I'm a bioinformatics nut. I long for the day when I can attach a small device to my arm that will connect to my phone's internet connection via bluetooth to upload health information to a central server somewhere for later analysis. I could have a pedometer in my shoes to measure how much I walk/run. I could have a heart rate monitor. There are lots of things you can do with a simple metal plate in contact with human skin.
My biggest complaint with fitness today is our lack of solid health knowledge. We don't really know what we're doing yet when it comes to nutrition and fitness. We know exercise is good, but we can't be more specific than that. What kinds of exercises are optimal for certain kinds of results? What is the best nutritional combination for this? We have ideas, but only general ones. The reason why we aren't satisfactorily answering these questions yet is because it takes a lifetime to answer. Literally. We've only become interested in fitness in the modern sense in the last few hundred years. We've been doing a good job recording data for less than that. Our diet has long term impacts; that much we know, but we can't exactly say what all those impacts are. When it comes to the data collected to date, we have a very small sample of the population.
The best thing we can do to improve this going forward is to create large (petabytes) databases of daily biometrics on populations of people, correlating that with other known health data, such as longetivity and cancers. We can crunch that data for correlations.
For now, I'm using FitDay.com to manually record personal fitness metrics. It isn't bad. It isn't great because it requires self-reporting. No fitness site lasts long using manual updates. One day, I want to be able to log into a web site that has daily health information on me that goes back years, which it can correlate to other reported factors like productivity, fitness levels, and mood. I want all this data on me collected passively, either by my phone or some other peripheral that uploads data to the internet via my phone (or, worst case, keeps it stored until you sync up later).
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notadora has been on a nutrition kick this year. Recently, she's been lecturing me about The Omnivore's Dilemma, which has me appreciating just how much we don't know. I want a computer to be able to infer exactly what I need to do and eat to get the results I want. It's perfectly possible; we just need to collect all the data. I'm not too sure what concentrated efforts there are to improve this space other than what wiz has told me about, but I loathe the idea that when I die people will still be advocating the Atkins diet. For now I'll do my part to record my heart rates, hoping to discover personal trends. I've always said I love doing data analysis. When you discover a new correlation, it's like learning a secret that no one else knows. It's a great feeling. I imagine it's as good or better than a runner's high, but I wouldn't know.
Just, yano, a friendly tip.
First off, I was accepted to Cal Poly (SLO) for Statistics, which was my first choice for a school. The only thing that may cause me to reconsider is if UCLA accepted me for stats as well. I wasn't expecting a decision until May, so getting the acceptance email while sitting in the lobby of the San Diego Marriot during ETech was probably one of the greatest shocks of my life. I immediately started crying like a baby for no good reason.
Secondly, I've been spending a lot more time coding. I won't say I've spent a lot of time on any particular project, but I've definitely been investing more of myself. I recently released one of the world's first desktop apps for Fire Eagle, a Yahoo-owned location reporting service (if anyone wants an invite, let me know). I walk around with a moleskine notebook these days, and I spend a lot of time writing in it. It's led directly to a desire to develop and document more of my thoughts.
Thirdly, I'm attending a lot more events and getting involved in the community. I just recently attended WSDM, ETech and gave two incredibly packed talks at BarcampLA. I'll also be attending MashupCamp next week. Doing post-event write-ups can be a buzzkill, so I've been falling back to alternative forms of documenting, like Flickr, Twitter and Tumblr. There is way too many good ideas out there, and the frontier is moving so fast. It's impossible to keep up and document it at the same time.
Right now, I'm mainly interested in writing about what I'm doing with code and the tech industry at large, which I'm going to start doing more over at Technarium. Beyond that, I'm going to start a wordpress blog on raconteuring as well in an attempt to reach a larger audience. Marketing/SEO of a wordpress blog is simply much easier than an LJ blog. I love you, LJ, but embedding you on my site is going to be more trouble and cost than it's worth.
To begin with, let's talk about hardware specs:
- AMD Sempron 2200 (1.49 GHz)
- 1 gig RAM
- 400 gig hard drive
- GeForce FX 5500
- Netgear 10/100 a/b/g wireless nic
- onboard audio
- Sony Trinitron HD television (at a lowly 420p)
- Windows Experience Index Rating: 2.6
Software-wise, this is how I'm configured:
- Windows Vista Ultimate with Aero disabled
- Windows Media Center (WMC)
I chose WMC over similar offerings on free operating systems like Ubuntu for a few reasons. First, I'm historically a Microsoft shop. I write my quickest code in .NET, and eventually I'll want to write custom apps to augment this machine. Second, I don't feel like fiddling with a new OS specifically for this one project. Third, I have never seen an open source project get a UI right, and this kind of project is all about presentation.
What are my capabilities:
- Manage/view/play audio, video, and picture
- While music is playing, it can display sideshows of my photos
- Pull media off anywhere in the network
- Internet TV
- Internet radio
- Record TV (whenever I get a TV tuner)
- Burn CD/DVDs from this interface
- The interface is really elegant, and designed for a remote control. I understand that I can use my phone for this function.
- The automated tag completion and album art retrieval is impressive. It's identified a lot of music iTunes has missed.
- It took no time at all to configure, and it handled all the fiddling with picture quality and resolution in a very user-friendly way. It just works.
- The photo slideshow combined with music is really slick.
- The OS itself is horribly slow. Media Center constantly has the CPU pegged, even with Aero turned off and many services disabled. Granted, WMC is busy pouring over gigs of media to organize, complete tags, and download album art. I also haven't noticed any visible performance problems inside WMC itself. However, this is not a horrible machine. It'd be nice to know that I could drop out of the WMC app and load up Firefox without noticeable performance hits.
- Running any of WMC's visualization kits for music tries to change the resolution, which disrupts the user experience. More than that, it frequently won't run at full screen, which is just horrible. I've decided to not use it.
- A plug-in system and/or API for extending media center. All WMC really consists of is an elegant UI. I'd like to be able to write modules that can include my own functions. There is no reason that this interface can't extend beyond media and control other computer/network functions. Ideas that readily come to mind: News/RSS feeds, IM notifications, email
- Ways of configuring WMC to include internet services like Flickr and YouTube into my photos/videos. I have options for internet TV and internet radio, but I don't appear to have much control over who provides that for me.
- A web-based interface for controlling WMC, so I can control it away from home or from other computers on my network.
- Either finding a better CPU or do some serious Vista performance hacking. Worst case, I'll be downgrading to Windows XP Media Center Edition. I'm not sure what the differences are, so I'm going to do some research first before I go down that road.
- Write/Find some simple apps for keeping my photos on flickr in sync with my local drive so WMC always has all my photos. OH WAIT. THAT'S WHAT LIBERATR DOES.
- Look into different ways to handle the remote control aspect of the software
Consumers aren't vertically loyal. I may use Windows, but I want to use iTunes, an iPod, and Flickr. If I'm not allowed to have all that, I end up dropping the brands I'm least loyal to. Microsoft needs to understand that, in the minds of most consumers, that means them. Nobody is loyal to the Microsoft brand. The more they create an Apple-like bubble of applications that only have synergy with other Microsoft apps, the more they force people away from what strong applications they have created, because they're being dropped for competitors. The future of agile competition is open standards for data formats as well robust APIs so that companies can leverage vertical support from other companies that aren't directly competing with their products. It's that, or Flickr needs to build a media center offering.
- School's begun. Taking 9 units. I wanted to take 12, but too many schedule conflicts.
- I'm teaching Visual BASIC to a couple friends 2-3 hours a week for the next 16 weeks or so.
- WSDM is coming down the pipe in a week
- eTech is coming shortly after
- I will be hearing back from Cal Poly in a few weeks, hopefully. Cross your fingers!
- Building a media server. I want to start streaming more video and audio to the television while I study. When I'm at home, I place too much emphasis on being at my desktop computer, and it shouldn't be that way.
- Going to start a research experiment with a friend using twitter to identify users who initiate trends. I want to see if it's possible to identify a subset of a community as trend setters, or if the origins of trends are evenly dispersed throughout a large community.
- Continuing work on raconteuring. More will be coming soon.
- Doing my best to keep up with the presidential primaries
- Writing a presentation on the good, bad, and ugly of OpenID for the next barcamp
- Writing a DirectX picturebox control in .NET for release through technarium
- Learning how to design icons
- Acquiring an internship
- Exercising 2-3 times a week
- Planning to take over the world
When Guy Hands, the new owner of British major EMI, unveiled his plans for the struggling group recently, he said he would look into the role of corporate sponsorship arrangements, where an album or tour could be backed by a sponsor.
In December, I attended Lunch 2.0 in San Diego, which was held at Eventful's offices. While there, the Chairman & Founder, Brian Dear, gave a talk about the evolution of event management. One of the things he discussed was consumer-driven events. Using eventful, users could demand certain events, like a live concert by a certain band. Usually, these kinds of events are arranged locally or by labels without much information about potential success. However, using demand data, events wouldn't require labels as spearheads. Companies could discover sponsorship opportunities. If there is enough demand for an event, and, seeing this, Coca-Cola steps in to sponsor and organize it, how big of a hero would Coca-Cola look like?
Right now, Eventful is the only place I know of that does something like this, but imagine this approach becoming ubiquitous, as this news link suggests. Conferences on topic X would appear in the places users demand them, as often as they're demanded. Bands could plan their tours around the demand of their fans. Even on a micro level, communities would form as people in town who don't know each other discover similar interests.
One more business model being revolutionized by the social paradigm.
Also, I've been fiddling with RSS feeds. If you subscribed to my tumblelog, you'll need to go to my life stream page and resubscribe.
I'm nowhere near done. I also want to reskin my LJ to follow Raconteuring's theme. I also have a ton of extra sections to add, and I want to add more stats to my lifestream page.
I've enjoyed this a lot more than I thought I would.
- I'm visiting offbeatmelodies in Indiana. It's cold here, but not as cold as Connecticut. I expect that will change, since it's supposed to snow today. I've taken over his living room, and his place is pretty cozy. I've fallen in love with his kitchen a little bit, even though his stove is older than I am.
- I finished writing Liberatr. It should be going into beta whenever notadora finds an icon.
- I'm fiddling with the Facebook API for kicks, since I really feel aimless development-wise. I'm writing a quiz control that I think I'll release separately under the Technarium brand when I'm done.
- I'm also fiddling with DirectX, which a lot less sexy than it sounds. I thought I would magically get all kinds of performance gains over GDI the moment I invoked a device, which hasn't happened yet. I'm going to B&N while Matt's at school today to look at DX books to figure out what I might be missing.
- I've been dealing with this dead, uninspired feeling for the last couple months. Ironically, it made me a really good student for finals. Last semester was the best in my college career.
- There's been a lot on my mind lately, but nothing I feel that's reached any kind of conclusion. All my writing feels flat. The best I can do right now is a bullet list. I tried very hard to make an inspirational New Year post with a themeword, but it all sounded hollow and meaningless when I typed it out. There is...something...important I need to say, but I haven't found the words yet. I don't know what it is yet, but I know I'll feel so much better when I banish it with words. I hate that feeling.
Having grown up with video games, it's difficult to listen to people like Tom Brokaw or scientific studies that pronounce doom upon anyone who chooses Quake or Half Life as a hobby. It's knee-jerk for gamers to tune out people like that. I once knew every finishing move in Mortal Kombat (I and II). I played GTA3. I'm about as passive as you can get. I turned out okay, didn't I? What's the big deal?
The big deal came to me as I analyzed what bothered me so much about Company of Heroes. COH is a strategy game that lets players take command of famous World War II scenarios. The cut scenes in the single player campaign irritate me. The generic scenes of brotherhood, accompanied by a swaggering lieutenant created in John Wayne's image, make me feel dirty. It nakedly tries to inspire nationalism. It rubs me the wrong way to see the commodification of an aspect of our history.
Company of Heroes could've been set in a magical fantasy land where the armies of rock, paper, and scissors are waging deadly war. Instead of tanks, it could be rocks. AT guns would be paper. The mechanics of the game don't require US vs Germany. However, Relic chose to take the game to Europe 1949 to give us a lame, incidental feeling of cheap historical heroism.
If you're not bothered by games that do this kind of thing, you should.
That's why I'm suddenly disturbed by games like Manhunt, Mortal Kombat and Grand Theft Auto. These games give you gore and opportunities for extreme violence. Video game critics take the wrong angle. Video games don't make people shoot up malls, but if we can take joy out of beating pedestrians with baseball bats in GTA3, there is already something wrong. Video games don't cause violence, but it sure shows something about how out of touch we are with our own morals if we can look on that kind of thing (knowing it's imaginary or not) dispassionately.
For my part, I'm against violent games now. The mechanics of the game can exist without this kind of visualization, and I'm starting to prefer games without it. It's the difference between Team Fortress 2 and Call of Duty 4. Creating a realistic setting for a game without greater thematic purpose seems irresponsible. Not all people who play video games are violent. I don't think video games cause anything, but every violent person I've ever met or seen covered in the news plays violent video games. Shouldn't that say something?
The big deal came to me as I analyzed what bothered me so much about Company of Heroes. COH is a strategy game that lets players take command of famous World War II scenarios. The cut scenes in the single player campaign irritate me. The generic scenes of brotherhood, accompanied by a swaggering lieutenant created in John Wayne's image, make me feel dirty. It nakedly tries to inspire nationalism. It rubs me the wrong way to see the commodification of an aspect of our history.
Company of Heroes could've been set in a magical fantasy land where the armies of rock, paper, and scissors are waging deadly war. Instead of tanks, it could be rocks. AT guns would be paper. The mechanics of the game don't require US vs Germany. However, Relic chose to take the game to Europe 1949 to give us a lame, incidental feeling of cheap historical heroism.
If you're not bothered by games that do this kind of thing, you should.
That's why I'm suddenly disturbed by games like Manhunt, Mortal Kombat and Grand Theft Auto. These games give you gore and opportunities for extreme violence. Video game critics take the wrong angle. Video games don't make people shoot up malls, but if we can take joy out of beating pedestrians with baseball bats in GTA3, there is already something wrong. Video games don't cause violence, but it sure shows something about how out of touch we are with our own morals if we can look on that kind of thing (knowing it's imaginary or not) dispassionately.
For my part, I'm against violent games now. The mechanics of the game can exist without this kind of visualization, and I'm starting to prefer games without it. It's the difference between Team Fortress 2 and Call of Duty 4. Creating a realistic setting for a game without greater thematic purpose seems irresponsible. Not all people who play video games are violent. I don't think video games cause anything, but every violent person I've ever met or seen covered in the news plays violent video games. Shouldn't that say something?
If you aren't interested in reading the already summarized Slashdot story, here's the gist: Eidos paid Gamespot a whole bunch of money to advertise a video game on their site. When the game came out, the guy who reviewed it on Gamespot gave it a poor rating. Eidos gave Gamespot the choice of losing out on future advertising deals or firing the man. Gamespot chose the latter. These facts aren't in dispute.
Gamespot had to decide what constitutes sound business ethics, which, like all other ethics, are about doing the right thing. Doing the right thing in business does not always involve keeping an eye out for the bottom line. Any decision-making entity, be it a person or a corporation, has a reputation for being "good" or "not so good." Reputation is a very tangible thing. The less good you are, the less people will deal with you. Gamespot, in trying to exercise good business sense made a poor business decision.
There is an unspoken contract between any journalist and their audience: you can trust me to tell you the truth. Journalism works because we as readers believe the journalist knows what he or she is talking about and is sharing that truth with is. That trust is the real currency of journalism. However, they've blatantly broken the rules. It's now public knowledge that a senior editor was punished for being true to his profession. No one can reasonably trust Gamespot now.
A good business decision is not "do whatever you have to do to make money." I'm sure Gamespot wants to keep their advertisers happy. Businesses exist to make money, after all. However, no one who hears about this fiasco will ever believe their reviews anymore. Readers will boycott their site, and fewer readers mean that Gamespot can't charge as much for advertising. Acting for their short-sighted bottom line will cost them money.
I ask anyone interested in business ethics to justify Gamespot's behavior. It rings hollow that they were loyal to their bottom line. Gamespot didn't act like a company that thought it was focusing on profit; Gamespot acted like a company that didn't think about the consequences of getting caught being bad.
The Practice of Mercy
Beginning the practice of mercy,
study first to forgive
those who have wronged you.
Having done that,
you will be ready
for the sterner discipline:
learning to forgive those
you have betrayed and cheated.
Escape from EdenI have no idea where this book came from. It isn't something my father would take on a trip and leave with me. What's mystical is how it ended up, not scattered somewhere in my apartment, but on the top shelf like it belonged there. I don't have the slightest clue where the little yellow book came from, and I think that's part of its charm.
When I was near death,
these little nurses
stripped me naked
and bathed me.
When it appeared
I would live,
they covered
my loins
with a sheet.
When I learned to sit up
and drink consommé
through a straw,
they somehow managed
to wash my back
without removing
my pajama jacket.
Now that I can walk
to the sink and back
without falling,
they knock loudly,
pause,
before slowly opening
the door
of my room.
- Applications lay down a lot of redundant files. Really. In attempts to make sure certain DLLs get registered, applications like DivX Player will put them everywhere. The system32 folder, the ProgramData folder, etc. Quicktime is worse. Microsoft is the worst.
- If you were to create something along the lines of symlinks to these files instead of copying them around everywhere, on my meager system I'd save space in the hundreds of megs. Is it too much to have a process built into the kernel that detects collisions like this, and instead of laying down duplicate bytes on the hard drive, just create a new reference in the FAT? Applications don't care, and if one gets edited, you can split the files on the hard drive then.
- I honestly don't see why windows doesn't perform a function like this on its own in the background. Keeping a hash table of the contents of my hard drive took a meager 40meg. Just give the thread a really low priority with a bubble that pops up in the system tray when a hash collision is detected. Considering the amount of redundant data users are bound to have laying around in this day and age, it'd be a huge ROI in terms of hard drive space.
I never expect to do anything with it, but it's a good lead-in for my other project, which I feel has hit writer's block.
Cheer me on! http://www.nanowrimo.org/user/240008
Moral of the story: if you want to make sure your house is saved in a firestorm, don't bother with clearing vegetation or what kind of roof you have. Just make sure you have a few thousand gallons of combustible liquid on the premises.
You gotta laugh. You gotta laugh to keep from doing something else.
Still awake. My sleep is off, but school is out all week, so I have time to get back to normal. So far, everyone I know seems okay.
Sounds great, but it's like being constantly behind in your email. Between the blogs, comics, tumblelogs, and news sites I follow, I have progressively gotten more and more behind. I now have ~2000 articles I haven't read. How can keeping up to date on things that interest me feel like a chore?
So I took the raw feed from every high volume site I have in greader (slashdot, kotaku, etc) and wash it through AideRSS. It's a heuristics engine for determining which posts are more valuable, and gives you the option to only subscribe to the top 80%, 50%, or top 20.
I'm still keeping raw Lifehacker, though. For actually directing me to AideRSS, they get a reprieve.
Now I'm forced to.
However, about a month back, I won an Intel Core 2 quad processor while at PAX. I initially didn't plan to use it, since I could use the money, but I haven't been getting the kind of bids I wanted, so I figured I might as well put it to use as long as I'm playing with hardware and operating systems. I went to Fry's and bought the necessary components to support this new processor at a pretty cheap price.
Now, the computer component business has gotten pretty shady. In a lot of ways, you have to be very specific and very watchful of these guys you're getting your components from.
The understanding I have, from people I've met who would know, is that Fry's has a pretty bad problem with employee theft, and I believe it. I once nearly walked out the door until I noticed my receipt had a PS2 game on it I didn't buy. Not only did I not buy this PS2 game, I didn't buy any PS2 game that trip. I did buy a lot of expensive items that trip, though. I'm sure the cashier thought he could slip in an extra 50 buck item in a long list of expensive purchases without noticing, and magically walk home with a new video game.
While I was at Fry's this most recent time, I had to be very specific about the RAM I wanted THREE DIFFERENT TIMES to keep myself from being charged anywhere between 40 to 100 bucks more than I had to pay. They also gave me a video card whose box was opened, and when I mentioned I was getting an opened box without a reduced price, the cashier accused me of opening the box slyly right then. I felt like I entered some black market cyberpunk world, where you have to haggle with the shopkeeper for an hour before he gives up "the good stuff" without swindling you.
It isn't just Fry's. The local vendors are worse. The stores are manned by employees who probably got that job because they're gamers, and they don't make enough to live and maintain an expensive hobby, so they embezzle goods from the company via the customer who isn't paying attention. I'm at the point where I'm going to start buying from no-name online stores because it feels more secure.
Think we're done? Not yet.
I come home to build this machine, which is a straight forward exercise to anyone who's ever played with legos in their life, and that is a very smooth, if not time consuming, process. However, I begin to install XP when it doesn't recognize the SATA hard drive, which is revolting. It will recognize the hard drive just fine during operation, but for whatever ungodly reason, it whines during the install. Long story short, I can't install XP. I'm forced onto Vista, an OS I was considering moving to, but not exactly today. Vista is not the future. It's a whole bunch of chrome added to a ten year old car. I didn't upgrade to it because it had some operational benefit for me, as upgrades should be. I upgraded to it because the install process came with the driver I needed to actually install the thing.
So now I'm finally at an honest-to-god vista desktop, and I'm not terribly interested in customizing my experience. I know there's a period where you "move in" to a new OS install, but I stopped having those urges when I started working at Websense.
I've realized that I really don't care about getting the best performance anymore. I just don't want things to stutter. I don't enjoy pricing and reviewing competing chipsets. I just don't want to get ripped off. I want to be supplied with a working machine with all the things I need installed on it. I can go on from there. I have things to write and products to build. I don't see computers as an end anymore. They only enable other things. I am no longer a computer geek.
- Mood:
aggravated
"It's my choice to be here."
"My life is not a horror movie."
"Focus on one thing."
"I do not have to be mean and defensive to survive."
"Don't suppress the good."
"Remain creative in the face of difficulty."
"Remember childish wonder."
"The status quo does not have to be 'broken'."
"Don't look backward for answers."
"Shepherd yourself."
"Life makes sense when you know where you're going and where you're from."
I'm keeping a better system this semester, and my schedule is the best it's been since I went back to school (though my professors suck!). However, as the pressure mounts and remaining a full time student becomes more difficult, I think I need a list like this of my own.
Profile
- itmightbedave
- David
- Raconteuring
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