Somewhere along my circuitous route through paid employment I spent ~21 months at a company called CafePress. I met some great people, learned a lot and as part of the offer letter, received Incentive Stock Options (ISO) in the not-yet-public company. My previous encounter with stock options did not result in anything material i.e. my […]
This is not a post about sorting algorithms; nor is it celebratory. December 10, 2012 marked the 1 year anniversary of what seems to be the worst event in my life to date (and perhaps some of the other people involved). I have resisted writing about it in the past because I felt the need […]
My Flickr account, while public, is not something that gets many views. According to the stats, my photos have been viewed 23,710 times. 10% of those views are for one photo someone decided to link to in a comment on Digg in 2009 (original post is here and someone re-posted a link to my photo […]
On January 18, 2012 a number of websites “went dark” to protest the United States House of Representatives Stop Online Piracy Act and Senate Protect IP Act, more commonly known as SOPA and PIPA. Like many things, there are many way to go about “blacking out” one’s website. Wikipedia used JavaScript and CSS to overlay […]
Towards the end of last year I signed up for the “basic” track of the Stanford Engineering Introduction To Artificial Intelligence class, mainly out of curiosity, but also because the instructors (Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig) and I share the same employer. I intended to follow along at a leisurely pace, unsure if I would […]
In college, I got by without a car. Whether it was going to the grocery store, a punk rock show, the airport etc. I walked, skateboarded, took public transportation or bummed a ride from a friend. Cars were an unnecessary expense and parking was a pain in the ass. When I got a job, I […]
In 1999 I acquired my first digital camera, an Epson PhotoPC 700. Looking back at the tech specs (1.3 megapixels, 4 megabytes of internal storage, no optical zoom) makes me wonder why I took photos with this camera at all. At its maximum resolution (1280×960) it could store 5 photos at “super fine” resolution, 11 […]
Today marked another step towards Judgement Day as a computer, built and programmed by IBM, competed against the two best human Jeopardy players of all-time, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. After watching the episode I wondered if Google Search would be competitive in this forum. So I tried typing a few of the answers, verbatim, […]
Most travel guidebooks inundate the reader with “must sees”. For example, any book on Paris will mention the Eiffel Tower, perhaps going so far as to say one must travel up the tower (at least to the second level). I don’t think anyone would argue with listing the Eiffel Tower as a Paris “must see”. […]
10 years ago, I worked for a company where I worked very closely with designers to create websites that typically had a lot of playful movement/interaction/motion graphics. While a lot of the coding dealing with motion attempted to mimic real-world physics and trigonometry e.g. friction and trajectories, in a number of instances I ended up […]
