• James Landay: “Nice profile of Scott Klemmer’s work in Technology Review: Tools for Better Web Design”
• Watch President Obama announce the death of Osama bin Laden: MSNBC
• [May 1] Osama’s death have prompted huge crowds to gather at World Trade Ctr. (Wall Street Journal) Hard to believe I was there <36 hrs ago.
• Sadat Shami: “Interactive map of emotional reactions and the perceived significance on the war on terror after Bin Laden’s death” (New York Times)
• Overrrated Outcast: “We still haven’t seen Sarah Palin’s high school diploma.”
• Keir Clarke: “Washington Post Map of the American Civil War. I can’t believe how much work has gone into this animated time-line map.”
• New York Times: Intel Increases Transistor Speed by Building Upward. James Landay adds: “This will be more important than people say.”
• “Henry Kissinger”: “I asked Palin for her thoughts on secularism in Turkey. She said she only eats poultry from ‘God-fearing farmers’. #GiveMeStrength”
• Overthinking It: The economics of Death Star planet destruction (via Daring Fireball)
• Why is c the symbol for the speed of light? (Physics FAQ)
• Google at CHI 2011 (via Ed Chi )
• Another sweet stop-motion video: 2000 photos of Paris
• A reminder to all Americans going to CHI 2011: Canada is a foreign country. Don’t forget your passport.

Saturday, April 23

• When setting your alarm for a morning flight, make sure it’s set for AM, not PM. Parked in short term and just made it.
• Don’t remember so many NYC subway service notices, but managed to get to the hotel anyway. Late night pizza nearby for dinner.

Sunday, April 24

• For brunch, meeting up with Sabrina, old HCI/IBM friend, and her husband Steven, who turns out to work for Google! Small world.
• Awesome brunch at Balthazar in SoHo. Eggs Norwegian with smoked salmon and hollandaise. We got lucky: no wait!
• Visited the Morgan Library, as in JP Morgan. Amazing collection and buildings. They have 3 Gutenberg bibles!
• Surprised the ice skating rink is still up at Rockefeller Center
• It was beautiful earlier today, but now it’s a downpour. Luckily we have umbrellas. Yay NYC weather.
• For dinner, had the best pastrami at Katz’s Deli. I always make a trip there when I go to NY.

Tuesday, April 26

• I keep forgetting how much humidity affects how warm it feels. 70º in NY easily feels 5–10º warmer than in SF.
• I also don’t feel the need to wear sunglasses in NY like I do in SF. The sunlight is much more diffuse (humidity? pollution?).

Wednesday, April 27

• New cafe in Google NYC opens today! Gorged on fried calamari.
• The theme of the new Google NYC cafe is street food. There’s an actual food truck in the cafe, serving dessert.

Thursday, April 28

• At a colleague’s apartment west of Midtown. Great views from the roof, and great Turkish food delivered for dinner!

Friday, April 29

• Tried to go to Ippudo for ramen, but the wait was literally 2 hrs. Went to Rai Rai Ken instead, which was solid.
• Vince was still craving pizza, so we went to John’s Pizzeria & got half cheese half sausage. Excellent, highly recommended!

Saturday, April 30

• Amazing hot fresh bagels at Brooklyn Bagel. Didn’t realize they could be so good!
• Visited World Trade Center. Unbelievable number of tourists. Didn’t realize so much of 1 WTC is already built.
• Awesome gelato at L’Art del Gelato in Chelsea Market. This trip has been a home run foodwise.
• LIRR to JFK is a bit more than the subway but 20-30 mins faster. And both are MUCH cheaper than a taxi.

• Thou Shalt Not Be Colloquial: why the King James Bible endures (New York Times)
• Sadat Shami: “Awesome overview of the New York Times’ R&D Lab’s Project Cascade – a tool to explore the life stories in social spaces” (Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard)
• @StartupJesus: “Googling ‘Torture + Friday’ used to return hits about Good Friday, my day of torture on the cross. Now you just get hits for Rebecca Black.”
• My heart goes out to the victims of the tornadoes in the South. What a horrible disaster. redcross.org

• Sadat Shami: “Giving up tenure… and getting happiness in return? Reflections from someone who did” (The Scientist via Nick Diakopoulos)
• I think I’ll get a standing desk (New York Times)
• Jeffrey Bigham: “How languages may have diffused from Africa, modeling phonemes” (New York Times)
• Boris Smus: “Allow me to explain sorting algorithms through interpretive dance” (YouTube via Pamela Fox)
• This collaboration of cellist Yo-Yo Ma and street dancer Lil Buck is amazing (YouTube)
• Looks like the folks at Red Hat are creating their own JVM language called Ceylon (Ars Technica)
• Sandra Kogan: “Walmart’s $1.85 billion mistake. They relied on what customers said in a survey versus what they actually do.” (Phil Terry)
• Dilbert creator Scott Adams: Forget art history and calculus. Most students need to learn how to run a business. (Wall Street Journal)
• Mugizi Rwebangira: “How to fool yourself into working harder” (Dextronet)
• Impressed by Ovi Maps 3D. Besides buildings, trees and overpasses in suburban Silicon Valley are also 3D.
• Republicans paying $575 an hour to defend Defense of Marriage Act (San Francisco Chronicle)
• Sadat Shami: “Google Map Maker allows you to add your local knowledge to a map [currently for the United States only]”
• Kayur Patel: “1998 Onion article on streaming video. It’s more interesting than funny in today’s Netflix age.”
• Frog Design and design innovation in China (Forbes via James Landay)
• Can a complete novice become a golf pro with 10,000 hours of practice? (St. Petersburg Times via Lynn Wu)
• John Regehr: “‘Facts have no meaning on the Internet.’ —Thomas Jefferson”
• Boyce Avenue not only covered Katy Perry’s “Teenage Dream,” they subtly changed some of the lyrics: YouTube video
• Intrigued by Hyde, a static website generator in Python and Django by Lakshmi Vyas. Boris Smus switched his blog to it.
• xkcd: Seismic Waves
• Mike Lee: “So busy bitching about iPhone location logs I forgot to check in on Foursquare”
• The joy of mapping a 2D image on to a 3D terrain model (The Map Room)
• Cities build airport cities — ‘aerotropolises’ — for growth (USA Today via Sara Galligan)
• Sadat Shami: “BO.LT is a web-based tool that enables people to quickly, without code, remix the content presented on a website” (Huffington Post)
• Madhu Prabaker: “Interesting new approach to metered parking in San Francisco. sfpark.org”
• Sadat Shami: “Recommendation service Hunch revisits the Mac vs. PC debate with this infographic based on their users”
• The Onion: ‘The Economist’ To Halt Production For Month To Let Readers Catch Up

• Backbone.js is a model-view-controller JavaScript library in just 4KB (via Boris Smus )
• SparkFun intros IOIO, which allows Android phones to control DIY electronics. (Engadget)
• Everyone in Google Doodle for Charlie Chaplin’s birthday are part of Doodle team, and like many of Chaplin’s films, it was filmed in the Niles District of Fremont, California. More from CNN.
• IBM launches Maqetta, an HTML 5 tool as an open-source answer to Flash and Silverlight. (eWeek via Jeff Pierce )
• The White House launches a personalized tax receipt (Macon Phillips of the White House, via Ed O’Keefe of the Washington Post )
• I’ve often had this very same thought: Tim Pawlenty wants members of Congress to do their own taxes without help. New York Times article
• Mister Rogers defends PBS in front of the US Senate in 1969. (via @Noetic_Hatter )
• The Story of Linux: a 4-minute video commemorating 20 years of the Linux operating system (via Mario Fusco )
• Jen Mankoff, a Carnegie Mellon computer science professor with Lyme disease, tries to make sense of Lyme info online (via James Landay )
• Barack Obama: “There’s nothing serious about a plan that claims to reduce the deficit by spending $1 trillion on tax cuts for millionaires & billionaires.”

• (2 wks ago) Got back from Pittsburgh yesterday. The pilot announced that the Giants were going to the World Series! #
• Great talks yesterday at #baychi @egoodman on IxD practices in the field, Xianhang Zhang on social software design. http://bit.ly/a93Tv9 #
• I'm starting to dig through and reorganize all the computer files I've accumulated over the years. Oldest: 1987 (GWBASIC program) #
• And with DOSBox on my Mac, I can still run that GWBASIC program, 23 years later. #
• After "Helvetica", what's the next movie for font geeks? "Linotype: The Film" comes out in fall 2011. http://linotypefilm.com/ #
• New version of Freebase Gridworks, an open source tool that cleans and enhances data sets. Now called Google Refine. http://goo.gl/wHKUX #
• Surprise: geocoding photos by hand SUCKS. Time to get a GPS data logger. I've heard good things about Amod: http://amzn.com/B000WO6HJW #
• Apple has been experimenting with tablet computers since 1979. Here are some amazing concepts and prototypes: http://bit.ly/cCtA6n #

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• @jeffbigham Don't know. Personally, I'd like "Delay by", and so far haven't felt the need for "Delay until". Time for a user study! 🙂 in reply to jeffbigham #
• #SFGiants #49ers and #Raiders all win on the same day. When was the last time *that* happened? #
• YEEEESSSSSS!!!! After 56 years, the #SFGiants have run the World Series! Woooooooooo!!!!! #
• And the first time since the Giants moved to San Francisco! woooohoooooo #
• (1 wk ago) Visited CMU today and yesterday, talked with lots of profs and grad students about their work. Good times! #
• (1 wk ago) Also went through funky new Gates-Hillman CS building and took the Pausch Bridge to rest of campus. Randy, your legacy lives on. #
• @jeffbigham I'm paranoid about my privacy, which is why I delay my travel tweets. I don't know how many tweeters like me are out there. in reply to jeffbigham #
• @jwnichls More than 2 years ago? That's sad (but not surprising). in reply to jwnichls #
• While I'm delay tweeting by a week, the NY Times is delay blogging the Civil War by 150 years: http://nyti.ms/9X9BKu #
• McRib returns to McDonald's for 6 wks. LA Times: http://lat.ms/cvZbYd Reminds me of Homer Simpson lusting for a Ribwich. http://goo.gl/fyKOC #
• BART, Caltrain, freeways, ferries completely jammed for the #SFGiants victory parade. Wish I could be there. #
• Hey GOP, for all your talk about repealing health care reform: you only control *one* chamber of Congress. #
• Watching the #SFGiants parade on http://cbs5.com. Freakin' unbelievable! #
• (1 wk ago) At Google's new Pittsburgh office in Bakery Square, an old Nabisco factory built in 1918. Wow, this space is really nice! #
• More proof that California is different from the rest of the country: Democrats won 8 out of 9 statewide races; AG is too close to call. #
• @jeffbigham I'm now using slowtweet for its intended purpose, to avoid swamping my followers. It's great! #
• @jwnichls Good point, although I still think we can do better. 🙂 #
• Google Pittsburgh is in East Liberty, which suffered from urban decline in the 60s-90s but is making a comeback. http://nyti.ms/aXzqos #
• After #SFGiants won the World Series, I can't get "Don't Stop Believing" out of my head. Maybe it's because of: http://youtu.be/_P-DpMFd8_A #
• (1 wk ago) It's funny to think that after a long day at Google, the place to hang out is the game room — at Google. Time for Rock Band! #
• Whoops, just realized all those "1 wk ago" tweets were really 2 weeks ago. Ugh. I really need an automated program to do this for me. #
• @ArsTechnica has wonderful in-depth reviews. Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick) – http://t.co/CmZXkt6, Windows Phone 7 – http://t.co/mLflJOO #
• Sigh, twitter.com doesn't parse the ArsTechnica Ubuntu 10.0 review URL correctly, let's try again: http://t.co/CmZXkt6 #

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• Nice article on TurKit with @jeffbigham, @msbernst, and Greg Little. Congrats! http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/26535/ #
• @manukumar So if your mom and bf/gf are both Facebook friends, then Facebook is stressful all the time. in reply to manukumar #
• @landay Funny, the first meaning I learned for that character was "and". in reply to landay #

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• Today's date as a binary number, 101010, equals 42. So today is the ultimate day for geeks to get married! /via http://nyti.ms/c2Z4tA #
• Congrats to the SF Giants! Apparently, the key for them winning a post-season game is for me to not watch it. I only saw Friday's game. #

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• @drjpierce I undo closed tabs all the time. I don't know how I'd function without it. in reply to drjpierce #
• Just upgraded my MacBook from 2 to 6 GB of RAM. Feels so spacious! (for now) #
• Jason on FoxTrot sees double rainbows: http://www.gocomics.com/foxtrot/2010/08/15/ #
• @drjpierce Fall is when the Bay Area finally warms up! in reply to drjpierce #
• @wordium You'll appreciate this Ripley's Believe It or Not cartoon on poutine: http://bit.ly/d7qUOz #
• "Googling" in a whole new light: http://www.gocomics.com/nonsequitur/2010/09/09/ #
• The contents of ready-to-eat military meals from 14 countries: http://nyti.ms/c8Vz5Q #
• @rweba Remember the days when we could use a computer for hours and it wasn't networked with anything? in reply to rweba #

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