Procrastination

One summer during my undergraduate studies, I came up with some ideas that I thought might make some witty t-shirts about procrastination. Just now, as I was procrastinating, I came across a blog entry by Aaron Swartz that describes procrastination in a unique way that I think is right on target:

[Y]our brain puts up a sort of mental force field around a task. Ever play with two magnets? If you orient the magnets properly and try to push them towards each other, they'll repel fiercely. As you move them around, you can sort of feel out the edges of the magnetic field. And as you try to bring the magnets together, the field will push you back or off in another direction.

He goes on to say how a mental block is just like magnetic repulsion in this way - the more you focus your energy on getting around to that task, the harder it becomes, and the sneakier you have to be to accomplish the task. He also hypothesizes that the mental force field of procrastination is caused by the task being hard or assigned.

I also think the amount of time left in which you have to do the task plays a major role in procrastination behavior. Right now, I have the whole weekend ahead of me, in which I would like to get many things done, but none of them seem pressing enough quite yet for me to dig in. This is a great contrast to earlier in the semester when I had so much going on that I often remained in the library until late night on weekends. It's nice to be able to afford some procrastinatory internet browsing. It can be quite fulfulling.

Facebook doesn't know how happy they just made me - and reflections on graduate school

One of the main problems lately with facebook has been the mass amounts of application invitations and other such visual spam. Once again, facebook has come to the rescue a few months later with a way to block all the notifications and messages from an application.
Now I can resume my hectic grad school life with an occasional hiatus to Scrabulous without Zombies attacks distracting me. Hooray!

In other news, as evidenced by my lack of posting for several months, graduate school has certainly taken over my life. I am involved in many projects and I am learning a lot and enjoying my time spent here. Campus is beautiful and the weather has stayed warm later in the year than I expected. One of the opportunities I have enjoyed since I have moved here was attending ArbCamp which was a community event with keynote speaker Joseph Jaffe of the internet marketing oriented blog Jaffe Juice. I met many interesting members of the community and talked about social computing, privacy, and web design. I am excited to have a signed copy now of Jaffe's new book, Join the Conversation. In the conversations about social networking, I was very surprised by the number of people subscribing to microblogging services like Twitter and Pownce. Perhaps people strongly connected by their college associations prefer Facebook, whereas those finding facebook too cluttered enjoy the brevity of micro-posts. The issue of critical mass in adoption may be the main deciding factor in who uses one social tool over another. In any case, I think it would be really interesting to see a study on demographics of these various tools over time, to see if it is just the rise and fall of trends with certain populations always being the first adopters or if the population using the tool has more to do with the nature of the tool.

I will post more about my first semester, but it may not be until Winter break. Until then, my first priority is surviving and thriving in my newfound environment.

Addicted to the net - Thanks Google Reader

I've recently renewed my internet addiction with Google Reader. I knew that great sites like Digg existed, but I visited them infrequently enough to not call myself an addict. Now I find myself constantly steering myself away from Google Reader while I'm at work, and working late after feeling guilty about catching up on Reader during lunch.

If you don't know about Google Reader, it's one of many ways that you can have the internet come to you instead of you surfing the internet, via RSS feeds. For a nice intro to RSS, see the Common Craft video RSS in Plain English.

The reason I'm falling in love with the internet all over again is that I've found my niche of blogs and news sites that keep me informed up to the minute on what's happening in the world of the internet. I never knew the extent of social bookmarking or social shopping sites available, and these RSS feeds are only whetting my appetite for more.

I would recommend that everyone get an RSS feed reader, but beware of putting too much appealing information at your fingertips at once, it's quite addicting. Begin with the sites you frequently visit anyway and opt for discovering more once you've conquered that load.

Mashable.com

Today, I stumbled across mashable.com, a social networking blog. As I'm about to start my Masters in Social Computing and Human Computer Interaction, I have since been in internet heaven. I feel like I'm finally educating myself about the career path I'm choosing, and it's wonderful.

Just a few of my discoveries (or rediscoveries, as they are all a bit older, since I'm starting with the entries from 2005, and link hopping from there):

• Friendster was granted a patent on Social Networking over 1 year ago.
• Stuff like Red vs. Blue, which uses video game graphics to create movies and music videos, is apparently called Machinima.
• Placeopedia, connecting locations to Wikipedia articles, might have comparedto the awesome and fast growing Wikimapia, but seems not to be very browsable.
  

I'm sure there will be more mashable inspired blogs from me in the future. If anyone else discovers a good HCI/social computing blog, let me know! They are few and far between, or simply hiding from me.

Play with gravity to make music

Just as I thought I was going to get more work done... I came across a site I feel compelled to blog about: Kepler's Orrery. This site generates music based upon gravity equations while showing balls bouncing around and interacting with objects.
You have to try it to understand how cool the music is, but this picture will give you a taste of the visuals. Amazing!

Crowd Farms

I just read about a cool concept - a crowd farm. A crowd farm could take the energy of people in a crowd catching a train or enjoying a rock concert and turn mechanical energy produced by their movement into electricity. This could work by having blocks of floor that move against each other as people move over them.

Apparently Thomas Edison was way ahead of us on this one, with a turnstile in front of his house that pumped water into his holding tank. The possibilities are endless for creative use of mechanical energy generated by movement. Why not put bored or exercising people to work generating power?

After a quick Google search, I see that a gym in Hong Kong is already powering part of its lighting systems in this way, the Japanese are testing a similar application for use in a train station, and merry-go-rounds in South Africa help pump water to rural areas. When I first heard about the one laptop per child project, I recall that they were planning to have hand cranks and pull strings to generate electricity for the laptops, and that often the towns that do currently have a desktop would have a bike to power them.

I can see the future of gyms, playgrounds, and public transit stations just waiting for the right people to promote this. I wonder if Google has thought of integrating some of these ideas into their carbon-neutral plan...

GrandPerspective - Your files visualized

Today, I wanted to find out how I had already used more than a third of my relatively new MacBook Pro's 120 gigabyte hard drive. I decided to seek out a nice way to visualize my file system. GrandPerspective turned out to be the resolution of my quest.

You can see from the visualization and the labels I added that the largest chunk was of course, the 10 or so gigabytes I have allocated for Windows Vista. The next largest chunk was my first iMovie project - a video of myself using a coworker's paper prototype. Most of the rest was simply system files and applications, Adobe and iWorks being some of the larger chunks. I suppose it is about what I expected, but I am happy in any case that it appears I have a while before I should worry about filling up the whole thing, whether it be with applications, documents, or media.

All things considered, it is useful and quite pretty. Reminds me of a square version of the Sierpinski fractal I made once. I'll post more about fractals another time.

We live in a Fast Food Nation (sadly)

I took a nice break from work last week to spend time with family and friends, and I also had time to finish both Schlosser's Fast Food Nation and Turkle's Life on the Screen.

Fast Food Nation was a genuinely informative look at the fast food industry overall. If I weren't already a vegetarian, it would have me seriously rethinking my lifestyle. As is, it has convinced me to never support McDonald's in any way, if at all possible; I won't even buy the veggie burgers that are surprisingly served at the one in Fairfield, Iowa. (I will admit to eating a Burger King veggie burger in an airport once.)

Fast food is all about low wages, unsafe working conditions, frozen foods created and reheated on assembly lines, corporately owned farms, and of course, profit, profit, profit. None of this is entirely new to me, but it helps that I have actually read much of what I consider to be evidence of the unethical nature of most fast food places. There were a few potential signs of hope for a better fast food future, however. The successful chain In-N-Out Burger still peels and cuts its own potatoes for fries, never freezes its food, uses no preservatives, and pays decent wages, making it a better option for the ethical consumer than many alternatives. Another flicker of hope lies in the potential for public demand for change; McDonald's does respond to bad media, as in the case of meeting Greenpeace's demands for better sandwich packaging by finally changing to paper wrappers.

Overall, definitely a well researched and informative book that I would recommend, especially to those who frequently consume fast food. Seeking to understand economic choices that we make in our every day lives is an important part of becoming an ethical consumer.

I'll post again later about Turkle's book for those more interested in the HCI side of my rambling blog.

Currently reading: Shadow of the Hegemon by Orson Scott Card (Sequel to Ender's Shadow and I suppose Ender's Game.)

To Google, with Love

I am in love with Google.

It's any HCI student's dream to be able to work at Google, a company who has from the beginning valued the user experience as a top consideration when designing their products. Google's mission to organize the world's information is ever-more successful. Recent user-pleasing improvements include a new look for Google Docs and Spreadsheets and the ability to drag your route around on Google Maps. It's now easy to visually choose your alternate route and to compare times on different routes.

In addition to the generally useful awesomeness of Google, Google is environmentally conscious. So much so, in fact, that they plan to be carbon neutral by the end of 2007. This is an amazing step for a company of their size. I wish I had a quote on how many servers they have, but it's a LOT! And to make all the energy to power those carbon neutral is quite a feat.

Incidentally, a little later I stumbled across a link to Greenpeace's Guide to Greener Electronics, which I thought was interesting. It's unfortunate that Apple is lagging behind in some areas, since I like them so much (what a change from a few years ago!), but when I look at their page on the environment, it seems that they are making a decent effort with the recycling and such, even giving 10% off of a new iPod if you recycle your old one.

I also feel that their products tend to last longer, which in itself is good for the environment since they don't enter the waste stream (or recycling) as readily.

In any case, I wish you happy and green computing until next time.

Freakonomics and LibraryThing

A few weeks ago, I finished Freakonomics. I found it to be a fun, light read that examines everything from teachers and sumo wrestlers cheating to the origin and educational names to the downfall Klu Klux Klan in a different light. One of the facts I found particularly interesting was the strong correlation between legality of abortion and crime rates. It was a perfect read for my daily bus ride to and from work. I would recommend this book if you're looking for something that is fun without being unintellectual.

This particular book I borrowed from my father's extensive library. For his birthday, I began to catalog it with LibraryThing, a social networking site for bibliophiles, as a PC Magazine article described it last year. This site not only offers an easy way to catalog your collection, which is what I was originally looking to give him, but it has unique social features like tagging and forums and common interest groups. While I have a long way to go in exploring all the features, my favorite so far is the Zeitgeist, which can tell you the highest (or lowest) ranked books, authors, tags, and much more statistical fun based upon the users of the site and books they've entered, tagged, reviewed or discussed. When I settle down somewhere and establish my own more permanent collection, I'll have an account there as well.

Speaking of my book collection, as I became more environmentally conscious, I realized that just because I have the money to buy books new doesn't mean that I should always do so. Now, I usually purchase books used online if I think I will be unable to find them used at local bookstores. I need to consider other tradeoffs this entails, including the environmental impact of packaging and shipping (I usually find a copy that is also in the Midwest at least), and the fact that it doesn't support the author much. How much do authors usually get after the publisher's cut? Perhaps I should consider making personal contributions to the author based upon my level of enjoyment of the book.

In any case, all this talk about books has me wanting to get back to reading.

Currently reading: Life on the Screen by Sherry Turkle and Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser

Welcome!

Welcome to my blog!

As a new Human-Computer Interaction Masters student and someone who has kept a personal blog for a long time, I feel it is time to begin a new blog that is meant not just for my friends, but for anyone with common interests who finds his or her way here. Let me begin by telling you a little about myself and what you will find here over time.

I have a Computer Science background, with some social sciences and humanities mixed in for fun. Some of my main interests are social computing and HCI, including but not limited to social networking, blogs and wikis. I am an environmentalist, but an introvert so not much of an activist. I reduce my ecological footprint in a number of ways including not eating meat, air drying my clothing, and driving a Prius when I'm not on foot or using public transit.

While I make no promises about the frequency of updates or the content I will post, as I start this blog I feel that it will be a place for me to write about interesting social phenomenon on the internet, new technologies that interest me, books I read, and anything of environmental interest to me as well.

That said, I have a few ideas for posts in mind and a summer reading list, so more to come soon!

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Currently reading: Freakonomics by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner
Links: Freakonomics Blog