Digital Feng Shui

Hyannis Sound Videos on YouTube

Wow, I want to cry... There are Hyannis Sound videos on YouTube and no one told me! Until now. Uhh I'll edit this post with annotated links when I don't feel so lazy... But but but. ZOMG who's going to see them this weekend for their alumni show? I will! w00t!

Edit (seperated by possible venues):

Drive My Car
Signed, Sealed, Delivered
Solsbury Hill (Peter Gabriel)
Cecilia
Lady Madonna (The Beatles)
Don't Your Worry 'Bout a Thing (best rendition from Talk About It, 1997)
Gone (Ben Folds Five)

Disco Inferno

29 Ways (generic soul, I love it when they do more R&B type stuff, my favorite of this post)

Drive My Car
Rocksteady (Marc Broussard)
Disco Inferno
Solsbury Hill

What It Means to Be from Jersey

I've seen it before, and I've seen it again, but this time it's my turn to post it.

Yo, I'm from Jersey. I curse... a lot. I say dawg, son, yo, and B...a lot. It's also a sub, not a hero or a hoagie. The diner is a natural end to a good night out. I know that a bagel is a helluva lot more than just a roll with a hole in the middle.I never had school on Rosh Hashanah or Yom Kippur. I know how to drive... and tailgate. NYC is THE CITY. I sure as hell dont pump my own gas. I know what real pizza tastes like-& know that getting a pie means pizza, not apple or cherry. All parties end with a fight. I don't go to the beach-I go down the shore. I judge people by what exit they are off the parkway or turnpike. I know 65mph really means 80. When someone cuts me off, they get the horn and the finger & expect it. I dont wear red or blue cuz i know being caught in the wrong hood with those colors on will get u shot. I'm from JERSEY and I fuckin love this place.

Context-Aware Tasks

When I was Outlook-crazy (in the pre-crash era), I was always annoyed at how flat Tasks were in Outlook. In reality, a lot of what I did would be dependent on a person or a place, or just a certain type of availability. A lot of these tasks didn't really have a due date, but were just things more easily accomplished at the right place or the right time.

With that, I propose some sort of system... Such that, as I go around the world and go about my business, I'm pinged about more appropriate things like what data sources can help me or what tasks would be good to finish while I'm in the area.

I vaguely imagined a tag-like system (gee, aren't all the hyper-categorical things we do nowadays tag-like?) that was also a grid, where people were graphed against places, and this program would allow me to examine intersections of where I might be, who I might talk to, and what I might be able to accomplish while I was there.

I don't have so many interpersonal tasks now, being away from campus and all. I don't really have that many appointments (unlike class and such). If you look at my calendar now, it would probably say something boring like Work.

Bleh to that.

Power Friends and Connectors

Every time I join a social network, I'm annoyed at how much activation energy is required to get things going. In line with intelligent systems being more predictive or at least recommending, I think social networks should suggest people you should be friends with. There are two reasons for this.

One, if you belong to a circle of five friends, and you're only connected to three on the network, there's an extremely high probability that you are friends with the fourth in real life (we're excluding you, the fifth friend). So, task numero uno in any social network is to find people you actually are friends with. What a chore. Tedium should be eliminated!

Two, maybe you just want to up the strength of your network. The people in question, who may or may not be your real friends, but maybe acquaintances, are otherwise known as connectors. These mofos are the ones that link together different social circles. If you've ever looked at a graph of people's social networks, you'll see that for the most part, they're clouds. People tend to hang out with people who have similar interests. But of these people, there's usually an outlier or someone who just also has a vastly different set of friends or interests. What you see happening is that this person is the junction point or the intersection on a Venn diagram where two social clouds would otherwise never meet.

These connectors would be found by ranking everyone in the second-degree (from you) based on their social strength. That is, who of all the second-degree friends know most of my friends?

Actually, it should be noted that as I write this, the idea is deviating or changing from what I originally thought. So, what I wrote about who knows most of my friends is nice, but not what I ended up thinking. What it should be is, who of all the second-degree friends would add the most connections? That's more in line with mathematically strengthening your network.

How I came upon this concept is more of a mix of the first idea and the first metric, who of all the second-dgree friends know most of my friends? It's essentially completing the existing social circles. While working on my Friendster account, I would click on people I didn't know very well (third-degree friends) and then look at how I was connected to them. Usually, the same names in the second-degree (the first-degree is useless since those are my friends) would always come up and these would be the connectors. So, just as a matter of observation, these people (I called them power friends) were either people I should have been friends with on the network or literally people I should just be friends with. They were extremely connected and virtually all of my first-degree friends connected to him could vouch for him.

So yeah, I can feel this entry going a little roundabout... It might be unclear, but the idea is the same, having a social network recommend to you people that are statistically well-connected, either for the purposes of actually knowing you, or just increasing the power of your social network.

Another Era: Riothero and Boylog

If you'd like to take a trip down memory lane and see a slice of the blogging world as it was in oh, say the year 2000, try Googling the terms riothero or boylog. Both are the (extremely unique, and very Googlable) names of two blogs, one by a dude named Mark and the other, Chris. Their websites seemed to have fallen off the face of search (I'm sure the Internet Archive is storing something, somewhere), but their influence is still noticable in all the hits their searches produce.

Euphemisms for Genital Secretions

Boy juice and girl juice.

It's funny, laugh.

Roof Climbing atop 530 Broadway

Vinnie's post about Windows Live Local inspired me to capture aerial ("Bird's Eye" they call it) shots of my office. I did try looking up my house, but I guessed (correctly) that they only had stock for major metropolitan areas.

I liked hanging out on the roof a lot. It was either the view, the fresh air, or just time to get away from the office. It was nice times up there, usually with my cell phone, making calls and burning hours. I have a friend who would be mighty proud to know that I scaled that building. Not too hard though, considering I just went up the first escape. This dude, however, likes to scale walls like Spider-man. Crazy. One time, he almost got busted by the popo...

From the view, I can totally see what Spider-man sees. The New York skyline, at least in Soho, is very organic. People actually have crap on the roofs of the buildings. Really interesting stuff to look at when you're thinking about nothing at all.

I think I'll miss it. (And it's not just me. The whole office is moving to Chinatown.)

Enrique Iglesias to Launch Brand of Small Condoms

Although humorous, this is going in the Knowledge section because hey, it's true.

Latin singer and poor excuse for a Filipino Enrique Iglesias is to launch his own brand of small condoms. "The next product I'm going to put my name on is extra-small condoms. I can never find extra-small condoms and I know it's really embarrassing for people." Notice how he says "extra-small"? Jeez. I understand the whole promoting a minority thing, but this also classifies as self-pwnage. 0wned.

About Me

A product of Filipino Design from the Summer of '84. Grew up, graduated, and still live in the state of New Jersey. I've been blogging since August of 2000 when blogging was all the rage and Napster was hot shit.

Since '97, I've been a child of the net. I try to learn as much as I can about stuff like technology, web design, music, a cappella, programming, design, martial arts, feng shui, taoism, psychologym artificial intelligence, gaming, podcasting... Anything cool, I'm there. And usually online.

I spend most of my hours at or commuting to IgoUgo as a web designer/developer. Since March 2005, I've helped design the Switzerland Travel Community and a random assortment of IgoU-things...

While I'm not as established as some other developers and designers in the world out there, I do have plenty ideas. Just never enough time, haha... Two main projects that are on my radar are a (scripting) language shoot out and a blog/wiki hybrid written in Rails.

I believe in minimalism and the power of knowledge and accessibility. All that and laziness, impatience, and hubris. And I'm an INTJ.

(Article format ripped from and inspired by David Heinemeier Hansson's About Me page.)

Filelight for Visualizing Disk Space Usage

Ahh, information visualization makes me... uh... wet. Tee hee. =)

So mmm mmm, check out Filelight for KDE on Linux. One, I love the concept. Two, a circle is a great geometric shape to work with. Very ideal, very smooth. Three, I love the purty colors. Seriously, it's a joy to know where my files are.

Linked from sweetcode, from Danny O'Brien's text file, from this O'Reilly article, from Slashdot.

Programming Languages and Their Philosophies

I love programming languages, or actually any domain of knowledge, that has philosophies attached to them. I'm a big user of the word "philosophy" because it encapsulates the essence about a given topic across different domains. So this page about hobby horses in programming languages is right up my alley.

Googling for Audiogalaxy

As I was enjoying a tech-infused discussion with a friend, I again mentioned my love for Audioglaaxy, as I eventually do with all people. Googling for Audiogalaxy let me to this article about how Audiogalaxy's founder made FolderShare, a new software application for synchronizing folders.

I can't believe it took this long to make something so simple as remote folder synchronization. But I totally love the fact that FolderShare uses the satellite philosophy to conduct its business. That's totally in line with how Audiogalaxy worked. And anyone who knows me knows that I loves me some Audiogalaxy. Along with macaroni and meatloaf. But mostly Audiogalaxy.

Googlemania!

Of course a post about Google would be superceeded by yet another post about Google...

Google has improved my sex life, tightened my abs, and brought me closer to God. (I keed.) Actually, as a working gossip columnist, I appreciate Google as a rough - very rough - research tool. The Internet is still the Wild West. [link to printable version]

Emphasis mine. It's funny, laugh. =)

More Results from Google, Updated

Hmm... Maybe I'm slow. Or maybe the publishing speed of the Internet is slow (really?). But I just wanted to be (or try to be) one of the first to document this change (so far as I can tell) to the Google interface.

It all started when I was searching for apache and asp...

EDIT: OMG. It totally disappeared. I'll try to recap what I was looking at but it has since disappeared during the writing of this post. God damnit, Google.

Anyway. Looking for apache and asp, I get search results with this site up on top. But back to the search results page. Usually, for a large site included in the results, there is an indented section for links originating from the same site as the parent result. Below that entry, inside that indent, is a link described as "More results from [domain]".

Here's the kicker. Above that. Or what used to be above that, since it has (since) disappeared was a list of links that looked like top-level sections of that website. So for Apache::ASP, I saw a list of links that looked like INTRO - INSTALL - CONFIG - SYNTAX, just like the top level navigation on that site. I wondering if this was a new thing, so I tried looking for other people to describe it... Asking questions on Google was never really its forte. No avail.

But I did try it with other big keywords, like amazon, ebay, and microsoft. Same thing happened. The Amazon search result was populated with four top level links, just like Amazon's regular shopping site. Something about electronics and babies probably. Ebay, Microsoft, same thing. Microsoft had links to Support, Windows Update, Office... Whatever.

So that's it. And that's me documenting it. I've seen something, Google! And I ain't crazy!!!

Upgrade to Microsoft Update

Ahh, the latest and greatest of being a Microsoft fanboy/whore. Introducing... Microsoft Update! It's just like Windows Update, but it apparently includes updates for Microsoft Office 2003. That's all I've noticed so far. But hey, I'm all for automatic delivery of updates. Mmm, tasty. Time to evangelize and run around to everyone's computer, hackx0ring them and corrupting them with the newest and shiniest Microsoft update delivery mechanism.

You know you want to. >=)

The Six Simple Principles of Viral Marketing

http://www.wilsonweb.com/wmt5/viral-principles.htm

The Five Mutable Laws of Web Marketing

http://www.wilsonweb.com/wmta/basic-principles.htm

Abusive Cycle

"I'm still trying to decide if this is progress. I was always sort of bothered by the fact that so many of [them] seem determined to look like the [those] who despised us (and still do). It's like the abuse survivor who grows up, has kids, and beats them for spilling their Kool-Aid during breakfast."

True, I guess.

Singing is Life

Singing is life. The rest... Is just details.

X, is life. The rest... Is just details.

It invades the soul.

(All inspirational material ripped from the SPEBSQSA video, Singing is Life)

Gasolina

A web contribution first... I love doing it. Anyway.

Daddy Yankee. Gasonlina. Lyrics. Translation.

Keyword stuffing, done. Here's a blog post that has a rough and partial translation of the song. Enough for we, the non-Spanish-speaking population, to know how silly the song is. Just as Hispanic comedians/funny friends have predicted for the longest time.

Muchas gracias.

Extreme Ironing

Oh man, nothing replaces good old video-game inspired wit!!

There is a game, made by the Super Flash Brothers, which is a mini-game that helps occupy your time as the Flash movie loads (great idea, just like Atari's ping-pong).

And in this game, Etreme Ironing (like irony, I thought), you get to choose either the Flattennator (sp) or Creased Lightining (that's the LOL part)... You iron stuff, it's great. And you get to choose your board, and what seems to be the most difficult board (ironing board!!) is "Nightmare", and ironing board covered in stars and ducks!

So good. I wish I laughed out loud. Still good.

Entertaining flash movies yoinked from the area involved in the above...
The Decline of Video Gaming 2
The Return of Ganondorf
[all here]

Wikipedia is to Open as...

Wikipedia is to open as Britannica is to closed [sourced software, that is].

That thought came upon me while reading this post at Boing Boing snatched from this post at Many-to-Many. Doesn't it sound the same? Here's a quote from Boing Boing:

If these errors had appeared in Wikipedia entries, its likely that they would have been fixed in short order -- and once they were discovered by the outraged experts quoted in this Observer article, they certainly would be fixed.

Sounds like the pro-active, many eyes, shallow bugs theory. But in this case, the barrier of entry or activation energy for the Wikipedia is really, really low. You literally can go in there and just edit something. I know I did! I spent this morning and last night, after work, of course, editing my watched articles. It felt good to contribute.

And more importantly, I found a great way to contribute that eases my mind. The short version of it is to compare the latest revision of the article to the revision that you last created. This method assumes that you approve completely the last article you created, making it "your" article. Any changes since then could collectively be called an edit, to which you must now approve.

I did this method and updated like seven articles without fretting what I missed (since in this case the in-betweens kinda don't matter?). Awesome. It's something I've been considering for the wikilog. I plan on letting anyone changing my blog entries. But just like in the forums, the posts will gain a flagged status of "this post has been edited". In order for that flag to go away, *I* have to edit the post once more. This second part is standard practice in blogs, where you can't really tell the author made a change until he told you. I changed it, good to go.

A Bliki for a Reason

(I'm gradually copying this post as I read it... Alas.)

Krzysztof Kowalczyk's thoughts on weblogs and wikis...

Scott/Skippy's rebuttal, describing how blogs and wikis exist as different natures (one to many versus many to many, remote discussion versus active discussion).

Finally, which I'm reading now, K's counter-counter.

Blogs, Wikis, and Blokis

Ton's interdependent thoughts on blogs, wikis, and blokis.

N-Gate to Get Another Overhaul

N-Gage to Get Another Overhaul, from Slashdot.

So I guess it's if at first you don't succeed, try try again. My friends know that one about me. =) But I thought the N-Gage wasn't profitable? But then again, if I don't know much, and they're still going, it must work for somebody, somewhere.

I was also going to say this is a first time I've seen a company improve a product... But then I remembered the iPod. Four generations now. Uhh and a branded one, a mini one, and an even smaller one. Oh, I forgot to mention the photo one. And the different flavors. Crazy. CRAZY LIKE A FOX.

You Slay Me!

[para] "You get lazy. Ever see one of those dish washers that empties itself? Yeah, [my wife] does it!" *zing!*

Oh man. Adam Curry, you slay me.

Really Zingy Thought

Read on a blog about being struck by something akin to an oncoming truck:

"Damn, even Helen Keller saw that coming!"

Wow. Really zingy thought.

Are We Sure?

Are we sure this is a comment about design?

"I normally show them theirs and then show them mine. (Sounds dirty). Mine mostly wins but the others keep coming back in the future with stationary, brochures, annual reports - those really sting."

Really... Stings the nostrils. And dude, reports? That's flippin' amazin'.

Ross's Chord Progression

embarassment
modesty
pride
anticipation
pleasure
pain
...scene change at 13:14
optimism
struggle
awkwardness
happiness
excitement
intensity
pain
relief
ecstasy
rhythm

Beware of Incompetent People

It all makes sense now...

Lessons from a Dog

This is weird. If someone actually followed all of those doggy behaviors... You'd end up with an unusually enthusiastic person.

A guide for happier living, maybe?

Who Did Kara Saun's Runway Music?

Yanked from Bravo Message Boards.

I am making this post in regards to the over whelming response to my music that has been posted on the message board. My name is Jason "JFK" Fleming. I am a 20 year old up and coming record producer in Hollywood, California. I was asked by Kara's management to provide music for her show and I was more than willing. I was able to come up with the tracks with the help of Production Supervisor, Jakeem "J Ali" Jones (of Muzic Monsterz Productions). I am currently working with a long list of artists in the industry. The runway track as well as 2 others that did not air will
be available for download shortly. Anyone looking to download these tracks will
be able to do so via a website TBD.

If anyone has any questions or comments
regarding Kara's music feel free to email me at (jfk@ervingwonder.com)
or Jakeem :J Ali" Jones at (j.ali@mewzicmonsterz.com)
JFK Management info: Troy Carter (www.ervingwonder.com)

Once again thanks to everyone for the complements and thanks to Nathan for posting on my behalf.

Jung Says

Yanked the banked from the INTJ-relationships mailing list:

"Everything that bothers us about someone else only tells tells us more
about ourselves." - Yung

Really? Well, shit. I'm bothered by a lot of things!

Moleskines are Popular

Moleskines are popular because they don't suck. It's just a premium quality notebook, that's all it is. But this premium quality... Lends itself to ease of use. And yes, cult-like status.

But from what I can see in images online... The Moleskine notebook lays flat, and doesn't curve inward in the middle like some books.

Meh. Can't think of anything else. Now'd be a good time to finish GTD (see? I'm being cool again) and rethink my strategies for life...

As Rich would say to a pretty lady... Au revoir.

Managers Do Things

Managers do things right; leaders do the right thing.

Wallet, Like Wah Ley

In true elitist fashion, I'm going assume that you (you anyone) don't know jack about wallets. But let me clarify this further by addressing only the minimalists in the audience. And for you, fellow minimalists, I have jack. That is, the perfect wallet for those who actually like carrying things in their front pocket (I've never carried my wallet in my back pocket). The back pocket leads to butt-curves in your wallet and it's more likely to be stolen. I mean, if they knew slight of hand.

So here it is! Jack! The slimmest wallet in the world! And guess what! They came out with a minimalist version of that wallet! Crazy.

Ultra-minimalism. I love it so. Now you know jack.

Ignipotence

Possibly one of the coolest words ever. Ironic how a word about fire could be cool. =)

Ignipotence.

Root element potence.

Hydropotence.

Aeropotence.