I’m from Newtown, Connecticut

I’ve seen my other friends do this, on the advice of Newtown High School teacher Lash Ashmore, so here goes… Hi, I’m from Newtown, Connecticut. Newtown has modern conveniences — supermarkets, Starbucks, an Interstate highway. But it also has small-town charm. People go to the Town Hall to watch movies for $2 and buy sandwiches …

Ariel Hsing: Ping pong’s newest American star

Ariel Hsing has had a great run at the Olympics as a member of the U.S. table tennis team. She was the only American to make it past the first round, she upset a former world champion in the second round, and she pushed the eventual gold medalist to the limit in the third round …

Computing as a career

Here are some thoughts for students who are considering computing, including computer science and software engineering, as a career. While these tips are particularly geared for high schoolers going to my alma mater, Monta Vista High School, they can apply to many others. What do I enjoy about computing? Computers are capable of doing amazing …

Tips for New York City transit

Since I’ve been to New York City several times for business, I thought I’d pass along some tips. If you’re in New York City for a week, I would highly recommend getting a 7-day Unlimited MetroCard ($29). A single ride is $2.50, so just two trips a day makes it worthwhile. However, you can’t use …

Mac OS X: Clipboard vs Pasteboard

In my previous blog post, I noted my surprise and distaste for the term “Pasteboard” over “Clipboard” in Mac OS X. It seemed like an unnecessary change in terminology. However, a friend and long-time Mac user later pointed out to me that OS X still calls it a Clipboard, for example, Edit→Show Clipboard in the …

Tips for Inkscape on a Mac

Last night, I worked on an SVG file that Caitlin Kelleher had created with Inkscape (for the cover of the proceedings of VL/HCC 2011). I also used Inkscape, but it took a few tricks on my Mac to get it to work properly. I wanted to use Helvetica Neue for all of the text, but …

Steve Jobs presents plans for Apple’s new campus

Just one day after his keynote at Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference, Steve Jobs made an appearance last night at the Cupertino City Council to present the company’s plans for a new campus in Cupertino, on the old Hewlett-Packard site. It essentially consists of one giant building shaped like a doughnut that will hold 12,000 people. …

CHI 2011 Tweets: May 12–14

Buxton: Jobs revived Apple with people already employed there, such as Jonathan Ives. The culture needed changing, not the people. Gerken et al present method called Concept Maps to elicit developer’s mental model of API. A related resource: apiusability.org Missed Wrangler (creating data transformation scripts interactively), but saw Jeff Heer’s BayCHI talk on it. Good …

CHI 2011 Tweets: May 11

Saw and enjoyed last 3 papers of Photo Sharing session, especially Jones and O’Neill on relationship of photo metadata and sharing Will definitely discuss web credibility papers back at work. Need to read other 2 papers in that session. Not tweeting much during CHI 2011 itself: the wi-fi is totally overloaded so I can’t connect …