May 18, 2006

I gave away a Moleskine today to Gabriel Mansour, one of the students
I’d met at Mesh. He’s been enthusiastically going to networking events
and taking down notes, and I saw him struggling with the little paper
tickler he had. The university bookstore didn’t have plain hard-bound
journals in stock, so I bought three packs of thin plain journals
instead. They still have inner pockets, which are tremendously useful
for keeping things like business cards in place. I gave one of the
journals to him, and I’m sure he’ll put it to good use.

It’s a little bit odd to be taking notes during a conversation, yes,
but I’ll take remembering over forgetting any day.

On Technorati: moleskine

Random Japanese sentence: メアリーは読書をしており、１匹の猫がかたわらで眠っていた。 Mary was reading, with a cat sleeping beside her.

Squishing through the thunderstorm in my soaked red sneakers, hearing
droplets drum the samba on my umbrella, feeling the humid air embrace
my skin – how I felt like I was home!

I normally don’t like rain, but today felt amazing.

On Technorati: weather

Random Japanese sentence: 突然、猫の鋭い叫び声が私たちに聞こえた。 All of a sudden, we heard the sharp cry of a cat.

Joey de Villa has an excellent blog post explaining BarCamp. Check it out.

On Technorati: barcamp

Random Japanese sentence: 私は犬の方が猫より好きです。なぜなら、前者の方が後者より忠実ですから。 I like dogs better than cats, because the former are more faithful than the latter.

=)

I’ll hack my T-shirts but not my hair or skin – no bleaching or dyeing or tattooing or whatever.

]]

Random Japanese sentence: じゃあ、ネコの世話は誰がするの。 Who will take care of your cat then?

I like wearing outfits inspired by traditional Filipino costumes. I
love wearing my malongs, for example.

I want more Filipina flair! =)

On Technorati: filipina, malong, fashion

Random Japanese sentence: 彼はとても満足そうに見える。 He looks like a cat that ate the canary.

One of the coolest things about blogs is that they can get indexed almost immediately after they’re posted.
Services such as PubSub and Technorati
make it easy for people and companies to find blog posts that mention something.

This means that I can, say, mention Platial and get this comment from someone who works at Platial:

Thought I’d share a couple of other uses for social mapping/place annotation.

On Platial, primarily people are using tags as a way to find functional places like platial.com/tag/donut or based on interest like platial.com/tag/burningman

But they’re also saving Places and making maps based on common interests like machinima http://platial.com/lolly/map/4922#Machinima or birding platial.com/kclama

It’s still very early but the idea of allowing maps to be personal is showing us new ways to use Platial every day. It’s a familiar metaphor that excites people. We get people plotting where they were married, broke up and had their first kiss. It’s pretty incredible to see all of this rich annotation around the world! Thanks Sacha.

As numerous speakers pointed out during mesh: the conversation is happening out there in the blogosphere. The only question is: do you want to join it? Are you keeping track of what people are saying about you, and are you responding?

Who’s been particularly keen at that? The Blinklist guys always turn up whenever I mention it. I got some Google love when I blogged about their recruiting talk at U of T (probably name-based searches). Heck, I read every single blog post in the IBM internal blogosphere, and I keep track of all the posts related to social bookmarking there. Fun stuff.

Can _you_ hear the people out there?

Random Japanese sentence: 彼は猫を飼っている。 He keep two cat.

As part of a research study for Bell Canada, I get free VOIP calls to US and Canada. However, that involves booting up a Windows machine, and that’s rather inconvenient at times. Well, Skype just beat that offer.

If you’re in the US or Canada, you can use SkypeOut to call any landline or mobile number in both the USA and Canada for free.

I’ll check that out this weekend. =)

On Technorati: skype

Random Japanese sentence: ピエロを見て少年は物が言えなくなってしまった。 When the little boy saw the clown, the cat got his tongue.

Feedburner statistics show that out of 225 blog readers in the past 24 hours, only 12 of them actually visit this site in a browser. 9 Mozilla, 3 Internet Explorer. Everyone else uses an aggregator. <laugh> What a skewed profile!

On Technorati: blogging

Random Japanese sentence: Ａ ｓｐｏｔ ｏｆ ｓｈｕｔ−ｅｙｅ は、また猫のいねむりともいわれている。猫は１度に２〜３分しか寝ない癖があるからだ。 “A spot of shut-eye” is also called a cat nap because a cat is in the habit of sleeping only a few minutes at a time.

My research supervisor has just strongly hinted that it would be a
good idea to get some kind of draft in by 2:30 PM. Now is a good time
to wake up and practically inhale papers…

On Technorati: research

Random Japanese sentence: 「はい、でも私は、ただのみっともないねこでございます」と、こねこは言いました。「だから、あなたが、どのねこが一番きれいかと、お聞きになったとき、私は何も言えませんでした。」 Oh, I’m just a very homely little cat, said the kitten, so when you asked who was the prettiest, I didn’t say anything.

It’s drizzling and gray outside, which makes staying here and working
on my paper more attractive than trekking over to the lab. I’ll go
there after lunch so that I can call into IBM for the workshop
planning meeting.

On Technorati: research

Random Japanese sentence: あなたのサイトは、猫に興味のある人達にとって魅力的です。 Your site appeals to people who are interested in cats.

I have a few hours to read tons of papers on innovation diffusion,
social network analysis, and other fun stuff. Ack. Must not panic.
I can do this.

Looping over Jed’s cover of Code Monkey. It’s upbeat, and I like it
more than the original because I know Jed. <laugh>

Random Japanese sentence: テーブルに猫の足跡が付いている。 There are footprints of a cat on the table.

My mind’s just blanking out. There’s no way I’m going to finish a
credible draft of this paper within the next 20 minutes. I’ve been
thinking about it all day, but… this just isn’t what I had done my
initial reading for, and the lack of background is really biting me.

My technology diffusion visualizations were born out of an afternoon
of play, a direction I took during a random walk. For some reason,
Mark liked it. Now I find myself scrambling madly to learn about
innovation diffusion theory. (Hooray, Everett Rogers!)

My reading notes are all about bookmarking and its personal and social
benefits. Maybe I can still work that in somewhere, but bookmarking
isn’t the main focus of the paper, and I need to fill in a lot more
back story.

Should I have skipped all the afterparties and focused on this? My
sense is that in the long run, that networking will be of much use.
(Although perhaps I could’ve skipped mush…) Now if only it didn’t
take me so long to get back on track.

If Mark was looking over my shoulder, he’d probably tell me to stop
blogging and concentrate on writing my paper instead. Unless I manage
to unblock my mind, though, it’s going to be pretty hard for me to
make sense of the papers and write a coherent submission.

My problem is that I’ve been giving him all of these half-papers:
teams, personal benefits for social bookmarking, etc. – but we keep
changing my topic after I pass them. I’m sure all of these paper
fragments lying around the place will be useful someday, but it’s
incredibly frustrating having to keep branching out.

I feel like such a research failure…

On Technorati: :(, research

Random Japanese sentence: その猫は好かれている。 The cat is liked.

My research supervisor and my labmates are totally awesome. They
listened to me freak out about impending doom and told me that I can
figure things out somehow. =)

On Technorati: iml, research

Random Japanese sentence: 弟は猫を花子と名づけました。 My brother named his cat “Hanako”.

I don’t know why people complain about not being able to find talent.
;) I run across so many interesting people while watching mailing
lists or hanging out with other geeks. For example, if you’re looking
for Ruby geeks in the Philippines, Botp Peña sounds really interesting.
Hey, anyone who advocates Rails and volunteers training has to be cool. ;)

if you’re interested to learn ruby, i can provide training session for free. just provide the place and at least 10 people to join. dili nako kaya tudlo isa-isa. ma-luoy mo. dapat naa whiteboard (kung wala projector), mga desk/silya, printer para sa handouts/exercises, and notebooks or desktops na ma-gamit ninyo ug nako (wala koy notebook, sorry). Also, dapat naa mo programming background (any language will do. di nako gusto lurat inyo mata. dapat naka-smile pirmi). i prefer to hold trainings monthly/semi-monthly lang kay para dili kaayo ko hago. one training session will cover the whole day (puwede sab ma-hangyo half-day)

• Peña, Botp (botp AT delmonte-phil.com)

E-Mail from Peña

On Technorati: ruby, philippines, geek

Random Japanese sentence: 私はあの店で猫を買った。 I bought a cat at that shop.

Now I need to figure out how to get all this data off my system. I should share my videos at least so that my mom can look at them,
but youtube caps at 10 minutes and 100 MB. I suppose I should just look into downsampling my Toastmasters speeches…

On Technorati: video

Random Japanese sentence: これは私が今までに見た中で一番大きいねこです。 This is the biggest cat that I’ve ever seen.