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Posts from — April 2006
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From the tome of “Arrested Development references I didn’t get”…
There’s a brief scene where the hook on Buster’s arm comes off when he’s listening to Mr. Roboto in the car, which is an allusion to Tony Hale’s VW commercial with the same song. The two can be viewed together here.
I’ve been watching a lot of the older episodes lately and keep finding more stuff, including some more foreshadowing of Buster losing his hand. Wikipedia has pretty comprehensive coverage of the more obscure jokes (there’s an entry for every episode).
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I just emailed a guy from Sweden who was asking when Runstoppable will work in his country. That’s pretty exciting.
In other news, I’ve been working with some other intenrs on “GInterns Planet”, a site modeled after planet.mozilla.org. Basically it’s just an aggregation of blogs from people who have something in common. Anyway, we were talking about design, and I came up with something that I think is pretty neat:
Taking the RSS feed icon…
… and combining it with the google balls logo …
to form this:
This is just a draft, but I think the idea is pretty good. I’ll be posting more about this later, I think.
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So, I’ve been keeping my schedule on Google Calendar. It has supplanted my planbook since I generally bring my lapotop everywhere I go and almost always have wireless access. The interface and sharing are really well done, too. My calendar is public, it’s mrcasey@gmail.com if you want it.
Anyway, I had an idea today: a program that looks at my calendar and figures out when I need to wake up and sets an alarm for the correct time (playing an MP3 or two). For students whose wakeup times change from day to day depending on class schedule, this would be really useful.
Patent not pending, feel free to implement it if you want.
It’s back!
Time to get back to riddles!
I still haven’t figured out an answer to the bank robber’s one that I can defend, though I can’t disprove Jack’s answer, so he may very well be correct. I haven’t had enough time to think about that one.
Anyway, here’s the new one… a neat variation on a common riddle:
Four people are sitting, one in front of the other.
The first guy is wearing a red hat. The second is wearing a blue hat. The third is wearing a red hat. The fourth, the last one in the back, is wearing a blue hat and has a blindfold covering his eyes.
They are told that there are two red hats and two blue hats, and that everyone is wearing a hat. First to figure out correctly which hat he is wearing, wins the prize. No turning around, no discussing.
After a period of complete silence, one of them guesses correctly and wins. Who was it?
Note: Assume that when someone guesses what color hat they have, they announce it and everyone is made aware that the game is over.
Reminder: <font color=”white”> spoilers </font>
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I got my plane tickets today… I’m leaving from Allentown at 6am on Monday May 15. The itinerary is pretty long… Allentown -> Detroit -> Houston -> San Jose. I’ll be in San Jose by 2PM (PST), which should give me plenty of time to get into my apartment and prepare to start work the next day.
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Interesting note about search engines:
“And speaking of putting a dash in URLs, hyphens are often better than underscores. african-elephants.html is seen as two words: “African” and “elephants”. african_elephants is seen as one word: african_elephant. It’s doubtful many people will be searching for that.”
(from Matt Cutts, sorta)
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I got my housing arrangements for the summer figured out today. I’ll be living 2.2 miles from Google in an apartment complex. I’m living in a 2BR with two other interns. They will be taking twin beds in the other bedroom, and I will have one to myself (I’m paying 3/8 rent and will be the only one with a car). Now that I have a place figured out, I can make plans (transport, car shipping, etc).
I can’t get my filtered hashing classifier (for my thesis) to work. This is a big problem since I need to have my thesis done by the end of the week. I don’t expect to leave Packard for a long time tonight, but hopefully I’ll have it working once I leave. If not, that’s really bad and rather demoralizing since it’s just 800 lines of code.
I’m doing a presentation on the Google Maps API on Thursday (4PM, Lewis Lab 270). It should be pretty good. I worked on the slides over the weekend and I’ll do the code walkthroughs tomorrow night. I’m hoping people will bring laptops so that they can tweak the code examples and experiment during the presentation. Ideally it’ll be a mix between a presentation and a workshop.
It sure would be nice if I could leave here by 2am.
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From a NYT article several months ago:
The familiar pattern of a decade ago begs the question that Bill Gates was asked when he met last month with a group of executives and journalists from The New York Times: Will you do to Google what you did to Netscape?
Mr. Gates, the Microsoft co-founder and chairman, paused, looked down at his folded hands and smiled broadly, as if enjoying a private joke. “Nah,” he replied, “we’ll do something different.”
I guess what I’m left wondering is: do all companies think this way and some don’t admit it, or is this exceptional? I sure hope this isn’t the norm. Maybe that’s just how things are at the top of big companies.
On the plus side, Ray Ozzie (Microsoft CTO) “speaks of a thriving ‘ecosystem’ of open competition in which developers and customers have many choices and in which Microsoft’s future is not in crushing rivals but in becoming an attractive choice.”. Hopefully that’s the case.