trisweb.com

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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I’d like to commemorate the passing of my grandfather, Harold Harward. He was 96 years old and gave so much to this world, to his sons, and certainly to his grandchildren. I was priveleged enough to spend a lot of time with him before his stroke, and one of my favorite quotes of his was “People ask me if I go to church, and I tell them I go to church every day! It’s all around me.” He loved nature (every bit of it in this country), he loved his dog, he loved his children, and he loved his wife (hopefully they’re together in some way as we speak).

He was a good man and a good father and a wonderful grandfather, and we’ll remember him forever. We love you grandpa.

It all started with my last “new year” post, which is timestamped January 1st 2005, 00:00:02. I guess I wrote it on the last day of last year, so I’ll do that again.

This year was, in a word, wonderful.

Warning: Long. It’s not obligatory to read past this line.

It began with a great ski trip (as so many good Januarys do), then back to Berkeley to finish my Junior year, which I did, fairly successfully (read: without failing).

My summer plans began to take shape early. I applied for an internship at Google, which I didn’t get, so I went for a backup job at Patagonia in the IT department, working on a gigantic web-based product lifecycle management program. Turns out it was a great job where I really felt useful, and now I’m consulting for them in my spare time.

I became fed up with the available web photo gallery apps as I began to take more pictures with my new camera, so I decided to write my own, which I called zenphoto. Development is very active today, especially now that I’ll have more time to devote to it, and with the thankful addition of Todd Papaioannou to the zenphoto “team.”

I finished summer, and work, and vacations, and headed back to school for this past semester, which just ended as my best yet (as in, highest grades and most interesting classes, which correlate, of course). I also moved into my very own house with four friends and my own room, which has been a… maturing experience. Seriously though, it’s been great. Much better than group living.

I turned 21, and didn’t have a drop of alcohol my entire birthday (come on, it was a game day! I made up for it later).

I finally (yes, for the first time) asked a beautiful young lady out to dinner. Now I have a beautiful, wonderful girlfriend. For the last few months, life has been better than ever with her in it.

It was another great season in the Cal Band, and for Cal football, culminating in a decisive win over BYU in the Las Vegas Bowl last week (and a great trip to Las Vegas for us band members).

I found out I’m accidentally graduating on time, and I’m starting to think about life after college (just a little). I realized over projects and work that my skills (both technical and creative) are worth something (quite a large something), and I’m incredibly lucky to have been in such a position to develop them, which I will always remember.

trisweb.com is still alive and well, though it could use a little sprucing up. That could be in order for next year. Also due for a makeover is the frontpage of zenphoto.org… blech. And hopefully this will be my last post in Wordpress 1.5, as 2.0 was just released earlier today.

Like I said, the year has been wonderful. I hope all of you have had even half the good fortune I’ve been having, and I hope I can share my wealth of it with you somehow through my various projects.

Now for some due celebration! I’m currently scarfing down my Christmas candy, and later, Champagne! Happy new year!

I’m writing an essay on nanotechnology. It has great potential and great risk, and some possibilities are just scary. The same is true for biotechnology, which I know a little more about.

Let me just say this: each and every one of you had better have a real breathing respect for this earth we live on. One little screw up and it is possible that it all goes away.

I’ll just be really disappointed if that happens.

From George Dyson’s “Turing’s Cathedral,” an essay on his recent visit to Google.

“We are not scanning all those books to be read by people,” explained one of my hosts after my talk. “We are scanning them to be read by an AI.”

They understand. No one else does. Everyone’s bickering over copyrights and competition and all these stupid little things, and we’re all shooting way too low!

I’m sorry, I’m stunned by that. I never thought of it that way before. It half scares me and half excites me that a company would put so much investment into the good of a future AI, recognizing how much of our knowledge is stored in books, and how useless it would be to a computer unless someone makes it digital.

Man… what a mind blow. Let’s hope Google sticks to “Don’t be Evil.”

It seems that there are rhetorical fallacies in every corner of public life in the United States — politics, television, corporations, families — everywhere, everyone is misinterpreting everything. That there was a fallacy of generalization. People do it all the time. Half the people in the US have below-average regard for the way they use generalizations when speaking. Isn’t that incredible? It also happens to be a 100% true statement, and on a subject I have no clue about. A statistical fallacy. It’s all in the way you word it. You can make anything sound any way you want it. How often do you think the media or the government (on all sides of the political spectrum) does this? I see it all the time.

I’ve been very disturbed with a new fallacy I’ve seen used all over the place recently. I call it the Fallacy of Potential. Simply put, it is the misinterpretation of a potential for something to exist as the loss of that thing. I’m sure it’s been well documented before, but I just want to point out a few blatant examples of its continuing rise in public media, politics and beliefs, and the effect it’s having on the country.

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