I was gone all last week to an engineering conference held by Factset – hence that ride in Central Park – and came back more appreciative of our trademarked sunny Californian weather and (relatively speaking) friendly highways. The time away from home was pretty good (it was almost like a company-expensed vacation), but the actual business purpose of attending technical discussions and presentations turned out to be, well, not as good.
Engineers get a bad rap for lacking in social and interpersonal skills, which, I’m sad to say, was evident from some of the presentations I had to sit through. I don’t blame them too much, though; I had to stand up there myself and gave a talk on Windows Vista, and it’s tough to keep a crowd of 150, 200 people focused on your talk when you have to compete with wireless internet and engineers’ tendency to zone out 10 in the morning.
You start speeding up, you lose concentration, you forget your lines and your slides, your well-rehearsed jokes and one-liners are forgotten and delivered in the flatest of monotones – that’s what standing up there is like, especially if it’s your first time and imagining the engineers in front of you sans clothing makes you physically sick. Sadly, bad presentations and lectures are the norm at software conferences, so completely messing up only puts you in majority of those who chose to speak on stage.
So, um, bye?
Graduation ceremonies are a fickle thing; you spend a good hour or two sitting through something you are completely uninterested in for around ten seconds of redemption that is “the walk”. It’s a show meant to be for parents, to show that their financial support and patience the last 4+ years actually amounted to some level of accomplishment, and what better way to cap the end of a hard-earned, intense, four-year run through an undergraduate degree than a long and superficial show?I had the honor of attending Sui’s graduation from the MCB major at Berkeley this last Friday, and – forgive me for being so condescending here – it was essentially what I described above, having to trade a few hours of boredom and discomfort for the few seconds when it really mattered: when Sui was striding across the stage in her black robe and square hat looking very much like the girl who took everything Berkeley threw at her and made slimy biological goo out of it. It was a proud moment for me, her, her parents and family, as well as her friends that drove over from UC Davis; so closes an early chapter of her life with another one following right along.
Heading out to company headquarters always feels like a vacation in itself: Factset’s generous meal allowances, hotel arrangements, and proximity to NYC almost makes up for the crappy weather, time away from home, and terrible, terrible jet lag.
So I’m out here for a conference this week, and naturally the weekends are spent in the big city next door: travelling to the city, travelling in the city, walking from landmark A to B, then finally travelling out of the city. For every minute that you’re experiencing something interesting or extraordinary, chances are you spent 10 minutes getting there. The less cynical would point out that the commute is in itself an experience, which may be true in the rarest of cases and such occurences would deserve to be documented in some form of writing to be savored by future generations.
On a completely unrelated note, I had an awesome bike ride through Central Park. Bay-Area-like weather, well designed bike paths, myriads of people, and a storm of spring pollen made it probably the best ride I’ve ever had on a bike. Central Park is probably the best designed inner city park in the world sporting the world’s most expensive maintenance bill, so it comes as no surprise that a trip through it is exhilarating and refreshing.
But don’t rent bikes from those guys in the park; they’re ripoffs and will make you sore the day after from their award-winning anti-ergonomic design, a.k.a. cheap and crappy. Next time I come here, I’m packing my own bike.
Last weekend, Sui and I had a chance to take a tour of the facilities of world famous (kinda) Scharffenberger at Berkeley, one of America’s leading makers of concentrated, dark chocolate. That is, they hold daily tours of the factory (), where they teach you about how chocolate gets made, let you sample some of their trademark mixes, and gawk at some of the machinery that make the magic happen, concluded by a thorough walkthrough of the gift shop.
To give some credit, though, it’s cool that they took the time to organize free tours. be “the only chocolate factory in America that lets you take as many pictures as you want”, and set up a classroom to teach people how their chocolate is made. I guess I was a bit underwhelmed by the actual tour – machines weren’t moving and there was not much to see for those that did, the facilities weren’t as big as I had hoped, and they could have been more interactive than “here’s that thing that I talked about in the beginning of your tour which you have already forgotten the name of: ta-da!”.
Since uploading this site late, late Monday evening/early Tuesday morning, I’ve spent the past few days enhancing various parts of the site, mostly navigation and cleaning up a rather bare-bone interface. One of the things my friend convinced me to do was move all my old posts over here, which I had previously scrapped but turned out to be fairly simple (an hour’s worth of time writing a PHP script to migrate database entries, basically). Yay for suggestions; I actually keep a “to do” list now of all the self-inflicted and suggested improvements.
And I do it on a portal homepage called Netvibes. Based in France, these guys are a Web 2.0 startup who had the best portal product out at the time I was looking (maybe 4 or 5 months back) and kept on improving it, even as juggernauts like Microsoft’s Live.com and Google’s Personalized Homepage moved into the same space quickly with their free offerings.
For those not familiar with Web 2.0 portals, they’re basically customized homepages that hold a collection of RSS feeds, useful widgets such as weather, stock tickers and to do lists, as well as integration with other Web 2.0 products such as picture-sharing sites (e.g. Flickr and online storage spaces, I use box.net) all unified onto a single page. If you’ve never used one before and you were like me – having 20-30 bookmarks that you manually visit every morning – portal pages are a great time saver.
It’s been a while in coming – for me at least – but essentially months of planning, research, study, design and coding have resulted in this framework from which you are reading these words. This is probably the longest time I’ve spent getting my homepage revised from scratch, but I’ve also tried a lot of new things this time around.
So the biggest motivation this time actually stemmed from some of the issues I had moving from my old host 8-95.com to my new host Site5. If you’ve even glanced at the v3 stub that I had running on the new host, chances were that it crumbled into virtual HTML dust whenever you tried something like submitting a comment or, god forbid, look for the missing Pictures pages. I also figured I’d take a stab at all this fancy AJAX and spend a bit of time learning more advanced Javascript techniques, as oxymoronic as that might sound. A fair amount of time was spent appeasing the perfectionist in me, who demanded exotic experiments such as checking whether 5 pixel margins or 8 pixel margins would look better.
Take a look around; there isn’t much in terms of major content, but I tried to add small things here and there to make the site more navigational, user-friendly, and look less plain (at least, compared to my previous offerings). I’m going to deprecate and stop updating v3, although I’ll keep the site around () and I’ll integrate searching into those entries.
Oh yea, and don’t forget to leave a tip on your way out. Or a comment, I accept either.