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i was perusing facebook earlier tonite and i came up with some random thoughts…

…if someone “friends” you on facebook, and when they ask how you know each other, if you say you hooked (and you didn’t) what does that say about you to that person (same or oppposite sex)? you wanted to hook up with them?
…what levels of intimacy to couples display on their social network?
…are there cliques on social networks? or is each social network a clique in itself?
…if social networks do thrive, will there be an academic field dedicated to studying them? where does it belong: sociology? computer science? biology?

also, i think if one was to pursue a Ph.D. in sociology, there can be a lot of research topics in social networks.

that’s all.

-m

i had to get this out today cuz i’m pretty stoked about these new and exciting things for august!

first of course, the new foo fighters single was released this week… it’s called The Pretender, and biased as i am, i can only say: it’s a great song! take a listen at mog.com

secondly, i am pretty stoked about webbalert.com, a daily (well, monday-thursday) podcast featuring Morgan Webb that sums up important tech stories in < 5mins. i think the way she integrates ads into the podcast is great, pretty non-intrusive for the most part and fitting in a natural break in her delivery. it took a while for me to warm up to her after being added to x-play, but she does know her stuff, and i think she’s pretty hot to boot. (note: she was the gaming goddess in FHM, before they became defunct)

all for now, will be adding more posts soon.

sometimes you find the strangest, most unconnected things in your life somehow all intersect and form some sort of vehicle for reflection of your life… recently, it’s been an odd mashup of work, celebrations, travel, and youtube.

i always seem to be quite meditative on my life on 2 occasions in a given year: my birthday and new year’s. both occasions give way to reflecting… the former on my life as it has changed over the course of an “age” so to speak, and the later on life over a generally agreed upon set of time. i find both to be different reflections and both to have different meanings.

i’ve worked a lot of hours in the past few weeks. somewhere in the range of almost 3 weeks worth of hours in less than 2 weeks worth of time…. it’s in these times of lack of sleep and pure exhaustion that your subconscious kicks in and brings to light new perspectives on yourself, your world, your relationships, and your desires… it sucked to have to have done all that work, but it wasn’t so bad to have the subconscious do a lot of calculating for me.

iris and i also went to the east coast recently:to d.c., cincinnati, and detroit. while our schedule was packed, there was a lot of time during our drives to look around at the greenery (that’s all you really see when you’re driving out there) and contemplate. not on anything specific, but just to contemplate and let things come to you. i imagine this would be some sort of meditation, but with out your eyes being closed and chanting.

there’s also been a few youtube videos which i can’t seem to stop watching/playing/listening to. the overtones from uc berkeley sing a wonderful a capella version of frou frou’s let go, which of course was a prominent track on garden state. andy mckee does a kick ass guitar version of toto’s africa a song that should be familiar to us who know a little bit of 80’s soft rock. finally, there’s birdy nam nam, a group of turntablists from france who just have some funky shit going on. i’ve been watching them all at least 3 or 4 times a day.

so where has this all led?? i think these things have kind of mashed together to teach and tell me some things: 1) i really like what i do as a career, even tho i’ve been on the edge of burnout. 2) i like music and music videos way too much, and i miss getting down and dirty running doubles with pip on the turntables. 3) getting old isn’t so bad, it’s the weight you gain that sucks (altho i am trying very hard to control my diet and get down 15 lbs by the end of the year). 4) i am surrounded by awesome people, and i can’t be thankful enough to have them. 5) i think i know where i need to go next after i’m done working at PV, i’m just not sure if i’m brave enough to do it.

it’s strange i know, and i don’t expect anyone to really know how these all connect unless i was really asked about them… looking back at the post, i’m not even really sure if i was typing proper english, but i’m sure it made sense at the time. in any case, i hope things continue to swing upwards as we descend towards the end of the year.

thanks to everyone who is in or has been part of my life. you have all played a small role in making me who i am now.

-m

first off, happy Memorial Day! please take a moment to remember all of those people in the armed forces who have fought and died for our freedoms in this country…

…

yes, i intentially put 2 equal signs in the title… it’s a programming thing.

so i’ve watched quite a bit of discovery channel lately, and man there are some good shows on there… iris found a show called man vs wild, which is a show about a former british special armed forces guy showing the viewer how to survive in various dangerous environments… some of the things he does are probably too physical for a lot of us, but he has a lot of useful information that one should probably carry around just in case. the thing that kills me about the show is the presence of his camera crew… i mean, just think about it… there’s no way those camera guys are out there struggling as hard as Bear (the host), and it must kill him when he’s struggling out in the jungle or something, and his crew is just a few feet away chillin’ in a nice tent… i mean, i’m not sure if it really is that way, but it would seem like that to me… great show nonetheless, and is shown off-season from most networks, so it won’t eat all the space in the DVR…

another show i’ve taken a liking to is deadliest catch… man, life out in the bering sea is crazy!! i didn’t realize there was so much to crab fishing, and it’s a very gritty look at the entire job… i think a lot of it has to do with the real humanity of the ships’ captains… there is a real human element, and it shows in those captains’ faces.

come to think of it, i suppose those have become replacements for me for monster garage and american chopper… i know american chopper moved to another channel, but i don’t think it’s as good now that they have a fancy shop and paul jr. is better at time managing the bike builds… not to mention that they have a full warehouse full of people to work on bikes… i guess it just seems that they show less bike building than before, and more of the extra fluff…

i’ve always been interested in those kinda nerdy shows, thanks in part to my dad who made me watch a bunch of PBS shows like Nova and National Geographic…

any other good shows to watch??

-m

i’m a fan of open source. while it may be as lucrative in creating software in terms of money, i always find myself seeing how much better open source ends up being. while it’s still quite rough around the edges, as the movement is still quite young in my opinion, i believe that open source is getting closer and closer to the types of software we are used to seeing from closed source companies, such as Microsoft.

i use a lot of open source software myself. firefox is my current browser of choice. at work, i like to write code in eclipse. i’ve been an avid fan of the linux operating system, as well as apache as a web server, and LAMP (and its variants) in general. and for instant messaging, i like to use gaim when using multiple screen names/messaging systems. heck, even to keep myself healthy at the computer, i use workrave to make sure i’m not staring at my screen during crazy coding sessions.

now, i’ve been taking guitar lessons for a while now, about half a year i would say… i’ve been learning a lot, and for some reason tonite while i was having myself a crazy practice session, i came up with this thought:

open source is a lot like music

it seems a bit strange at first, but to me it makes sense… despite what the RIAA says, music is very open and free when you look at the core makeup of a song… music and software are all built upon basic building blocks – music has its notes and chords, software its statements and functions (and i suppose objects if you wanted to include that as well). each musician takes those notes and puts them together to his liking… the same is with the developer. every song has elements that can be found in other songs. the same with software.

lately i’ve been learning to play guitar solos… my teacher, donovan, told me that in order to learn how to solo on your own, you listen to other great guitarist’s solo’s, take the style and parts that you like, and make them your own to create your style. i believe this is what is happening in open source now. take the above linked gaim for instance… the people behind that program took what they like about other software, the messaging protocols, and put it together to create their own program. they stripped what they didn’t like, and kept the stuff they thougth was good. the result is a messenger program, that, while not completely unique or new to the computer world, but has its own place in the world of computing much the same way a song has its own place in the world of music. the same can be said about lots of other software, like open office, eclipse, and firefox.

i found this small epiphany very enlightening and exciting for some reason… it’s strange how you start to see how things interconnect sometimes.

i also decided that there doesn’t seem to be too much open source musical software out there… i think what i’d like to do is create an open source music application… there are 2 programs that i’d like to create and maybe possibly merge or integrate together at some point… the first is a program that would aid in learning and memorizing different musical ideas, such as notes in a chord or scale, building and recognizing complex chords, and other such musical things… the next would be to create my own sort of guitar teaching program… i would basically take the lessons i got from mike granat (my first guitar teacher) and donovan, and try to put them in some logical order that would help someone learn the guitar… or, i would build it for donovan to give to any of his other students as compliments to one on one lessons.

i think this would be an awesome way to get my code into the open source community… the only thing that i’m unsure about is building the graphical parts, as it’s been a long time since i’ve done it, and i don’t know how to make it portable to the different platforms… i’m sure if i build it on the GTK framework, it should work on windows and linux, but i’m not sure about mac… we’ll see tho’, i’ll have to do some research and write some documents for each, and my time is stretched thin right now…

if there is anyone out there would like to join me on this, please feel free to hit me up on the comment section and i’ll write you a proper email… while i’m sure there are probably few developers reading this blog, who knows who might show up and find this interesting…

anyways, i think that would be pretty cool to do some programs like that… i could use the practice and would love to learn some new coding tricks.

so yeah, that’s that… go try some open source software, you’ll be surprised at what you’ll find!

-m

doug and i were chatting on the way back today about why american car companies can’t (and couldn’t) create THE hybrid engine (arguably, Toyota currently reigns in this area btw) that would be model to follow… we came to the conclusion that american car companies want to continue to make money on maintenance, while japanese car companies want to build products that last and satisfy, so that the customer returns in 10 years and buys another. i guess it wasn’t a great conclusion, as we practically excluded any other car makers (european, korean, etc), but the important part of that conversation was the notion of the idea.

everyone has ideas, and very few become the ones that grab hold and stick… this is even harder on the internet, as there is so much out there to filter that many of the brightest ideas can be lost to the most marketed ideas. and, even the most marketed ideas don’t always become those that hold out…

one of the discussions russ informally has with us as developers is what our ideas are, and how we can make them part of us and have them become the next big thing… the way i see it, the big “things” on the web are those that are highly pervasive in our (online and offline) lives. google has search. craigslist has classified ads. aim has conversation (in the US anyways, i’ve read it’s different elsewhere).

now let’s look at another big “thing” on the web: myspace. their idea wasn’t really all that novel… one could say social networks existed prior to myspace in instant messaging. you had all of your friends, you grouped them according to your different social circles. aim had profiles long before myspace. what really drove myspace to their current state was something else that is highly pervasive, practically on the verge of universal: music. i don’t know anyone who doesn’t like some form of music, heck i don’t know anyone who doesn’t like music period.

by using something that injected into all people, myspace drew everyone in. the social networking stuff came later. so now i wonder, in search of what could be the next big web “thing”, what is there that is as pervasive as music that could be tapped into and harnessed in the online world?

there are a few ideas that come to mind: money and food. but still, neither of those is still as pervasive as music because music is much more accessible… want money? have to work. want food? gotta find some berries. music? hum something, bang on something, clap!

genius, tom. as much as i didn’t really like doing work for you, that was a fucking brilliant idea.

it’s unfortunate that so much has surrounded myspace lately, that this notion has gone somewhat unnoticed. the next big (web) idea?? well, i don’t have it, i can tell you that. but, creativity is undoubtedly one of the better facets of working.

guess i gotta figure out what is or could be pervasive to our lives. then market it somehow.

hopefully it comes to me in the shower one of these days… that’s where i get my best ideas.

-m

alright, alright… so i’ve been crazy laggin’, but i’ve wanted to write about this for a while…

check this article… the guy who wrote it, Philip Chu, documents his lessons from MIT, and it made me think about what i learned at UCI… certainly there’s a huge gap here, in terms of academics, rankings, cost, and other such things, but what we both really learned isn’t all that different in the end… aside from the Work Alone thing, Philip’s look at software engineering is pretty close to mine in many ways…

so why such a big deal here… why is it that much harder to get into MIT when you learn the same thing at a state school?? i suppose the same could be said between, say, UCI and Cal State Bakersfield… i suppose there is some sort of distinction between the learning that goes on, but i’m not all that sure since i went to UCI for both undergrad and grad school… i think the point i’m trying to make, for those of us who are in the software engineering field, is that software engineers tend to have a similar view on the task of writing software… and, may i point out, that view is completely different from a programmer’s view of writing software…

one of the things i’ve learned so far in the working world is that programmer’s are a dime a dozen, much like the smart people mentioned in Philip’s article… sometimes it seems like it’s no wonder much of the world’s applications are buggy… aside from the fact that we can’t think of all possible scenarios, sometimes i wonder if that whiz kid “hacker” was hired because he could deliver ahead of schedule or on time… i don’t know if i have any right to say that or even draw that sort of conclusion, i just wonder sometimes…

it just makes me ponder the year ahead… where do i want to be next year?? where will i be in a few months from now?? all i’d really want would be to know that i was on my career track, that i was out there getting myself to where i want to be…

question is now, where do i want to be??

-m

so here’s something i’ve been pondering lately:

how would life be different if someone proved or disproved the existence of God?

it’s not really a matter of whether life would be different, i believe it most certainly would… i think the real trick to the question is how would it??

now, i don’t belive there would be utter chaos in the world or anything… a belief is something that people hold onto more than anything, you would be hard-pressed to find people who would give up their (dis)belief in God whether you proved existence or not. on top of that, i think it would be refuted over and over.

if you think about it tho’, isn’t that what’s been going on all these years?? the constant argument and human struggle over the proof of God?

i believe the struggle for belief one way or the other is part of human nature… how can creatures who believe they can be rational (and more often than not, are irrational) hope to conquer such a feat as proving that a being, which is in and of itself without rationale, exists? i guess the meaning comes from the struggle, and maybe we were all meant to find our own types of meanings in each of our own struggles.

i think the other thing that really sparked this thought was the whole teaching “intelligent design” in schools thing… i know there’s an effort there to teach the world “scientifically”, and “intelligent design” may not fit the criteria of “scientific”, but are we forced to keep kids without perspective? it’s bad enough that the US is already low on the scale when it comes to math and science… i was always curious as a kid, and i still am now… maybe a presentation of perspective could help here. i’m not saying to teach it in a religious sense, but to present it as an argument as to how the world was created, and maybe we could spark some interest in some kid who may grow up loving science and solving one of the many problems we have in this world.

a final thought: do we live our lives differently because of our (dis)belief in God? how would our lives be different if we thought the opposite of what we thought now?

comment box as necessary.

-m