Posts from — June 2007

Selected pictures from the last couple of weeks (travels from CA to CT to MA to PA and back).

Taking the train over to SFO, I couldn’t help but take a picture of the “no angry unibrows” sign:

Fog rolling over SF as I was leaving SFO:

A revenge photo of my grandmother at my sister’s graduation party:

My cousin with some guy from brazil:

Looking down the street in Kendall Square (Cambridge, MA):

The edge of MIT’s campus, that’s the Gates building on the left… I went to the bathroom there once (great story)

On to LU…

I think I’m making this incredulous expression most of the time:

Some google photos to follow…

Bruce Schneier: Portrait of the Modern Terrorist as an Idiot

This seems like a nonsense phrase to me:
“I literally can’t wait!”

Putting “literally” before a metaphor should make it literally mean the words following it. Instead, uses like this use ‘literally’ to amplify the metaphor. This is like “change is literally sweeping the nation”… if that were true, it could probably clean up all those cigarette butts that smokers leave on the ground..

Presidential Candidates talk about torture, mixed with appropriate monty python clips:

I’m not sure which is more absurd.

My favorite quote goes to Mitt Romney:
“Enhanced interrogation techniques have to be used; not torture: enhanced interrogation techniques”

I wonder what it’s enhanced by! If I knew, I couldn’t post it, because the terrorists reading my blog would “adjust” and it wouldn’t work. Sorta like antibiotics, if you think about it…

So, apparently AT&T (the company that gave your phone records to the NSA without being asked twice) is working on hunting down its own users for copyright violation since they want to sell video in the future, and decided that was worth more than their current customers. I’m not an AT&T broadband customer, so I don’t care that much, but I think it demonstrates a good point. AT&T has already shown that it will sell you out to the NSA, RIAA, and MPAA (all without subpoena) if it feels like it, but Google’s apparently the one with the privacy problem (not linking to the original report, since it’s deplorably bad). There’s a good chance your ISP has your search history, entire web history, billing info, name, address. If they’re anything like AT&T, you might as well consider it all public.

At work, I use a gmail-like interface for my email. Since my duties at were were becoming more varied than when I was an intern, my ad-hoc method of dealing with email started to break down. Noticing this (a few months ago), I decided to read a bunch of descriptions of how people (inside and outside google) handle their mail.

Here’s how I do mine:
- Any mailing list I don’t need to read daily gets filtered and labeled (skipping the inbox). The only list I don’t filter is the one for the OCR team.
- There is often one label for several lists, grouped by my relationship with them. For example, I have a ‘lurking’ label that has mail from an internal Google Maps API list, Google Gears list, and some other projects I just like to keep tabs on from time to time. Having too many labels would make the label list require scrolling.
- Unread means I haven’t read it! This sounds obvious, but I used to mark things as unread that were on my “to do” list.
- My inbox is “what’s on my table”, at least as far as email. This means it’s the union of conversations that I need to reply to, conversations I’m waiting for a reply, or other pending matters. Any resolved matters are archived.
- Any email that is awaiting a response from me (reply or other followup) is starred.
- Emails that are addressed to me or CC’d to me are starred automatically in the inbox.

The last part I didn’t see in any of the articles I read, but I’ve found it useful. Emails sent or CC’d to me should by default merit a response, or at least the decision that they don’t need one does require reading them anyway, so unstarring them just takes a press of the S key.

Oh yeah, this system works a lot better if you know gmail’s keyboard shortcuts, especially with the extended shortcuts from the greasemonkey script.

I’m too tired to write much write here, but there’s a lot of catching up to do. I’m back from a week-long trip to CT/MA/PA, which was quite fun. After 6 flights, I’m done with flying for a while. Though I only took one day off, I have monumental amounts of work to get done in the next few weeks, but I’m also refreshed after the trip and excited to get it done.

More posts to follow this week, hopefully.