failing like never before

31Jul/081

Ubuntu – Squishy Snake

I was riding my bike to the library today, when I happened to notice what appeared to be a brownish hose lying on the road in front of me. Since I have a mountain bike, I usually just run over small stuff like hoses. But as I got closer, I noticed all of a sudden, that it was not in fact, a garden hose, but a snake all coiled up and enjoying the morning sun. Instinct took over.

You see, I live in a fairly rural area, where rattle snakes, deer, and wild turkey are common. Something, every teenager learns when learning to drive in my town, (although technically, we're too small to be a "town") is that if a wild animal or domestic pet runs out into the road in front of your car, don't try to swerve out of the way, just hit it. It happens all the time; someone tries to swerve out of the way of a wild turkey, only to hit a tree, killing themselves and the turkey at the same time. So my instinct when I see an animal in my path, is to slow down a bit but keep going straight (a strategy which has no doubt saved my life but ended that of many a squirrel).

I cannot lie; at the last minute, I pulled my feet off the pedals, held them in the air, and screamed like a little girl. Which was probably a good thing, since the snake make a solid, squishy, sort of noise as both wheels of my bike went over it. It was kind of like the sound a large bug makes when you squish it, only less crunchier. I did not turn around to check if the snake survived, but snakes are quite resilient creatures so perhaps it still lives yet.

Ubuntu has always used alliterations in naming their releases, the distribution name taking the form of <adjective> <African animal>. I therefore propose that a future release be named Squishy Snake, in remembrance of the snake that I killed today.

Just think of the artwork that people could make for it.

I know you're all jealous of my amazing drawing skills. No eight-year-old can rival my genius artistic talents.

18Jul/082

Good Business

I went to a Japanese Buffet a few nights ago. The place was located in the richer side of town, and was quite upscale. I could tell it was posh because their bathrooms were clean and they kept the place dimly lit (I don't understand why expensive places are always darkly lit, surely they can manage to pay the electricity bills.).

As we were walking in, I noticed that one of the waitresses was speaking to a customer in Cantonese. I thought it a bit strange at first, considering it was a Japanese restaurant, but realized that it was not unheard of for Japanese people to speak Cantonese. But later on I overheard the two sushi chefs joking to each other in Cantonese. One might assume that the staff were simply multilingual and familiar with many different tongues, but the ease with which the chefs spoke Cantonese and the fact that they spoke it for conversing rather then Japanese or English, would seem to imply that Cantonese and not Japanese was their native tongue. Also, I have never met a Japanese man with the surname "Hong," because "Hong" is a distinctly Chinese name (although to be fair, he could have been of Chinese descent but grew up in Japan).

28Jun/081

It Gets Easier

Check out these ads by Intel.

Intel released these ads for the Intel vPro platform at least a year ago (I think probably much longer). Last summer at work, we would play the songs on our laptop speakers during our breaks. It's major geek humor, but its even funnier if you work in IT. The songs are actually kinda catchy too.

Mad props to the singers, I doubt I would be able to sing "hardware-based remote manageability" with a straight face.

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18May/080

A little About Me

Every personal blog has an "about me" section, except mine, and I don't know why I never wrote one. Who am I? Its a tough question to answer. My roommates had to answer it in their homework for their leadership class, and I believe it took them a few pages to answer throughly.

I'm not going to answer that question now, because I really do have to do homework. But I do want to throw in something. A few years ago, I had to take a sort of personality test at work, and my results are listed below. I think its rather amusing really to see just how messed up I am. If I recall correctly, everyone else had fairly modest values in the 40-60 ranges in most categories, and only I was this messed up.

According to this graph, I am demanding, yet amiable, very precise and cautious, but most definitely not a people person.

DISC graphDominance
* Demanding
* Driving
* Ambitious
* Forceful
* Determined
* Aggressive
* Decisive

Influence
* Inspiring
* People Oriented
* Likes Recognition
* Expressive/Emotional
* Enthusiastic
* Optimistic
* Approachable

Steadiness
* Relaxed
* Amiable
* Patient & relaxed
* Loyal
* Good Listener
* Team Player
* Consistent

Conscientous
* Evasive
* Cautious
* Conventional
* Exacting
* Diplomatic
* Accurate
* Open-minded
 
 
 

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18May/080

About Me

If you've ever gone to an event, like a first club meeting or first dorm dinner, where everyone is new and just starting to get to know each other, then you've probably had to do a lot of introductions. As an engineer, the efficiency (or rather of lack of efficiency) really bothers me. Why do I have to introduce myself to thirty different people in the space of one hour and make the same boring and useless small-talk every single time? Why couldn't the people organizing said event hand out placards we could wear around our necks? And then we could write our introduction on these signs, in a style similar to social networking sites like Facebook or Myspace.

"My name is first_name last_name. I am a year_in_school year and I am majoring in major_name. I am from home_town and I went to high_school_name. I like hobbies. etc.

Just think how much easier that would make our lives! While people tend be fairly complicated organisms, thus making it difficult to sum up their entire personality and background on one placard, the signs are not meant to completely describe a person, rather only to remove the need for useless introductions. Should someone find the persona described on a placard interesting, they can quickly and easily establish a conversation with that other person. The initial awkward introductions are avoided, allowing people to skip straight to the actual interesting conversations, and people that have nothing in common are not forced into awkward conversation in order to realize their dissimilarities.

Its such a beautiful solution to a non-existent problem, that I wonder why no one has ever tried to implement it before.

11May/080

Things of Note

Things of particular noteworthy significance that occurred today:

  • I shaved for the first time in about three weeks. Another monumental point, is that I now have to buy some new razorblades for the first time in my life; all the rest of the blades that I have ever used were free samples.
  • I threw a racquetball against my door for about twenty minutes while listening to my roommate watch The Office. There is no one alive who can procrastinate as I can.
  • I ate my last granola bar; I am now bereft of snacks so my need to go shopping is now even greater.

I also slept, ate, did homework, studied, and worked on a project for one of my classes. Once again, I did not go to church because of the obscene amounts of work that I had to do.

And that about sums up the amazing adventures of my day.

10May/081

The Monkey

There's this site called mturk that is run by Amazon, and allows for companies to pay people to do really stupid things that are easy for a person to do, but nigh on impossible for a computer to do. Mturk, is short for Mechanical Turk, like the old chess playing machine the Turk. The original Turk, was a machine that existed a few hundred years ago and was supposedly able to play chess quite well. Eventually, people discovered the secret behind the Turk: a guy sitting inside the machine moving the pieces around.

Now Amazon's mturk is essentially like the original Turk, only mturk can do pretty much everything, not just play chess. Suppose you're a large company and you have some recordings of meetings that you want transcribed. A computer has a lot of trouble doing this kind of stuff, but a person can do it fairly easily with time. All you do, is take your audio recordings for transcription to the mturk machine and in a day or so you get your completed transcriptions. Amazon's mturk machine is a group of random people who get paid tiny amounts of money to perform relatively simple tasks that a computer would find pretty much impossible. Anyone can sign up and get paid to be a part of Amazon's giant machine. Just like the original Turk, mturk appears to the end user as just a machine (of course, this time everyone know that the machine really isn't a machine, and thats part of the magic), but inside are people doing the actual work.

As I said, mturk can do pretty much anything. If you go to mturk, you'll find requests for not just audio transcriptions, but also surveys, image tagging and categorization, movie and book reviews, links to white papers, and even some really weird ones. Like one I found a few days ago that asked for an original drawing of a monkey. I got paid two cents for my drawing which took close to 2 minutes to do.

And here is my monkey.

monkey drawing

10May/080

Nightmare

I had a pretty bad dream recently, which is of particular note primarily because I never remember my dreams, and secondly because it was a pretty lame nightmare.

I dreamt that someone had hacked into my server and erased my entire database, whereupon I woke up with my heart pounding fast in my chest. I got out of squeaky metal bunk-bed turned my monitor on, reassured myself that my blog was still whole and complete, backed up my entire MySQL database onto my hard drive, and climbed back into bed. The next morning, I woke up unsure of if I had dreamed up the entire experience; that is, if I had dreamed that I had had a bad dream and instantly dashed to my computer.

I don't even understand why I was so stressed out about losing my blog articles, after all I already do periodic backups. Even then, its not as though anyone actually reads my blog so losing a few bad blog articles could hardly be considered a big lose.

But anyhoo, there it is. My worst nightmare since I was six and dreamt that my cousin was a monster that was going to eat me. Its really quite depressing.

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