Brian's World

Looking at the Where

Writing a web application is a lot like writing a story.  You’re trying to communicate something to someone, somehow.. right?  Who, what, when, where, and how are the common elements in any story.  Most of the time the who in the Internet is pretty easy to identify, yourself, your friends, that stranger you met on facebook, etc.  The what is still mostly clear.  Sometimes cryptic messages can be used  like “bff,” but the general idea is clear.  When is the easier to know, you click the go button and the server knows within a few seconds when you did that.  Next comes the where.  For the most part sites have been limited to asking you your city/state/zip to identify your location.. but how often are you actually there?  Right now my “location” on 99% of sites is South Hadley but I’m 2 hours away right now.  They don’t know that, nor did they ask.

I was cruising the net not to long ago and found myself on pownce, a site I still don’t understand where I found a link to Fire Eagle.  Fire Eagle is this thing run by Yahoo! that stores and distributes the location of a user to create “location aware” Internet services.  A few weeks ago I was skeptical of this whole “location aware” idea.  As a web developed I rarely care where users are.  I actually prefer to not know where you are, the idea of running into users of a program of mine in public is a scary thought… but I digress.  Tonight when I was looking at Fire Eagle I got excited about the idea about location aware services.

What form this data will be used in, I have no clue at all.  I think I am out of ideas because I really had never imagined having the data of a user to be reliably accessible.  I could see a potential application or two with Concerto, but that’s a ways off.  There would have to be more than 1 Concerto install running in the world for your “location” to matter at all.  Right now everyone is close to the RPI install.

Location aware data isn’t new by any means, its just newly accessible and newly in the hands of users.  In the past location was determined by IP address.  Thats one of the techniques used to serve ads where they have a city near you in the image.  This data isn’t very accurate, nor is it being put to good use at all.  I’ve seen some adds for “Hot Singles Available Tonight in Troy” where they have a few photo’s of females on webcams with their town posted as Troy or a surrounding area.  I find that funny, because there is a 1% chance that the girl in the photo could locate Troy on a map, never mind live here. (Now that I think about it, I wonder what percentage of the Troy population could find it on a map…)  But its crazy to think that by putting my local city into an ad you can get me to believe it.  Yes, I’ll give you that it does make me look more than those “Shoot 10 ducks and win an Xbox*” ads, but that’s only because I enjoy seeing how accurate they’re getting lately.  Clearly someone downstream is selling out the location for 128.113.x.x as Troy, NY.. and there are plenty of people interested in buying it up.

I do wish there was a strong, smoother way to update all this information about me online.  Having to twitter, update my location, consider updating my facebook status, etc is a lot of separate programs to run.  Things would be much easier if a background process on my iPhone could keep my location in check, or even a cron style job every 2 hours or so.

I look forward to playing around with the idea of knowing where I, and others, are in future web applications.  Who knows what will come of it, but it might be neat.

Good night moon

Drawing

This one should have you scratching your head by the time I’m done with you.

Today must be dumb people do laundry day.  I went to do my laundry, which I start every Tuesday between 2:00 and 2:30pm and there was someone’s stuff in the washer.  Ok, I had some extra time in my schedule today so I figured I would give that person the common courtesy to wait 30 minutes before removing their clothes and starting mine.  Of course 3:00 came and their clothes were still in there so I started forcible removing them.  They were not organized into lights or darks or any easily destinguishable pattern, but by washing several wool items in both machines they managed to keep everything fairly dry (the wool absorbed most of the water).  Then I found a lighter, which I guess might be commonly found in pockets but I imagine its a little more difficult to forget.  Unlike a wallets, headphones, and pens, a lighter is made of hard material and has a bit larger width and diameter than that of a pen.  I wonder if the individual (I concluded it was a male) will continue to use the lighting device, that if its still in working order.

Today I determined, like I have many a time before, that if I could draw or sketch artistically I would be a fashion designer.  I would avoid designing dumb items, probably giving my attention to pants.  In my opinion, finding a good pair of pants is hard to come by these days.  Jeans are everywhere, and they are not good pants.  Then there is the problem of size, where pants do not come in any logical set of sizes.  I wear a 30×34 size pant.  I have only found 1 such model in existance the comes in this size… why?  Because the companies feel that since I am taller I should be fatter.  I am sorry pant manufactur, I have not gained weight in many years and as such I do not think I will suddenly grow in the waist.

Also, there is this magical category of clothes tagged as “active.”  You may have seen it as “activewear” or  “active styles” or something along those lines.  This does not make sense.  Why would anyone want clothes promote inactivity?  The last thing this society needs are clothes that motivate people to be lazier or do less.  Personally, I refuse to wear clothes that do not allow me to be active.  Actually I tend to dress in such a way to support a higher level of activity than I normally exert, its always better to be prepared than to have to say “Sorry, you can’t lift me off this roof top into your helicopter, these pants really lack the appropriate activity rating for that.”

Don’t even get my started on the “straight leg” labeling issue.  If you legs are not straight, you should probably see someone before you go shopping for pants.  I think there are doctors that specialize in making malformed limbs straight again.

Imagining

I spend significant effort to optimize and find the subtle efficiencies I can gain in my daily life, and maybe the lives of others around me.  As a result, I’ve found re-evaluating past decisions to be generally a very poor use of time.  There is little you can do to change the decision you made in the past, instead you should focus on what you can do moving forward to change what needs to be changed.  The decision itself is set in stone, why bother thinking about the what-elses after the what.

This blog will not be optimized or efficient.  I hope to review some my decisions just because.  I can’t articulate the specific reasons why I feel this way, but its something I must do.  I wonder if there will ever be a point in my life where I don’t feel that when looking back, I’m regularly making wrong decisions.  I think part of this process occurs now because I don’t always do such a hot job of fully evaluating ideas before executing thing.  I would say I have a few people I can talk (by talk I mean instant message) pretty openly about ideas and things I’m thinking about to, but most of them have some a moderate to more extreme form of bias that I’d like to avoid when seeking neutral feedback.  This presidential election, while not a topic receiving much of my thought at all, is a great point.  If I talk to a Republican, then McCain is the way to go.  Democrats obviously feel Obama is the way to go.  There are some confused people out there who are like “Arg, write in Ron Paul” but none of those are really what I was hoping to gain from discussing whatever political issues that I might have been concerned with.

I’m unsure the best way to present these ideas I’m rethinking.  I could make a timeline, but that implies I’ve tried to generate an exhaustive list in chronological order.. which I haven’t.  I guess I’ll just dive into this in the Order of Brian, which is an O(1) ordering routine my brain computes.

One of the larger decisions I’ve made has been the location to attend college, aka RPI.  I know my identification of schools process was very poor, only reflected by the fact that I got into every school I applied to.  I would be more comfortable with the process if there were school I didn’t get into because I would have a better understanding of the perceived limits of mine.  I’m not quite sure why my searching list was so poor.  I could probably throw some blame on the under-achieving guidance department at SHHS where I can’t say they do a great job of motivating students to try their hardest even if there is a chance of failure…  A fair share could also go on my parents, who consistently underestimate my ability when it comes to just about everything.  Technically there has always been the options to leave and go somewhere else, but its very hard for me to justify all the work involved if I don’t know the outcome will be any better.

I think I have a larger problem with college and the higher education system in general.  I’ve found the system to be pretty decent at teaching people how to be researchers, professors, and teachers but very little when it comes to being productive in a business workplace.  No, those “Professional Development” classes don’t count for anything.  In the past few years I’ve applied approximately 0 skills learned in a college classroom while working and I would say the jobs I’ve had have been pretty technical in nature.

Sometimes I think about my involvements here at RPI.  Not usually the binary case of being involved or not, but the gradient to which I am involved in organizations.  Sometimes being involved to the extent I current am works out pretty well, but other times not so much.  Its easy for me to think about what would happen if I resized this, or shifted something else around, but in an organizational group its hard to have any substantial influence on the direction of a blob.  My goal has never been to single handedly try to shift the direction because that approach is pointless to me.  I can see how people have single handedly directed things and as a result group participation is substandard.  Instead I rely on the hope to spread my direction and help others take ownership of an individual part of a larger goal.  It makes things much more fluid than say, 2 or 3 members stating the direction and assigning tasks to everyone else.

There are very few decisions I think back upon and debate their profound impact on my current life.  I could see most choices effecting slight trends, but what choices have I made that have been real game changers for me?  What choices have I made that have provided significant redirection in my life?  I think to myself, if I changed things would I be in a more strategic location today or would I be less than I am.  I don’t have the answers, which makes it very hard to learn from those choices.  I think that at the time of choosing, I am comfortable with somewhere between 80% and 90% of the choices I make, but I lack a running list of uncomfortable decisions to conduct a further analysis on.

You always wonder.. well I do at least, if I had done Y differently, where would I be today.  Would I be in Troy, NY?  Would I be attending college seeking the degree I’m seeking?  Would the economy be where it is right now?  (Ok, I just had to add that last one in.  I am moderately confident I hold little influence over the financial rivers.)

Alas the clock is no longer on my side.  I’ve used up my allocation of rethinking time for now.  My plan, as it always has been, is to press forward.  Upward and onward right?  I’d settle for any direction, it doesn’t have to be upward really, as long as you keep moving.

Someone famous once said something like “Even if you’re on the right track, you won’t get anywhere if you’re just standing there.”