Dan’s Blog

Considering I never write to this blog, it will be nice to update it with the full CHI low-down. For those who do not know, the Association for Computing and Machinery (ACM) has a Special Interest Group for Computer Human Interaction (SIGCHI). This insanely long-winded name is why the whole endeavor is referred to as ‘CHI’ (both the group and the conference itself). The annual conference was in Florence, Italy this year, and I was a student volunteer (SV).

This is going to be a very long post, so I’ll cut it off here. All of my pictures can now be found on Picasa.

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Last November, I put my name in a lottery to be a student volunteer at the annual conference (CHI 2008) of the Computer-Human Interaction Special Interest group of the Association for Computing and Machinery (ACM/SIGCHI). My name came up 120th on the wait list, so I forgot about it. In mid-February, I received an email that my name popped off the wait list and could be a student volunteer (SV). Woo-hoo!

I put my name on a list (via Facebook, of course) to share an apartment with other SVs. The accommodations were completely worked out by other SVs, which was wonderful. I’ll be sharing an apartment with three other students, two PhD and one Masters, I believe.

That brings me to today, and the reason for my post. I just purchased my plane tickets, which solidifies the journey in my mind. I can now say that it is official. Now, I just have to find a way to get to Florence, find a hotel for my time in Rome after CHI, determine what I want to see, and countless other things.

It’s going to be an incredible experience.

I opened my front door today to get the mail, and there was a package waiting for me. The OLPC website didn’t change to say that they shipped my computer, but evidently, they did. Yay! I have posted the unboxing pictures on Flickr. I’ve only played with it for about an hour, and here are some initial comments:

• It’s very light and small - the touchpad and keyboard are little too small for my hands, but hey, it wasn’t designed for me.
• The plastic on the outside looks like it could really take a beating.
• The battery doesn’t seem to work. It’s fully charged, but when I pull the plug, it dies. It also won’t turn on with out the plug in. Weird.
• I need to find other people with OLPCs to take advantage of the nifty mesh network features.
• The music creation app is very entertaining.
• The SD card slot is under the monitor and VERY hard to get to. Plus, I couldn’t determine how to access the card once inserted.
• The ‘please wait, I’m doing stuff’ icon is a pair of people doing jumping jacks. Funny.
• I can’t wait to see what applications people wind up developing for it.
• It’s picking up wireless networks that my Dell can’t see.
• I plugged in my Microsoft wireless USB mouse, and it worked like a champ.

That’s it for now. My weekend just got full.

It seems that Jack Thompson is being called to court for filing “frivolous and inappropriate” cases.  Nifty.

I’m writing a paper about ADHD and in my researching travels, I came across some pretty nifty alarm clocks.  I especially like the puzzle clock.  Imagine a piece falling behind the dresser.  That’ll get ya up.

Yes, it’s been 3 months that this blog has sat here like a lump, clogging up the precious Interweb tubes. What can I say? In my life priorities, blogging is waaaay down there. Scrabulous and Risk on Facebook are much higher. Oh yeah, school, finding an internship & job, and other responsibilities too. I’d like to blog, but seem to go in spurts. So here’s to hoping that I get back to it. But not now. Now I must investigate music tagging (ID3) and ontologies. Well, not now. After dinner.

I love Zappos.com. They offer good prices on a wide variety of shoes. They’ve always been very helpful either over the Internet or on the phone. A CS rep once helped me find the best price on the Internet for a pair of shoes that they didn’t carry. This story makes me love them all the more. So, if you have to buy a pair of shoes, may I suggest that you do so via Zappos?

(Via Consumerist)

The power of music never ceases to amaze me. I put on AC/DC (Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap) this evening to commiserate my bad mood. Then Big Balls came on, which reminded me of a story that put a smile on my face.

I remember sitting in my brother Adam’s room as a kid. I must have been nine or ten, and he was in high school. We were listening to the very same album at the time, and Big Balls came on. I believe that I expressed that I liked the song, and Adam asked if I knew what they were talking about. “Of course,” I stated, “playground balls.” Adam left it at that.

A challenge to my (few) readers: what’s the name of the song from Revenge of the Nerds during the part when the Asian nerd is doing the tricycle race? I’ve been searching for it here and there and can’t figure it out.

I have a love/hate relationship with Dell. I love them because their computers are top notch and their prices are reasonable. Whenever I have to recommend a computer to a friend or family member, it’s always Dell. I hate Dell because of their customer service. It used to be fantastic. Then they offshored their CS and all hell broke loose.

This summer, my father needed a new computer. He uses his computer for work-at-home purposes, so he can’t go a day without it. He had been having computer issues for some time, and it was an old computer anyway. So, it was decided a new computer was in order. I identified a refurbished model on their website (a good way to get a cheap computer). I then called, had the operator reserve the refurbished item, and asked him to ship it next day. He told me that was impossible, since the credit check and paperwork took a couple of business days. Unbelievably, no matter what negotiation methods I used, there was no way for him to ship it overnight. So, my father and I took a trip to Wal-Mart, yes, you right right: Wal-Mart, to purchase a Dell. They had two boxes: a model without keyboard/mouse/monitor, and the same model without said peripherals. It was a great machine for a great price, so my father got a new computer.

But that’s not the point of this post, believe it or not. This summer, I reformatted my computer in the name of starting the school year fresh (it got abused with installs last year). I thought I had reinstalled everything, but evidently, Dell does not make the PowerDVD codec available for general download. I did a chat session with a Dell technician yesterday who informed me that there was no way to download the software and that she’d have to ship one out to me. Fine, just send the software. I expected to get it in a few weeks. When I came home today, there it was on my doorstep. They shipped it DHL next-day. Perhaps Dell is starting to realize that their customer service used to be a competitive advantage that they had lost and are now working on fixing it.

It’s 1am and I’m about to go to bed. All I can say is that it feels like I just woke up.

My kingdom for about 4 more hours per day.

Headline on Yahoo news:

Lindsay Lohan says rehab was ’sobering’

You don’t say.

So the MBTA (Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, for the non-Bostonites) has the nifty, semi-new CharlieCard. It’s just like NYC’s Metrocard, except better (because you don’t have to be in NYC to use it). I’ve used it in the past, and it is quite convenient, just tap the card and go. A good start. Today, I decided that I would take public transportation to the Seaport Hotel in Boston tomorrow morning. The MBTA site is pretty crappy. First off, it took me a very long time to determine the most efficient bus route there. Yes, I am pretty psyched that I (eventually) found a bus/silver line combo that gets me there in under an hour. But finding that combo was quite time consuming.

Now to the crux of my gripe: there is no way to add value to, or even check the balance of your Charliecard online. I can buy a Charliecard online, which they will ship to me. The only way to add value is to go to a station that has a machine that does it. That’s fine, since I’ll be at South Station tomorrow. But, I have no idea if the card will get me onto the bus tomorrow. Sure, I could use cash, but that’s SO 20th century.

Update: I’ll take my gripe factor down a coupla notches now. I’m gonna have to say that my bus experience today was quite pleasant. I was able to walk about four houses up the block and get on a bus that took me all the way to South Station. Then I had my first Silver Line experience. The Silver Line is essentially an underground, electric bus. Overall, it’s nothing special, just interesting and different. I wound up just walking back to South Station on the way back, since it was such a nice day.

Yes, it’s been a while since I’ve posted something (even through a spike in traffic). Every now and again I ran across something that I mean to blog about, but don’t write it down, so off it goes. I need a good way to organize the things I want to blog about…

Anywho, it’s been busy here. Papers, family visits, reading, etc.

I will report on an interesting conversation that my brother and I had this weekend about the ordering of movies/books. As I previously reported, I saw Hot Fuzz and loved it. This weekend, Eric and I watched Shaun of the Dead, which he thought I would like more than Hot Fuzz. That was certainly not the case. I enjoyed Shaun, but it didn’t catch my attention like HF did. We determined in a situation like this, the first movie a person sees will set the stage for expectations. HF is a VERY different movie than Shaun. So, I was expecting an HF-esque movie, which Shaun just isn’t. The same can be true for The DaVinci Code & Angels and Demons. I read A&D first and loved it. When I read DaVinci, I was not impressed. When I polled people who thought DaVinci was better, most of them had read it first. So, to make a long story short (too late): the first movie/book in a series will (most likely) be enjoyed more because it sets the expectations for the second movie/book. I also think that Shaun is a movie that will be enjoyed more the second time around, there was a lot to pick up on.

Back in Mr. Scott’s eighth grade class, I never would have thought that algebra was important in the real world. This was thought that went through my head as I put an algebra equation in an MBA case analysis exhibit (no, that’s not the equation in the picture). It wasn’t anything fancy, ’cause I probably couldn’t do anything fancy, but it solved the case question. Ok, it’s still academic, since I’m in school, but cases are real-world situations, darnit.