Whose Parrot Had Learned

Classic David Sedaris:

Once, at a dinner party, I met a woman whose parrot had learned to imitate the automatic icemaker on her new refrigerator. "That's what happens when they're left alone," she'd said. It was the most depressing bit of information I'd heard in quite a while, and it stuck with me for weeks. Here was this creature, born to mock its jungle neighbors, and it wound up doing impressions of man-made kitchen appliances.

-From "Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim" by David Sedaris in his essay Repeat After Me

Row Limit You Ask?

As much as I love Excel 2007 (finally an easy way to save your graphs into templates!), I cannot believe they still enforce a row limit. A "row limit" you ask? Surely not, I mean, it is after all 2007--the years of mandating artificial limits of data sizes are long over, no? Unfortunately not. Excel 2007, row limit=1,048,576.

Um, why?

I'd like to think it's because Excel's dev lead programmed int [] rows = new int[1048576] at the top of the Excel document model.

MyExperience Website

I finally updated the MyExperience website such that it now actually has real content. Although the MyExperience source code has been available for quite a while now at http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/myexperience, the website http://myexperience.sourceforge.net was mainly a skeleton page with broken links. This has been fixed :)

Note that the SVN activity log on the leftside of the webpage is actually live. I wrote a php script to dump the two most recent commits to the frontpage.

Update 10/02/2007: I was alerted to the fact that http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/myexperience was a broken link before. I had accidentally left out the "projects" part. Now fixed.

Last Day at Microsoft Research

Art Through Technology

Any guesses as to what this is?

Happy Birthday Wishes From My Niece

My niece is nearly two years old and left this adorable happy birthday message on my voicemail yesterday. Note that the woman who is prompting the "happy birthday" from my niece is my sister--do not confuse the two voices :). I used a myexperience script to record the voicemail audio on a Windows Mobile device.

Click here to play the audio yourself.

No GetAltitude Functionality in MapPoint

Unfortunately neither Microsoft MapPoint, Microsoft Virtual Earth, nor Google Earth have GetAltitude(lat, long) functionality. That is, you cannot retrieve elevation data given a lat/long pair. However, NASA, the US Department of the Interior, and the US Geological Survey provide a tremendous amount of geographical/topographical data on the United States and its territories (including elevation) at this website.

For a more direct link to this data:

1. Open this website: http://seamless.usgs.gov/
2. Click on the View and Download United States Data (click on the map of North America in the upper right part of the webpage)
3. This opens the Seamless Data Distribution Viewer. You can zoom in/out and select what features to download by drawing a bounding box over your desired region. There is a 1.5 gigabyte limit per selection. On the right side of the application, you can change what attributes the viewer is displaying.

Here's a screenshot of their tool.

I Said, "No Negative Values"

I selected "Logarithmic scale" on an Excel 2007 graph that contained negative data points (which I didn't realize until it was too late). I was told in a not-so-subtle manner that this is a bad thing. Needless to say, I was graphing about 12,000 data points--only about 500 of which were negative. I would guess that this is also the number of error dialogs that popped up.

Should I select the "Was this information helpful?" link? Microsoft certainly seems to think so. I guess they're not really following the adage: less is more.

I'm going to start clicking OK on these babies--probably be done in about an hour.

Charts that Flow

BoingBoing has been linking to lots of flowcharts recently, see Criteria for proper tactical usage of phrase "Oh, Snap!" and Medieval sexual decisionmaking for penitentials . My favorite, however, is this one from Toothpaste for Dinner: the Panflute flowchart. Comedic genius.

T. Scott Bachelor Party

T. Scott celebrated his last days of bachelorhood by playing his two favorite games: golf and Dartmouth-style beer pong.

Susumu and Sam: a formidable team

Oh yeah, I'm rockin' the dub shirt.

Kayur and J-Lest had skills but the King (background) could not be stopped. Tonight, even LeBron would be proud.

Susumu harnesses his years of martial arts training to direct the ball into the opponent's cup.

Sam and Susumu battle for a top seed.

The championship round: Bridges and Toomim vs. T. Scott and Carlson.

Berkeley and Pitt go down early vs. G. Tech and Dartmouth

Scott finesses the ball and hears some sage advice from the seasoned Dartmouth veteran, "if you're going to miss, miss long."

Feel the intensity.

Feel the 9% alcohol by volume beer.

The king would not be denied.

Winners.

Undefeated blue-ribbon champions.

North Cascades National Park

08/10/2007 Heather and Maple Pass


08/11/2007 Cascade Pass

Subway Cheese Tessellation

(click here to see fullsize).

Puerto Rico Eco Tour

My girlfriend and I arrived in Puerto Rico a few days before MobiSys 2007 started. One of the things we did was go on an "EcoTour" in the middle of Puerto Rico--somewhere south of the Arecibo Observatory. It was absolutely fantastic. The tour included hiking through rain forest, spelunking in a cavern, hiking/swimming along a river, vine swinging across water, repelling down a cliff and zip lining. We were also fed an authentic Puerto Rican home cooked meal for lunch. What really topped it off, however, was our two guides Jaime and Jorge--they were incredibly fun, informative, and helpful. The tour company is called Acampa Nature Adventure Tours and the tour we went on: Organic Tanama River and Cave Adventure.

Here's a video I threw together of our adventure:

MyExperience Poster for NPUC

I've been meaning to make a MyExperience poster for a while now; NPUC 2007 was a good forcing function.


From my publications page:
Froehlich, J., Chen, M., Consolvo, S., Harrison, B., & Landay, J. (2007) "Sensors and Surveys: Collecting Qualitative and Quantitative Data on Human Attitudes, Behaviors, and Activities via Mobile Phones" New Paradigms in Using Computers (NPUC), The Healthcare Interface, July 9th, 2007 IBM Almaden, California
[extended abstract pdf (0.23 MB)]
[poster ppt (4.32 MB)]
[poster pdf (11.6 MB)]

UbiFit in Press

I know Intel Research Seattle has been fairy reluctant in giving open public demos of their work of the UbiFit project, but here's a recent write-up in news. Note that UbiFit is built on top of the MyExperience tool, a project that I started and worked on while at Intel Research. MyExperience is now open sourced under the BSD at http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/myexperience.

Gnarls Barkley Crazy

Wow, this is just awesome musicianship. I used a Theremin at UCI--Crista Lopes has one in her office. It's not easy to produce such sound (it requires, like all instruments, practice and skill).

Walker Week 2007 - Nature Photos

Sunrise over Whitefish lake

A Great Blue Heron perched on a tree

Sunrise over Clamshell lake

Sunset over Whitefish on a calm summer evening

Purple wildflower from my kayak trip

This photo and the next few contain pictures of Monarch caterpillars