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.
I’m going to make this short and sweet so I can get back to designing v4; I just found this cool little free app that lets you specify the size and position of a Windows window. Appropriately dubbed Sizer, it allows you specify the exact pixels that you want your windows to appear. If you’re like me and have to work on today’s larger monitors (oh, the pain!) and you spend time getting your windows to just the right size and position to maximize the space that you’ve got, you’ll really appreciate something this simple yet useful.
For as long as there have been programmers seeking monetary compensation for their time and effort coercing a machine to do their bidding, has there been users who look to take the former group’s 0′s and 1′s and claim them as their own. Like conjoined twins, commercial software and piracy tend to pull each other along, not quite able to rip free from the bond that, well, makes this analogy interesting.Remember the days of Intel 386′s? I was first imposed to computing sometime during their rise to popularity, and I distinctly remember all the clever schemes sales and marketing came up with to thwart people from taking a shiny new 5 1/4″ disk and digitally replicating their $200 piece of software; or, in my case, $30 games.