This post is about two weeks overdue.
The news – kinda old at this point – is that I’m no longer working at Factset Research Systems and have exchanged working for the finance bean-counting man to working for the social network web startup man. I’ve labored at Factset for 3 1/2 years, so while I certainly didn’t approach the decision lightly, the gravity of the entire ordeal did not dawn on me until the last moments of my old job, in between responsibility transferral and fond farewells. I’m only now starting to realize just how much I left behind.
There’s not much more to say about my previous job; any commentary I make now makes nary a difference and would simply be whining at a scenario I’m powerless to affect.
Forza Motorsport 2 for the XBox 360 came out last week; Microsoft’s answer to Gran Turismo turns out to be a pretty good game, and figuring that I have not played a serious driving sim with a racing wheel, I went out and splurged on a Microsoft-branded wireless racing wheel.
The thing is solidly built: nice faux leather on the wheel, tight clamp to the coffee table glass, and responsive foot pedals and paddle shifters. As with all custom peripherals, though, the biggest obstacle to recreating an arcade (or in this case, a driving) experience is how to feasibly mount the device in front of the TV. Driving wheels are especially a challenge given the need for a sturdy wheel and space for the pedals; we were barely able to get it onto the coffee table, and it required sitting on a lowered “gaming chair”, shifting the table onto its side, and bracing a heavy filing box behind the pedals to keep them from sliding.
Hello.
I spent the past couple of weeks trying to get Windows Vista running on my computer courtesy of Microsoft’s Power Together program. For all the hand-wringing leading up to the release, I actually think it’s a very capable system which does a lot of what users might have wanted in XP (even without them knowing they wanted it). It’s impressive when a lot of utilities simply do not work in Vista (and me being a fan of utility software…) but Microsoft has enough functionality built into the operating system to make them unnecessary.
Apparently I’m only one of few who likes Vista enough to install from scratch and keep it as my only OS; maybe I’m just more sympathetic to the cause being a software engineer myself and relating to some of the pain of dealing with whiny users. It’s kinda interesting: software scales well with usage (e.g., it doesn’t cost much to add users), but badly with complexity (e.g., big programs cost a lot more to develop); applications that can deal with the complexity, as they mature and provide core functionalities users want, evolve into natural monopolies (e.g., Windows, Photoshop, to a lesser extent iTunes); as the user base grows people get whiny and demand a lot more out of future versions of the software, despite the difficulty of getting to first place to begin with.
In the software world, the reward of success lasts but for a fleeting moment, the drudgery of support and maintenance can fill one’s remaining days with despair. I’m not bitter at all.
Once in a while, you get an e-mail sitting in your inbox that looks just like 90% of the spam that infests your virtual mailbox, but sounds interesting enough to open and appreciate the new creative heights spammers climb to entice their victims. Only to find that it’s not really spam, it’s just someone or something you haven’t thought about in a long time.In my case, it’s actually pretty cool – some academic publishing house is letting me know that a paper I wrote two years ago (and I’ve since happily forgotten) for a research project got published in a book as a collection of studies. I don’t even really remember what the project was about, only that I did the graphical and UI part of the test program we wrote.
If you’re interested in the area of computerized document searching (a la Google) and some of the latest research on “the last 10% of search accuracy Google won’t touch” (according to our professor), this might be of interest to you; and if you don’t feel like paying $130 for one of what looks like over 200 volumes of text on fuzzy logic, I found the PDF archived in the bowels of the CS department at Berkeley, for your viewing pleasure.
Not so much for bedtime reading:
We present a framework system for evaluating the effectiveness of various types of “ontologies” to improve information retrieval. We use the system to demonstrate the effectiveness of simple natural language-based ontologies in improving search results and have made provisions for using this framework to test more advanced ontological systems, with the eventual goal of implementing these systems to produce better search results, either in restricted search domains or in a more generalized domain such as the World Wide Web.
Happy reading!
Recently, I was sent by my company into the bowels of Berkeley to collect resumes for our planned internship program. Potential interns, unlike full-time hire and industry candidates, tend to have much less interesting resumes and the same cookie-cutter class experience, which means you tend to spend most of the time selling your company and determining how well they lied on their resume.
Which makes it all the more interesting when you get one of those resumes: more higher-education degrees that can be listed on a page, in 5 or 6 different fields, reading more like a brochure for a university than someone’s personal achievements, asking about what they can do to secure a position meant for third year bachelor’s. It’s also virtually guaranteed that they’ll have a heavy accent and come from either a Chinese or Indian institute of technology or engineering.
