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Well, this Tuesday night was certainly historic for many reasons. Barack Obama will be the next President of the United States of America. Personally I am extremely proud of the country for the level of democratic involvement this year – there was a very high voter turnout, possibly exceeding 62% according to an ambiguous WSJ article.

I am also proud that we will have a professor of constitutional law as our president, who seems to understand the role of the president as the executive, who carries out and executes the will of the people, and is not “the decider,” as it were. It’s also nice to have a Vice President who understands he is not the leader of the senate. See, our country was founded by some excessively intelligent people who debated and theorized and figured out a system of democracy that is truly genius, with a balance of power and safeguards against tyranny. It’s only fitting that we should expect our president to share that understanding.

I believe Obama will be a good president. Indeed, our standing in the world has already improved, and that’s a good sign. Time will tell if he can live up to the expectations, but I have hope that someone who understands just how diverse and complex this country is can have a chance to bring it together to its full potential.

Anyway, here in Berkeley, the people rejoiced and danced in the streets (literally) with joy. It’s amazing to see Real Americans ™ happy and proud for their country again for all the right reasons.

You know what that means? Uptime reports today this server has been running for exactly 1 year uninterrupted.

A small milestone, but a nice one nonetheless. Thanks to Slicehost for some seriously great hosting! Clearly, I have been 100% satisfied over the past year. They were recently bought by Rackspace, but I’m sure they’ll continue to have great service.

You may also notice the Mac OSXness. Well, I’ve been waiting for the next MacBook Pro upgrade, and since Apple released some new ones last month, I decided I’d pick one up, and here I am, the proud owner of a 15″ machined-aluminium shiny-screened MacBook Pro. I think I’ll write more on it later, but in short, angered reports of glossy screens stabbing eyeballs and blinding users have been greatly exaggerated. This thing rocks

A lot has happened in the past year, but the server kept on rockin through it all. Here’s hopin it lasts to 730!

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.

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