And Now for a Gentle Reminder...

My body likes to periodically remind me of a fact that I tend to forget: I have no real physical coordination, and any sport in which I engage ends in injury.

Today, that gentle reminder came in the form of stitches across the top of my left eyebrow after attempting to do a hockey stop at the ice rink.

A quick list of sports-related injuries, from a young child to now:

- Biking: Broke my arm
- Eating: Tonsillitis
- Breathing: Pneumonia
- Soccer: Dislocated my shoulder
- Eating: Acne
- Downhill skiing: Some kind of injury after hitting a jump
- Gyro gym: Dislocated my shoulder
- Roller blading: Dislocated my shoulder, resulting in surgery
- Motorcycling: By some odd luck, no injuries whatsoever
- Skating (today): Huge inverted T-shaped gash above my left eyebrow

Anyway, kids, wear your helmets and pads -- it sucks when you have to get stitches.

Quick, We Need a Graphic!

I found this story on CNN amusing, but only because the editor obviously felt a need to include a graphic with the story -- any graphic.

Have Toaster Oven, Microwave, Will Prepare Food

US News

Five days ago, an earthquake devastated Kashmir, killing more than 35,000 people. About a month ago, Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, with a death toll of about 1,000 people. For weeks, Katrina was the top news item in the States. Here are the most viewed, most emailed, and top stories are on my.yahoo.com right now, five days after the earthquake:



Social filtering -- of which the "most emailed" and "most viewed news items" sections are examples -- can be great a tool to help manage and organize all the information on the Internet. But it is also an interesting mirror onto society.

A Peek at My Youth

Growing up in Western New York, there were fields behind my house all the way to the horizon. We knew the local crop duster, who flew a plane like this one. His name was "Crash" and when we went out to the backyard to watch him, he'd wave at us by dipping his wings.

Today I got this one on film, and also recorded some audio. From far away, the crop duster sounds like this (ogg or as a QuickTime movie). Here he is flying directly overhead (ogg and QuickTime).

Notice in the picture how close he is to the ground. At the end of the field, there are power lines that he has to climb up over. Must be fun :)

The Mac's Built-in PDF Capabilities

I'm finding one of the real niceties of Mac OS X is the built-in PDF engine. There are two ways I use it in day-to-day tasks.

First, when I find an interesting web article that I want to keep around, I don't save a bookmark, but instead print a PDF copy of the page. Presto: A time-stamped snapshot of the web page. Using BibDesk, I then create a bibliographic entry for it and link the entry to the electronic file.

I also use it to separate pages of a PDF document into multiple documents. Recently, I had a PDF document that needed to be separated into two separate documents, so I loaded the PDF, then "printed" each section of the PDF to a separate PDF document. There was no loss of quality, that I could detect (though it was a text-only document).

I recall meeting an Adobe employee about three years ago at a conference, and he said Adobe was a bit "disappointed" that Apple so thoroughly integrated PDF into their operating system, without including Adobe. I can understand why: They're obviously losing some revenue by not selling Adobe Acrobat to every Mac user. But there is still one thing OS X can't do well, and that's add comments to a PDF document. You can do it, but it's really kludgy and destructive: When you add a comment to a PDF document using OS X's Preview program, it creates a yellow box that, when saved, permanently obstructs any content underneath it by turning into a non-editable text box. If Apple were to model its notes/comments feature on Acrobat, then I'd truly have no reason for Adobe's product.

The Future of Software

Tim O'Reilly recently posted an article on "Web 2.0," or what might be considered the future of software development and delivery.

When people first started talking about web-based apps years ago, I always conceived of them as my current applications transplanted to a web browser. What Tim does really well in this article is clarify how web-based apps are a separate breed of application altogether. These are applications for which data and user collaboration are key:

• Amazon's user reviews, user lists, and affiliate program provide value above and beyond what Amazon's employees could do on their own
  
• BitTorrent's de-centralized distribution method naturally scales up with the number of clients (whereas Akamai doesn't)
  
• Google Maps goes beyond what they think you should do with map data by allowing motivated users to create their own custom apps with the data
  

Right now, academia seems to be lagging a bit behind these developments. Over the upcoming years, it will be interesting to see whether students get training in web-based development in much the same way they get training in user interface development using toolkits like Java's Swing.

Back North

After 10 years south of the Mason-Dixie Line (3 years in Florida, 1 year in Washington, DC, and 6 years in Atlanta), I've moved back north. My apartment was packed last week, and now I'm waiting for the call saying my stuff is in Canada. Until then, I'm hanging out on Lake Ontario, where you can see turtles sunning themselves in an adjacent pond. It's October here, but it's in the 70's during the day. I can't remember such pleasant weather this time of year.

Summer Music

Two really solid albums have been released recently, both in constant rotation on my playlist: Beck's Guero and Gorillaz' Demon Days. It's rare that two gems appear at the same time, so I can only assume that the RIAA's crackdowns on file sharing are providing artists with the security and incentive to once again release high quality music in this digital age.

Speaking of high quality music, my brother's wife just released a great CD on her own.

http://www.bettysoo.com

You can hear some samples if you click on the audio button on her press kit page.

How Steve Voida Made My Day

Now that my Ph.D. defense is behind me, I've had a bit more time to explore my Mac Mini. It really is something you have to use for awhile before you can really appreciate it, and I am quickly becoming one of those "Mac people."

There is a lot to like about OS X, but one thing that was killing me was the inability to tab between components in things like a dialog box or web browser. I don't like using the mouse if I don't have to, so it was painful to have to click on buttons and the like when doing things like using gmail.

Enter Steve Voida, my labmate and recent Mac convert. He let me know that you can actually customize OS X to enable tabbing between controls in via System Preferences -> Keyboard & Mouse -> Keyboad Shortcuts. Awesome! This took care of the only grievance I had with OS X, which totally made my day.

This worked great for just about every app (though the traversal path through controls is not always what one would expect), but it didn't work for Firefox (which I use because of its built-in ability to block banner ads). Fortunately, you can customize this in Firefox, too, via its about:config settings (which is not as intuitive as it might be):

http://sidesh0w.com/weblog/2004/09/01/tabindex_osx_firefox/

For other, more in-depth keyboard shortcut info in OS X, check out:

http://www.xvsxp.com/keyboard/