

Headlines for Thursday:

  1. Moleskine (129 words)
  2. Thunderstorm (58 words)
  3. Barcamp explained (33 words)
  4. Awww... (34 words)
  5. Traditional clothes (47 words)
  6. Web alerts, pubsub, and other cool tools (287 words)
  7. Woohoo! Free Skype to US and Canada! (90 words)
  8. Why I don't have to make my website pretty (71 words)
  9. Research paper cramming (64 words)
  10. Working at the lab versus working at home (54 words)
  11. Must not panic (62 words)
  12. I am so dead (297 words)
  13. Bestest research lab evar (40 words)
  14. Finding geeks (183 words)
  15. Video sharing (64 words)


    AXGather references for paper: visualization
    AXGather references for paper: social networking analysis
    AXGather references for paper: technology diffusion
    AXShare video and pics
    AXSend e-mail to everyone else
    AXGet in touch with EWB volunteers
    BX@1300-1400 IBM conference call for workshop : E-Mail from Cheryl Morris
    BX@1830 Dress rehearsal, meet at Graduate House : E-Mail from emily winerock


1. Moleskine: 02:55

I gave away a Moleskine today to Gabriel Mansour, one of the students I'd met at Mesh. He's been enthusiastically going to networking events and taking down notes, and I saw him struggling with the little paper tickler he had. The university bookstore didn't have plain hard-bound journals in stock, so I bought three packs of thin plain journals instead. They still have inner pockets, which are tremendously useful for keeping things like business cards in place. I gave one of the journals to him, and I'm sure he'll put it to good use.

It's a little bit odd to be taking notes during a conversation, yes, but I'll take remembering over forgetting any day.

On Technorati:


2. Thunderstorm: 03:22

Squishing through the thunderstorm in my soaked red sneakers, hearing droplets drum the samba on my umbrella, feeling the humid air embrace my skin - how I felt like I was home!

I normally don't like rain, but today felt amazing.

On Technorati:

Random Japanese sentence: 突然、猫の鋭い叫び声が私たちに聞こえた。 All of a sudden, we heard the sharp cry of a cat.

3. Barcamp explained: 03:29


On Technorati:


4. Awww...: 04:02


I'll hack my T-shirts but not my hair or skin - no bleaching or dyeing or tattooing or whatever.


5. Traditional clothes: 04:09

I like wearing outfits inspired by traditional Filipino costumes. I love wearing my malongs, for example.

I want more Filipina flair! =)

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6. Web alerts, pubsub, and other cool tools: 04:21

One of the coolest things about blogs is that they can get indexed almost immediately after they're posted. Services such as PubSub and Technorati make it easy for people and companies to find blog posts that mention something.

This means that I can, say, mention Platial and get this comment from someone who works at Platial:

Thought I'd share a couple of other uses for social mapping/place annotation.

On Platial, primarily people are using tags as a way to find functional places like or based on interest like

But they're also saving Places and making maps based on common interests like machinima or birding

It's still very early but the idea of allowing maps to be personal is showing us new ways to use Platial every day. It's a familiar metaphor that excites people. We get people plotting where they were married, broke up and had their first kiss. It's pretty incredible to see all of this rich annotation around the world! Thanks Sacha.

As numerous speakers pointed out during mesh: the conversation is happening out there in the blogosphere. The only question is: do you want to join it? Are you keeping track of what people are saying about you, and are you responding?

Who's been particularly keen at that? The Blinklist guys always turn up whenever I mention it. I got some Google love when I blogged about their recruiting talk at U of T (probably name-based searches). Heck, I read every single blog post in the IBM internal blogosphere, and I keep track of all the posts related to social bookmarking there. Fun stuff.

Can _you_ hear the people out there?

Random Japanese sentence: 彼は猫を飼っている。 He keep two cat.

7. Woohoo! Free Skype to US and Canada!: 04:40

As part of a research study for Bell Canada, I get free VOIP calls to US and Canada. However, that involves booting up a Windows machine, and that's rather inconvenient at times. Well, Skype just beat that offer.


I'll check that out this weekend. =)

On Technorati:

Random Japanese sentence: ピエロを見て少年は物が言えなくなってしまった。 When the little boy saw the clown, the cat got his tongue.

8. Why I don't have to make my website pretty: 04:47

Feedburner statistics show that out of 225 blog readers in the past 24 hours, only 12 of them actually visit this site in a browser. 9 Mozilla, 3 Internet Explorer. Everyone else uses an aggregator. <laugh> What a skewed profile!

On Technorati:


9. Research paper cramming: 09:36

My research supervisor has just strongly hinted that it would be a good idea to get some kind of draft in by 2:30 PM. Now is a good time to wake up and practically inhale papers...

On Technorati:


10. Working at the lab versus working at home: 09:43

It's drizzling and gray outside, which makes staying here and working on my paper more attractive than trekking over to the lab. I'll go there after lunch so that I can call into IBM for the workshop planning meeting.

On Technorati:

Random Japanese sentence: あなたのサイトは、猫に興味のある人達にとって魅力的です。 Your site appeals to people who are interested in cats.

11. Must not panic: 13:07

I have a few hours to read tons of papers on innovation diffusion, social network analysis, and other fun stuff. Ack. Must not panic. I can do this.

Looping over Jed's cover of Code Monkey. It's upbeat, and I like it more than the original because I know Jed. <laugh>


12. I am so dead: 15:49

My mind's just blanking out. There's no way I'm going to finish a credible draft of this paper within the next 20 minutes. I've been thinking about it all day, but... this just isn't what I had done my initial reading for, and the lack of background is really biting me.

My technology diffusion visualizations were born out of an afternoon of play, a direction I took during a random walk. For some reason, Mark liked it. Now I find myself scrambling madly to learn about innovation diffusion theory. (Hooray, Everett Rogers!)

My reading notes are all about bookmarking and its personal and social benefits. Maybe I can still work that in somewhere, but bookmarking isn't the main focus of the paper, and I need to fill in a lot more back story.

Should I have skipped all the afterparties and focused on this? My sense is that in the long run, that networking will be of much use. (Although perhaps I could've skipped mush...) Now if only it didn't take me so long to get back on track.

If Mark was looking over my shoulder, he'd probably tell me to stop blogging and concentrate on writing my paper instead. Unless I manage to unblock my mind, though, it's going to be pretty hard for me to make sense of the papers and write a coherent submission.

My problem is that I've been giving him all of these half-papers: teams, personal benefits for social bookmarking, etc. - but we keep changing my topic after I pass them. I'm sure all of these paper fragments lying around the place will be useful someday, but it's incredibly frustrating having to keep branching out.

I feel like such a research failure...

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Random Japanese sentence: その猫は好かれている。 The cat is liked.

13. Bestest research lab evar: 22:23

My research supervisor and my labmates are totally awesome. They listened to me freak out about impending doom and told me that I can figure things out somehow. =)

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Random Japanese sentence: 弟は猫を花子と名づけました。 My brother named his cat "Hanako".

14. Finding geeks: 22:46

I don't know why people complain about not being able to find talent. ;) I run across so many interesting people while watching mailing lists or hanging out with other geeks. For example, if you're looking for Ruby geeks in the Philippines, Botp Peña sounds really interesting. Hey, anyone who advocates Rails and volunteers training has to be cool. ;)

  • Peña, Botp (botp AT

E-Mail from Peña

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Random Japanese sentence: 私はあの店で猫を買った。 I bought a cat at that shop.

15. Video sharing: 23:30

Now I need to figure out how to get all this data off my system. I should share my videos at least so that my mom can look at them, but youtube caps at 10 minutes and 100 MB. I suppose I should just look into downsampling my Toastmasters speeches...

On Technorati:

Random Japanese sentence: これは私が今までに見た中で一番大きいねこです。 This is the biggest cat that I've ever seen.

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Page: 2006.05.18
Updated: 2006-12-2612:08:2112:08:21+0800