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Photo of the Week #1
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It’s been suggested to me that I try to do the ‘Photo-A-Day’ thing, since I got a fancy new camera, etc. Well, I’m not going to. Trying to do it daily would be difficult for me, given that most days I’m either at work, at home, or traveling in-between (and taking a lot of pictures at work is not a good idea). I’ve decided to compromise on the project though, and try to take and post a photo every week. My reason for doing the photo-a-week thing, is to make sure I get out and take more pictures, working under the theory that it will make me a better photographer. With that said, I’m going to warn you that I don’t plan to have an exact schedule for the photos, so they may not show up on the same day every week.
I’ve created an album for these photos.
I started this week by walking around the area I live. The picture below is of ‘Monroe Park’, just over Adobe Creek from my apartment building. While I was there, I saw a man playing frisbee with his dog, while talking to the dog in Russian–that’s something that you don’t often see/hear back home.
Bridge School Benefit
This was supposed to be a different post, but the quality of yesterday’s concert has preempted it.
Yesterday was the Bridge School Benefit concert. What a show. The lineup included Neil Young, Death Cab for Cutie, Foo Fighters, Trent Reznor, Brian Wilson, Pearl Jam & Dave Matthews Band. It was all acoustic, and quite fantastic.
It’s the 20th annual benefit concert in aid of the Bridge School, a non-profit organization to help the education of individuals with severe speech and physical impairments.
Everyone played for around a half hour, all with current and past students behind them on stage (some of whom have graduated from universities, etc.). Neil Young came out and played a song or two with most (if not all… it was a long day, I can’t be expected to remember every last detail) the other acts.
I’m not going to try to describe all the acts, but I will say that Brian Wilson was the sleeper hit in the bunch. I didn’t expect a whole lot, but he was terrific–playing Beach Boys classics. That’s all I’m going to say, but if you’re in the Bay Area some fall, check out the concert. Otherwise, they’re releasing a bunch of songs from past concerts on iTunes November 14th, they should be pretty good.
Who is Ken Jennings?
A few weeks ago, Ken Jennings (of Jeopardy! fame–74 straight wins) came to visit Google. He was doing the tour for his new book “Brainiac: Adventures in the Curious, Competitive, Compulsive World of Trivia Buffs”. I managed to get myself a copy of the book, and stuck around long enough after his talk to get my copy signed.
I recently finished reading the book, and I highly recommend it. It’s a nice, easy and entertaining read. He tells the story of how he got interested in trivia, his time on Jeopardy!, but also some of the history of trivia itself, the people who white trivia books, contestants, etc. Ken’s own story is actually not the main story in the book, this is not an autobiography in any sense. It’s not a trivia book, but a book about trivia, with pieces of his own story peppered throughout. Every chapter also has trivia questions embedded in it, with answers at the end–which is good, because I didn’t know many of the answers.
Go ahead, try this at home
On October 5th, Google Code Search was unleashed upon the world. People have found many uses for it so far, like finding things that people don’t want found, or finding other security bugs. Now, some people have been known to find some entertainment or humour in off searches (I wouldn’t know anything about that). So, in that vein, what would make good code searches?
I thought to search for common comments that developers might use to warn people of ugly, hackish, or otherwise complicated but working code.
- “professional driver” “closed course”
One of my favorites, but only 5 hits. - “don’t try this at home” / “do not try this at home”
About 100, and 20 respectively; who’d have thought that programmers would prefer the slightly shorter one? - “trained professional”
Again about 100 hits. - (here)?\ t?here\ be\ dragons\ (here)?
Only 50 hits for this one–but, like the the ‘professional driver’ one, it has more colour and I like it. - “do as I say, not as I do”
It shows 19 hits, but a quick check shows that most of them look like they’re just quotes.
I can’t think of any other good ones right now, add a comment if you come up with any.
My New Toy
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I recently bought myself a digital camera, a Canon Digital Rebel XTi (called the EOS 400D outside North America, except in Japan where it’s the Kiss Digital X). It’s a 10.1 MP digital SLR, that can shoot 3 frames per second. I wanted to learn photography for a while, so I finally broke down and made the big purchase. I’ve been reading a few photography sites online (mostly Ken Rockwell’s), and plan to take a course here sometime soon. Until then I just have to get out and take some pictures when I can. The first three (currently only) pictures in the linked album are a few I took in Marin county the first weekend I had the camera.
Currently I have the camera (with the kit 18-55mm lens), 2G compact flash card, bag, extra battery, tripod, and UV filter. (The filter that came with my ’starter kit’ was uncoated, so I picked up a new multi-coated one–hopefully to cut down on the reflections and lens flare.) Eventually I plan on getting another lens (something with a wide aperture and around 28-30mm, which should work out to be the “standard” 50mm lens), and maybe a proper flash. But taking a class and reading a few books comes first–I’ll learn how to use what I have before I buy more stuff.
The camera has also led to me submitting a patch to UFRaw, a program and Gimp plugin for manipulating RAW files. The current CVS version now has the white balance presets for the Rebel XTi.
Machines are Spiritual?
I recently finished reading ‘The Age of Spiritual Machines’ by Ray Kurzweil. I had been meaning to read it (or really any of his books) for a while, and after I saw him give a public lecture at Stanford back in mid-May, I ordered the book.
It was an interesting read, and nobody’s ever going to claim that the man doesn’t have some wacky ideas. But he also has a really impressive track record for technology predictions, one can already see some of the predictions he made in this book coming true (it was first published in ’99).
He starts off by explaining the law of accelerating returns, which is the same way the Stanford talk started. Essentially he says that the rate of paradigm changes in technology (and human evolution, which he sees technology as an extension of) is increasing at an exponential rate. Wikipedia covers this pretty well, so I won’t bother to repeat it all here (plus they have the graphs).
I like the style he used whereby at the end of all of his chapters, there’s a “conversation” between him and somebody else who’s reading along. It serves the purpose of answering common questions and clarifying things. Near the end of the book, when he starts making predictions, the conversations take place across time, ie. to this person living 10 or 20 years in the future. As a side-note, I liked Orson Scott Card’s use of a similar technique in the Ender’s Game series.
Now, the downside–I found it to be a really slow read, I wasn’t really motivated to pick it up night after night, and rarely did I push to read more than a single chapter at a time (I usually didn’t finish a single chapter in a sitting). In it’s defense, the first part of the book is really information-heavy; not quite to the level of a text book, but getting pretty close. The exception to this is near the end where it really picks up and gets faster and more engaging when he starts making more predictions and the conversations mentioned above take up larger portions of the chapters.
So, do I recommend that you go out and read this book? I’m going to go with a non-committal ‘maybe’. For anybody interested in things like AI, nanotechnology, etc. I’d suggest reading it. That being said, hearing him in person was better, but I’d like to hear him debate a lot of these things with somebody more pessimistic.
More Concert Happenings
I saw another concert this past weekend. This time it was John Mayer and Sheryl Crow. Once again at Shoreline Amphitheatre, and once again to a pretty packed crowd.
Although I don’t claim to be a huge fan of either of these artists (not like Dave Matthews Band and Counting Crows), I rather enjoyed the show. Marjorie Fair was the opening act, who I can honestly say did nothing for me. It wasn’t bad, but I won’t be rushing out to purchase anything. Sheryl Crow went on next; most of the songs she played were her hits, so it was all things I had heard at some point before. Mayer, on the other hand, prefered songs off his new album, so a lot of it was previously unheard by me (and I suspect to a sizable portion of the audience, given that it’s only been out three weeks). I would have liked to hear more of the older stuff, but I can’t really blame him for pushing his new album.
As a side note, I got an actual seat for this concert instead of the lawn (bought the ticket from somebody who couldn’t make it, below cost). I was sitting in the last row, and not in the centre section. Honestly, I think that unless I’m going to shell out for the lower section sometime, the lawn seats are probably better. I know when we sat on the lawn, we had a better view, the same sound, and a cheaper price. The only real benefit to having a ticket is that the quality of your seat doesn’t depend on when you show up (it’s when you buy your ticket, and how much you’re willing to spend).
Posting Frequency
I know my posting frequency has dropped off a lot recently. (You can stop reminding me)
I’m going to make an attempt to change that, and get back to my original goal for this year of writing approximately one post per week. So, I’m taking a page from Angus’s book and have put my posting statistics on the sidebar. I did this with a custom Wordpress plugin, that I will post publicly as soon as I clean it up a bit.
Hopefully with the numbers out there for the world to see, I’ll be a little more motivated to make them go up a bit. As a side note, I’m not going to try to get the frequency up to one per week for this past year (as I’d have to write between two and three posts per week until new year’s to make that happen, and I’d rather write longer posts with some content in them).
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