James Lin’s infrequently updated blog
Get this: a neighborhood where the streets are for cars and planes.
Here’s an overhead view from Windows Live Local. Notice the extra-wide streets named Boeing Road, United Drive, and so on, next to the Cameron Airport. These streets are also taxiways.
I just found out that the School of Information Management and Systems at Berkeley is changing its name to simply the School of Information, or “iSchool.” It’s a better name — I don’t think anyone had a good grasp of what “information management and systems” meant, while its new name implies a more expansive charter, understanding the nature of information and how it shapes society. It also makes it more directly comparable with other information schools at Michigan, Washington, Texas, and so on.
More reactions:
“With overall membership on the wane in Japan, union leaders were only too happy to welcome newcomers, no matter how unconventional the trade.”
I’ve finished putting in all of my old blog entries from TrailBlazing into this one. I haven’t posted any photos yet, so all those links are still broken, but everything else is in. As I was categorizing my entries for the first time, I realized how many different topics I’ve blogged about. The blog’s living up to its name!
It’s been more than a month since I came back from Taiwan, and I’m still organizing our photos from our trip to Asia. In Taiwan, Matt and I had CDs burned with my photos and some of his. And then a couple of weeks ago, Michael gave me a DVD with photos from him and John, and some of Matt’s. And then I just downloaded the rest of Matt’s photos from his server.
As you can imagine, the resulting collection was a mess. The photos all had different names. The timestamps of the files were useless. The EXIF timestamps recorded by the camera were better, but most of us forgot to change the time on the camera until one or two days into the new time zone. (I never changed mine, because I knew I’d forget.) So I amassed a collection of useful software tools to plow through and organize the photos and video clips.
At last, I have over 4.5 GB of photos and videos renamed, re-timestamped, organized, and ready to show off. (Although I still need to finish captioning them…)
I saw MythBusters on the Discovery Channel for the first time last Saturday and again tonight. It has instantly become one of my favorite TV shows. Tonight they fired handguns and rifles, including a 50-caliber, into a pool to see how deep underwater you would have to be to avoid getting hurt (at 30 degrees, only about 3 feet).
They also found that a person cannot go 360 degrees on a chain swing under his or her own power. But it is possible—if you strap a rocket to the person (or dummy, in this case) at 40 degrees.
Sweeeeeet. All in the name of science…
It’s odd that, now that I’m living in the South Bay, I seem to be going to San Francisco more often than I was in Berkeley. In fact, I’ve gone up once a week for the past 4 weeks: to visit Francis, Simona, Rich, and Agata [photo]; Ame and Chris’s wedding reception; a Super Bowl party with Jon; and a Lincoln Highway Association meeting [photos]. And I’m probably going up next week to visit Norman. It’s all about being done with grad school…
Are the Winter Olympics being held in Turin or Torino? Yes. Different media outlets are using different conventions: the Chronicle says “Turin,” while NBC and CBS Radio say “Torino.”
I find “Torino” to be a little jarring. We don’t usually use the local name for a city if it has a different English name: we don’t say Firenze or Köln or Moskva. Swedes don’t expect us to say “Göteborg” (pronounced something like yohtuhboree) instead of Gothenburg. Indeed, there was no reason to switch from Peking to Beijing, except that the Chinese government wanted us to (although I admit I like “Beijing” better).
And it turns out there’s another wrinkle to Turin’s name. According to Wikipedia, the area around Turin speaks not only Italian but another Romance language called Piedmontese. And in that language, Turin is called… Turin.
While Yahoo 360 has an easy-to-use blogging service, it’s a little too basic for me. There are three things that are missing:
So now I’m giving WordPress.com a shot. It’s got the above features, it’s free (woohoo!), and if it’s good enough for Robert Scoble and Dave Winer, it’s good enough for me.
There a few restaurants that have been featured on Check, Please! Bay Area on KQED Channel 9 that I want to try out.
With Check, Please! reviews, your mileage may vary. For example, Vik’s Chaat House is a favorite place of Berkeley students for chaat. 2 out of 3 reviewers weren’t impressed with it, but one of them doesn’t like Indian food in general, and the other one usually orders Chicken Tikka Masala and was bewildered by the chaat menu. Argh! This place definitely deserved better reviews. Thankfully a ton of people have defended the restaurant on the Check, Please!‘s web site. I’m tempted to chime in.
It’s also unfortunate that the vast majority of restaurants that are reviewed are around San Francisco. I know there is good food down here in the South Bay — it just may not be in the most classy setting (OK fine, they’re all in strip malls). Which reminds me, there’s a hole in the wall that serves great pot stickers and noodles in west San Jose (near Cupertino): Tong Dumpling Pot. Highly recommended.