Posts from — March 2007

I hate April Fools Day on the internet. I keep reading blog posts, forgetting what day it is, and reacting in amazement or anger for a while until I realize what happened.

It’s also annoying when actual products get released on April 1… for example, Gmail was released on April 1, 2004, and it doubled its storage limit exactly one year later.

Granted, there have been some really funny jokes online for 4/1, but there are so many bad ones that it just isn’t worth it, I think.

I’ve been using last.fm to keep a log of all the music I listen to for a while. It generates some cool lists so I can analyze what my favorite artists are and stuff, which is nice. You can see my user page here, if you’re curious. It doesn’t reflect my current musical interests since I had taken a moderate hiatus from the site, but I digress.

I realized that I could do some cool stuff with access to this data. For example, I’d like to see a graph showing my listening to different artists over time. If I had the data, I could do this, but I can’t seem to find a way to get it. They have an API that can give me recent data or top *, but there’s no way for me to wholesale download the data that I gave them.

This is really frustrating, and locks me into their service, because it’s the only one that has two years of my data. Lame.

Here are some other web apps that I use that lock me in:
- Google Reader doesn’t give me access to the data behind my reading trends. My reading list is exportable, though, and that’s far more important.
- Yahoo Mail charges extra for POP3 access, which is what you’d use to export your mail. They have an API for mail now, but the limits prevent a wholesale export, as far as I know.
- Google Talk chat history doesn’t seem to be downloadable yet.
- Probably more that I can’t think of right now.. what am I forgetting?

Matt Cutts wrote a good collection of methods for exporting your data from Google apps a little while ago.

Livejournal lets me download all my data, which is cool… maybe I’ll download it and do something cool with it sometime.

I hadn’t seen this before… apparently when you search for directions from one continent to another in google maps:

In case you didn’t see it… the most awkward 4 minutes on television, featuring Karl Rove dancing

If you read this journal regularly, but don’t contribute to your own, you should think about changing that. Narcissism is meant to be shared. Stalking is not a one-way street.

Time for some old-school “updating”.

I’m not sure when I last wrote a general-purpose update, but I’ll just include some highlights from the last month.

- Jon Howard, who was also an intern last summer, came up and visited for the week of the GDC. This was when I had first moved into the apartment, so it was good to have someone else around. I got a lot of buying done and we made it to SF one weekend, which I hadn’t done yet. Definitely a good visit! (he’s starting to update his lj now, too.. )

- Steve Rittler was in the area for a conference, so he stopped by Google for a quick tour and lunch, which was fun. He has proof he was there

- I went golfing yesterday, for something like the first time in a decade. It was our offsite trip for google book search, and it was pretty fun. We got into groups of four and played a best-ball tournament, 18 holes. Most of the people there had never played golf before. I played reasonably well, especially with some good putts. We eventually retired to a billiards hall for pool, beer, and dinner, giving me a chance to prove that my golf skills were a rough approximation of my pool skills.

– Girts and I are still in the process of assembling the apartment. He set up his Wii, which I’ve played a bit. Mattress should be arriving soon, I hope. It’s been a while since I’ve slept in a bed.

- Work’s been ok.. between the offsites this week and being sick late last week, I haven’t got as much done lately as I wanted to. Today I finally got some momentum, so I’m hoping to keep that up tomorrow.

First of all, I hate that this post is tagged “politics”, but it is, because that’s the state of affairs. This post is a bit longer than usual, but hopefully you’ll read it, because it’s important stuff.

Since I’ve been back in CA, I’ve been seeing and hearing more about energy, especially since it’s such a big issue for Google. Today was alternative transportation day (at google), so I walked to work instead of driving. I’ll probably walk again tomorrow and then get a bike this weekend so I can switch to that.

Several weeks ago, I was able to attend a presentation at work by a researcher at Berkeley. He does work in the energy field, and his presentation covered a wide variety of topics, ranging from energy efficiency to technical descriptions of how possible future fuels would work. It was an amazing presentation, and several points he made have left a big impression upon me. Unfortunately the presentation isn’t publicly available right now, so I’ll do my best to share what I took out of it.

The first was the most concise explanation of how scientists attribute climate change to human activity. He showed one graph: a model of world temperatures over time. This does vary not just on cycles, but also natural events like volcanoes can have a very large effect. This model does not take human activities into account. He then overlays the actual temperature on top of the model. The model tracks well with the real temperatures until the end of last century, at which time the model does not see the same increase. He then shows a model that takes both natural and man-made effects into account, and, as you probably figured out, it tracked much more closely with the upswing. If you don’t buy the whole argument… what evidence would sell it for you?

Yes, climate is cyclical, but that doesn’t mean that /all/ changes are.

Moving along a bit, he talked about energy efficiency. Many people (and important industries) believe that energy efficiency and cost-effectiveness are perpetually at odds, but with good engineering this isn’t the case. His illustration of this was the refrigerator industry. He showed three curves:
- Average energy use
- Average cubic feet
- Average price
all plotted over several decades of the last century. As regulations loomed, manufacturers put in effort on efficiency and brought about a huge decrease in energy usage. At the same time, the average price DECREASED! In fact, those two curves correlate pretty well in this example. Meanwhile, instead of getting smaller, square feet actually increased during this time. More space, less energy, for less money. What brought this about? Government regulation. There’s a clear inflection where the regulation went into effect (well, just before it). I wish I had the actual graph, it was beautiful.

Hopefully the political system will catch up with the private sector on this issue. Well, some of the private sector. There’s a lot of work to do, and the results will be really good. Then again, if the Chinese continue to industrialize but don’t learn from any of our mistakes, we’re all in for a really rough ride.

As an aside…
So, when Dick Cheney leaves office, what global cause is he going to take on?

Jon Stewart’s interview with John Bolton is worth watching. What struck me most was not the content of the discussion itself, but it was just that there were two people talking calmly and disagreeing about most things. Compare that to most “real” news shows on cable, where they either:
- Have guests they already agree with
- Invite on disagreeing guests literally in order to yell at/lecture them for the crowd
- Talk about stories of little importance, like missing teens or celebrity news.
I had a good O’Reilly clip that demonstrated the difference well, but I don’t have the link, and it was so disheartening to watch that I don’t really want to find it again.

The daily show followup to the interview was pretty funny.

This welcome mat (“mat” is tonight’s theme, apparently) reads either “Come in” or “Go away” depending on which way you’re walking.

(via boingboing, of course!)

The store also sells a villain chair for aspiring british villains.

I was buying a chair at OfficeMax tonight, which I had them assemble since it was free. The conversation at the counter:

Me: Hi, I’d like to pick up a chair.
OM: Sure, what’s your name?
Me: Matt
OM: OK, one moment.
(gets chair)
OM: Alright, would you like a chair mat?

I then stood frozen for a moment, since I misunderstood this as “would you like a chair, Matt?”. Was he going to make me plead for it or something? Why would he play games like this? I said “excuse me” (the “I didn’t hear you” kind, not the “how dare you” kind) and had him repeat himself to stall for time, and luckily I figured it out after that. Otherwise I would have been stuck.