Giveaway FAIL

Posted to thoughts on November 24th, 2009

Really?

The asymmetry of passive-aggressiveness on status replies on facebook

Posted to thoughts on October 28th, 2009

There are many actions you can take on your friends’ status updates on Facebook.

The first action is inaction.  If you feel indifferent, or lazy, or if the “friend” is just an “acquaintance”, you can do nothing.  You might feel like a voyeur (or stalker-lite) for peeking into someone’s life without being an active part of it, but that’s what social networks are all about (e-stalking).  This is also about as passive as you can get on facebook.

If you feel strongly for or against the status, or if you follow this flowchart, you may choose to post a comment.  This is about as aggressive as you can get in a virtual environment short of throwing punches in super poke.

If you feel less strong FOR the status, but would still want to alert the poster so that they know that you know that they’re up to something, then you can “like” their status.  This is a passive-aggressive “like”.

If you feel weakly AGAINST the status, however, all you can do is “hide” their status (but hide actually has a different semantic meaning both in the term itself, and the actions that facebook takes once you hide something).  The original poster will never know that you hid their status, and any passive-aggresiveness that only one person is aware of is no aggressiveness at all.

Hence the asymmetry.

lenguajero

Posted to thoughts on July 30th, 2009

Congrats to Natalie and August launching lenguajero.com.

Do you want to learn Spanish (or English if you’re a Spanish speaker - although I doubt you’d be here if you were a non-English speaking Spanish speaker), then see how you can start learning English or Spanish today.

Biking

Posted to thoughts on June 8th, 2009

Over the past month, I’ve been doing a lot of biking (mainly on the weekends, since apparently long bike rides take a lot of time).  Here’s what I can remember.

May-02

(Road) S. Lake Washington -> Cedar River Trail -> Tiger Mountain -> Leschi - 64 miles.

May-09

(Road) Same as above - 64 miles

May-10

(Mtn) Tapeworm - 4 miles

May-16

(Road) Whidbey Island - 72 miles

May-23

(Mtn) Tiger Mountain - 12 miles

May-25

(Mtn) Rat Pac - 12 miles

May-30

(Road) Bainbridge Island - 44 miles

May-31

(Mtn) Tokul East - 8-10 mile range

Jun-06

(Mtn) Paradise Valley - 11-13 mile range

Jun-07

(Road) TWBC Peninsula Metric Century - 69 miles

I’m taking a break this weekend as I head home to Canada, but am looking for other trail suggestions for the coming weekends.

The dark side of Dubai

Posted to thoughts on April 8th, 2009

This is a long article about dubai, but interesting (via boingboing).

Once the manic burst of building has stopped and the whirlwind has slowed, the secrets of Dubai are slowly seeping out. This is a city built from nothing in just a few wild decades on credit and ecocide, suppression and slavery. Dubai is a living metal metaphor for the neo-liberal globalised world that may be crashing – at last – into history.

Reminds me of this video on real estate in Dubai.

Pipe Lights

Posted to thoughts on April 1st, 2009

They’re a little expensive, but the concept of these lights are very cool.  Maybe this will be a DIY project.

My Experiences with Apple Products

Posted to thoughts on March 27th, 2009

Over the years, I’ve owned 2 iPods, a 1st generation iPod shuffle, a 1st generation iPhone, and a MacBook, here’s what happened:

First iPod

  • worked great for a while (several months), until it didn’t.  It quite literally just died.  No reboot, or recharging, or anything could save it (would not even connect to my computer)
  • brought it to an apple store’s genius bar, they could not fix it either
  • they did, however, give me a new one, no questions asked, which is good from a customer service perspective
  • I sold the other one a year later and bought a zune (of which I still like the UI better)

iPod shuffle

  • I bought this for tunes while snowboarding.  I do not like using iTunes, so I tried some other program to rebuild the music db without having to use iTunes.  This worked with some level of semi-success
  • during the off season, it just sits there.  Now it cannot hold a charge, and I cannot replace the battery

iPhone

  • iPhone works fine so far, although I did have some iTunes weirdness where it erased all the apps I’ve downloaded
  • the charger, however, died about a day outside of warranty.  Somewhat ironically, I’m now using a USB travel charger targeted at Zune users to charge my iPhone

MacBook

  • about 3 months after buying the MacBook (running on 10.4), I got the spinning beachball of death (SBOD vs BSOD).  I waited a long time, and the beachball did not stop, so I did a hard reboot.  The reboot never got past the apple logo on the startup screen, it just did nothing.  I tried rebooting multiple times, each with the exact same effect. Again somewhat ironically, I had dual boot set up at the time, and could boot into the vista partition, which worked quite well, and can even see into the mac partition.  However, OSX would not boot
  • I finally decided to reinstall OSX.  This was largely OK (aside from the fact that I had to do it), except that I also had to delete my vista partition, and when I tried to install bootcamp again, it was out of beta (and no longer available with 10.4), and I didn’t want to pay for 10.5
  • now, every month or so, when I close the lid on my MacBook, it will just restart, for no apparent reason as far as I can tell

Would you live in a shipping container?

Posted to thoughts on March 6th, 2009

Container Living

Absolutely.

Self-ad

Posted to thoughts on January 25th, 2009

There’s advertisement everywhere these days, including on social media networks.  You often see products or services being hawked alongside your profile.  This is something new that is interesting, especially given the current economic climate:

Not only is he advertising on facebook to people in a particular network, he’s looking for a job there.  That’s pretty innovative.  If anyone is looking to hire a PM, the link points to here.

Tilt-shift

Posted to photo, thoughts on January 13th, 2009

Tilt-shift photography has been around for a long time.  Tilt changes the plane of focus, from the regular vertical plane (parallel to the film), to intersect the film (or sensor) at different angles.  This is why you only see a horizontal band of the picture in focus.  Shift changes the perspective of the photo, to either make parallel lines more or less parallel.

These days, there’s been a resurgence of tilt-shift-like photography, although the focus (no pun intented) is more on the tilt side of things.  The real appeal is that it makes the photo look like a miniature model.  There’s all sorts of software (fairly simple really, just apply blur) that will allow you to turn a regular photo into a tilted photo.

Now there’s even an online tool.

Husky's Game

Here’s the original.

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