The Shangri-La Diet

Seth Roberts, a UC Berkeley professor in psychology, has an unusual theory on Lose Weight Exercise gain: whenever you eat a food that is flavorful and familiar, your body demands that you bank as many of those calories as possible. What if you could keep your thermostat low by sending fewer flavor signals? He eventually found two ways of doing so: by swallowing a few tablespoons of either unflavored oil or sugar water in between meals, he was a lot less hungry. He and his friends and colleagues have lost Lose Weight Exercise and have not gained it back.

The Chronic—WHAT?—cles of Narnia

Everyone else is linking this, so I’ll join the fun. (Thanks, Jason!) Take a look at this rap video from Saturday Night Live: “Lazy Sunday.” There are some sick rhymes in there (sick as in phat. uh, yeah). As a geek, I love this verse:

Yo where’s the movie playing? Upper West Side dude
Let’s hit up Yahoo Maps to find the dopest route
I prefer MapQuest. That’s a good one too
Google Maps is the best. True that! Double true!

The deed is done

I finally submitted my Ph.D. yesterday. I would have blogged yesterday, but as you might imagine I was too tired. I spent all weekend prepping my dissertation for printing, and then a few hours actually printing the necessary three copies. It weighs in at 583 pages (about 200 pages for the text, and the rest for the table of contents, appendices, etc.).

Andy submitted just after I did, so we celebrated with dinner at an East Bay institution: Zachary’s Pizza. So one day later, it doesn’t feel so different. But I know that in the future, I won’t have to endure the question, “When will you be done?” What a relief! And I get to put “Ph.D.” on my business cards, heh heh…

More on the new Microsoft Office UI

I just got back from a BayCHI talk by Jensen Harris, the lead designer of the new Microsoft Office 12 user interface. He’s actually already blogged a lot of what he talked about, so I won’t repeat it here — take a look at his “Best Of” list on his blog for an overview. Instead, here are some high-level impressions.

  • Jensen is an excellent speaker. He’s clear, funny, and not afraid to poke fun at Microsoft’s previous attempts at “improving” the user interface of Office.
  • UI designs are actually driven by data that is collected anonymously, and with permission, from current Office 2003 users. It may not be perfect data, but it’s a lot better than guessing.
  • The new UI is most easily adopted by novice users. Power users already know Office well, so they have the most to loseWeight Exercise in the new UI. The biggest thing Jensen feels the new UI is lacking is customizability for power users.
  • Office 12 is about a year away from release, but Microsoft is already talking very openly about it. They haven’t been nearly this open in the past, and other companies certainly aren’t as open today. I believe it’s from a combination of starting from a position of strength and feeling the pressure to show that they are innovative, that the next version of Office really is worth buying.

26 hours

It was a busy weekend for me. On Saturday at 2 PM, I first went to the housewarming of Tessa and Dan, who I know independently from IBM and Caltech, respectively. It was made all the more memorable by Seth flying a radio-controlled helicopter right into a tree, and then him climbing the tree, a good 40 feet up, to shake it out. [photos]

Then I made my way up the peninsula to San Francisco, where Andy was throwing his farewell party — he’s graduating from Berkeley and moving out of the area. I plan to see his dissertation talk this Thursday. Andy most certainly did not want gifts (unless it was food), since he was trying to clean out his apartment. [photos]

After that I went to another party, this one in the East Bay, where Jennifer and Fredrik, who I know from SIMS, were holding their annual Glögg party. Their first party had mostly Berkeley students, over the years it has shifted to mostly co-workers. I’m glad I was there to uphold the Cal tradition. [photo]

I stayed overnight at my old apartment in Berkeley, where my former roommate Chinh still lives. It’s nice to have an option to sleep overnight up there! The next morning we had breakfast at Rudy’s Can’t Fail Cafe in Emeryville [photo]. I enjoyed the corned beef hash, although the salt gets to you after a while.

Then I drove down to Palo Alto to meet up with my high school friend Jon. Together we went on a tour of the house and garage where HP was founded. The only public tours scheduled so far was today, yesterday, and Saturday, so I feel lucky to have snagged a spot. Unfortunately, we weren’t given much time to linger, but I did get some good photos.

Finally, I went back to the South Bay to Shumin and Pernilla’s housewarming. They have a beautiful house complete with a pool, and Pernilla cooked way too much food. 🙂 Good stuff! She said if we had eaten like Swedes do at a Christmas party, there wouldn’t have been enough. Those Swedes must fast for days beforehand… [photos]

I finally went home at 4 PM, 26 hours after my first party. When I mentioned my schedule, someone said, “I’m sorry.” But they misunderstood — for me, it was fun! I got to see a lot of friends spanning high school, college, grad school, and IBM. It also helped that I didn’t have to host my own party at the same time.

The new AT&T logo

Today the SBC/AT&T merger was completed. It’s a little bizarre to think of AT&T as my local phone company, essentially having grown up after the 1984 breakup. Anyway, the new AT&T logo was also introduced today, and it’s like the old one but 3-Dified for extra spiffiness.

Actually, I don’t think it’s too bad, but I decided to look at a design community blog called Speak Up to see what they think. The verdict: nearly universal condemnation, with a few “let me sleep on it”s. Not unexpected — I haven’t seen a logo redesign that these people do like.

What I found more interesting is that there was also dismay over how the new logo was described in their press release. One commenter said the statements were “empty, meaningless BS that do a huge disservice to the profession of design.”