June 2007
8 posts
Walking
I’ve been eating a lot more this summer at work, so I’ve decided to make a few choices to limit the amount of weight I’ll gain. Hopefully next week I’ll find a cheap gym in the area (although I’m not optimistic). Until then, I’m: Walking anywhere that is less than a mile away Taking the elevator only when I’m traveling more than 5 floors, otherwise...
Google Earth + SpaceNavigator
Every so often, as my design work requires, I’ll do a bit of 3D design. I also happen to absolutely love Google Earth. So when I got a chance to buy the SpaceNavigator for a reduced price, I jumped on it. The space navigator is a high-quality knob that allows you to manipulate it in every way you can imagine. Pulling out zooms out, pushing in zooms in. You can pan and tilt and roll and...
New York
For my summer job, I’m working in New York. I’m originally from outside of Washington, D.C., and I’ve only visited NYC a few times before. To be honest, I didn’t particularly want to come to New York. It’s intimidating and big and dirty and expensive. But then I realized that this was the perfect time to get exposure to New York without living here long-term. ...
Remember the Milk + Google Gears
I briefly mentioned the other day that offline apps were going to be able to take off. Imagine my surprise this morning when I logged into my task organization program (www.rememberthemilk.com) and was told that it had added integration with Google Gears! I’m glad that more companies are already taking advantage of Google Gears, but hopefully the API will be opened up so other competitors...
Video Chat
I have really poor hearing. I often have an incredibly hard time especially on the phone, where the poor audio quality makes the problem even worse. It follows, then, that I’m not good at talking on the phone. I get frustrated and irritable, and it’s not a pleasant experience. When I moved to college, it was a huge challenge to stay in touch with my family, due to this problem. I...
Lazy Sunday
During the school year, Sundays are my busiest day—they’re when I get the important head start on my school work for the week. Saturdays are a little more low-key but I generally also use them to get a head start on work. Basically, in school, you’re always busy with school work or extracurriculars—there is no clean break between “home” time and...
Sudoku, IE, Frustration
I’m a sudoku addict. Really. I love it so much that last year, when I should have been studying for exams, I built a web-based sudoku game. I had started it because I found that all of the sudoku games online at the time were poorly designed from a UI point of view. Clearly, very few of the developers were avid sudoku players, or there would have been all kinds of extra features to allow...
Offline Webapps
Yesterday, Google released something called Google Gears. What Gears allows applications to do is store information in a local data-store to allow an off-line mode. When the user reconnects to the internet and resyncs, all of the waiting requests are sent back to the server. This is huge—although maybe not as paradigm-shift amazing as Microsoft’s Surface, it will affect far more...
Sometimes All that Matters is Cookies
I just got back from an exhausting but totally fun day at work. I don’t want to do anything, much less find/cook food. Thank goodness for my roommate, who took it upon himself to make cookies for me and my other roommates. Some days all I care about is the latest gadget or some aspect of intellectual property law. But other days all that I care about is a nice warm plate of cookies. And...
May 2007
4 posts
Microsoft Still Capable of Cool Ideas
I feel bad that I bashed Microsoft in my first post. They do some neat stuff every so often, but most of the time they are just the representation of everything I hate in the commercial tech world. Today they did something very right. The Surface table, which they released today, is undeniably cool. No, scratch that. It’s paradigm-shifting cool. Computers used to be beige boxes that...
TV
For the longest time, I didn’t watch any TV. As in, no TV ever. This was during high school when I didn’t have much extra time, and also when most popular shows were traditional sitcoms. Now, I watch three shows regularly: Lost, Heroes, and The Office. These shows are entirely unlike what TV shows used to be. Traditional sitcoms, complete with live studio office, flat sets, and...
Maximizing Profit != Moral Good
I would describe myself as having libertarian leanings—I’m not a full-blown libertarian, but I do lean far left on social issues and to the right on economic issues. In general I believe that people should be left alone as much as possible, as long as they don’t harm others. I believe strongly in capitalism. Barring some obvious flaws and a handful of situations where it falls...
