caleb walker

communimacation

A few loosely related things:

• I follow a few friends on Twitter, but I'm thinking about unsubscribing to some of them since recent tweets look a lot like this: "RT @Vandelay @HDoofus @Mulva July 25 #Nothing event at bit.ly/LiNkItY #Whatsit #UmWhatNow." And it's just too much cognitive effort to figure out what's being said. Why not use the 140-character size limit as a challenge? Like the 100-word essays we do in my writing group as an exercise in word choice, in focus, in clarity.
• I got a cell phone last weekend and haven't received any calls yet. I'm not too happy about paying a monthly fee for a digital pocket clock.
• When KR cooks, the dogs like to lay around her feet. I'd think they wanted to catch dropped food, but when she does drop something they're oblivious until she points it out to them. Anyway, they're always in the way when she's cooking and the command she uses is "Get out of the kitchen." Georgia slinks away then, and Kaden stands up, not sure what to do until we push him far enough away. The other morning KR was doing her yoga in the bedroom. This attracts the dogs, too. I was in the office next to the bedroom when I heard her say, "Get out of the kitchen." The results of the experiment were inconclusive; Kaden gave the same slack-jawed stare as when he's actually in the kitchen.

That's about it for now.

eternal september

Eternal September:

[T]he period beginning September 1993. [Eternal September] encapsulate[s] the belief that an endless influx of newbies since that date [when AOL gave its users access to the Internet] has continuously degraded standards of discourse and behavior on Usenet (and the wider Internet).

(via)

cool science on the youtube

My neighbor from down the valley, with whom I ride the bus home from CMU, sent me this very interesting video of a research project being done in my home department. It's a cool implementation of a computer-screen projection with touch-screen capabilities using a Wiimote. I told KR about it and she said, "Is this interesting?" Okay, maybe it's not.

My neighbor noted that a lot of research these days is getting its biggest exposure on YouTube instead of in journals and conferences. He's right. Here's another CMU project, a robotic water strider, and Plushie, an application that... well, look for yourself.

joe's goals

We're all trying to do good things for ourselves and avoid the bad things. Aren't we? But it's awfully easy to forget to take that walk, and hard to know how many days since you last exercised. It's easy to eat the Trader Joe's Organic Ginger Snaps until you're ill, and to have another glass of wine just to finish off the bottle.

Joe's Goals was designed to take care of all that. It is a website where you specify the things you want to do and avoid, then each day you click off the number of times you've done them. Your totals are automatically tallied (positive or negative) and you can get yourself a graph of how you've done.

The resulting table shows your daily totals and reminds you of when the last time was that you partook of a particular activity. I can see, for example, that I last took a walk was 5 days ago.

There are a few ways in which this process makes you a better person. One is that it makes you keep track of what you've done in your day. I can now tell you at any time in my day how many 20-oz bottles of water I've had, or whether I've flossed. By keeping track, I've trained my feeble brain to keep that tally. And with that tally in mind it's surprisingly easy to stop after one bowl of ice cream or after two drinks. I have new-found will-power.

Another unexpected behavior is that I make little deals with myself. "I'll have one of those giant chocolate chip cookies from the coffee cart, but I'll have to blog to offset it."

mouseless mac tip

This I like.

Occasionally I'll be keyboarding around my Mac, and get moderately perturbed that I need to go to the mouse or trackpad to get to the menus or dock. In Windows you do something involving the alt key to get access to the menu bars. When I use Windows I usually hit the alt key when I'm reaching for the command key and end up opening menus willy-nilly. That I don't like.

But, and you could see this coming, it turns out Mac users can get to the menus with the keyboard. (Found this tip at Lifehacker.) Ctrl-F2 gets you into the menus. Ctrl-F3 gets you into the dock. (On my MacBook F2 and F3 are mapped to other things, so I hit Ctrl-Fn-F2 and -F3.) Ctrl-F3 highlights the first item in your dock. Use the arrow keys to pick an icon and to open its menu. Very nice.

memories

Here's how I remember it. My fourth grade teacher loaded four boys into his VW Rabbit and drove us to Pittsburgh to see the Pirates play the Montreal Expos in Three Rivers Stadium. It was 1972. We sat in the top row of seats above left field. We saw Roberto Clemente hit a home run. The Pirates won, 8-0.

Thanks to Retrosheet, I see that, on May 19, 1972, the Pirates won a game against the Expos, 8-0. Clemente hit a double, but not a home run.

On May 17, 1971, in a 6-5 Pirates win, Clemente hit a home run in the 8th inning.

The Pirates won a game against the Expos, 8-2, on September 5, 1971. But Clemente did not play in that game.

Thanks a lot, Retrosheet. So what really happened?

imagechef

Thanks to Michelle, over at A Flying Leap, for linking to ImageChef, where you can put your text on just about anything. Good clean fun.

two ends of the spectrum

Denny sent me a video demo of the Smackbook Pro, a hacked Macbook Pro. I had to replay it a dozen times, I was so overcome by its brilliance.

Then I found a blog post that described a recent Oprah tv special featuring Elie Wiesel, holocost survivor and Nobel Peace Prize laureate. This is how the post began: "I just saw Oprah's special w/Elie Weisel. Mr. Weisel's accent is so cute." I had to read that a dozen or so times too, I was so overcome by... not brilliance.

help wanted

click to enlarge

I'm looking for a way to peek at the usage of my wireless modem since it seems to blink a lot, even when I'm not using it. So, after finding no help at the Netgear website, I tried a web search.

Google thinks I should take on a completely different project.

Anyway, if anyone who knows how to monitor my WIFI USAGE reads this, please leave me a comment.

number one

"Soldier Boy" by The Shirelles was the #1 song on the day I was born.