Treasure Island is Horrible

I'd like to write an insightful post right now, but I promised my brother I'd do this first, so bear with me here. I promise to share pictures at the end.

So my birthday was last week, and several of my cousins, as well as my brother, came with me to go barhopping on Friday night. We were all having a good time when we ended our night at 413 E 6th St, Austin, TX, aka Treasure Island Pirate Bar. I had been there before and the bartender did tricks with the bottles so it seemed like an interesting place to come back to. It ended up being a bad choice though.

At 2:00 AM, it's standard that all bars on 6th Street stop serving alcohol. Usually, they give you a few minutes to pay your tab, drink some water, and take another bathroom break. Not so at Treasure Island. We were rudely shoved out the door. I mean they physically pushed us out. What were we doing? I was taking pictures with my cousins, very innocent smiles, and drinking water. We weren't being rowdy at all. It wasn't just us, it was everyone, to be fair. Still, they even pulled the glass out of water out of my brother's hands! Come on! We just spent money buying a couple of rounds of shots, why kick us out so quickly?!

When we get outside, we complain to the bouncer and he says, "Yeah, we are assholes. If you don't like it, go somewhere else." I am not exaggerating, those were his precise words. So I encourage you, my humble readers in Austin, to not support this bar. There are plenty of others on 6th that treat their customers with some respect.

As promised, here are some photos, I'll write more later:



Mmm...beer can chicken. This is from a few weeks ago.



Fred is so precious!



The guys from Friday night.



Happy birthday to us!

I'm behind

I know =P Just had a bday, give me a few days here. I promise a new post before the week's end with promise of more posts more regularly in the near future.

The Interweb is a Dangerous Place

You think it's dorky to still say Interweb? Anyway, I know it's been a while, but the busier I am the more motivating the news has to be for me to report on it, and there's just been kind of a drought recently. I think it'll be easier after this semester since 15 hours and football is tanking me.

Anyhow, the good news is that Amazon has cut down my job search with a full time offer, and it's a big deal to me to finally get this opportunity. I feel blessed to have such a great offer in front of me, and it's really a product of everyone who has helped me over the past 20 years, so thanks to all you guys. Whenever I give Amazon good press here, it's because I'm honestly impressed by the product, and that's what really excites me about potentially going there full time. They never had to brainwash me to like them or believe in them as a company.

What I really wanted to talk about today though was security. I'm still trucking along in my Network Security and Privacy class, and it's been a lot of fun though there's so much material that I wonder if our first exam will swallow me whole. Our first project is actual to steal fake sensitive data from a fake site they set up by impersonating the user or getting them to "accidentally" send it to me, except that it's not so fake. Yes, it was created solely for this project, but the ideas it's based on are, frighteningly enough, actually used for authentication.

I think what this course has done for me most of all is make me more afraid of the state of online security. I just wanted to share my fear in an effort to help you guys protect yourselves better. I used to think that the people who got viruses and other bad things were just way too naive and opened spam e-mail or went to shady sites or something. In actuality, it's so much easier than that to be compromised. A botnet searches for unpatched holes in your system's security to make it a zombie and use it to send spam and mount distributed denial of service attacks (a fancy way of saying that it'd make you an accessory to illicitly taking down web sites and, likely, extortion), and you may not even know.

There's much worse though. If you don't have a password set up on your router, someone could plant a one pixel (unnoticeably small) applet on a web page that would maliciously change your router's firmware and make it so that legitimate sites (like PayPal or banking sites) redirect to phishing sites (sites engineered to steal your credentials without you knowing). So www.wellsfargo.com would go to their malicious site, though the URL wouldn't change and it'd look exactly like the real thing. Scary, huh? It's called drive-by pharming, which is actually a pretty cool name.

If you're worried about phishing, you should keep your web browser patched, and your OS for that matter, and maybe try out PwdHash. There's much more I can say about phishing, but the I want to move on to something else that PwdHash helps with (slightly): user authentication. This process is largely dependent on the server authenticating you being smart, but it also relies on you choosing a good password. If you must use the same password at multiple sites, use PwdHash. It fights against phishing (though not drive-by pharming) and it gives you a different, seemingly random password everywhere. If you can find your password that you use at any site in a dictionary, that means it's pretty easily crackable. Please, include numbers and symbols in your passwords!

Of course, even if you set up a firewall, change your router's password, use random passwords, and don't go to shady sites (or trust phishy e-mails), you're still in danger. Crazy, huh? There's always the threat of cross site scripting (XSS) attacks, where-by a hacker basically injects code into a web page or a URL and uses it to take cookies from you or just does generally bad stuff to your machine or uses you to inflict damage on other sites. Speaking of cookies, there's not quite as bad and insecure as you may think (as I once thought): only the site and server that created them can read and edit them, but unfortunately there are ways around this for a smart hacker dealing with a naive user.

You could blame the creator of cookies for not designing it well enough, but the rule that he established would sound pretty good to me if I didn't know any better. You could blame the creators of TCP/IP for not having stronger security protocols, but how long until someone finds a loophole? What I've come to learn more than anything is that when it comes to technology, there's always a way to get screwed. If it's hard enough to get screwed over, then you'll likely be fine because hackers prey on things that are computationally less greedy. But still, your system is only as secure as the least secure part of it (and for a network, the same goes for the weakest computer on it), and how you authenticate is only as safe as the most vulnerable part of the process. It's scary, very scary, but there's definitely hope.

There's plenty of public knowledge out there about these issues to protect yourself. For the most part, the little things count (like what I cited above). Just don't be too trusting when you're out there on the web, and keep a progressive back-up of your data. Live every day like it's your computer's last. No matter how careful you are, it's still possible for you to lose everything, if not to a hacker than to hardware failures.

Amazon's Unveilings

Full disclosure: I worked at Amazon this summer, for those of you who didn't know, and I was not a part of creating the new mp3 store or the new site navigation. I did see the new navigation, and had some time to play around with it, but I didn't actually tell anyone about it or blog it, for that matter, because it wasn't public.

Amazon finally opened their music store, and I was pleasantly surprised. My earlier impressions of it were that it would end up being an unfortunate mess, but I think they've really come a long way since what I had been hearing about it. All the music is totally free of DRM and features UMG, EMI, and tons of indie labels. The only reason they're missing Sony BMG and Time Warner, I imagine, is that they haven't let go of DRM yet.

There are a few reasons why I really like it and have faith in it. You can basically download the music from anywhere, you just need a browser. Strangely, you need a downloading tool to get an entire album, but this is nice because it doesn't require additional software (though I wonder if Amazon is working on an iTunes-like player to supplement this) to get a random song. This means that smartphone users could probably download music from Amazon MP3 and sync with their computer later, so this would even better compete with iTunes. I like how easy it is to preview tracks: you can forward through them after hitting "Play All", you can hit the play button next to each track, and it's much more responsive than iTunes is. These previews aren't just available for an album or artist, they're for search results also. The pages overall are clean, and the album pages have direct links to the CDs in case you want to buy those instead (the CD pages now have the same preview functionality, much better than what it was like before). To top it all off: the top 100 songs at any given time are $0.89 (with songs usually priced at $0.99) and the top 100 albums are $8.99. Overall, it's an easy shopping experience.

There are some problems though. For one thing, if albums can cost as much as $11.99 (maybe higher, I haven't browsed thoroughly), won't they be as much as the hard CDs? Then all you're saving on really is shipping. You can't re-download tracks once you've bought and downloaded them once, which isn't that big of a deal since it's not like you could on iTunes and if you could then you could just give out your account information to friends and they could all have your music very easily. I'm sure they are tracking your purchases for recommendations though, which is another thing they should flesh out more (and knowing Amazon, I'm sure they are). Why do we need software just for album downloads? That's weird. It's kind of like Down Them All: it only appears when you click to download a song or album. It sounds like bad design, to be honest, that you can't download full albums from the site, but maybe there's a better reason or maybe it's something they'll hammer out now while in beta.

Why are their odds good? They're Amazon. They have a huge brand name, they have really smart people, and they can probably personalize, recommend, and cross-promote stuff better than iTunes can without being obtrusive and, hopefully, while staying fast, convenient, and cheap. I think they're very well aware of the business model, so I believe in them.

I have to go pretty soon, but real quick: Amazon has started a Web Lab for their new global navigation. Basically, only a portion of visitors will see the new design, and they'll use data from these visitors' clicks to determine if it's good or bad or needs tweaking or what before they roll it out. I was at first very stubborn about the new design, but it didn't take me long at all to embrace it whenever I went back to the current Amazon site. It makes a lot of things better and easier. You always have access to the entire site in the corner of the screen, the top bar gets a lot smaller, you can see what's in your cart without clicking to it, etc. They put a lot of time, thought, and effort into this design, so don't discount it as some overnight impulse change or anything. They're really focused on making the site easier to navigate, faster to use, and more visually appealing. If you manage to see the new site, definitely play around with it. In my opinion, it's their largest overhaul of the UI since Amazon.com first opened its doors over 10 years ago, and it probably actually is.

Stay Tuned

Ok, I totally have to blog about Amazon MP3, but I have a Finance exam in about 10 hours so just wait a bit. I just need to get this exam out of the way...

Piracy Beats Legitimacy?

I know, I kinda fell off again. I have pretty bad luck, let me tell you. Every week bad stuff just seems to happen. Last week, I was consumed with interviews for NSC and that was followed by a crisis for someone dear to me, and then I had a project due at midnight last night.

Still, I wanted to crank out a small post in the new format I decided to move to. At the heart of what I want to talk about is this article. When it's easier to pirate stuff than get it legally, what do you do? I mean the advantage with movies to buy the real DVD from a bootleg copy is better quality, and it's more reliable, right? And with books it's just a lot more convenient than trying to copy a book you borrow from a friend or something. With TV shows, do we have that? It turns out that not only can you get high quality copies of popular shows, as we all knew, but it's easier than ever now for non-techies. The program described in that article will literally just pull new shows you your computer as they're available, and there's no restrictive DRM on it or anything! Why would you turn to iTunes, which NBC has abandoned, has only comparable quality, and is strapped with DRM?

Basically, the studios need to use their heads and collaborate with Apple or another major player (who else is there that big though?). They need to hand over more content, and Apple needs to compete better with pirates. When it comes to digital media, it's beyond just delivering content, it's about making it faster, easier, and better quality than pirated copies at an affordable price. They're failing to do this, and their success is limited and will stay limited until they try to progress. How long has iTunes had video now? Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe it was the Fall before last. So why hasn't it gotten much better?

To top it off, Winamp is bringing the heat with the support of mp3 blogs for you to stream your libraries as you listen to them. Oh, and it makes it easier to host an mp3 player, much easier than back in the pre-Napster days. I haven't used Winamp in forever and even I'm tempted to get this new version. Who knows, I may try it out later tonight. Not territory iTunes will enter anytime in the forseeable future anyhow, it focuses too much on simplicity whereas Winamp focuses on the music geeks.

I love Ars, so I'm plugging their iPhone Touch review. It's a great read, as always.

Touchy Touchy

There it is, the new iPod Touch from our friends at Apple. It's literally the iPhone minus the phone, but you can see for yourself. Apple made an announcement on Wednesday that could be construed as ruinous as it was amazing. They decided to drop the iPhone price to $400 (only an 8GB model now), and strip off the phone part of it to make this new iPod available for only $300, in addition to revamping most of its iPod line. Considering that it only has 8GB, that's a big pricey, but you can double the capacity for another hundred bucks. I love Apple's strategy: making you feel warm and fuzzy about handing your money over to them by selling it you at a ridiculous price at first and then stripping it down for a much cheaper, but still high, price. What's you're clearly paying for here is the style and design, but that's arguably what you pay for in all Apple products, I suppose. I'm not here to trash this new iPod though, because I think it's something that was bound to happen and will do extremely well. The iPhone is an amazing mp3 player. If you're ok with not being too fancy though, you can get an 8GB iPod Nano for $200, and a 4 GB for just $150. Here's where I think they fell short: why do you need two Flash-based mp3 players at the same capacity? Why wouldn't they put more capacity in the Nano rather than doing a re-design? Did it really need a fatter screen to play video and have a visual interface like the iPhone?

One can't deny though that their iPod line looks pretty damn cool now. It's pretty and what's really nice is that they've really fleshed out the gamut of prices. Heck, they even have the jukebox market covered with the iPod Classic at a paltry $249 for 80 GB and a hundred more 160 GB while sporting a visual interface almost identical to the new Nano. Some say this is dumb, but I think it's smart. You have to have a hard-drive based mp3 player to keep it cheap but with a large capacity.

The worst thing they did though was to have such a big change so early and the best thing they did was the iTunes WiFi store. Ok, so I know that the Apple marketing guys are brilliant and they always have a plan, but why would you alienate iPhone first adopters so early? We all knew it was going to have to happen at some point, but if you did it in like mid-October then surely no one would criticize Apple as having made the price artificially high at launch or anything like that. I know it's been a little over 2 months now, but that's not a long period of time for technology to advance them to cutting the price by a third. At least they're going to give early adopters a $100 rebate. Plus, if they had waited a little longer they could start selling these other iPods and opening the WiFi store the day of the announcement, and maybe even put more capacity on the Nano (theoretically). So why, Apple? Why did you shoot yourself in the foot? They have to have something up their sleeve here. There's something I'm not seeing, and it's driving me a little nuts. I'll try hitting up some tech podcasts and see if any of the other pundits have reasonable ideas. Could they really be planning for something bigger just before the holiday season? Because it looks like all their cards are on the table, unless they're going to have new laptops or something out in November.

Ok, well now back to what they did right: that WiFi store. Totally genius, and a long time coming. I wonder if Microsoft is kicking itself at all knowing that this should've been then. It should've been their gravy train. They totally dropped the ball on the Zune and handed it right over to Apple. Apple took that ball and filed a patent, and ran with it. The iPod Touch and the iPhone will both soon be able to buy music (not video content, yet) wireless, and when you dock to your computer it'll sync up so that your iTunes will also have the music. Quick, easy, and pain-free. Of course, it's stupid that you have to pay another buck to convert songs you bought into ringtones, but I'm sure that's for royalty purposes. Anyhow, people bored on buses or in class can now use that time to quickly hand over more money to Apple, which they can now use to keep labels on board since no other mp3 player does this. Smart, huh?

Of course, not everything is well with the iTunes music store. NBC isn't happy. Apple claims that they want to double the price of shows, whereas insiders retort that Apple actually wants to cut prices in half. Things are so heated that NBC has even turned to the DRM-restrictive Amazon Unbox for more flexible pricing. Now I love Amazon, but Unbox still has serious issues. For having so many developers who love Linux, it amazes me that Amazon Unbox doesn't support Linux because they're using that stupid Microsoft DRM technology. Anyhow, Apple must be out of its mind to think that they can cut prices in half. We'll see what happens though, but I think they'll find that these studios are even less open-minded than the record labels are.

The New Format

Hey gang! So, I've been gone for a while, I know. I assure you that it was not my intention to abandon this blog, but things got hectic. Through only my own fault I did something stupid and added all this extra work onto myself. Things with NSC have been crazy busy. I have all this work to do for school. I think I've made some of the people I love dearly hate me. It's been kind of an intense and kind of a crazy start of the semester.

In a lot of ways, it's nice to be back in Austin. I've missed this place so much. When I walked around campus for the first time in 3 months, I couldn't help but smile at the little things. Shivers ran down my spine when I went to the Rec Center for a workout. I felt all warm inside to walk down into Taylor basement. I felt happy again when a certain person came over to study. I have a full docket of 15 hours though. Foundations of Finance and of Marketing don't seem too difficult, but all my CS classes will be challenging: OS, Computer Vision, and Network Security and Privacy. I feel like I'll enjoy that last class the best though. I'm worried about how much I'll like Computer Vision, but we'll see. It's a bit more math intensive than I would've preferred.

Overall, I don't know how I feel though. I feel like my feelings are clouded my all these other things that have been going on. I'm scared of a lot of things, but I'm optimistic about others. I went to Copa last Thursday and I was really bad. Hell, maybe I was never good at Salsa. But you know what? I'm not done. Not by a longshot. Even if it kills me, I will one day be the kind of dancer that girls will long to dance with. I'm not done with anything. I can be a better student. I can be a better speaker. I can be a better person. I can be more loveable (probably =P). I can be more fit. I can be a better cook. I can be a better driver. I have all these lofty goals in front of me now, but I can get through it all, I think. I'm done selling myself short.

Unfortunately, my life has definitely gotten too busy for me standard blogging schedule. What I've decided to do is to change the format of the blog to where I blog about a few things whenever I think they're interesting to talk about. I'm not going to talk about everything interesting anymore, I'm going to pick out the best stuff and talk about them when I can make time for it. In fact, I'm going to talk about the Apple announcement right after I wrap up this post. This is the only way I can keep this blog together, because I don't want it to disappear. I fear somehow that it may take a part of me with it, and I can't afford that.

Moving Back In

I guess I forgot to mention that I'm in the process of moving back into Austin and doing NSC stuff, and with classes starting on Wednesday just keep your eyes peeled for my next post. I'm sure it'll be very soon.

Superbad

Before I get started here, I have to say that I hate Sprint. I called them to activate my brother's old Treo 650 for me, and they were rude and ugly the whole time. If you can help it, don't use Sprint. Anyhow, I saw Superbad today so I felt that a brief review was in order. It was a pretty entertaining movie, but quite crude. Maybe not quite on the level of Clerks 2, but still pretty heavy on cursing and gratuitous innuendo. If you can look past all that though, it's quite funny. The last portion of the movie is definitely the funniest, but it's pretty evenly sprinkled with what-the-hell humor. I guess I laughed so much because I could see the inner perv that every, and I mean every, guy experiences for a couple of years following puberty, cut lose on the big screen in the character Seth. What makes this movie so funny is that the casting is spot-on. I just love every character in this movie; they're perfect. Keep in mind that this is a comedy, not a drama or anything, so good acting means good delivery and believable caricatures. There were a few scenes where I had to look away because the scene was so shocking or I felt embarrassed for a character; that's what good acting is in a comedy. Anyhow, I give it a B because it was rather crude, but worth seeing if you can appreciate juvenile humor. You have to basically try to not be mature about it or an adult and realize that it's all just for fun.

This is truly amazing: so Google decided to refund customers of Google Video in Google Checkout credit when they shut down their video on demand services, but people were pissed. However, they actually responded and are additionally going to refund people's credit cards of purchase as well now! That's really quite an impressive response from Google. They're even going to extend the life of the videos by 6 months! This is how customer service should be.

Oh, they're also allowing you to embed Google Maps, handy for web pages and blogs and such. Very useful, I imagine. By the way, while I'm on Google Maps, have Houstonians noticed that we have Street View now?

Remember yesterday how I reported that Paramount and Dreamworks went HD-DVD only? Well, it turns out that they were paid off to do so, according to a Viacom insider, which doesn't make them look too good. What does it say about Toshiba that they have to pay studios to want to use only their format? Ouch.

Wal-mart has jumped on the DRM-free bandwagon at higher quality than typical protected content from UMG and EMI. Again, another solid step for DRM-free music since Wal-mart is such a big player, but I just hope that this pilot doesn't fail horribly, or that they don't misread it as increasing piracy but rather see it as a way to trust their fans and hope to bring back their business after all this alienation of lawsuits and DRM.

One of the greatest, if not the greatest, torrent-sharing site, Supernova, is finally back online after quite a long hiatus. The Pirate Bay took over to get it back online, and it looks like it's here to stay. It's too late to say if it's back to its original capacity, but it's still looking good.

Lastly, this is a good read for the casual Linux user. It's just some commands that no Linux user should be without knowledge of.

In movie news, I only have a couple of trailers to talk about. The first is for Cassandra's Dream, which is a Woody Allen movie, but I have no idea what's going on in that trailer. If you've actually decoded it, please do comment and fill me in. The other trailer makes more sense: it's a rockumentary from Martin Scorcese about a Rolling Stones concert from 2006 called Shine a Light. Both are low quality because they're on YouTube, but the latter is cool to see.

Let me show you guys a cute picture before I close off of my brother's dog enjoying a jog on his tredmill:


Now for the Tuesday Twosome, on canned meat:

1. Do you check your email once a day or more? Explain:
More, because Gmail is always on for me. Now that I have a data plan on my phone though, I'll probably check even more often!
2. When you receive SPAM emails, do you just delete them or take the time to mark it as SPAM? Explain:
I mark them as spam, but it's pretty rare with the Gmail filter in full force.
3. When a friend/acquaintance emails you a “forward” email like a joke or chain letter, do you forward it to your friends or just delete it? Explain:
I never forward those things unless they're either extremely important or extremely funny. I hate forwarding stupid stuff.
4. Who are two people whose emails you look forward to receiving? Explain:
Pretty much just my girl. I don't know of anyone else who sends me any good personal e-mails.
5. Do you believe that email has completely replaced other forms of communication?
Not at all. People don't use it near enough for that. However, I think that text messaging and IMs have gained power quite quickly in recent years.

Copowi is Cool

Well there's no single important piece of news recently, so I thought I'd just use my main topic today to heap praises on Copowi, a new ISP that has promised net neutrality no matter what legislation gets pushed through. They're at the mercy of the existing telcos though as they obviously don't have fiber of their own out there. Of course, they have higher prices as well, and they're banking on the audience of users who aren't taking price into consideration. Heh, an interesting policy, right? Still, I think enough geeks may care about this cause to give them support. Are people really happy with their current broadband connections? I know I have unexpected, unpredictable outages, often at peak times because the connection is just inundated with users since Time Warner and Comcast and such are such cheap, greedy bastards. I think people would definitely pay a premium for quality service, and net neutrality would then just be an added bonus. There are certain niches where brand loyalty is important, and I think we don't have that in ISPs mainly because everyone hates them. If you change that though then you may have something to really run with.

This is interesting: Microsoft is licensing its audio watermarking technology to a small company in Seattle making its money off of similar technology. The idea? Free, ad-supported music. I'm not exactly sure how it would work, but it sounds like the watermarking would provide some targeting, and would likely bring up privacy concerns. I'm not going to cry foul until I see some solid use cases here.

In a very interesting move, Paramount and Dreamworks have decided to ditch Blu-ray for just HD-DVD, depriving the Sony-backed format of such titles as Transformers and Blades of Glory. Definitely not good news for Sony, but since HD-DVD is still playing catch-up, it isn't near bringing us to a definitive winner.

The Silicon Valley has decided to bring social networking to adult entertainment in the form of Zivity. It sounds nuts, but I'm genuinely intrigued by the concept (note that I didn't say this is the first Web 2.0 porn site, but it's quite different from Suicide Girls). They're going to give you high quality, free pictures of girls clothed, and you can pay to take the clothes off, and then you get a certain number of votes to give bonuses to the models you like best. This is strange because it's pretty racy and it involves significant investment, but it sounds like it tries to reward models and photographers appropriately, at least.

An MIT spinoff is trying to manufacture a chip with 64 processors involving the mesh architecture being researched at UT Austin by Dr. Doug Berger and Dr. Steve Keckler, both brilliant guys, in TRIPS. Can someone shed some light as to how they were able to fabricate this chip so quickly? In any case, I bet that TRIPS will come out with something even more powerful, but more useful for research than the mainstream.

There was only one piece of movie news I really wanted to bring up today, the teaser trailer for Harold and Kumar Go To Amsterdam where they're really running from the law as they're mistaken for terrorists. I'll admit that it's better than I would've thought, but it still leaves me skeptical.

Now for a bit of Monday Madness:

1. How many desktop computers in your home?
Just one, but I have on in Austin as well.
2. How many laptops?
None
3. What kind of internet service do you have? (i.e. phone modem, dsl, etc.)
Cable
4. Do you tend to use more than one email account regularly?
Yeah, Gmail and utexas, but both are controlled via my Gmail.
5. Do you use email as a main source for communicating to your family and friends?
Not exactly. I use IM or Facebook more frequently for family/friends my age, and the phone otherwise. I still use e-mail, just not primarily.
6. What kind of computer monitor do you own (flatscreen, or other)?
A 19" CRT in Austin, a 17" LCD in Houston.

Goodbye, Summer 2007

Alas, my summer is almost done now. Before I get to the retrospective though, I'd like to share some pictures from last week where I was pre-occupied taking in the city with a very special, beautiful girl:



The flowers in Pike's Place are really beautiful this time of year, and the sunflowers are ginormous.



The Japanese Garden at the UW Arboretum is breathtaking. I love the little island in the middle there.



There was even a Tea House!



Sunset on Elliott Bay is truly something to enjoy.



The Pacific Science Center was fun since the both of us are such huge science geeks.



Butterflies!



Golden Gate Park is perfect for a late afternoon picnic. You can't jump in the water, but it's still a sight to behold. I love how the sky almost looks like a blue texture I just painted on there.



The Seattle Aquarium was really awesome. They had a giant circle for the jellyfish to swim in since jellyfish have to swim within currents.



Nemo!



The river otters are soo cute!



We had sushi at Maneki and it was awesome! Mmm...California Rolls...



I got a good picture of the skyline from a harbor cruise.

So as you can see, I've been too busy to post. Sorry about that. I wanted to talk real quick about my thoughts on how my summer went. If you don't care, then just check back tomorrow for a real post.

This summer felt like an exact opposite of last summer. It was almost creepy. Fun-wise, last summer was probably my best ever. I meshed very well with the Rapscallions, our little group of interns, and we had pool parties and pick up basketball games every week. Plus, that was where my interest in Salsa began. However, work became rather pedestrian. I felt like a real member of the workforce in that on Sunday night I always felt like the weekend flew by and I didn't want to wake up for work in the morning. This summer, it turns out that I was actually slightly sad some Saturdays that I didn't have to go to work that day! Of course, in July, I actually fulfilled my whim and went to work on Saturdays, in the interest of spending time last week with my girl seeing the city.

Anyhow, Amazon was a lot of fun. It was good and bad. It was bad in that it wasn't quite what I expected. It wasn't as glamorous as Google or anything like that, but it was still fun is what's fun. In fact, at first, I wasn't really all that excited about my team. They just seemed like all business, whereas last summer I hit it off immediately with my mentor and the other intern's mentor on our team. Over the summer though, I definitely grew to like all of them. They were actually a fun bunch, and extremely smart. I don't know if I'll ever get over how smart everyone is there and how attached they are to getting work done for the good of the company. Now that is the power of loving where you work: when you care about doing what you do. At TI, the morale didn't seem as high. The HR people hyped it up as being high, but I saw it as more of an Office Space environment. At Amazon, it was a plain environment, but very open and friendly all the same. Plus, there's a wonderful view everywhere in PacMed (and in TCC, as well, I'd imagine). Yeah, free food and chocolate milk would be nice, but free tea and hot cocoa packets are still good. Plus, two monitors! The only drawback was the big plus of Dallas: I didn't have as much fun outside of work. I didn't mesh as well with the interns this summer as last. Not to say they weren't cool or smart, they were, I just never felt as close to them. Plus, I missed home terribly, especially my girl.

As for the city, it's freaking gorgeous. As happy as I was to be back in Texas yesterday, I hated getting off that plane and looking outside to see ugly. There's nothing pretty about Houston at first glance. Yeah, it has hidden gems, but Seattle's beauty is so overt that you'd have to literally be blind to not see it. Plus, it was so humid here! A 20 degree jump really sucks. The biggest problem with living there for me was not being able to get around by car because I lived in downtown. I guess the actual big problem with going there is the high cost of living and the insane prices for real estate. Amazon would compensate appropriately, so I could probably still spend sensibly, but it still requires saving a lot of money. I'd love to settle down there though. It just seems like a wonderful place to raise a family, it really does. There's just so much to do with kids, and so much to do for a date, as well.

So would I move there? It's funny, I've said that Seattle isn't Austin, but Austin also isn't Seattle, and that's the best way to sum up my current predicament. My mom wants me to move to California, but I don't know that I can make enough out there right out of school to afford to live there. Austin is a fun, smaller city with some natural beauties of its own and its close to other places in Texas, especially my family. Plus, I have a lot of friends there, and it's a great city for a bachelor should I find myself in that predicament come next fall. However, Seattle is a wonderful big city, and it's surrounded with lots of fun stuff to do, including Vancouver and skiing. Plus, the weather is much better there. I don't know what I'm going to decide, to be honest. I loved Amazon, and I think I'd genuinely enjoy working there full time, but that's not to say that I couldn't find just as fun a job in Austin. I really am not sure what I'm going to do right now. Then there's my girl, who I love like crazy, and I want to be included in whatever I decide.

Well, I have the fall to look forward to. I get to spend it with her, most importantly, and I have to decide my future. It's scary in a lot of ways, because my first job will pretty much make or break my career. I have to go somewhere that gives me a diverse skill base, gives me a solid career track for advancement, compensates me appropriately, is in a vocationally fruitful location, and where I'd really enjoy what I do. Definitely not easy, but Amazon is definitely in the running.

Creating a Niche

I ran into a couple of interesting things today that I figure I could combine into a good topic: creating a niche. Something I never really gave much thought to until today is that the big bucks out there really come out of making a niche. It makes sense in a lot of ways since the rule of thumb is that the more specialized the field you study is the more money your liable to make since you're probably in short supply. A direct example of this is David Elsewhere, who is actually the guy from some of the iPod ads and that cool Pepsi commercial with the dancing jeans and some others. His niche is crazy dancing, like he's made of rubber. No one can do what he does, otherwise they wouldn't superimpose people's faces on his body for some of these ads. If you don't possess a natural talent like that, then you can try creating something totally different like these three Berkeley grads who have come up with a high quality video compression technology for high-end e-Commerce clients. As far as video quality goes, there's no one above YouTube that has really picked up. I really like Stage6, but it hasn't really gone anywhere, and I think DivX has gotten a lot of bad press. These guys have the opportunity to become the YouTube of car companies and medium-sized businesses and the like. I know, it's not user-generated content, but its a video platform that doesn't really exist right now. It may not sound like much, but it has Steve Wozniak and Red McCombs backing it, which is pretty big. Moral of the story: find a niche, and build your business on it.

Ars Technica put out one of their great product reviews, this one for the new iMac, and it sounds like what I thought. It's an improvement, but the keyboard doesn't feel right. Why did they make it so low and flat? Anyway, still a solid machine, and I guess the glare isn't as obtrusive as one would presume.

New ground has been broken against the RIAA: an Oklahoma attorney brought in testimony from a computer security expert claiming that the RIAA cannot use IP addresses to identify litigants because IP addresses just aren't unique. They can be masked, shared, etc. I can't believe that no one used this argument before. Anyway, I can't imagine the RIAA winning this battle, so it should be interesting.

Is the iPhone set to get games? The Download Squad has snooped around iTunes's localization strings (I'm guessing these are some internal configuration settings used by iTunes in other countries) and found some strings that appear to confirmation messages for whether you want to remove a selected game from your iPhone. It could just be garbage, but doubtful. They already have games on iPods, after all, so this would make a lot of sense.

Beware of sites bearing pricey gifts and promises of robust file-sharing. uTorrent is prepared to file suit against one such fraudulent site trying to sell uTorrent, a freeware application. That really boils me: to profit solely off of someone else's hard work, and so blatantly. This site looks really authentic, so definitely beware of these sorts of schemes.

I know it defies the theory of evolution, but ever wonder if computers preceded us? Because if so, then our creation was probably something like this.

I have a few movie items for today. First off is a trailer for Lars and the Real Girl, a dramedy from Craig Gillespie featuring Ryan Gosling about a guy named Lars who pretends that a mannequin is his girlfriend to fill the void. The trailer actually looks really cute, I think this has the makings of a really interesting character study.

Speaking of characters, someone who saw Heath Ledger on the set of The Dark Knight had only good things to say about his portrayal of The Joker. I don't think he saw any dialogue, just his demeanor, and it sounded very true to the original villain. If I keep getting pumped about this movie, I may explode before we even get a real trailer.

Usually, I say that direct to video (DTV) movies aren't very good, but a part of me wonders if Return to House on Haunted Hill is the first movie to get it right because it takes advantage of being at home. How? It lets you choose your own path through the movie (I'm pretty sure this is only for high-definition formats), almost like a video game I suppose or those books when you were little that would have you turn to different pages depending on the path you chose. The trailer is pretty creepy, so I'm definitely not prepared to write this one off.

Lastly, I'm not a big Hitman fan or anything (though I think its story is one of those that is easily lent to a movie, unlike Halo), but I like the looks of this teaser poster:


Now for the Thursday Threesome:

Onesome: Swimming-- along? Do you swim? Can you swim? Do you like to swim? Do you have a place to swim? I'm drowning in questions here!
I can swim, but I don't often enough. At school, our gym has a cool Aquatic Complex, but I have never had the time to actually use it for exercise. I was sure glad I knew how to swim when I went rafting!

Twosome: Pool--? ...or billiards? Have you played either one? ...or would you like to learn?
Yeah, I have, but I'm not very good. I'm one of those people who makes key plays purely out of luck, not skill.

Threesome: Pump--ing iron: is that in your reps? ...or does the thought of that style of working out just do you in? Inquiring minds and all that...
I try to work out 6 days a week, but I'm a guy and so obviously muscle mass is probably of inflated importance to me. Hey, having a better physique sometimes correlates to bigger salaries because you're perceived as being more dedicated. I personally do it because I was overweight when I was younger and I feel obligated to keep myself in shape as a result.

I have a very special visitor coming tomorrow, and I'm dedicated my free time over the next several days to her, so don't expect a post from me for a week. Sorry to have to do this again after just coming back from my last hiatus, but stuff happens! I'm sure you'll all understand.

The Missing Mac

There's always been this gaping hole in the Mac lineup that some people like to ignore. It's called a business Mac. A blog post from the CEO of a startup got me thinking about it. I think it was Molly Wood who asked Steve Jobs yesterday about Apple's intentions, as in where they're taking their computer business, and his response was kind of a bland "we want to build the best machines." Whoopety-doo, Steve Jobs wants to build pretty machines. It's not always about that. It's like my favorite two lines in Pirates of the Silicon Valley:

"Steve: We're better than you. Our software is better.
Bill: Don't you see? That doesn't matter!"

They're not doing their best as disseminating computers by virtue of the fact that companies aren't adopting Macs in large numbers. There's no enterprise-level Mac. My supervisor loves Macs so much that he bought a MacBook Pro for work, but he still has his trusty Dell laptop in his office, though he tries not to use it. Amazon doesn't support Macs, so if you want to use one you're pretty much on your own. They need to fill this space. They need to start making deals, and they need to start marketing more to businesses. In my opinion, it's one of the biggest reasons Apple isn't doing better at grabbing market share from PCs. Until they make this move, I can't imagine them ever coming close to taking out PCs.

Interesting news from Google: they're giving Linux patent protection from their patents in exchange for use of some patents from the Open Innovation Network. While I agree this is a good move, you have to admit that it's kind of ballsy. I mean what if the Linux camp flagrantly copies Google on something? I guess there's a lot of trust involved though, as it should be.

One of the more attractive things to me about Amazon is the opportunity to work with massive amounts of data and learn about scaling and performance. So naturally I have to plug this article about the Digg architecture and how it deals with lots of data. It's kind of amazing that a site as simple (to the eye, I mean) as Digg requires 100 servers.

I heard this on Buzz Out Loud and had to report it: this NBC reporter Michelle Madigan tried to go undercover at Def Con 15 and catch hackers admitting to illegal things and then catch Feds there doing nothing about it. The idea of the convention is to share knowledge about security to serve the greater good and let your guards down so that you can talk about things you did in the grey without having to face the consequences. I don't know how she thought she'd outsmart hackers, but they found her out and there's a clip on YouTube of them playing a prank on her of sorts in inviting her to another conference where the secret point was to expose her to all the hackers.

Now for a few one-liners. This is a pretty big, awesome list of web development resources, so check it out. This is a great guide to being smarter about using torrents. I saw this site on an ad and just thought it was too funny:



I just want to touch on a few movie news items here. Michel Gondry has come out with a new movie: Be Kind Rewind. It looks pretty cool to me, and it stars Mos Def and Jack Black. They run a video store and all their tapes turn blank, so they film their own versions of movies. Gondry is definitely pretty creative, so I want to see what he does with this one.

Jessica Alba is going to do another comedy, but this one with Mike Myers called The Love Guru. I'm skeptical, but Mike Myers is really funny so you never know. I don't know why Alba wants to get into comedy now though. I guess it's because her acting could need some help so she wants to try lighter stuff.

We have a couple of Southland Tales pictures, and they're not much but they're something. I'm still stoked to check out this movie, despite early reviews from Cannes.

Now for the Wednesday Mind Hump:

List ten random things in your refrigerator.
Too easy: Turtles (like the candy, not the animals), sparkling water, an onion, milk, chocolate syrup, lunchmeat, strawberry jelly, ketchup, bread, flour tortillas, and some potatoes.

Apple's Summer Event

Apple had a special summer event today at their campus for the press, and it was strictly about the Mac. I've read all that coverage and even watched the tour of iLife, so I feel pretty qualified to give some thoughts on it. They basically just gave the iMac a makeover and beefed up the hardware. The rest of it was trying to pitch the new iLife and .Mac. I don't know that the changes to .Mac were significant enough to save it since I can't use it, but I loved the changes I saw to iLife. I don't know that there aren't other products out there that wouldn't create movies as quickly and easily as the new iMovie, but it's still really awesome. I loved watching the demo for it, and I also really enjoyed the iPhoto demo, which seemed to be pretty smart about organizing photos into events and it was cool that you could hover over albums to skim through its pictures (same for clips in iMovie). These are both products that set the bar for how making movies and messing with your photos should be. They're not perfect or anything, but they still make switching to Mac really tempting. I don't know why the new iMac has a shorter, thinner keyboard. It doesn't look very comfortable, but at least Jobs is getting over his key phobia and loosening up a bit. I like how they wrapped up with a Q&A session that told us nothing other than that they've also upgraded the Mac Mini, and we'll see Apple TV news soon. All in all, not a bad little event, though nothing especially exciting came out of it.

I was temp bted to make today's main topic about hiring because of this article, but decided not to because I've already said a lot of what I want to say on this topic, and I just spoke about recruiting yesterday anyway. But I strongly agree that it's key to spend more money on expert programmers than to slack and hire average or sub-par programmers. The weak links on a development team become sore thumbs pretty quickly, and it really does become kind of a sink or swim environment. The good recruits should never sink given good management (not just an MBA who thinks he's hot shit, they need to be technical).

I'm really exhausted, so I'm going to close up here with a couple of one-liners. If you're not sure the best way to IM, then you'll waste plenty of time at this list of Instant Messaging tools. I probably didn't know about more than 20 or 30 items on that list (I personally love Pidgin and Meebo). The Guardian has a great lesson in history: technology's 10 greatest legal battles. This is the kind of stuff your kids will likely learn in social studies (or their kids, at the least).

However, I was intrigued enough by the international trailer for Beowolf that I figured I'd plug that.

Now for the Tuesday Twosome:

1. Two places you go to for relaxation (spa, beach, etc.)
The gym and the lake.
2. Two activities you do to relax:
Sleep and listen to music
3. Two people who are able to calm you when you are stressed-out:
Myself and my girl.
4. Two songs that always make you feel better:
Yellow (Coldplay) and Can't Help Falling in Love.
5. Two people/pets that you miss the most when you go on vacation/holiday:
My brother and my girl.

Out-Recruiting Google

Has anyone noticed the irony of the ads on the Forbes site about how the Fake Steve Jobs has been revealed? Anyway, what's more interesting is an article that Forbes is running about how to beat Google in recruiting the best tech talent out there. Being a student who has been through two recruiting seasons now (I don't count Freshman year), I figure that I'd offer my point of view. Google is like this magical fruit that's just out of reach, and I've begun to resent them almost as much as National Instruments. That's right, NI, your interviews are lame and your representatives are arrogant. On the other hand, Google just brags about their perks (they literally do no publicizing for their company nights and pack the room) and pays for the fancy O's food (overpriced crap, but use of the nice auditorium only allows their food), then goes nuts on the interviews. They emphasize way too much on math, and are still using brain teasers. One of my friends had to endure a month of phone screens to get an offer, and by that time he already had an offer from Amazon. This is what really pisses me off about their recruiting: they recently sent out a sneaky e-mail to Amazon interns (they just rope in one to tell his friends) behind the backs of Amazon's HR to get them to come to a recruiting event in Seattle. That is sleazy. They do this for normal employees, too, as I understand it. I wonder if they realize that they can't compete with Amazon in compensation (not speaking out of my ass here). Anyhow, it's fairly simple to undermine Google's recruiting: be fast, be inviting, and don't be so bloody selective. There are people with GPAs below 3.5s that are still brilliant, you know. Take the time to conduct thorough, balanced interviews rather than doing 8 of them (not an exaggerating comparison to Google). The best thing you can do, above all, is sell students on the company culture, environment, and management structure. That's what the good students will really care about (aside from type of work, that is).

There are a couple of U.S. Senators I feel I should applaud for actually being awesome: they're threatening SoundExchange to not try to strongarm Internet radio stations into DRM technologies in these recent negotiations. Not sure if they can follow through on these threats, but I think we all appreciate the effort and support.


The problem with taking a hiatus from blogging is that you miss out on things like Apple having a special event tomorrow, which is supposedly Mac-focused. Mac Rumors put up that fan art picture, which I kind of liked, though I can't imagine that they'd do a touchscreen iMac. Now if the touchscreen was just an extra feature that didn't affect elemental functionality then I maybe impressed. Still, the iMac needs an update, so that's a likely candidate for tomorrow's event. There's also strong speculation of updates to .Mac given that the service is to be down for the duration of the event (like how the Apple Store is usually closed during these events).

Nissan is showing off some technology akin to Volvo technology that I had reported on a few months ago regarding safety improvements. It provides collision prevention (braking when collision is imminent), lane departure prevention, and bumper sensors to assist in the sportier models from normally severe crashes. I'm skeptical on braking for suspected collisions because of false positives, but maybe it only does this if it's like 100% sure or something.

Wired usually doesn't put up ill-conceived editorials, but I have to slam this one about opening up social networks. First of all, Facebook is not totally closed. Besides the obvious API (which, I'll admit, is still limited), you can share pictures, among other things, with users outside of Facebook's realm; I have done this several times before. Another problem is the fact that I don't think people really care about opening up all these social networks. As made apparent by the clamoring we saw last year in response to the mini-feed addition, the Facebook community is pretty avid about privacy concerns, so this is a terrible idea. At the most, if you really want to open up people's data, it should be a private RSS feed or something. Lastly, they recommend mashing up your own Facebook via other social networking sites, but this defeats the purpose of Facebook, which is to unite all your social networking needs in a single convenient place. Zing.

One liner: to all you Firefox haters (*cough*my brother*cough*), go here.

Before I get to the trailers today, i thought it was interesting that Ridley Scott has decided to make a Monopoly movie. That's right, the producer who brought you Gladiator and Hannibal has decided to base a movie off of a board game. Wow.

Since I've been pimping Amazon so much I figure there's no harm in plugging their exclusive trailer for Reservation Road. I think this is their first exclusive movie trailer, and the video quality leaves something to be desired but I'm glad that they're starting to get into this business. They're clearly using their acquisition of IMDB to help beef up the page, and I hope they'll do even more with these pages in the future. The trailer isn't bad, but I'm just not interested in it. You know too much of the plot right off the bat (it's about a guy trying to hunt down a hit-and-run driver who killed his son, but the trailer reveals the killer).

MySpace is hosting the trailer for Amanda Bynes' next flick, Sydney White, a movie that makes me literally cringe with disgust. It's about this "hot" chick (Amanda Bynes is really not attractive) who doesn't get into a sorority so she leads a band of 7 geeks to shakes things up. I don't know what I hate more: this promotion of geekiness in a completely superficial (and, what I consider offensive) way or the idiotic plot itself. The comments on that video speak for the quality of MySpace users.

Lastly, IGN has the exclusive trailer, an interesting horror thriller detailing an archangel's battle against fallen angels in a fight for souls. Yeah, doesn't sound too compelling, but it still looks like it could be fun.

Now for some Monday Madness:

1. What ONE thing would you like to accomplish before the end of the day?
A full guitar practice session.
2. What one goal would you like to attain before the end of the month?
Getting the NSC site back up and running at full capacity.
3. Are you a "to-do list" writer? If so, do you stick to your list and cross things off as you complete them?
I write less-organized to do lists if I actually have a bunch of things to do, usually in my planner during the school year. Currently, I hack up Outlook calendar for this.
4. In general, how organized do you feel you are?
Reasonably organized.
5. How many piles of papers/junk mail/etc. do you have laying around your house?
I think four, but that's only because I have no bookshelves or storage space in this apartment because it's temporary.
6. Which ONE surface in your home
This desk? I don't know what that means...

How Bad is Flash?

I saw this blog post a few days ago, but it has taken me a bit to respond to it. It largely claims that Flash sucks, and a part of me agrees but a part of me is nostalgic of first playing around with Flash 4 (or maybe it was 3, whatever was out in 1999). Way back then, it was this revolution for the web because Java applets looked gaudy and the support for Javascript wasn't nearly as widespread as it is now. That blogger hates the navigation Flash-based sites provide, but I think that's too harsh. For small sites, namely movie sites, Flash can be great. It lets you have a little fun, which is what you're there for in the first place. No serious business should have an entirely Flash-based site, mind you, but it can still have its uses for multimedia, especially when you want to make it harder to download the content in question. I know, proprietary formats are bad, all that jazz, but sometimes they really are necessary. You can't write off proprietary formats just because they get big; why does Adobe need to give away what they've worked hard on? What's in it for them to give people carte blanche access to their formats? My two biggest gripes with Flash though are really that it's lagging behind in 64-bit support, and Flash-based advertisements are ridiculously annoying, and they just feel like a breeding ground for viruses, whether or not that's true. I believe Flash already has safeguards to prevent such things, but it seems too flashy (no pun intended) to be 100% safe. I don't think it's going away anytime soon, especially since people were pissed that the iPhone wouldn't support Flash, which means their brand recognition must be amazing, but I am curious to see what advantages Silverlight will come up with (the fact that it has a toolbar for IE but not Firefox is discouraging).

I actually got an e-mail about Amazon Flexible Payments Service on Friday but I totally didn't know that it was going into public beta that same day. The message sounded like it was an internal beta, but I guess not. Anyhow, it's basically an API that Amazon Web Services (about 4 floors above my office) is providing to add an easy, affordable payments system to small businesses' websites. It sounds pretty huge and extensible, but will it be able to take over what Paypal provides? That's very hard to say, but Amazon's brand recognition likely surpasses Paypal, and is maybe even more trusted (I have nothing to back this up other than anecdotal bad press for Paypal), so it definitely has a chance. After all, remember how S3 really took off?

I neglected to report on this a while back, but AT&T had hidden away in its terms that it had a $10 DSL plan, which it was obligated to offer as a result of losing some lawsuit, and now they're covering it up by saying that there was no demand for it. Do these people take us for total nimrods? No duh there's no demand, it's hard to demand something when you don't know it exists. Are people really happy to pay them for overpriced, low-quality Internet service?

If you're stuck without a TV, like me, then you may be entertained by LikeVid. It provides totally legal television channels available online, some of which are Internet-only, and it's a fun way to kill some time when you don't want to do anything but sit back and absorb.

Lastly, if you know nothing about torrents, you may find some value in this article explaining all about it. I'd say that it's a worthwhile read if you don't know what that word means seeing as how it has become a rather important idea to understand.

In the box office this weekend it should be no surprise that the big winner was The Bourne Supremacy at over $70 million, which is nearly 3 times as much as the opening weekend for the first movie in the series. I thought it was impressive that The Simpsons Movie managed $25.6 million, which is a pretty heavy drop, but it's in 2nd place and I'm sure it cost much less than $128 million to make so I think they'll be doing just fine. It's also amazing that Transformer, despite being a month old, is still #8. Passing $300 million in a little over a month is pretty crazy.

It looks like the World of Warcraft movie got a greenlight from Legendary Pictures, which is interesting because I have no idea what they're going to come up with for a plot. It's obviously just a cash cow, but the fans will go and see it so it's really probably a brilliant move.

Now for a bit of bad news: neither of the Grind House film DVDs will include the interstitial trailers. How greedy is that? Obviously, they're pre-planning a double dip, which is a bit cruel considering that you're not just keeping special features from the fans but you're actually tearing away a vital part of the experience. For shame, Weinstein Company.

The trailers for Superbad had me interested, but this clip on YouTube has me even more determined to see this movie. It's sure to be crude, but as long as it's as funny as this clip I really don't mind.

Now to close out with a couple of trailers. The first is for Lions for Lambs, which looks like a thinly veiled critique of Bush's politics. I'm not happy about the war, but a fictional movie about it isn't going to change anything, and it sounds too preachy to be received well. The other is much better: We Own the Night. It's Joaquin Phoenix and Mark Wahlberg playing two brothers, club owner and a cop, who ally together to stop some bad dudes. I can't really explain it without it sounding lame, so you're going to have to just watch the trailer to understand why I like this movie so far.

Yesterday was the Amazon.com Company Picnic, so here's a couple of pictures from that:




And now, it's finally time for some Unconscious Mutterings:

I say ... and you think ... ?

1. Voices :: Hearing


2. Have to :: Eat


3. Machine :: Maniac


4. Seventh grade :: Sucked


5. Beach :: Ball


6. Roommate :: Apartment


7. Cyclone :: Twister


8. Theater :: Movie


9. Pregnant :: Baby


10. Phoebe :: Buffay

Amazon Takes Over Your Den

I'm a bit tired tonight, so this will be a short one, but I wanted to put something up. Obviously, I'm fond of my bread and butter, Amazon.com, so I thought it was cool to see this article from last100.com about how Amazon is taking over the living room. I think it's still a bit premature, but I believe it, nonetheless. From talking to an undisclosed individual at Amazon, I think the same train of thought clicked in my head. Amazon would love to go past just your shopping stop from your study or bedroom and move into your living room. It makes sense: DRM-free music, Unbox, Tivo downloads, the rumors about Netflix, and let's not forget about IMDB, the place you turn to when you're sitting in your living room confused or forgetful. They've even already made the move into on-demand DVDs with those DVDs you can order with specific news events, and it's unfortunate that Your Media Library because that's just another example of them trying to catalogue what's in your living room to share and build on. I'll admit, Amazon isn't there yet. They still have a ways to go. However, their chances are pretty good. They really have some smart people running these teams, and trust me when I say that they have some top-notch managers and SDEs. I have no material information about any of what I've just talked about, it's just a result of what I've seen (like you guys) and what I've experienced in their working environment.

The Pirate Bay is looking to revive the long-dead Suprnova.org, which was the de facto search engine for pirated torrents before they lost in court. The owners of the domain handed it over to The Pirate Bay, and they're looking forward to putting it back online very soon.

If you haven't seen the Dark Knight teaser then behold. It's awesome.

I have to say that this is pretty sad: a 19 year-old girl was arrested for recording 20 seconds of Transformers to show her little brother. I don't know what's more disturbing, the fact that it was only 20 seconds or the greed over a movie that's already made buttloads of money. It's not the studio, it's the movie theater, but this is still sick. The example they're setting is that they're dumbasses, not that they're strict.

I'm going to end here with some one liners: another great list of freeware applications lie here. I can personally vouch for the awesomeness of nearly all those video editing ones. If you have issues trying to track all your bills and you have room mates, you'll get a kick out of Billshare.

Demo Day and The Simpsons Movie

Guess what? I'm back! This won't be a standard post though, because it's too late for me to do one of those. I didn't think it would take 11 days for me to post again, but apparently I was wrong. Yes, I was actually working all those days, even in the evenings, and I used my spare time mostly to rest and work out. It all paid off though as today was my day to present to the organization include our VP. Check out the view from the meeting room:


The room was packed; people were even standing up. We had 10 intern presentations to get through in under 2 hours, and mine was third to last. I spent a good part of yesterday working on it, and practiced it this morning to the point of memorization. For those of you who don't know, my project was to add predictions to Amazon's logs for geographical location and then use that to visualize our traffic and revenues geographically with various dimensions and filters and such involved, including per capita and relative percentage views. So it was a huge amount of effort, and went right down to the level of state maps. I wish I could show you guys, but I'm 99% sure that I would get sued for that so I'm not going to. I had planned out the entire demo so that everything I showed has a use case on the side of marketing and advertising groups, and the crowd seemed to love it. I worked in as much humor as I could (my favorite was viewing trends in Women's Swimwear because I know nothing about women), and I got more laughs than any of the other interns did. It was scary and exciting all at once, then just a flood of relief when I was done. All the blood, sweat, and tears (literally) really paid off when I got to this point:


I won most creative solution! That's very exciting because that means that people higher than my manager were impressed with my work, which is a really humbling experience. Plus, the audience seemed really engaged with my demo, and fortunately I did not suffer demo-itis. Now that it's over I can take a breather and get back to playing guitar and such and prepare to see my girlfriend again very soon, which is even more exciting than all this.

Enough about that though, I also saw The Simpsons Movie tonight (UT intern event), and so I thought I'd go ahead and give my thoughts on that. I was quite impressed with it. I assumed it would because the show had taken a turn for the worst in recent years and making a movie seemed like they were just trying to exploit the series. The basic plot is that the pollution in Springfield has reached critical mass and Homer ends up foiling a clean-up effort, which leads the government to put a big bubble around Springfield and eventually destroy it. This is actually one of the few comedies nowadays where they don't put the best scenes in the trailer, so there's still plenty more to enjoy when you see the film. The humor is witty as in the old episodes, and almost never takes things too far, unlikely some of the more conventional comedies nowadays. The only drawback is that some of the characters are strange from how the series used to be (like Bart being sentimental all of a sudden), but that's not really a big deal. The animation is crisp and even better to look at than the series is, so no issues there. I highly recommend this film with a B+ just because I feel hesitant to give an A to a movie that had little substance an was more about jokes than anything else. There's nothing wrong with that, but an A movie it does not make. If you're a fan of the series, definitely run out and see this.

Busy

Hey guys,

I'm sorry to say this, but I have to take a break from this blog. Today was probably the worst day I've had since my car accident, and so naturally my heart isn't really into blogging right now. Aside from that, I'm going to be working every day for the next 11 days to get my project for work done by August 1. I'm not saying that I'm taking a break for that long, but I'm warning you guys that I'm just going to be insanely busy and I'm just not feeling very good right now. Maybe I'll feel better in a few days, maybe in a week, who knows.

This is not a cry for help. I'm not sick or dying. I will be just fine. Since I'm sure many of you will ask me what you can do I'll tell you right now: enjoy your life =P Don't worry about me. I've already talked to the people who can help me, and the only other people who can help me are obviously my teammates at Amazon. I'm just feeling stressed out of my mind right now. It's not Amazon's fault, I still love it there, and I'm convinced that I will not fail them, but that prospect scares me enough to make me work 11 days straight.

This is NOT the end. I will return. I just need a break. Oh, and in case any of you are getting the wrong idea about this: no, my girlfriend hasn't done anything bad to me. She's a phenomenal person, and I still love her very much, and I'm pretty sure that she still loves me. I'll leave you all with a few pictures.