09 Aug 10 My fancy beer sticker collection…in my cubicle
On long Mondays like this, when the weekend has passed too fast, I find myself looking fondly on my collection of fancy beer stickers. Ahhh…delicious.
Tags: beer, breweries, fancy beer, job, work
18 Dec 09 I Bought a New Car: Coriolanus, A Welcome
So, yesterday evening, I bought a new car.
Friends will know of my relationship with the long-suffering Belisarius, my 1993 Chevy Lumina with a quarter-million miles on it. I knew it was time to get a new car earlier this year, so in the summer I started looking and researching.
My criteria for buying a new car was:
- ~30 MPG or more
- Compact or sub-compact car
- Good tech: cruise control, USB interface, internal/external sensors
- Good security & alarm
- Good warranty (5+ years)
These were the major criteria I looked for. Besides the Fit, I checked out the Toyota Yaris, the SmartCar, the Nissan Versa, the Volkswagen Jetta and Bug, the Chevrolet Aveo and the Kia Rio. I eliminated all but the Fit, Yaris, and Smartcar on a bunch of different criteria. Then I scheduled some test driving.
Initial reports are that the vehicle can be described best as "sexy as hell".
Smartcar: While it looks awesome and handles incredibly well, as well as having a nice interior, the gas mileage is nowhere near as good as you’d expect it to be. Plus the interior felt kinda old-school and cheap, not very well done.
Yaris: While the outside is stunning and the gas mileage is excellent, the interior is B-U-D-G-E-T. I was not impressed, and the car was really bumpy and lacked a good ride. The agent kept bothering me, about 3 times a week, for almost a month.
Fit: It had a good ride, very good mileage, and the interior was really technically good. For a small car it’s really spacious inside, has 4 doors but a unique, non-sedan look. I chose the Fit Sport model because it had more options and had a much nicer reaction time.
I purchased it last night for a song and a dance, and off I went! Many thanks to my roomie Mike Music who drove me there and waited patiently. And now, the car’s name.
My first car was a 1998 ‘Eddie Bauer Edition’ Ford Explorer, named Aquitaine, after the famous French region where wine was grown and Huguenots fled from Catholic persecution.
My second car was a 1993 Chevrolet Lumina, named Belisarius, a Byzantine general who recaptured much of the Roman Empire, but was blinded
My third car, a 2010 Honda Fit Sport, will be named Coriolanus, the famous Roman general who conquered Corioli and was betrayed by both the Romans and the Volscians. Welcome, Coriolanus!
Tags: car, Career, job, Shakespeare, work
16 Dec 09 Belisarius – A Farewell
Goodbye, Belisarius, faithful car of more than 5 years. 
We purchased the car in late summer 2004, as a way for me to get to work and school. It had 80,000 miles on it, a few scratches and dents, and cost $700.
Now it’s time is gone. Belisarius has been sold for $350, and had about 245,000 miles on it. With other expenditures for repairs and licensing, the total cost per mile was just under a penny a mile. What an investment!
P.S. My siblings named it “El Shit-o”. Needless to say, the name did not stick for me.
P.P.S. Could it be that the timely passing of this beautiful, liberal vehicle could indicate my next big update later this week!? Details forthcoming…
P.P.P.S. New Years Cards are in the mail!
15 Apr 09 Web 4.0
So, a few weeks back, I was reading about some of the expected capabilities of Web 3.0, where machines (weak artificial intelligences) will read web pages and applications as much as humans do. That’s a very rough, unsophisticated way to declare what Web 3.0 is, but it’s a starting point. The foundation layers of Web 2.0–API, web sites becoming web services, data scraping–this will all be implemented to the full extent in Web 3.0.
I could write a whole post on the implications of Web 3.0 alone, not to mention more. What I’m more interested in is Web 4.0–or, in general, Where is the Internet heading? Thoughts come to mind of William Gibson’s “consensual hallucination” of the Internet in Neuromancer, or perhaps the vision of the Matrix-like Internet in Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash. What is the end goal of the Internet, the point where the Internet is the final Internet, and additional variations are no longer recognizably Internet-esque?
Part of me think this ties into the technological singularity, a point where technological improvement reaches the point where man can design a machine smarter than himself, and the machine will then inevitably design smarter and smarter machines successively. Eventually, we will reach a point where we can create an Internet that is no longer a collective of many multiple machines but rather is one machine in and of itself. Perhaps concepts of “disconnected” and “offline” will eventually become defunct words, as every machine will be part of the Internet.
There would be no distinction between a machine that is part of the Internet and the Internet itself: the machine’s capabilities would be so firmly tied to the Internet itself (the function of all machines, all together) that there would be clear and obvious disadvantages to disconnecting it. To some extent, this can be demonstrated now; but in Web 4.0, a computer’s processing and data storage systems will all be handled through the internet.
Where is this all heading to?
Tags: Career, futurism, Internet, job, the future, transhumanism, work
31 Mar 09 Impressions of Houston, TX
Last week, I took a business trip to Houston, TX through work. It was my first major business trip (if you don’t count the 30-minute drive I once too from Morris to Benson to review some designs for Morris Commercial Printing).
Houston was different. I read online that it had no specific zoning laws, and the city felt like it was kinda thrown together, with people building whereever there was land. As a result, its size was huge–urban sprawl was unbelievable. It seemed massive compared to Minneapolis. It also had an interesting rhythm of neighborhoods–mall, then an oil refinery, then a drainage ditch, then a residential development. It didn’t seem to happen in any specific order.
The business meeting went very well. I was well-prepared, but felt like I needed to improve my own facilitation and recap capabilities. Since a lot of the technical discussion was way over my head, it was hard to keep track of everything. Thankfully, I was with two senior developers and a managing director who was once a senior developer. As a result the team was fairly well-set to discuss things with the client and it went well.
The food was amazing. I had barbecue chicken pizza the night we got there, and then the night after I had chicken carbon with jumbo shrimp and butter (fresh from the Gulf, I’ll warrant). Overall, the trip was a success. I didn’t take a single picture, unfortunately.
