More about features

Our little release of two days ago seems to be getting a lot of good press (or maybe I'm just noticing more because nothing is going on so I have more time to read such things). Check out this, written by a guy I work with:

New Bird's Eye Interface Details From Stchur


Here's another:

Hey - Runners, Cyclists, Hikers, Bikers... New VE features especially for you


I really liked the stuff mentioned in here (which, of course, I didn't even know about, despite working a few doors down from the people imlementing it), so I decided to start a bike route collection (only one item so far, but I'll add more):

Bike routes

And, while we're on the subject of bike routes, this is the most useful site I know of for biking in the PNW:

MapCruncher Bike Maps Mashup

More about features

Our little release of two days ago seems to be getting a lot of good press (or maybe I'm just noticing more because nothing is going on so I have more time to read such things). Check out this, written by a guy I work with:

New Bird's Eye Interface Details From Stchur


Here's another:

Hey - Runners, Cyclists, Hikers, Bikers... New VE features especially for you


I really liked the stuff mentioned in here (which, of course, I didn't even know about, despite working a few doors down from the people imlementing it), so I decided to start a bike route collection (only one item so far, but I'll add more):

Bike routes

And, while we're on the subject of bike routes, this is the most useful site I know of for biking in the PNW:

MapCruncher Bike Maps Mashup

DRM

I'm sure there are other people who've said that DRM is pointless, but I really like the way this article puts it, particularly this phrase/link: "DRM only punishes honest consumers." I've spent a fair amount of money buying music from iTunes, despite having (and wanting) no iPod, which was probably pretty foolish. Given a way to buy music legally that I can use in a flexible way (like, say, unencrypted mp3's), I'd feel much more confident doing that, and would probably buy more music through it. Sure, there would be a bit of 'leak' from people transferring files they hadn't paid for, but I think the decreased resentment is worth more than they give it credit for.

Post post post

In case you were wondering... several of those last post were old ones I'd started earlier and just wanted to put the finishing touches on before actually putting up.

I'm really enjoying these few minutes where nothing is happening at work.

You know you have interesting friends when...

-You periodically get asked, "So, hey, would you mind being a subject for this experiment I'm doing?"
-Every few months you have an email exchange that makes you go read the labels on all the food in your cupboards.
-"You wanna do something this weekend?" "Sorry, I'll be in another country."
-The word "thesis" makes everyone in the room shudder.
-"Remember that little rubber gasket thing that was missing from the engine? I made something that does the same function." "From what?" "A piece of copper wire."
-You go to another state for a weekend just because, well, there's a good party going on.
-"LHR, FRA, or CDG?" "Eh, doesn't matter."
-You can be at a party where someone says "I think slow-growing log files are like the tooth fairy" or makes a joke about cross-compilers and everyone laughs.

Why I'm Not In Marketing

San Francisco: We've Got Shit You've Heard Of, Like, You Know, Alcatraz

Nasal Irrigation: It's Like An Enema For Your Sinuses

New Green Tea Flavored 7-Up: made from the highest grade tea, monkey-picked oolong. Drink The Monkey!

Yay features!

I'm feeling very actualized:

Microsoft Virtual Earth Birds Eye View Greatly Improved

I did a lot of the minimap and worked with the guy who did the pseudo-panning.

Repeal Winter!

That is all.

Actually, I should at least give credit for that phrase, at least where I heard it: Robin Blume-Kohout, the TA for the first-semester physics class I had Berkeley.

Why am I posting in the middle of a weekday? Because it's lunch break from a class I'm taking, and, well, I just feel like it. Actually, I feel like screaming, but this is a reasonable approximation that doesn't make too many people think I'm a freak. Maybe that's deceptive, trying to keep them from thinking I'm a freak.

Fridge

And now, back to our horror show from the evening, "Things From The Back Of The Fridge."

"Is that grease or mold?"
"If you have to ask...."

--

"The proof is in the pudding."
"I don't like pudding."

--

Hmm, I wanted a third item in the list of random snippets, but I can't think of another (without borrowing, which doesn't seem fair), so I guess this will be it. Maybe this can be a meta-snippet.

Reality All Starz

This is a neat idea... some of these are pretty crazy, and some are things I've already done (hmm, I should enter...):

RealityAllStarz

Distrusting the Medical Establishment

For a while I've been saying I don't trust a thing the medical establishment says. It occurred to me to really question, isn't it a bit arrogant of me to say I value my own opinions over thousands of people doing research for decades? No, for these reasons:

• Conflict of interest: health care and food are absolutely huge economically and therefore politicially - for instance, I've heard the sugar lobby is the largest in Washington; hence the presence of sugar in everything, including plenty of foods where it really doesn't make sense (like ketchup). There are too many people who benefit too much from studies or opinions being swayed certain directions.
• Individuality: I believe strongly (granted, because of personal observation) that people's reactions to various inputs (sunlight, foods, etc) vary far more widely than is given credit; to follow a general rule just isn't much use. Not only that, but people live in widely varying situations and have widely varying habits - it may be quite reasonable to tell someone who lives in Tucson to try to avoid the sun, but in Seattle, I think it's healthy to make a point to get more. Observe yourself and do what appears to work for you. Granted, you won't know long-term outcomes til too late, but you can at least make more educated guesses.
• Complexity: Humans are the most complex system we know of, and we haven't even begun to scratch the surface of understanding how we really work.
• Conflicting reports and poor results: Every decade the medical establishment seems to completely change its story, and the United States, supposedly following these instructions, has only gotten less healthy. Besides which, I've seen too many cases of doctors diagnosing things wrong or treating things wrong first hand.
  

So, I eat what makes me feel good and take what actions seem to make me feel good. I eat as much unprocessed organic food as possible, and I greatly enjoy sunlight. Maybe I won't overshoot my life expectancy - or, then again, maybe I will - but one way or another I'm going to have a really good ride.

Restaurant

Today, we went to a restaurant called Byzantion (a Greek place in Capitol Hill). We were wondering why it was called Byzantion when someone suggested that the original was actually called Bantion, but some Ancient Thugs started talking about it, and their name for it stuck.

Browsers

My status message on gchat: Sometimes, I have strong bouts of "IE 6 is the scourge of the Earth"... this is one of those moments.
Andrew: *hands over some steel wool*
me: *scour, scour*
Andrew: and then, for the final touch. *9 volt battery*
me: mm, nice shiny w3c compliance
Andrew: heh

Deleted messages

A few years ago, I accidentally deleted a voicemail message before listening to it (I'd meant to delete the one I'd just listened to). It bugged the heck out of me. I still wonder, to this day, who it was from.

Well, I just did it again - I deleted a message in my spam folder that had "UPS" and a package number in the subject line from someone named "Val" (at least I think so, in the 10th of a second I glanced at the message). I thought, right after deleting it, that it might have been something, but didn't think much of it. However, when I got home, I found a package, shipped via UPS, sitting by my front door... and I have no idea what it is or where it came from. It's some kind of present, and it came from Common Grounds. Well, I guess I'll find out come Christmas time - or was it mean to be a birthday present? I peeked in the edge and saw a card, so I suppose all will be revealed when I read the card. Would it be cheating to do that early? The package is red, but I really don't know whether it was supposed to be birthday or Christmas. Hmm, dilemmas, dilemmas. Anybody know about this?

Hopefully I won't spend years wondering who the "Val" in that email was....

Stealing words

I don't like people who commit crimes on words. Semantic theft hurts the general psychology.

Advertisers are highly culpable in this. Usually I stay far enough away from marketing that I don't notice, but just driving around it's hard to miss the "home for sale" signs so prevalent in this area. No, what you have for sale is a house, a piece of real estate. A house may become your home, but it's what you make in the house and in your mind. "Home" is not something that could ever be for sale. Do not degrade the word by using it this way.

Corporations are really bad about this. They aren't willing to use the word 'problem', for one. When the parking lot gets full and you have to drive around for 10 minutes to find a space and people are 2 or 3 deep illegally, they'll say "we realize parking has become a challenge...". No, a challenge is a good thing, something you grow from and take on as a good fun puzzle or adventure that you'll feel satisfied about when you're done. The parking problem has no reward for employees. For the company, it's a matter of either hiring a valet or getting more space to park in. Maybe a little creativity might be involved in the latter, and that might merit it being called a challenge for a few people involved with business space acquisition, but that doesn't merit it being called a "challenge" in general. It builds up a bad association with the word "challenge," thinking that anything hard must be bad.

Then there's the word "utilize." Mostly it seems to be used to sound uppity. I guess that could be a goal, but it's not a very good goal. I'm all in favor of obscure words when you get more precise meaning, but I can think of few cases where semantic value is gained form saying "utilize" instead of "use." The only defensible case that comes to mind is "resource utilization," since it seems to imply a more quantitative meaning than "resource use." I guess it could also be argued that there's an implication in "utilize" that you're consuming a resource that has value, like the cost of a parking space for 8 hours during a week day. But I doubt all those corporate people think of such a fine semantic distinction when they write their missives.

There are many more examples, but you get the idea. Now, go forth and defend the precision and value of the language, and the impact it has upon our thinking.

Cookies

A few weeks ago, I took this awesome design patterns class. I asked a question about some pattern that he kept referring to but hadn't actually described, and he told this story about a study involving children and rewards. He said children were offered the choice of one cookie now or two cookies later. They tracked these kids, and the ones who understood delayed gratification (taking the two cookies after some waiting) did better in life than the ones who didn't. At the time I was rather offended by his telling me this (I'm already a big fan of delayed gratification, and if the point was to make us pay attention to that pattern by making us curious about it, it had long since been satisfied and was starting to really bug me). But it is an interesting example. What other analogies can we find?

Stock market: one cookie now, or a decent chance at three cookies later (and if not, none or one)

Venture capital: one cookie now, or a small chance of getting 20 cookies later

401(k): one cookie now, or 5 cookies later, but you might not be able to taste them

Higher education: a quarter of a cookie a day for the next two weeks, and 5 cookies a day for the next 10 weeks after that

Car maintenance: give up one cookie every 3000 miles, or give up all your cookies for a month at some point in the future

Marriage: start by making your favorite kind of cookie and giving it up to someone else, and eating their favorite cookies, and if you're lucky you either like each other's cookies, or each of you is good at, and doesn't mind, making the kind the other likes

Having kids: throwing up cookies now, for a long time, with a chance at a truckload of cookies later, but you don't know if any will be a kind of cookie you like

Go on, psychoanalyze me.

The life of stuff

In most stores (grocery, hardware, etc.), products come from all over the world and mostly wind up staying close to where the store is. In a gift shop or local art store, a lot of the things might come from the local area, and probably wind up all over the world.

Okay, not very deep... I'm only writing because I woke up and couldn't go back to sleep.