tidbits

Everyone’s been telling me I must be excited that school is starting soon, but it still hasn’t really hit me that I’ll be going to grad school. It still seems pretty far off. I think time’s been moving relatively slowly for me lately because I spend most of my days having nothing of consequence to do, really. I have other stuff to think about, and I’ve at least one more class to teach before school starts, and I still don’t want to think about what my housing situation is going to be, although getting my loan info means I can start taking concrete steps, as far as that goes. I’ve finally started getting crap from UCLA, all at once. My financial aid package arrived today, as did health insurance stuff and billing stuff, and something..sporty. About season tickets. I don’t know. But the end of September still seems light years away to me.

In other news: we’ve got lots of visitors in town for the 4th of July weekend! It seems like everyone is going to faire le pont, as the French say, and take Monday off – or is that considered a holiday-day too? Having holidays land on Thursdays and Tuesdays is the best for just that reason.

And my cousin who lives in Japan is going to have another baby! Makes me happy, because that means the cuteness in our family isn’t going to be running out anytime soon.

Ahh!! And I just found out another friend is having one too! Babies!

Filed under: personal

the daily plate

I love, love, love The Daily Plate. I probably won’t use it as often as I should, but I love the idea behind it, and I love that it exists.

A few months ago I’d tried to make my own calorie-counter widget for Konfabulator (now Yahoo! Widget Engine), but I never got very far. The most time-consuming part was trying to make life easier in the long run by finding a way to record my intake by food, rather looking up the nutritional data and then inputting the numbers every time (or, worse, digging the packaging out of the trash to get the nutrition info from the side of the box). This would have been fine for a limited number of foods, but if I wanted to keep track of every single thing I ate, I’d rather have easy access to a database that automatically retrieved such info for me.

The Daily Plate has a neat, web2.0, near-solution to the problem I was trying to solve. Once you sign up, you enter your height, weight, and everyday activity level, so they can give you your “recommended” daily calorie intake. In my case, this is around 1500 Calories a day. Then you are shown your “daily plate,” on which you can start to record the number of calories you’ve consumed each day.

The way to do this is to search for the food you just ate, and then click on whatever match you get. You’re then shown the product page, which you can see below. There’s a button to the left of the Nutrition Facts sidebar (which looks just like it does on food packaging!): after you click it, you can specify whether you ate this product today, yesterday, or some other day, and voila! It’s recorded. Pretty easy! On this page you can also leave a review of the food…I find this feature slightly less useful; if you’re hungry or grocery shopping, it would never occur to you to check some stranger’s review of a product, would it? But I could be wrong.

Anyway, another nifty feature is the box underneath that “I ate this!” button. It lists foods that might be healthier for you to consume (bring on the guilt trips!), or alternatives in case you’ve been eating the same boring quesadillas every day and wanna try something different, or with less protein or sodium or fat or whatever.

Ah, but what happens if you want to add Trader Joe’s Vanilla Yogurt but get no hits? Well, you can either go with the “generic yogurt” (with inaccurate calorie info), OR you can add the food yourself, which turns out to be more fun than I would have expected it to be, thanks to their extremely user-friendly input forms. You give them the brand and product name, then enter the nutrition information just as it appears on the product’s packaging (which, hopefully, you’ve saved). So yeah, there’s still a bit of work on the user’s side, but the power of web 2.0 means that the bulk of the work will have already been done for you (unless you’re a weirdo like Angie and only drink Peet’s coffee). Long live user-generated content!

The only downside to adding a product to the database yourself is that it’s not considered official until after the site’s mods have reviewed it. Understandable, but not exactly 2.0. Most other websites (like Craigslist and Flickr, or Yelp) rely on the users, again, to flag questionable or inaccurate contributions. So I’m not sure why they made that decision.

Another thing that gives me pause is how many of the search results return fast food products. Even something as basic as “orange juice” gives me tons of hits from Carl’s Jr. and McDo, and I have to go to page 2 to find like, Tropicana. My guess is that the site’s runners found it easy to find and add this data from fast food places, who are sort of obligated to make such info readily available (on their own restaurant web pages, for example). I don’t think there’s anything sinister going on in terms of ads or anything, at any rate. For now, ads on the site are rare and bare, which is pretty nice.

So The Daily Plate is basically a diet-tracking website, in the sense that it tracks what you eat, and not in the sense that it’s a ‘weight-loss regime,’ which it isn’t, ultimately, although there is the option to calculate how many calories you’d need to consume each day in order to gain or lose a pound or two a week, or to maintain your weight. You can also track the amount of exercise you get, because it lets you “subtract” calories you’ve burned by doing physical activities (which you can pick out of their list, or else you can just input the calories-burned info yourself).

Beyond the user-generated stuff, the site also has forums set up for users to share information, discuss diet tips, talk about the progress their making, and other general health- and diet- related issues. This stuff will be nice for community-building, and I plan to check it out once the site gains more users and the boards become more active.

All in all, a nicely done website (maybe a few UI, user-friendliness issues here and there, but if you can figure out MySpace, this place is a cinch). I guess I can put my calorie counter project on permanent hiatus =)

Filed under: food, web2.0

teaching them

I worked in references to Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix and “The Colbert Report” during my verbal class today, without even having to try. The opportunities presented themselves with the words “umbrage” and “formidable.” And now I know who the cool kids are (although none of them actually admitted to reading Harry Potter).

And then one of my students was the only one who knew the word “vestibule,” because she’d hear Chandler use it in an episode of “Friends.”

I also mangled a question involving the word “protean,” and possibly lost all cred with my class forever.

Luckily, I have only 2 more sessions left with this group. Yay!

Filed under: Uncategorized

is it still a notebook if you can’t fold it shut?

I am fairly distraught. My lappie’s left hinge finally gave out, leaving my notebook computer essentially headless (the right hinge broke a few months ago; right now, the only thing keeping it attached is the video cable). Right now, the monitor part of my notebook is propped up by an Amazon box so that I can see what I’m doing, and I can’t even shift my laptop around when my arms get tired of typing in one position or another.

It’s a pain. But I do hope I can repair it. I ordered a set of hinges from eBay, for what I consider to be an unreasonable price (but it’s apparently the going price in the small market for these parts, so I have no choice). I should’ve done this a long time ago, when the first hinge broke, but I didn’t think it’d be worth the money or hassle. I was wrong, though. Even if I do get another computer, this one will become a hand-me-down for my parents, and I’m not sure they’d appreciate a decapitated notebook.

And it will be nice to have a portable computer that’s, you know, *portable,* again.

Filed under: computer

folksonomy hits

Tagfetch.com is exactly what I’ve been waiting for, ever since I realized what tags could do. Tagfetch is a search engine that does folksonomy! It searches tags across bookmarks, photos, blogs, and news.

Del.icio.us has been getting better and better at providing relevant links to tag searches, and this is a direct result of how well people, in their own interest, have tagged their links based on what makes sense to them. It’s crowd sagacity at work =)

Expanding search to cover the entire range of “taggable” stuff, like photos, means a wider, but still useful, range of relevant hits, and the possibilities are…..well, maybe not endless, but certainly great.

I hope I’m right. I just ran a mile, and it’s entirely possible I’m not in my right mind at the moment.

Will come back to this, later, hopefully.

[via Lifehacker]

Filed under: web2.0

shoutout

I’m linking to Binary Moon, creator of the Regulus theme which is the current theme for my blog. I chose Regulus because it’s more customizable than the other themes currently offered by WordPress.com.

I don’t lurve the boxy page links at the top, but I can certainly live with them if it means I can have my little bee in the header!

Thanks, Binary Moon, for giving us poor non-self-hosting bloggers more options!

Filed under: meta

I can’t wait that long!

More good news about LEDs from Treehugger:

LED technology is being used to make LCD displays brighter and more energy efficient. Previously, the cost of LEDs had limited their use in flat screen displays. A user would have to pay two or three times as much for an LCD TV that uses an LED backlight instead of a traditional cold cathode fluorescent lamp (CCFL) backlight, for example. But prices have come down to the point where most technologies start to break into the market, when specialists or enthusiasts are willing to pay. And once LED production rises, reaching heavier volumes, prices will come down — and continue to come down as rivals in the industry expand factories and grab for market share.

In some devices, particularly smaller ones, LED backlights are already becoming common. Sony’s PlayStation Portable (PSP) handheld gaming device, is one prime example, since gamers demand the best image quality possible.

“The next major product will be the notebooks, notebook screens .. .maybe in the first half of next year,” said C.T. Liu, vice president of AU Optronics’ technology center, forecasting when LED backlights will become standard in new laptops.

LED backlights are making headway in laptops because costs are coming down and LEDs use less power, saving battery life. In laptops, power savings is far more important than plug-in devices, and screens tend to be a major battery drainer. LED backlights reduce power usage by at least 10 percent compared to older technologies, Liu said.

Great. I was hoping to buy a MacBook by the end of this year, but my conscience isn’t going to let me do that if Apple (or whatever notebook maker I end up choosing) doesn’t use these LED gizmos by then. (And, more importantly, I’m a sucker for anything that will extend battery life).

Filed under: Uncategorized

Because “Jesus loves web 2.0″

(Their tagline, not mine!)

I finally got an invite to try eBible.com during their beta, and to be honest I’m not quite as impressed as I had hoped I’d be. Remember how I’d wanted to check it out because it’s all new and shiny and web2.0-ized? Well, it’s definitely not shiny. No gradients!

That was my lame web2.0 pun for the day.

Rounded corners notwithstanding, I’m not exactly sure what makes eBible “web 2.0″ – they do offer a “bookmark” feature that sort of mashes up the conventional definition of bookmark with the new, post-del.icio.us definition (because you’re tagging a passage from the Good Book, and then letting others see what you’ve bookmarked – social!), but there’s nothing else to indicate that this site is about the “collaborative, user-generated social web.”

The first thing you see when you land on their front page is a big yellow search box from which you can search by Bible verse, keyword, product or tag (which is like a keyword, really). They also have something called “Answer”, which seems to be like the dictionary/concordance you’d find at the end of your physical Bible. At first I thought the giant cloud underneath the form was a cloud of popular searches, but it’s tags. You can browse by tags, if you’re bored.

I was hoping to be able to browse by book, but I guess you can just type in the book name in the search window (like John). When you do, you are led to a page that shows you the Bible passage containing your reference. On the right is the passage, and on the left is a box that contains any tags you might have applied to the passage from earlier searches, or if you click the “Commentary” link, will pop up the commentary of your choice (right now they have “Believer’s Bible” and “Nelson’s New Illustrated”).

The cool part comes next: you can read this Bible excerpt in 6 versions (other places, like Biblegateway.com, provide many, many more versions, and I’m a little surprised eBible doesn’t offer the NIV, but I’m an NASB fan and they do have that) — but if you want to compare two versions, you can view them both side-by-side! Neat-o! (And apparently, “The Message” is a bit more long-winded than NASB). At any point, you can highlight a verse or passage, and apply your tags so you can find them easier later, I guess. Which I could definitely see the value of.

[The fun thing about eBible.com is how ubiquitous their monetization stuff is - not only do ads show up in search results (though not on the Bible passage pages themselves), but prominent among their search options is the Product search, and there are lots of places where they provide ways for you to, ah, spiritually, part with your money (and help sustain their site).]

Aside from this cool side-by-side passage viewing thing, though, eBible doesn’t (yet) provide nearly as many resources as it could – particularly in its offering of searchable Bible versions. It might work fine as a personal Bible reference/journal (because of hte bookmarking), but if you want to do some serious Bible study, you’d be better off checking the more comprehensive resources at BibleGateway, or Bible.org (strangely enough, Bible.com *looks* more web2.0 than this site does).

And I’m still not sure what makes eBible “web 2.0″ – they need to provide more content, and more services, than just the ability to view others’ bookmarks. One thing they might do, for example, is to get people to start discussions on the Bible, and maybe do so in light of present-day events (ok, so maybe I just described Digg.com for the Bible, but you know what I mean! Something that allows you to *do* something with those bookmarks, maybe). I can understand how this stuff might not be within the scope of eBible’s purpose, if they just want to present the one, true unerring Word of God, but the fact that you’re using Ruby on Rails to do it (while *awesome*) doesn’t mean you’re entitled to call it web 2.0.

Not to mention, the “e-” prefix is SO 1.0 =D

I have 3 invites, so if anyone would like to use eBible, let me know.

Filed under: book, web2.0

how depressing

I try to be merciless when pruning tracks from my 4-gig iPod mini, but it’s getting to the point where the number of mp3s I need to delete to make room is not enough to let me upload the new mp3s I’ve obtained.

(just for the record, all downloaded legally, nyeh)

Filed under: Uncategorized

the more specific, the more universal

There’s an article on delish/popular right now called Thirteen Tips for Effective Tagging. There are some good tips here for users, but it the subtitle, “How to mark sites so you and others can find them,” reminds me of this other article I read awhile back (which I can’t find because I didn’t delish it! Oh, the irony =P) where someone was discussing the idea of setting a universal method for tagging in order to make it easier for everyone to understand everyone’s tags.

Which would defeat the purpose of tagging, no? The whole idea of a “folksonomy” is to sift order from chaos, not to create top-down sets of “standards” in the first place. That would just bring us back to taxonomy.

Tagging is at its most effective when you tag the way that’s best for you (or for your company, if you use it for that) — and nothing else. That means using tags that you KNOW will help YOU find the article again, and also not being self-conscious about the tags you’re using, and not worrying about “helping” strangers with your taggery (unless, again, it’s for your specific organization). If the tags you use are apt to begin with, you can rest assured that enough other users will have used the same tag to give it higher relevance to the page you’ve tagged, and that strangers will be able to find it based just on that aggregate number.

I feel like the collective “wisdom” that comes from services like del.icio.us will stay “authentic” and reliable if everyone keeps that mindset. The interesting thing about the wisdom of crowds is that if you’re conscious of the crowd, the wisdom becomes less effective, kind of like Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. If you start tagging with other people’s searches in mind, there’s a chance you’ll end up helping nobody, including yourself. Worry about yourself first, and let the wisdom of crowds work out the architecture of the collective del.icio.us universe on its own.

Filed under: web2.0