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Ah, isn’t it great when you get finished with a nice productive day of work and are rewarded with a few days to do whatever the heck you want? I love these long summer weekends.

Speaking of summer, it is, in fact, the first day of summer (woo!) – the summer solstice, and the longest day of the year. I actually almost woke up at 5:47am this morning just to watch the sunrise from the top of my building, but my awesome Ikea bed was way too comfortable. Sunset is at 8:34pm, making the day a good 14 hours and 47 minutes long. Sweet.

It’s also unnaturally hot here in the bay area – I can only imagine what it’s like further inland (sorry people from the central valley, I hope you have pools). It was 93 degrees here today, and it still feels like it. I went to the gym at lunch and worked up a sweat, and then stopped at the car wash just to feel the spray from the high pressure nozzle! Then after work I scrubbed my bathtub, cleaned my sink, and took a cold shower, just to cool down.

I’m not sure why I enjoy cleaning and organizing things, but I won’t question it too much, since I think it’s a good thing. It’s got to be something about being physically productive after spending all day being virtually productive. I mean, you can program all day and all you might have is something that goes a little bit faster than before, but scrub a grimy bathtub and man you can tell the difference! It feels good to get something real done in-between lines of code.

Aaaaand I’ll leave you with that thought. Besides cleaning bathtubs, what are y’all doing to beat the heat this summer?

This is not HDR in the traditional sense. Any guess what I did to it?

My girlfriend discovered the most amazing thing last month in a tree right outside her apartment window—it was a hummingbird nest! Not something you get to see every day when you step out your door, but she did for over a month! It all started with the mommy hummingbird just sitting in her nest incubating eggs…

The mother hummingbird sitting in her nest. 2/1/07

Keep reading for over a dozen pictures, including one of a baby hummingbird learning how to fly. It’s priceless, don’t miss out on this one.

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I just discovered another wonderful Internet Explorer bug—it didn’t understand how to download mod_deflate compressed zip files (Firefox, Opera, Safari all handle that case correctly) and was resulting in complaints about corrupt downloads. Well, okay, no, they’re not corrupt, your browser is corrupt!

Seriously, I thought everyone knew better than to use Internet Explorer these days. Get Firefox, Opera, Safari, anything else!

On the forums, Craig said “Wow. You really feel quite strongly about IE don’t you?” and this is my explanation why:

I do feel quite strongly about it, yes; as a programmer I’m appalled that other programmers made such a low quality product. It’s like people driving around a 10-year-old beat-up car that can only go 40 miles per hour, breaks down every ten minutes, doesn’t have a radio, and is put together with duct tape (coughCSS hackscough) when you could get a souped-up fire-orange Ferarri (FIREFOX) for FREE. Or a nice Honda Accord (Safari) or maybe a Toyota Camry (Opera), all for free, but no, people just keep on drivin the junker. I just don’t understand it, and it’s such a pain in the rear for web developers that I feel like speaking my mind about it sometimes, especially when I find another “new” bug. It’s just an unacceptable quality level. Even IE 7 doesn’t make it much better, so don’t bother, just use Firefox, Safari, Opera, whatever, anything but Internet Explorer.

So please, folks, if you’re using Internet Explorer, you are part of the problem. Go get a better browser right now.

I wouldn’t normally hotlink an image, but this one’s dynamic and frankly, the load from this site won’t hurt them.

This is how I watch the sky these days when I can’t get my own eyes above the buildings. It happens to be one of the best webcams I know of, situated in the perfect place.

Update: changed to a static image as of 2/18

I’m somewhere down there. Just a minute ago it was pouring rain, and a minute later the rain stopped and the sun came out under the clouds right over the golden gate and the whole bay area was shrouded in red. It happens once every few weeks, but it’s very cool when it does. It’s like the world is pointing a big red flashlight at everyone’s face saying, wake up! You’re alive, ain’t it great?

And no, I don’t always watch the sky on my computer screen. I do actually go outside every once in a while…

I was forced against my will (child labor) to mow my parents’ lawns, and while I was pushing the mower around in circles (some people go back and forth, some go diagonally—I’m a spiral mower myself) I got to thinking about my Artificial Intelligence class at Berkeley and how I was basically ridiculed for saying that Intelligence is complex!

I guess it sounds like an ignorant viewpoint for a computer scientist to have. Intelligence is complex—or should it be just a very powerful computer with the right program? It seems to me like most people in the strong AI group think this way; that it’s just a lot of complicated parts needing independent solutions and some putting-together. This view is almost required to believe it can be done in the first place! I do believe it can be done—in fact, I believe the only way it can be done is the way it already has. We need to simulate the evolution of a strong AI and all its sources—essentially, us. I believe the evolutionary processes of an intelliegence—artificial or not—are as important as the end result.

Trying to install a new hard disk in my laptop, I found my way to some MS support article. I found this in it…

“To boot from the shadow of a broken mirror.”

Seriously now, tell me someone didn’t sneak that language in there. Or at least I’d think that if it wasn’t followed by “Please note that you may need to modify the Boot.ini file to do this.”

Update: Darn! Comments weren’t working while the discussion was hot! I got a huge spike of hits from this one too… feel free to comment now…
Or “Why The Video Phone Went the Way of the Dinosaur”

First, a little context. This morning, Facebook, the huge college-turned-global social networking site, released a new feature known as Feeds. Essentially, Feeds are a down-to-the-second record of everything you do on Facebook, whether it be adding a picture, adding a comment to someone’s profile, changing your profile, joining a group, even getting “in a relationship,” and Feeds are public for all of your friends to see. There’s even a “Master Feed” on everyone’s front page that shows you all of the news related to all of your friends’ accounts. That’s right, it shows you, all in one place, what everyone else did/is doing/wrote/thought about/uploaded/RSVP’d to/created/hooked up with/etc!

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