After an impromptu swing down to Becksylvania this weekend, it’s time to settle down for a short week of thesis planning, an exam, a presentation on natural language processing, work on the image search engine, a MUG meeting (and one next Sunday), and a law school interview. This doesn’t stress me as much as it would have in the past. I’m getting the hang of things.
I’m being exsanguinated on November 2nd. It would be cooler if I was doing it on October 31st, but no dice.
Here’s a perfect example of why I love Slate.
Learning how to play the piano is really good for what ails me. I was starting to worry that my skill set was plateauing - I mean, how many PHP applications can I possibly make? But my piano class puts me in a great position: I’m working with something that is challenging, but periodically offers me a reward in the form of a song played well. This could easily become a lifetime passion. All I have to do now is master tennis and golf, get my pilot’s license, and walk on Mars, and then I can call it a life.
The reigning heavyweight champ in the upcoming sixth “Rocky” movie is named Mason “The Line” Dixon. There’s no way I’m not seeing this thing on opening night.
Stem Cell Test Tried on Mice Saves Embryo. Wouldn’t a God be proud that he/she created beings that could figure out how to do this?
I can tell you exactly what I was doing on the evening of May 22, 1997. A group of friends and I were at a local theater watching Jurassic Park II: The Lost World. Now, I know that’s probably not particularly interesting, but it’s indicative of a certain combination blessing/curse of mine: I’m a packrat.
I was never particularly fond of the idea of throwing anything away. The idea of discarding the past just rubs me the wrong way. Thus my obsession with collecting ticket stubs from movies, sporting events, and plays. Since my collection began on that fateful night in 1997, I’ve amassed over 220 of these little memories. If those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it, I should be in the great shape.
If my collection was limited to just ticket stubs, the overflowing mess that is my basement at home wouldn’t be nearly so bad. Instead, I’ve taken to collecting nearly everything I touch. When my parents do their yearly spring cleaning, they come across piles and piles of things that most people would have gotten rid of years ago. For example, I can’t think of any reason why I need to store every single piece of paper I’ve written or read for every year of school since 7th grade. But I have them. Occasionally I’ll look back through the many boxes and read a few papers, and usually I’ll remark on how embarrassed I am by what I thought were my great writing skills when I was 13. Other than that, though, everything just collects dust, waiting to be discovered by my grandchildren, or perhaps anthropologists from the 24th century.
I know everything I’ve bought this millennium, thanks to my many portfolio folders filled with receipts. Many of those things have been products made by Apple Computer, as computing with the Mac has long been a passion of mine. And for every Apple product I buy, there’s another box sitting in my basement, waiting to be moved with me as I travel between home, school, and internship housing.
Being a packrat combined with what can only be described as a mild form of obsessive-compulsive disorder can be especially troubling. I’m compelled to save everything, but I’m also forced to keep it organized. Believe me, it takes quite some time organizing hundreds of receipts into reverse chronological order (I debated for some time over whether I should sort alphabetically by merchant, but ultimately decided against it.) Adding to the time crunch were the two years that I originated and managed the IST Future Forum, when I was constantly managing a barrage of letters, emails, and notes between my committee of twenty students, thirty corporate guests, and IST faculty and staff members as we prepared our conference on future IT trends. Better yet, because I stored and organized even the most minute documentation, I was able to easily share this information with this year’s incoming committee chair, minimizing the transaction costs.
In the course of writing this post, I believe I’ve gotten to the root of ultimately harmless affliction. In short, I believe that information is a terrible thing to lose, whether it be in physical or digital form. That’s probably why I chose information science as an academic concentration, and why I’m constantly struggling to categorize, sort, and search information. I’d love to make some analogy about my brain storing massive amounts of information, ready to retrieve relevant and timely facts with unparalleled speed, but unfortunately this isn’t the case. Instead, I’ve become fairly adept at knowing where to go for information and at least being able to identify data that might be useful somewhere down the road so that I might stick it in a box next to old movie ticket stubs.
One of the announcements Apple made yesterday was that it will be shipping an iSight built into each new iMac. On the surface, this looks like just a great way to bring video chat to the masses - masses who normally wouldn’t go through the hassle of buying an external camera. Even though iChat made it easy to do video conferencing before, sometimes you need to lower the entrance ramp for beginners even more. So, kudos to Apple on that front.
As with all things coming out of Cupertino, though, there may be more going on here than meets the eye. Over the past few years, Apple has shown a renewed interest in innovative interface design. Exposé, Dashboard, and the Mighty Mouse are three of the most obvious examples, and they fit together well. Imagine, then, if the iSight built into all Apple machine was used for recognizing user gestures:
There are an infinite number of things you could do. It looks like Apple’s gemini twin, Nintendo, is already beginning to embrace the importance of gestures in gameplay. If Jobs & Co. included a feature like this in Leopard, Bobcat, Caracal, or Ocelot, they would be even more light-years ahead of Microsoft, and thus Windows users could expect to have the feature around 2015 or so.
My computer setup at work features two 17-inch monitors, for a total of over 3.5 million pixels. That’s a lot of space. The menu bar is always at the top of the right-hand screen. If I’m working on the left screen and I want to access the menu, it’s quite a hike. Thus I propose that somebody write the following program for me: Move the menu bar to the top of whatever screen contains the mouse pointer. It would also be acceptable if the menu were mirrored on both displays, and I’m fairly certain OS X doesn’t offer this capability natively. I can wait up to two (2) weeks for you to complete this assignment.
It seems to be very trendy, so I thought I’d better say it: I promise not to legislate from the bench.