weekends are for leisure

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Came home before 5pm and plopped down on the futon. A few moments later felt the futon bouncing very slightly and heard the “ticking” of picture frames re-positioning against the acrylic wall paint. Thought it was activity at the nearby construction site, but they had all gone home for the day. Very cool!

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Don’t trust your assumptions about yourself, and don’t apply them to others. They’re probably wrong.

– calinet6 on the Hacker News post, A (Short) Rant About Working Remotely

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Perfect for importing into Google Calendar. Shhh, don’t tell! Landing page is here.

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Wherein I recap the things I’ve done and learned this year as a software developer (mainly at work). I’ve fixed many bugs and uttered many curses. Through it all I’ve constantly strived to make the code a better place.

Amazon Web Services

• Video encoding instances Launch/Start when there’s a backlog, and Stop/Terminate when there’s not.
• Said goodbye to Amazon SQS for job queues, and hello to Redis. Hello consistency and speed.
• Learned that one must always specify timeouts for AWS calls. Especially for SimpleDB.

Node.js

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Everybody needs somebody to … kvetch to.

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It’s an “index of top non-profits creating a social impact”. Quite helpful if you want to ensure your charitable donation does the most good.

Saw it mentioned on Nightly Business Report last night.

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Published my first Android app today. It’s called When Moving and you may find it handy if you’re into personal information tracking.

When Moving differs from the others in that it doesn’t continuously poll GPS. It polls according to the frequency you specify (every 10-90 seconds), but only if the accelerometer detects motion.

In short, if the accelerometer doesn’t think you’re moving, it won’t poll for GPS updates, and your battery will last longer because of it.

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… all around me there are people who have never learned to endure dissatisfaction and I do not admire them.

– John Roderick. Roderick on the Line, episode 54.

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An episode of Science Friday talking about how wind power is plentiful.

So many cool things learned from this episode:

• Research shows that bird kills due to wind turbines would be less than from coal and gas.
• One rare-earth element is necessary to build turbines: Neodymium to make the generators efficient. Worldwide there is 7x the amount we’d need if we were to build 4 million turbines.
• The Bush administration did a technical study that showed we could quite easily get to 20% of our power from wind by 2030.
• Iowa already gets ~20% of its power from wind. Damn! link
• We wouldn’t want to strive to get all of our power from wind, because then we’d have to store the power in batteries. If we balance wind with solar and hydrothermal (or other), we won’t have to worry about energy storage, and would be able to handle peak demand regardless of the fluxuations in weather. Sweet!

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A tablet is the perfect fidgety man’s computing device. He sits in non-missionary positions – an unsafe environment for a lap-bound laptop. He shifts violently and frequently. He gets up every 30 minutes to do nothing. A tablet occupies his hands. A tablet is perfect. Specifically this tablet.

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