My last statement’s balance was 800 bucks. A desk, a bookshelf, a bed, mattress, sheets, bathroom stuff, all kinds of crap. Added to that — I spent 15 minutes of my first day in the apartment locked in my bathroom (apparently you should never close a door that doesn’t have a doorknob) before I busted through the door. I also spent the next day after that locked outside of my room (my absent-minded landlord didn’t have the key to my room so “Ramon” had to come the next day and drill my doorknob, resulting in a day without my room doorknob and my bathroom doorknob).
Too much stress.
At least my classes are pretty slack. The only thing I really have to worry about is Operating Systems, Graphic Design, my IBM job, and the MS Student Partner stuff. I had to drive to RTP today for my orientation and IBM laptop. I think in the next few weeks MS is sending me a tablet PC too.. and a Treo with a free data plan. Crazy. So I’ll have three laptops, my desktop, a Treo, and the Cingular 2125 I have now. Not really sure what i’m going to do with all of them yet…
Yesterday I bought an audio cable with couplers and finally got the surround sound working with the PS2… I think my ears (and my neighbors’ ears) are bleeding now. So classes are going well and my car is awesome.. still have to get used to directions and the bus schedule, but eh, it’ll happen eventually.
The apartment as a whole is looking pretty nice now. We got some bar stools, a bar set, and a painting to hang over the bar. Pretty much all we need…. Andrew also brought a flower-print living room rug to match our pink carpet. Thanks, Andrew. Just kidding.. I guess it makes it looks cozy.
Our work on iFold is going to be published in Bioinformatics, an Oxford Journal. I wrote up the part on the frontend and Dan did the backend. Our clients, scientists from the med school, wrote up a few things too. Writing a manuscript on iFold is pretty amazing. I have no idea how we were able to get it into two pages.. there’s so much stuff to talk about.
So yeah, awesome… my first published paper. Since i’m not going into research it might be my last too, but oh well, heh.
Undoubtedly, there is a lot in life we take for granted. It’s hard to imagine living without the ability to talk, walk, or think like we do now. You’ve probably seen a few disabled people in your life — the truth of it is, they simply want to live a normal life just like anyone else. I came across this story today…it completely moved me. It’s a story about a father-son team that competes in marathons and triathlons. It really shows how much of an influence we can have on a disabled person’s life and how much of an influence they can have on ours.
Time magazine just published a great article entitled “Who Needs Harvard” on why the current Ivy League colleges are, in summary, overrated. The basic tagline is that an elite career doesn’t stem from an elite college.
They also gave a list of only 25 schools across the country named as the “New Ivies” — “schools with exceptional educational programs and campus offerings that have seen a rise in stature to rival the Ivy League and other powerhouses in competing for top students.” Sweet.
This clip has been blazing across the internet. It’s amazing because George is able to completely rebut every one of the reporter’s biased questions and statements. Most of us live in a world where the general public’s opinions and thoughts are completely influenced by the media. This clip shows just how scary that can be.
Edit — the last statement “Anna” makes is just completely stupid and shows the total bias that Sky News and other media organizations have toward this conflict. How dare she say Galloway is being offensive against Israeli families. Here are the numbers, Anna:
1,187 Lebanese civilians killed, ONE THIRD are children and babies
4,000 Lebanese civilians injured
1,000,000 Lebanese civilians homeless and displaced
75 Israelis killed
We should mourn the deaths of Israeli soldiers, but we should not forget about the thousands of Lebanese civilians killed.
Windows Vista Speech Recognition. I saw a demo video earlier from Channel9 I think… but this is a better example. It gets the Aussie’s accent dead on, first time around. I wonder how much training it needs beforehand. It really shows you how far research has gone in this area.
If you notice, you’ll see that there’s actually some artificial intelligence going on in the background to figure out some of the stuff he’s saying. It’s not all preset words/phrases; he’s actually talking to the computer, almost like it’s another human.
It’s crazy how he’s able to navigate Internet Explorer so easily with voice too. I have no idea how it’s able to resolve the speech-to-text so fast and do a grep on the entire document. It must be doing some kind of optimized caching of the link names when the page loads.
There are a lot of people in this world who haven’t even had the chance to interact with all of our high-tech devices and culture simply because of loss of arms, paralysis, or blindness. Can you imagine what their world is like when everyone around them is talking about iPods and the cool new application from Google or Apple? Your OS could have the nicest, snazziest effects, transparency, icons, whatever, but if it can’t be used by people with disabilities, that’s a shame. It’s nice to see that Vista will have this.
I could go on and on about Apple’s design and innovation, but seriously, the videos and pictures of Spaces, Time Machine, and others speak for themselves. I love their marketing too: “Redmond also has a cat. A copycat”.. haha. I admit, good design and marketing, but come on, Apple has borrowed more than a few things from third-party companies ;] Another cool thing from OS X that isn’t mentioned as much is their amazing new advances in speech feedback. In an earlier post I talked about the iPod getting speech feedback.. well, here’s what the synthesized voice sounds like:
They’ve really got the tone and inflection down pretty well. The only reason that it sounds computerized is probably because they wanted to speed it up. I’m betting this is the same stuff that’ll go into the next version of their iPod. They even simulated the “breaths” at commas and periods… that’s attention to detail.
