'm home now, so it's summer's summer. No work and lots of time. The clear path is to use it as ineffectively as humanly possible.

More on metric

I'm writing this as a response to a great comment on my post about metric system use in the US.

Do you really think so? Speedometers have both metric and imperial units, but I don't think that's done much to improve "metric literacy" in the 'States.

Listing metric measurements after the imperial units doesn't quite say "these units are the ones we will be using." Even then, the things that list both don't really have "teeth." Switching speed limit signs to metric only would, I think, have a much larger effect since people could be punished for failing to process the information.

But, yes. Hooray for New Hampshire!

True enough anonymous. That being said, speedometers are easier to ignore. It's an analog measurement so you don't get the effect of repeated drilling of a=b. Also, the metric numbers are way smaller and on the inside loop. It's true that you could just look at the left side of the sign, but I think the minimum benefit would be a definition for a number of common mileages (1, 1/2 etc). I'd guess a fair number of people know that 100 k/h is close to 60 mph because those actually have lines on the speedometer and they're pretty close. Likewise I'd bet lots of people know 0°C is the same as 32°F because that's a temperature that people are exposed to (on both scales) on a regular basis. I'd bet 32 f/s being equal to 9.8 m/s is also not uncommon.

Here's a long-term plan I just came up with right nowish. Whenever an all-imperial sign needs to be replaced, put up a sign with imperial units followed by metric units in parentheses. When on of these imperial-metric signs needs to be replaced, put up a metric-imperial sign that has metric units followed by imperial units in parentheses. At some pint, once everyone is pretty hip on things, stop having imperial units on the signs at all. Hooray!

I don't think teeth are needed. I don't think this is a switch we can, should or will make quickly. My thought is pretty much that the next generation should be heavily exposed to metric - they should become SI literate even if we have failed to do so ourselves.

Is this just me? If I think about how many meters are in 32 feet, I take quite a while to get a correct answer. First I estimate by using yards and I get just under 11 meters. On my second pass, I use 1 m = 3.3 ft and get that it's just under 10 m. Win.
It's odd that my mind doesn't just think of the fact that it knows 9.8 m/s ~ 32 f/s and that it can just cancel the seconds and get to a much faster, more correct answer...

Japan #2 Fiasco - Part 3

The saga of Japan 2 continues - I left you all with burnt bread and near-futile dish washing.

What I did not tell you was my sad discovery. Later that night I found out that duct-taping down the cook button was stupider than I thought. It not only burnt my bread - it had apparently killed my rice cooker. I was devastated. Rice is hugely important to my way of life during the school year. I couldn't possibly live without this rice cooker (despite having a 5 cup, 3 cup and another 10 cup rice cooker close at hand). If I couldn't raise it to life I'd be down thirty bucks or so and it would be sad.

So I took the natural course of action. I played Smash in the hopes that it'd fix itself by morning. Well. No luck. This is what I get from getting used to PICs and Windows. Anyhow, I figured I'd try to fix it. I got to learn how the rice cooker works (there's a physical button [top left] that's released either as water evaporates into steam and the whole thing gets lighter or simply as a function of time). So I figured there was probably a mechanical trip that would go off if someone were to do something stupid like, say, duct tape down the power button. I found nothing off the sort. I managed to make a hack that let me turn the rice cooker on in 'keep warm' mode. Not exactly what I needed...

Eventually I found a fuse that my rice cooker had deviously been hiding from me under a sleeve thing. What a jerk. Anyhow, the problem was dealt with and the rice cooker was tried. "Arise cooker arise!" Great success! Now I could try it again...

PS- boriswitchdoctor.com feel more comfortable with rice cooker. - If you don't get it go watch some ATHF

PS 2.0- betcha you didn't see the 'circuits' label coming in this bread-related storyline

10 points to NH

I saw this sign in New Hampshire and was really impressed:

Ten points to NH for metric system use. Sadly, I only found three signs like this...

I really think this is how the US should be addressing the issue of SI ignorance. If they were simply to use both systems on new signs, we'd get huge benefits in the long-run at an extremely low price. I'd imagine that a kid seeing a sign like this every day for 5 years would have about as much trouble telling you what a mile was in kilometers as you'd have telling me how many inches are in a foot. The just go together so much that it becomes more than even just connectedness - it becomes identity.

Showing off my Firefox

So I pimped out my Firefox s'more and I wanted to show it off. So much screen real estate for holding my internets: teehee!




Here's a link to my current userChrome.css if anyone cares for it.

<--And these are my add-ons if anyone cares about that.

For more details on my setup, check out my post on vertical tabs or just e-mail me. Or you could even talk to me in meatspace. Crazy.

Review: The World is Flat

Today, I'll talk about Thomas Friedman's book "The World is Flat"

To sum it all up in one phrase: "People are becoming more empowered - with all that entails."

Considering the press this book gets and its strong following, I'm really a bit underwhelmed. To be fair, his major points are valid and he applies them to the coming world and has examples of how they've worked in the past. Nonetheless, he doesn't seem to say anything at all that surprised me. And, given all the tech research he must've done, he sometimes manages to sound shockingly ignorant. For example, he talked about bittorent as a music sharing network or something of the sort. This is far from right. It's more of a process or protocol than a network; and, more importantly, people share all sorts of files via bittorent.

I dunno. I wish I had a lot to tell you about, but it's really just him talking about how things have led to globalization and why this tendency is likely to continue. My two favorite things he talks about are people who's jobs are safe from outsourcing for a number of reasons (eg locality-based job - convenience store owner) and the idea that the opportunity cost of war between developed nations is a huge deterrent (eg India/Pakistan nuclear standoff).

He also likes to concentrate on a few key things for just about everything. Titles like "the 10 _" or "The 3 most _" or "the 7 _ that _" were easy to come by and he seemed to fixate on certain things more than made sense (eg: 11/9 [Berlin wall taken down] v. 9/11). I did like it when he acknowledged that any and all of the awesome power that an individual can wield use to the world's flatness can be used for progress or destruction.

Oh well. Not all books can rock hard. I should finish Atlas Shrugged (I'm finding it a bit tedious).

Too much simple

RSS might be right to call itself "really simple syndication." It's certainly simple enough that I have accidentally gotten to the point where it eats more than 3 hours of each day. This is not acceptable.
Here's a before screenshot. My subscriptions on the left have quite a scroll bar. You'll notice the tabs on the right - those are things I opened for further inspection as I parsed my rss feeds (largely digg). All right. Before: 47 subscriptions...
Exhales... It's a good thing I like radical change. I tore my list down to 27 in about a minute and then added one that I should've had on it before. Sweet. No scroll bar at all. Yay time reclamation!
I will miss you feeds...


Update: I find it kind of hilarious that one of the tabs I had opened while doing this was Steve Pavlina's post about the 50-30-20 rule. The general idea is to do less of urgent things that aren't really that important (*cough*rss*cough*). (In defense of rss, it does help me know things that are interesting to myself and others - goes well with ping-type e-mails).

Visualizing your files

Someone recently asked me how to visualize what files are taking up the most space on their hard drive. I decided this was a neat enough thing to do that I'd like to let y'all in on it too. My short answer: Use SequoiaView and/or TreeSize Free.

Sequoia:

Sequoia gives you a nice visual representation of what's going on in your hard drive. The best part is easily the coloring you can set up. Below I have my .jpg files in green, my .mp3 files in red, my .avi files in yellow and my .sys files in blue. Each file is represented by a block and you'll notice that blocks are grouped. For example, there's currently a yellow outline around the My Documents folder. If you hover over a block, you'll get its full path location - great for finding that massive uncompressed .avi you forgot about... Nice.
TreeSize:

If Sequoia is the way to look at the kinds of files eating up your hard drive, then TreeSize is the way to get stats about how much the locations on your hard drive are eating. The killer feature here is the explorer type interface that lets you delve deeper into the file tree. It gets you stats for every sublevel you need - sweet. The blue bars are also pretty neat. They represent the proportion of the hard drive that each folder takes up. Most folders have no apparent bar, but you can see that My Documents has abut 48% of my stuff. Nice.
So what's the verdict? They're both free. Get them both and try not to get lost playing with them (they are dangerously fun).

Japan #2 Fiasco - Part 2

Well. I've been told to get on with it, so I'll continue the epic saga that started with anime, a recipe and a dream. OK. There was no dream, but I did think it'd be neat...

I started baking it and took my evening nap. Then I woke up to see that the rice cooker was all steamed up and the bread was smelling breadish. "Good," I thought. I was wrong. You see, I had gotten worried that the rice cooker would switch to keep warm and not cook the bread enough. Dumb. Rice cookers always do that - this was a recipe for rice cooker bread. So. Maybe duct-taping down the cook button was not the smartest idea...

Anyhow, the results were tragic. After its first of three baking cycles the bread was more than a little bit burned on one side:

Washing the pot was incredibly difficult. It came out fairly well, but it will have marks of this day all the way to the grave:

I then did my best to salvage the situation. The offending portion of the bread was removed:
Then I went down to the kitchen and baked it for 20ish minutes:

The side that I'd removed a layer from dried up a bit, but it could've been far worse. While it wasn't the fluffy goodness promised by the anime, it was more than tolerable. I wish I could say as much for the smell of burning that permeated my entire hallway. Tolerable is not the way I'd describe it.

But this does not end the saga fair readers - I promise a minimum of two more stories before this epic is complete. The next one will be about my discovery later that night and my quest on the following day.

Linux for the masses

By now, it's common knowledge that Dell is offering a computer preloaded with Ubuntu (an easier-to-use-than -most Linux distro). This was huge for Linux users everywhere - it means that people who aren't huge nerds are starting to use it.

The Linux community's growth among non-geeks now has something else to look forward to. It appears that Walmart's super-economy (sub $300) line of desktops may offer a Linux version as soon as this year.

And it looks like we might soon see other big PC makers preloading Ubuntu. At Ubuntu Live, Shuttleworth told his audience that they would indeed be seeing "more top-tier PC manufacturers offering Ubuntu pre-installed." Looks like Ubuntu is really pushing for the mainstream.

Insane. I can actually imagine seeing Ubuntu be a serious player in the field. ie We could have Ubuntu pop out of the 'Linux' category that we now have when talking about operating systems: Windows, MacOS, Linux, other. That'd be neat.

What I'd really like to see for the masses (and maybe even us geeks) is a cheap Linux box that's ready to run headless and interface with Macs and Windows PCs. I think a cheap Linux box, some clever software and a huge hard drive would be an extremely marketable product. It could actually make backing up computers happen in normal households. I wonder if I'm seeing too much potential in this - the status quo is quite a force to be reckoned with...

Anecdote about money and life

I was just talking to my brother and he told me a story that I really liked. So I'll share it with you all as best as I can remember it:


So there's this hedge fund manager who is really successful. He makes somewhat over a billion dollars a year. Literally. Over a billion a year.

Anyhow, he's talking to John Grisham - for those of you who aren't familiar with him, he's an extremely successful, well-known and respected writer.

So they're talking and at some point the hedge fund manager says "Y'know John, last year I made more money than you've made on all the books you've ever published in your entire life. In one year John."

Since this was factually true, John Grisham agreed. "Yeah. That's true. You did make that much, but there's something I have that you will never have."

Manager-"Oh yeah? What's that John?"

JG-"Enough."

Kirix Strata

I saw a sweet, sweet, specialty browser today. The kind of thing that makes you want to actually need it just so you could use it. It's a browser named strata by a company called Kirix. I've never heard of either of those two names before, but it seems awesome.

Strata is a database browser. If you mess with large tables of numbers that you have to parse through (often by retyping them all). Strata can use tables on the web as the basis for a table that can be fully manipulated. I'm much impressed. I can't really write it nearly as well as their video shows it. And it can also make tables out of rss feeds. That was the neatest part of the screencast.

Hot. If someone ends up using this, give me a heads up so I can hear if its actually worthwhile. Thanks!

Sometimes the world is sad and pathetic

Just in case there are any normal/reasonable/sane people reading, I'll give a little bit of background.

There are now many games online that involve spending huge amounts of time acquiring experience (which makes your character better) or items (which also make your character better, but are fungible in game). Lately, an interesting practice of selling accounts has begun to take place. It really makes a lot of sense when you think about it - people are buying something of value that they can't get any other way that doesn't take an absurd amount of time. But here's where it gets gross.

A couple of weeks ago a curious incident took place. A leading player of Gunbound was kidnapped and had his life threatened in an attempt to obtain his account's password. Incredible. Evidently, one of the four kidnappers' girlfriends met up with this gamer online (on Google's social networking website Orkut). They set up a date at a mall, but when the dude showed up, he got a guy with a gun instead of a hot girl.

That sucks right? It gets better/worse. He refused to give them his account's password despite the fact that they held a gun to his head for five hours. Yes. Five hours. Insane. They eventually just gave up and were caught later. This dude is such a dumb ass. But I guess he won or something...

Unbelievable you say? I agree. So I checked the source and it seems to be all good. That's so gross.

Design Games == UOCD

True.

Or at least substantially true. Boxes and arrows, a design blog, recently posted about design games. My favorite game is easily "Design the Box." The idea is that the team, well, designs the box.

In this game, individuals or teams create a box, as if the project is going to be sold at retail. Small groups work together to answer key packaging questions: What’s the tone? The name, the tagline, the short hook on the front to entice a consumer to pick it up? What are the features and functions, the details that connect this product to some real need? Those go on the back of the box. What about system requirements?
...
Even though it’s a playful output, it’s highly practical; one client kept a box on his shelf for six months, and would toss it over anytime someone asked what his team was doing with the new intranet. People understood the core of the product immediately, and enjoyed the break from reading yet another document describing an initiative.

Our UOCD (User Oriented Collaborative Design) teachers would be happy to see this sort of thing out there. This sort of thing allows you to get a better grasp on your project than mere specifications ever would. Now they need to start talking to the end users in parallel to playing these creative, big picture games - design will owe a lot to any movement of this kind.

I was a bit saddened by one of the comments:

...Of course, as Jess said in the article, just don’t call it a “game”! That’s the kiss of death for any game technique.

It's quite sad that people doing design today can't handle the concept of furthering knowledge through gameplay instead of work. Arbitrary labels have so much meaning.

Interestingly, the dude who's trying to get s'more publicity seems to have it right - or at least more UOCDish.

I’d also like to stress that there is a fairly substantial difference between the “Design the Box” exercise you describe (and it’s variants) and the Innovation Game® Product Box. In Product Box, the focus is external, on your customer. What do they want? How do they design the box? What images do they use?. In “Design the Box”, the focus is internal, on the internal product team. What does the internal team want? How does the internal team design the box? What images do the internal team choose?

I don't really see "Design the Box" as confining you to ignoring the end user, but I'm still happy to see it explicitly mentioned.

Book Darts

These babies are sweet. They can hold your spot on a specific line instead of just a page. These aren't bookmark replacements; they're more like quote markers. It lets you mark notable parts in books in an externally visible way. Evidently librarians love them because they play nice with the books; no damage = happy librarians.

Evidently the librarian-pleasing people who run the company know how to please their customers and expand their fan-base. I ordered a tin of 50 - they sent me my tin with 50 then (this is from memory so it could be a bit off) an envelope with 3 more, a card with three more, a pamphlet with three more and maybe one more thing with some bookdarts stuck on it. Clearly the goal was to get people to be like: "hey check this out!" And then you could give them an envelope with a booklet inside that explains bookdarts and sings their praises. And, of course, you'd include a few of the extra bookdarts they sent you. Good plan. Nice thing to do. I have bonus bookdarts. I'm not going to be handing anyone an envelope, but if you want to check them out, find me and I'll give you some.

I hope I'll be reading enough good books to make a dent in that tin's worth of book darts. I wish I'd had these when I started reading "The History of Western Philosophy." That book would be littered with these things. While I'm at it, if you are at all interested in philosophy, I highly suggest this book. It's by Bertrand Russel and it gives you textbook content in a less dry form. Not that it's riveting or anything, but considering the amount of info that's in there, his book is shockingly readable.

Bookdarts make me feel like such a bibliophile...

Japan #2 Fiasco - Part 1

So. This story starts with me watching anime.

There was this one episode of Yakitate Japan where Azuma shows you how to make bread (namely Japan #2). The neat part of the bread is that it's baked in a rice cooker. In the show they describe the bread as "fluffy, fluffy, fluffy" and "so easy that even the producers can make it." Judging by this: I suck...

So I started by making the dough. Here's the recipe translated to American units (roughly).

---------------------- ----------------------

• 3 Cups Bread Flour
• 4 tsp Butter
• 5 tsp Sugar
• 7 tsp Milk
• 3/4 Cup Water
• 2 tsp Dry Yeast
• 1 tsp Salt

1. Add to rice cooker: flour, sugar, salt, yeast dissolved in water, water, milk. Knead
2. Add butter. Knead
3. After you've kneaded it enough that it sops being sticky, let it sit somewhere warm for 1 hr (first fermentation).
4. Drop the dough from about 2 feet to get rid of the gas. Thn, let it sit somewhere warm for 1 hr (second fermentation).
5. Bake it for 1 hr in the rice cooker.
6. Flip it, and bake it for 1 hr.
7. Flip it and bake it for 1 hr.
8. Eat.

---------------------- ----------------------
Ao things were going well for a while.

I made the dough...
I let it sit...
It fermented...And then things went downhill from there. I started baking it and took my evening nap. Then I woke up to see that the rice cooker was all steamed up and the bread was smelling breadish. "Good," I thought. I was wrong, but that is a story for another post. Or probably more than just one more - this is a long story.

I'm on Lifehacker!!!!

In case anyone from LH ended up here, this is the vertical tab how-to I was talking about.

If you didn't get here from lifehacker, check out my Firefox!!

As a really big Lifehacker fanboy, I don't really recall the last time I've been so excited while on the internet!

Woohoo!

#910090

Woohoo!

My site is in the top 1 million Technorati ranked sites! OK. So it's not that impressive. On the other hand, it means that I've passed up like 4 megan00bs. I use mega here in the SI sense. That is all.

Moleskine tips & tricks

I just retired a Moleskine and got a new one that I have to set up - I figured I'd take you guys along for the ride.


Numbering:
This is the first thing I do is number the pages in my notebook. This allows you to reference previous entries (eg Jane seems to be saying similar things to what John said when I talked to him [p.34]). You should do this as soon as you get it; it takes like 5 minutes. I know it's tedious, but just do it. NB - you only need to number the odd pages or the even pages. I do the odd ones and then just flip through pages on the right side to find what I'm looking for.


TOC:
Leave some pages open for a table of contents and metadata information. The table of contents can be used in a variety of ways. One can put every entry into it, just the entries that are particularly meritorious or even no entries until the notebook is retired. How much space you should leave at the beginning depends on what you want it to do; if you're not sure, leave 10ish pages and there should be no problem at all. I like putting in only things that I might look up again and doing it as I go. My TOC has the page, tag, title and date of entries.


Metadata:
This is a great tip I found somewhere I can't remember right now. The idea is to tag every entry with both a date and a topic in an easily visible place (B is for blog). I like to have a key for my tags at the beginning. I also use tags in my TOC. See TOC pic.


Tabs:
These are awesome for me. My notebook has three threads going most of the time. One is just whatever I've been writing and the other two are time and expense tracking. In order to do all these simultaneously, I use three markers. The stringy bookmark thing is used for whatever I've been up to in there recently and the other two get tabs. These are little Post-it plastic sticky things that are awesome. As I use up pages, I move the tabs so that they're always where they should be for me to open my notebook to the right page.


The tabs are also useful for bunches of other things from being bookmarks in other things to leaving small notes to holding sheets of paper up on a wall. That's why I always have some extra handy :D


So. That's my set-up. If you want a pen that can go along for the ride, I suggest a Fisher bullet. These are space pens that are used as normal size pens, but store small enough to fit on the top side of a Moleskine (you can hold it there with the elastic). Since I always carry a normal pen with me at all times, I don't carry my Fisher anymore. I'm a fan of the thin (.05) G2 gel pens - sooo smooth.

If you have any cool tips, leave a comment. Experiment and enjoy!

Semapedia

So I read about this neat site called Semapedia. The general idea is that Semapedia wants to make it possible to create physical links to wikimedia foundation pages (eg wikipedia).

The gig is that you can put in a wikimedia foundation page's address on their site and they will give you a pdf to print out. This pdf has labels that can be read using a program for cell phones that they link you to. End result? You scan a hyperlink irl ('in real life' for those who live more of their lives irl) and it points your browser at the appropriate page.

Honestly, their learn more page is pretty and easy to understand so you should hit that up if your interested. Anyhow, Check out this sample label:

Pretty cool huh?

So here's where I ask you for a favor. If you have a data or web plan, could you check if your phone has an install available for it? Just go to http://reader.kaywa.com on your phone and they'll let you know if it's supported or not. Thanks a bunch!

If you do get something going, leave a comment. And if I'm anywhere near you, give me a call - this makes me all excited... can you imagine if these were ubiquitous? I wonder how that camera's rated? *ping* I wonder what the political atmosphere was like at the time that this sculpture was made? *ping* Shiny, shiny, shiny!

Presence

So I was looking at this article and it occurred to me that my first name has no online presence. Honestly. I don't show up in the top 500 results if you Google "boris". This is unacceptable.

I'm doing all of the things this suggests (LinkedIn, Ziki and Naymz), but I'm wondering if I should edit all of my profiles so that my first name is included in their description or something... that would be a lot of work. The list of places I'd have to change has just exceeded the boundaries of my brain.

I think I'll just deal. But we'll at least be able to see what happens with these sites going at it no?

Sweet.

Start Using flickr

You have pics. you know you want everyone to see them. You know you want them to show up on PlanetOlin... it's a bit pathetic that 2 years has gotten us 613 photos. And by us I mostly mean Tostie14 who has 422 of those pics. All the other members combined don't match him. So let's fix this:


To start putting pics in a nice shareable public place you need a few things:

-Get a flickr account
-Add me (bdieseldorff) as a contact
-Upload some pics (I suggest using flock for this)
(Here you might have to wait for me to invite you to the group)
-Go to the 'Organize' tab
-Drag all the photos you want to give to the pool into the workspace
-Click the send to group button
-Click the Olin group

Yay!


If you've got Q's comment or e-mail me for some A's.

Some Early Metrics Thoughts

The website for Sitemeter is slow. Wow. It is seriously slow. Well. I have the code installed, but I have a stupid picture I want gone. Soooo slow. I'll continue writing this when the stupid page can be made to load stuff...

OK. I'm actually giving up for today. I should drill my speedreading.

One thing I did notice: Google analytics reports stuff the day after it happens. This is boring Google! I like to be able to randomly refresh and be like "w00t! two more!" Huge props to StatCounter for having this covered. FeedBurner seems to do things in batches, but I haven't really figured out what's going on there. This is somewhat of a tangent but in FeedBurner's rss metrics, they have this thing called reach that's really hot. It accounts for aggregators and stuff instead of just counting them as one subscriber - my numbers look much shinier with planet Olin added in.

Peace out.

Website Tracking Trial

I've heard that Google analytics is the best thing out there. Then again, I had trouble installing it and I've heard reports that it misses test visitors and stuff...

I've been using Statcounter. Sadly, this reputedly solid tracker gives me substantially different results from the Feedburner's reputedly solid tracking. What's up with that?

So I've decided to load my site up with stuff and see what they all say. This might hurt the load speed a bit - I apologize in advance. What do you use? Put in a little blurb in the comments and I'll add it the arsenal aimed at my traffic.

I'll start by reviewing the installation process for the three I'm using as of this moment:

Statcounter - Fantastic. Personalized instructions depending on what you're using. In blogger they just have you add one html element to your layout. So easy.

FeedBurner - Solid. It tells you where you have to go and what you have to do there.

Google Analytics - says something along the lines of "add it to your template above the tag. I'm fairly sure that this isn't where you want it; that just goes at the bottom of the blog instead of each post. I followed the instructions for FeedBurner's placement in the template instead and Google says Analytics is properly installed on my site. This is ridiculous. Google owns Blogger. I can't believe they enjoy shooting themselves in the foot so much.

Update: Actually, the FeedBurner instructions don't really work. Google's instructions do end up working but I'm still giving them badness points for being big losers. They install just like stat counter - an html element in the template.

Please pass on any tools you use for traffic analysis to make this a broader test!

Money

So I watched a clip about money that seriously attacked our current system and decided that it should be torn to shreds so here goes.

A bit more than halfway in they ask four questions that I'll go ahead and answer:

1 - Why do governments choose to borrow money from private banks at interest when gov't could create all the interest-free money it needs, itself?

Ok. Imagine the government just spawning more money whenever it needed it. If the total value in a system is unchanged and more money is introduced, all the money will be worth less. In the extreme, governments using arbitrarily created money lead to hyperinflation and disastrous consequences.

So why doesn't this happen with money that private banks create? Private banks create money when an individual makes a contract to repay it and collateral exists. The money does have real-world value - the property that would be foreclosed.

2 - Why create money as debt? Why not create money that circulates permanently?

This kind of money system would work.

But it would work more slowly. The ability to get a loan lets people gain more leverage and be able to accomplish more with the same original amount. Using a dynamic system instead of a system of permanent circulation allows greater value to be created from the same initial monetary investment.

The concept of a static money supply is silly. Suppose a static money supply. Assuming that humanity is productive (which is, I hope, a fair assumption), the value of money would be forced to increase. With a static money supply, money represents a fraction of the world's value; in other words, increases in global value would lead to runaway deflation. If humanity is productive and deflation is steady, the best way to amass value would be to simply sit on your money. Deflation would pretty much serve as an interest payment - talk about the rich getting richer.

The whole concept that our system is broken because it is independent of permanent money is flawed. It's true that it relies on debt; our system relies on a constant flow of paying loans and getting new loans. This common event, called equilibrium, is ubiquitous. It's found in everywhere in nature and it also dominates the structures of man. Supply and demand; debt and money. Everything balances.

3 - How can a money system dependent on perpetually accelerating growth be used to build a sustainable economy?

This part is, in my opinion, the only fair concern in the film. If humanity as a whole ceases to create value at an exponential rate everything will break. We must continue to create value faster than we create debt - and we have been.

To be sustainable we don't need to be using up less than or equal to the amount of resources that are produced in a specific period of time. We can afford to use some non-renewable resources because we are counting on becoming independent of them before we run out of them. As long as this is true, it is irrelevant that we may have used up of our non-renewable resources if they are no longer needed. In short, we are betting on technology. The bet seems OK to me though; technology also advances exponentially.

As a short response to this question, I will use my favorite quote from the clip itself:

One thing to realize ... is that, like a child's game of musical chairs, as long as the music is playing, there are no loser.

Simple. If we can continue to play the game (create value), our system will run smoothly.

4 - What specifically needs to be changed to allow the creation of a sustainable economy?

Things could certainly be improved by change, but it the monetary system itself is not inherently broken.

This post is getting really long so I will satisfy this question by saying that my previous arguments make the question invalid in the spirit that it was originally presented. If I were to write about my none-too-solidified opinions on our government and economics, this rant would become a paper that I don't have the inclination to write at the moment.

----------------------
These are just a couple of moments in the movie that made me angry that I couldn't work into the post well:

• Money earned from lending money is not the act of a parasite or a thief. Money is gained by creating value - the use of fungible money is hugely valuable. Lenders do not leech from the system; they make it more efficient.
  

• I think the worst one IMO was at 23:08. The clip says that individuals have more money to spend when they've paid off their debts - this is false. If I take out a loan, I'll have more fungible money available. It's the same on an individual and national scale.

----------------------

Please feel free to correct whatever I messed up and contribute opinions. ...I know this blog is read by at least one econ major.

Ode to Matlab

Matlab

you are quite effective
I feed you raw data
you return what I ask
you question nothing

you are a worthy adversary
matrix operations
make you run so much faster
linear programming is for losers

you are a workhorse without equal
when the going gets tough
the tough crunch the living hell
out of relevant numbers

Statcounter and random stuff

So remember how I said I'd gotten 208 unique visitors to date on Tuesday? It's more than 275 now. Blue is the unique visitor count. Check it out for the entirety of this blog's existence:

I use StatCounter. It's free, easy to use (add an html element to your blog) and has decent visuals. How accurate is it? I don't know. I recently started using FeedBurner (when Google bought FB and it became easy to use with blogger) which can do some site statistics too. Hopefully comparing them will be interesting.
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Last night at around 01:00 I was doing some reading drills and had a monstrous headache. I thought "Maybe I should do an extra nap tomorrow..." At the end of the day though, I think it was a blood sugar thing. I ate some pie and felt much better and much more awake.
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Evidently the Stop & Shop on 9 is open 24 hours. I'm also told it's closed Sunday. But seriously. 24 hours? Around here? Hooray places that are open after 20:00!
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As part of a NASA project, I'm using a PIC as a prototype circuit. I got to be all nostalgic and literally run through a good portion of the labs we did for POE. Awesome. For my money, the hardest thing to do with a PIC is get your computer to believe it's actually plugged in.

Fight?

So. I was reading a post on the Dilbert Blog. Here's a little taste:

What if the government could give something of value to the rich in return for paying higher taxes? It would have to be something that didn’t cost the government or its citizens any real money. How about extra rights?

As I read it I'm like "Man. That's brilliant." It's an interesting question because it probably hurts the rich more than it helps them; nonetheless, separating them into a higher class of citizen would probably not go over so well with the less rational minds in the nation.

In fact, it would probably also not go well with the more strongly opinionated somewhat idealistic minds either. That's a common type of person at Olin. Then again, we also have people on the other extreme who would see this, not as unfair, but as obvious and right.

So I'm not sure who my audience is exactly, but I'm hoping for enough strongly opinionated people for a comments fight like Scott Adams always gets:

Go!

Sleep Update

I'm actually doing better than I would've expected. I'm generally untired (except of course now that I'm writing about it my body is whining). My proof that I'm doing OK is that I had originally planned on taking 2 or 3 naps but have voluntarily only taken 1 each of the last few days.

I tend to be most off my game for about 20 minutes after my lunch-time nap and when 1AMish rolls around. That being said, there's some circumstantial evidence that I'm not actually that much worse off at 1AMish - I seem to do just as well with the whole speed reading bit.

On a related note, I think I'll be adding an energy drinky thing to my diet every day. Apart from having enough calories to satisfy that extra bit of hungriness brought about by my quirky sleeping, it also has more vitamins than you can reasonably shake a stick at. Once I drink it daily I'm pretty sure I'll be invincible. That is how vitamins work, right?

I called my mom in Peru with Skype. Skype has such a reasonable rate for Peru $.03/minute. So hot. Here's the sad thing, I had to call her on a cell phone; $.30/minute. Oh well.

Flock and Flickr

So I was going through Lifehacker and I happened upon a little blurb about Flock. Flock describes itself as a social browser. Aight, I thought.

I downloaded it, started it and found that it had a lot of shiny stuff and then Firefox as a browser. As it turns out, that's pretty much exactly what's up. Flock is a Mozilla based browser. The stuff it offers is a huge emphasis on rss feeds, blogging, uploading pics etc.

The blogging interface is really not worth it. I guess I could hit either of my blogs from a single place, but it opens in a new window so it might be a longcut for me (I keep both blogs open in tabs all the time). It does have a neat right click menu with a "blog this" option. This would be great if I had a quicker blog like that; however, there are Firefox extensions that do this (eg JustBlogIt).

So that was lame. Then it has this media stream thing going up top, which displays your flickr stream or equivalent from some other site. Pretty cool, but eats screen real estate. So I tried the upload functionality. This was wonderful. It was magnificent. It gave me so much control for so little effort. Oh fantastic. Auto resize (important due to the limited monthly bandwidth thing), easy naming. Really great stuff.

In short: lame browser; great flickr uploader.


When I logged into Flickr (for the first time in a long, long time. I found a message telling me that I was now one of the Olin flickr groups admins. OK. So I posted an effortless 27 pics and then added them to the Olin group (yay Flock). Here's the pathetically lame part. This makes me the second biggest contributor (48 pics). It's really easy guys.

vvvv

Upon a teacher's suggestion, I downloaded vvvv to help with some image processing I needed to do. It's a visual programming language that's pretty awesome at a/v stuff. I'm just going to toss in some pics instead of ranting for too long... I should note that it's kind of an annoying program and that most of my, uhmm, code(?) is just variations on code that others put online.




This program is hot. The parts of the image that look a bit messed up are because the camera is out of focus and has been substantially tampered with physically. Now this isn't actually what I need I think, but it's close. I need to differentiate color not brightness. This might be easier in the YUV colorspace instead of RGB... I need to look at if vvvv has support for such a transform and I need to look at the code of the effect node. The effect node is the one that has a bunch of inputs in the bottom left. It's the one that sets the brightness threshold and outputs the appropriate color. It's evidently the only node that you can easily get to the source for (a .fx file).

Sweet.

In case anyone wants to replicate this: I used this main patch, this effect file and this effect patch. I'm pretty sure that the second patch is a demo you don't actually need, but I didn't want to check and I wanted it available if it was needed.

On Seriousness

I think I figured out why I feel so tempted to make this blog far more structured. It's because I read things like this.

I would even take it one step farther. My bog is far more than my resume; it is my online identity. This blog especially. I have other things online (2 websites, 1 other blog), but this is the one that gets my opinions on it. This is the one that gets the little bdieseldorff badge at the bottom. This is my avatar. I feel similarly when I post on anything as bdieseldorff. Lifehacker (LH), Wikipedia, Wikibooks, other people's blogs; if I care about it and I post, I am bdieseldorff. (Some might find this amusing because my brothers both have names that start wiht 'b'...)

I can Google bdieseldorff and look at my dormant Flickr account, my unused Flagr account, random comments I made on an Olin forum. I can see my LH comments and my blogs.

I got interrupted for a sec there. I was Googling bdieseldorff and it turns out that I got flamed so I wanted to take care of it. I countered with a patronizing stance and thinly-veiled sarcasm.

So yeah. I blame Lifehacker for making me care too much about this sort of thing. <3 Lifehacker!

The Intersection of Eating and Sleeping

So. You know what's interesting?

When you sleep less you need more calories. I eat so much already. This is tough.

The Intersection of Reading and Sleeping

So I've been looking at my reading rates for four different drills since is started my new mode of sleep. All the scores have plummeted. There's been close to a 30% loss in speed.

Unfortunately there are confounding variables. Here's a few reasons I might be going slower

-I am sleeping less; therefore, I'm more tired
-I am drilling at 6:30 AM; therefore, I'm not as effective
-I am understanding more; therefore, I can't go as fast


The more I think about it the more it feels like that last reason is the big one. Today I read a passage at nearly 1400WPM with a comprehension that felt comparable to what I get when I go at normal speed. It's worth noting that this isn't a difficult book and that I've read it more than once in the past. On the other hand this is about four times faster than my original reading rate calculated from the same book.


If there is an effect from the first two, that will hopefully go away as soon as I start actually uhmm.... sleeping?... during my naps. Yeah...

Mental Wandering

Sometimes I have a tendency to take blogging too seriously. I'll check my stats more than makes sense. I'll ping. I'll check out Technorati. I'll see where I show up on a bunch of Google searches. This is unfortunate because I write mostly for myself. It makes me solidify some thoughts and it gives me an audience for random stories I'd like to tell.

I'll be on lifehacker and link over to problogger and soon enough I'll be all like "Y'know what? My blog has no f***ing focus. I mean it's ridiculous. How is something like that going to maintain traffic?"

Answer: it's not. Duh, self. But that's not what it's for. I've had 208 unique visitors and I have 81 returning visitors; not very large numbers. This is probably a bit low due to rss, PlanetOlin and the fact that Olin IPs probably show up as the same visitor (?). Man. I'm silly. Part of me really wants to come up with something to seriously blog about. And part of me thinks that's dumb. Oh well. This particular blog refuses to be consistently useful or informative.
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I'm having a not-so-fun time transitioning my sleep pattern. I have yet to get more than 10 minutes of sleep from any naps. This means that I'm pretty much just operating on my core sleep of 4.5 hours a night. Oh well. At least I decided to do a 4.5 hour core instead of a 3 hour core this time around...

When I did biphasic last year it was actually after a month or two of normal sleep with a 20 minute nap at noon. By the time I got to doing biphasic, I was awesome at falling asleep nearly instantaneously. I'll have to redevelop that skill. Hopefully soon.
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Barnes and Nobles didn't have the kind of Moleskine I wanted. *sigh* Tim to order online...

Ooh! Speaking of ordering online, I just ordered some book darts. These are neat little line markers. They clip onto books without leaving any marks. Word on the street is that librarians absolutely love these things. I have a plan that involves these. If it turns out not to be dumb, I'll post about it at some point in the future.
---
Now I remember what biphasic was like. There's just not that much to do this late on a weekday... it's OK. I have some books to read. I've also been considering being a wikipedia badass...
---
OK. I'm done for now. Hope you enjoyed random stuff.

Boris out.

Polyphasic a la Boris

I've decide to mess with my sleep schedule again...

This time around I'm doing a variation on a couple of themes. Last year I did a biphasic schedule with three hours of core sleep and a ninety minute nap. (I slept from 5-8 and 19.5-21).

At the time it worked fairly well, but there were a couple of issues:
- I had too much time and I got bored
- I would get tired around 3 or 3.5 and feel pretty lethargic until I went to bed at 5
- The nap interfered with events

I listed them in order of annoyance. The third one wasn't a big deal because I simply skipped or moved the nap if I needed to do so for an event. This helped make me more tired, of course. The first problem was the really annoying one though...

My plan for this time around differs a bit. First I'm killing the 90 minute nap and replacing it with one or two 20 minute naps during the day. Then my core sleep is being extended to 4.5 hours between 2 and 6.5. This early start will let me be productive in the morning which, for me, is more efficient than the evening or night. I was unable to do this with my other schedule b/c there was a recommended 8 hour gap between the nap and the core sleep and moving the nap earlier made it interfere with more things. This time around I'm free of that restriction
and the mornings are mine! I'm not actually sure how well I'll do, but I'll keep y'all posted...

Anyhow, this should be less interfery and give me a bit more sleep at more convenient times. Hopefully I've come up with enough stuff to keep me occupied without breaking my brain or any thing...

If you see me looking messed up for the next week or so, it's because the transition is annoyingly tough. Oh well. Gradual is lame.

I hope this works. Two 20 minute naps are super easy to work into my day...

Please Read

I'm going to repeat something Mel wrote b/c it's part of a big "I don't have time for this post" post.

Mel is in a sweet competition. If she wins she'll be helping out the world as she is wont to do (she'll be doing OLPC stuff).

People should hit up this site and vote for her. It's super-fast. Really. 3 clicks and you've finished voting. Oh yeah. Or you could read the list and see if there's anyone who's doing something you consider more awesome. Then vote for them.

Sweet.

Speed-Reading progress

Yay! I can use the title box!

Anyhow, I did the first treview test in my speed-reading book. I was rather dissapointed with my results. I got about 536 WPM (words per minute). I got about 240 WPM the first time I tested. So. I've more than doubled my speed since June 16th. This should feel nuts, but here's the catch:

When I've been calculating my WPM after practice and such I tend to get things around 700-800WPM when I'm getting full comprehension and up to around 1400WPM when I sacrifice some understanding for speed. I think I might have wanted to make sure that the speed increase I saw wasn't simply due to understanding less of the text. That seems like a Boris thing to do for a test.

Anyhow, I'm now completely confident in saying that I've more than doubled my reading rate in less than a month. That's pretty sweet. Also, I missed like 7ish days in there due to assorted visitors and other things that occasionally kept me busy. I'm pretty impressed.

But I was expecting to be far more impressed. I might test again tomorrow just for the hell of it to see if my result was a fluke on the low side of things... I'm not a very graceful loser sometimes.

This is interesting... I can't seem to title this post... I'll see if it works from a different browser after saving a draft...

Anyhow. Today was pretty sweet. Some of us were laser-cutting parts that we need for NASA out of thin plastic film for quite a long time. The way the machine works is rather neat; it just burns whatever lines you give it. One sets the speed it goes at and the power it uses. That's it. Then the laser goes along burning what you told it to burn and the ventilations system attempts to pump out all of the toxic fumes you generate. It doesn't fully succeed, but I'm going to go ahead and imagine that the smell would've been far worse if it weren't for the ventilation system.

So anyhow, one of the sheets of plastic we were cutting was really thin. I mean we had one that was five thousandths of an inch thick; that was the fattest one. The small one was to thousandths of an inch thick. We set power and speed lower for the thin piece of Kapton and then we started up the laser. It went along the bottom edge of the shape we were cutting and then promptly proceeded to miss the Kapton entirely.

This wasn't the laser's fault; it was positioning itself perfectly. The issue at hand was that the piece of plastic was really thin. Thin enough, in fact, to get sucked into the ventilation system. We had to shut everything down.

Eventually, everything was fixed and the now-wrinkled piece of Kapton was recovered from the ventilation system. Hooray!

...Something's being silly. I can't seem to get into my account from Opera. It wasnts me to switch my blogger account to a Google account. Oh yeah. It's always been a Google account. wtf.

OK. I got in. (I needed to tack on the @gmail.com). When I look at my post in Opera I can access the test box for the title, but I can't touch the bod. Also what I'd already written disappears. How odd. My hand is force. I will use the scourge of worlds: IE.

AH good. IE can't access the text box for the title either. Whatever. This shall henceforth be known as "The Post With No Name."

Adventures are fun

Haha. So. Here's the setting: it's the 4th of July. I'm bored. So are other peeps. We decide to adventure...

We start by heading towards Needham, but we've got very little gas. We turn to go towards Eliot and fill up on gas at the full service station right before route 9. We then head east on 9 because it's easier to get on the highway in that direction and we really have no plans. We try to get me lost by heading north and west. I keep on knowing where we are. Finally, I get lost. Then we cross 16. Damn. We work at it some more. OK. I'm lost. we stop to eat a snack at a Dunkin' Donuts.

We head out more or less randomly again still trying to go more or less northwest. Eventually we come to this sign.

I call a halt. This is where we adventure. It's raining, it's dark, it's perfect. WE head into the woods...

and come to a body of water. There's a bench next to it. Interesting. We wonder if it's a river or a pond or whatever so we decide to go along it for a bit. We pass a massive log and an almost climbable tree. We come to a place where there's something like a sandbar but with lots of sticks. I suggest going out to the middle of the river. They laugh at the idea, but I go ahead and try to see how far I can go without freaking out because I'm carrying my camera and cell phone.

I use a large piece of wood I found to help cross. One of my friends makes a snarky comment
about stepping on a shield. As it turns out, she was right! Incredible. I went on an adventure and picked up a quest item. Un. Be. Lievable.

I carry it with us the rest of the way. We eventually discover that we're on the Charles in Newton. On our way back to the car some guy asks if we were sword fighting. I answer that we weren't; I'd just found a shield in the Charles. He laughed and agreed that it was awesome.

Content.

Frustrated

Man. You know what's frustrating?

It's frustrating to want to talk to someone who doesn't speak your language.


You know what's possibly even more frustrating?

When they do speak your language except they're at this language immersion camp and they can't speak anything but some foreign language.


You know what might be even more frustrating than that?

Having taken enough of the aforementioned foreign language (albeit a long time ago) to try to talk anyways. Talk? Not really. Listen? Sometimes I can understand some things. Ish.



Most frustrating telephone conversation ever.
*exhales*
I needed to get that out. Thanks for feeling obliged to read b/c it's showing up in your rss reader or Planet Olin or something.

I promise a more upbeat post tomorrow. In fact, I'm pretty sure I know the topic. It should be fun!

Review: Never Eat Alone

I don't know If I'd actually spoil anything but I don't want to worry about it so:

SPOILER ALERT

Ok. You've been warned.

I often use my blog(s) as motivators to get me to do stuff. So. In order to get myself to constantly read, I figured I'd post about books I read. This should be good for my speed-reading and my general knowledge.

I might play a little bit of catch-up soonish as I've read a lot recently.

Today, I'll talk about Keith Ferrazzi's book "Never Eat Alone."

To sum it all up in one phrase: " Ask. You can't lose anything when you don't have anything."

Keith is big on a fairly direct approach. If you want to get to know someone, learn as much as you can about them. Then talk to them. Listen. Care.

I kinda like Keith. He's not a smarmy guy who's trying to get on people's good sides in order to get above other people. He's really into positive feedback. He offers help. This ends up creating a good rapport and goodwill. When he needs help he asks for it. The kicker: he doesn't keep count.

Keith also does things like recognizing the importance of talking to "gatekeepers." These are the people that get you on people's calendars. He talks to them, not through them and they are included in his little thank-yous he sends.

His general modus operandi is carry out all of the steps that normal people do when they become friends really fast. He learns about them. He talks about the intersection of their interests (he's studied up on this obviously). He finds their needs and fills them; he becomes needed. He pings people all the time (in taxis etc.). He follows up on everything, he hosts dinners, he finds mentors, he finds mentees. He gets close to the people who will get him closer to what he wants. This man is a machine.

I am not him. I cannot do life like him. That being said, we have very different priorities. I am very self-validated. Keith gains meaning from others, from interactions. I enjoy these interactions and will try to do more with them, but they will never be life-defining to me. I still plan on having few friends who are big enough in my life to be called life-defining. Keith is fine with celebrating his birthday at a business conference with his business friends or at his NYC home with his NYC friends or etc. etc. It's fantastic.

It reminds me of "The Tipping Point". Some people have few deep relationships, others have many shallow ones. If we think about these as two axes, the area defines how social a person is. My goal is to increase my total area by creating more shallow relationships; I have plenty and plenty of deep ones already. Good luck self.

On a completely different note, I decided I'm not following enough blogs (16). Send me links to good ones or just post them in the comments. Thanks all!

Vinny's

So I've been going to Vinny T's on a weekly basis since I got to Olin this summer.

Their food is not exceptionally tasty, but I absolutely love the restaurant. They have huge, starving-college-student sized portions; and for a bit more they have incredibly big family platters that are meant to serve 3 or 4 people. To me this means I have dinner for a couple of days or something of the sort. More important than their portions, their service is great. They take huge reservations in stride professionally and without batting an eye.

They're cool with things like "20-25 people I think... I'll call if it seems like it's going to be more..." Oh yeah. They also deal with huge bunches of loud college kids quite well. It's really quite a pleasure to eat there.

So. Here's my plan.

I recently decided that it'd be awesome if I could get non-student members of the Olin community to come. Last time we had one prof, and this Thursday I expect two more and one prof's family.

I'm really excited to do this on a regular basis. I hope I can keep it going during the year; it'll be much harder b/c the dining hall is such an easy option. And of course scheduling is annoying. There are conflicts every single day, so its actually been a moving appointment. We've done Monday, Monday, Friday, Wednesday and next week is Thursday.

If you're an Olinite reading this in the Boston area, but you're not at Olin itself, send me an e-mail to be included in the invitation e-mails for these dinners.

I am really excited for Thursday.

FPGAs

These things are sweet. Like, really sweet. The idea is that you write a program and the FPGA implements it in hardware (it makes a digital circuit with a portion of its hundreds of thousands of gates).

The parts I like are the cost and how much they jam on the board. All the stuff on the board can be used as either inputs or outputs (depending on what they are); also there's some mode-controlling stuff on the board, but let's ignore that for now.

I'll describe one that's just shy of $100. It has 8 LEDs, 8 switches, 4 push-buttons on the board itself. Then it has an additional 60 I/O ports that can be used for whatever. Some of these (24) are split off into groups of 6 pins that you can plug something called a Pmod into. These are extensions that they've already made for you such as video I/O or audio I/O or motor control etc. Oh yeah. It also has a 4 digit seven-segment display. This lets you make the simple squarish looking digital clock type numbers. And there's a slot for a 1/8 VGA LCD screen. Sexy.

Anyhow. I keep on coming up with reasons to buy one that aren't good enough to get me to do it. Case in point: for about $200 I can make a TV card for my monitor. I mean. OK, I could play Smash on my monitor. Or I could get a $50 TV card. But the FPGA can also do other stuff. But for $200 I could buy a new TV. *sigh* I need better arguments for myself. If anyone can come up with a compelling reason for me to get an FPGA other than their shininess, that'd be awesome.

I'm pretty sure this device has made me the happiest and most victorious-feeling for the most mundane tasks. For example, I felt accomplished after following a step-by-step screencast to make the FPGA count in binary and display the 8 MSB in LED form. And now, I'm failing to use the seven-segment display to make it count with numbers. Actually, I think I've gotten it to do it, but too fast for my eyes to resolve... I'll work on that.

Highrise

Oh man. Highrise is yummy. Thanks to the people who suggested it to me!

I've got only like 20 contacts up so far, but I should get much faster at this as I get a bit more practice and actually establish a system. I've had to do every single entry like 5 times because I keep adding things when I think of them. "Oh yeah... photos!" also phone number formats, labels, and, this one is key, birthdays.

This works really well as a tickler for birthdays or, hell, anything. I'm going to chuck all of my single task to-dos here and keep Mindmeister for projects and other more complex things. The ability to have tasks linked to people is rather awesome.

Complaints: Well I do have a lot actually. Inputting people is slow. I can't add a photo or put on a label until after the initial creation.When I add a label I have to click OK instead of pressing enter. Little things, but things that shouldn't exist in a serious site. I mean, I have on my list of to-dos for Olindocs "make OK pressed by enter." Honestly. Not pro dudes. Oh. I also wish I could label contacts en masse. But I can't. Lame. This requires much more forethought. Or going back to fix things. Or both.

That all being said. This is one-time. I can more than deal with it. It's notes are awesome. I'm not sure if i talked to anyone who reads this about one of my original plans when I first got a Moleskine. It went like this:

I'd meet someone. I'd get their name. Then I'd pull out my Moleskine and scribble something. I'd then have a normal conversation with them; except for the part where I'm writing stuff in my notebook every 5-15 seconds. Well. Highrise gives me a reason to do something like this. Except not until after the conversation and only with people I don't see all that often. Not quite as cool but hey.

The free version of Highrise has this limitation about having a single case. This means you can only have 1 foldery thing that keeps different things related. OR. I could use either labels or an additional contact to keep a project together. Pretty hackable.

In short: Highrise = cool. I will report on any changes in my opinion if it goes to pretty good or less or OMG this is the mostest awesome! or more.