Replacing FriendFeed

[edit 2009-08-12: Google Reader now provides a page of feeds based on your Google profile, solving my first two issues]

It was announced today that Facebook bought FriendFeed. This is unfortunate to me as this puts FriendFeed's future in doubt as Facebook bought the company for the developers and their tech, not the site itself. While I totally understand why the FriendFeed guys sold the company, it does mean I need to come up with an alternative to FriendFeed as I don't trust Facebook to keep the site up and open to my liking.

FriendFeed provided me three services. One was aggregating my online content into a single account online -- my lifestream online. To fix this I have created a Google Reader lifestream bundle for myself. There you will find an aggregate feed (that works in any feed reader) for my two blogs, my photos, and my Yelp reviews. I am also giving twitterfeed a try to update Twitter directly from this bundle. If you want ALL of my content, including things that are extremely noisy , go to my Google profile and subscribe to what you want.

The second service FriendFeed provided was getting shared stuff from various people online. This is picked up by Google Reader shared items. Many things I liked that I found from FriendFeed came from people and their Google Reader shared items, so this service replacement works.

The third service was as a microblogging service and Twitter backup. I always preferred how FriendFeed handled comments, and I had enough people following me that I could post there and on occasion get a response. But the really handy thing was FriendFeed as a backup when Twitter was acting up. Posting a message to FriendFeed meant it would at least be up on FriendFeed immediately and eventually get to Twitter once the service stopped having whatever trouble it had. Plus FriendFeed has an IM and email interface that I would use on occasion. Replacing the backup I can do through identi.ca, but the alternative interfaces will take more work. And Google Reader's shared thoughts features is definitely not there yet.

I think most of the reasons I used FriendFeed I have found a replacement, albeit not quite as slick as what FriendFeed has provided me.

Vodka, slurpees, a waterfight, and a stripper pole

There is a web site out there that lets you review local businesses; it's called Yelp (Canadian and UK versions are available). While I was interning at Google, Guido joined the site and told me that when he signed up the founders added him as friends since they use Python. As I had been looking for a site to post restaurant reviews in Vancouver and Yelp had the best listing of restaurants (most sites lacked a large portion of restaurant listings), I joined as well.

I then subsequently began to post reviews. While in SF I posted a couple, but didn't make it a habit. But upon returning to Vancouver I made an effort to post a review every time I ate at a restaurant. I caught the eye of someone named Crystal who was active in the local Yelp community here in Vancouver. She's so active, in fact, she became the new community manager for Yelp in Metro Vancouver two months ago. And when Crystal became community manager, Vancouver gained a Yelp Elite Squad, which I became a member of early last month just before the group's first event.

The great thing about being a part of the Yelp Elite is your local community manager organizes some free event every month. This month it was to attend the flash mob waterfight in Stanley Park. I went to this the first year it was held in Vancouver two years ago and had a blast, so I didn't pass up my opportunity to go again this year (I missed last year for some reason).

It started with us being picked up by a party bus right off the Burrard Bridge. We were then taken to three different 7-Elevens for free mini slurpees with vodka tossed in for those who desired it. My first slurpee was lime with vodka, the second one was a virgin orange. But I only partially got through my second slurpee because the vodka and sugar did not do great things to my stomach. Luckily someone thought to buy some chips that help settle my stomach.

We then hit the waterfight, and like the first year I went I just ran in guns blazing! I of course got soaked head to toe, all while having great fun. Couple hundred people turned out and all behaved themselves when it came to innocent bystanders. Did that for about half an hour and then headed back to the beach on the party bus.

But on the way back we made sure we took full advantage of our party bus. If you follow the link above for the bus you will notice that there is a stripper pole at the back of it. On the drive out of the park, Crystal tried to get the two other guys on the bus to dance on the pole as they were already sitting there with their shirts off. They said they were going to go for it, but didn't commit, so I said, "you pussies", and hopped on the pole and did a little dance. Now having all of our stuff sitting back there on top of my being taller than one could stand, it wasn't too much of a show, but it was enough to get me a Yelp shot glass full of vanilla vodka. After I broke the ice one of the guys finally went up. We then had two girls go at it together twice. That pair then had me join them and then later another girl on the bus. And when we finally stopped at our final destination I attempted one stripper pole move which I pulled off, and one I couldn't attempt because of a lack of upper body strength and general ceiling clearance. I actually did the one I could do twice because I got requests for photos, but that's when I learned why men typically don't pole dance.

Afterwards we went to Burrard Bridge for drinks. And from there I came home, showered, and took a nap. Overall it was a great day! And before anyone asks for photos, plenty were taken and will end up on the Yelp Vancouver Flickr collection sometime in the near future.

Reaching PhD candidacy and what it means

In case you have not heard through phone, email, IM, FriendFeed, or Twitter, I have reached PhD candidacy for my doctorate. But since a bunch of people have asked me exactly what that means I figured I would explain it along with the overall steps needed to get a PhD from UBC in computer science (CS).

When I first arrived at UBC, the first thing I did was take courses. All other departments at UBC have comprehensive exams, which are exhaustive tests to make sure your breadth of knowledge is wide enough for someone who will have a PhD. This is done to make sure you are well-rounded as an individual for your field since your PhD thesis makes you an expert in such a narrow field it would otherwise be very easy to get your degree without knowing some core fundamentals.

Luckily for me the CS department at UBC is special. We don't have comprehensive exams, but instead an eight course breadth requirement. By making sure you take courses in some broad areas the department with an acceptable grade (I believe it is a B or better) the department makes sure you are in general a computer scientist. My first year was spent taking three courses to meet this requirement.

You also need to find a supervisor. The definition of the role varies from supervisor to supervisor, but in general that should help make sure you stay on the right path to graduate. I lucked out that my masters supervisor is friends with my now PhD supervisor. So I managed to get a supervisor within a couple of months of arriving at UBC. But apparently most people arrive knowing who they want to work this. I suspect this is partially because in Canada a masters degree is a separate step from your PhD, unlike in the States where typically you skip your masters if you go for the PhD.

Then you start hunting for a thesis topic. For me this was a long, arduous process. The ideas I came up with either were either not scientific enough (not enough research and so more like a big masters thesis) or too big (requiring multiple PhDs and years of work). But I did finally find one.

Once you have a topic you need a committee. You can add people because they would make a good recommendation later on when you apply for a professorship. You can ask someone who fills in a knowledge gap you might have involving related work. Or you can ask someone who you think won't cause you much grief. Either way you need a committee. At UBC you need three, although one of the members is almost always your supervisor, so you really only need to hunt down two more people.

With a topic chosen and your committee selected, you need to defend your thesis topic proposal. A defense (at least at UBC) consists of a half hour presentation, a round of questions from your committee, questions from the audience, and then more questions from the committee. The purpose in doing this is to make sure you are not going to waste time on a topic that will not lead to you getting a PhD. In other words, if you successfully defend your thesis topic the department has said it will grant you a PhD if you do what you said you would do. This is what I just did.

The last step is actually writing your thesis and defending that. The defense is just like the one you do for your proposal. The reason I am now labeled a PhD candidate is I am now a candidate to defend a thesis. Up to this point the university would not let me consider defending a thesis as I had other requirements to complete. But with all but one checkbox out of the way I am allowed to defend a thesis. Some universities also call the state I am in All But Dissertation (ABD).

Now obviously there is more to a PhD then what I have said here (primarily the actual research and getting publications). But the primary steps of courses/exams, supervisor, topic, committee, proposal defense, and finally thesis defense are what you need to go through to get a PhD. For me I now have a flag at the finish line that is visible from where I stand; I just can't tell how far away the flag is.

How I would like to interact with the Internet from a physical perspective

Don't ask me why, but lately I have been thinking about how I would like to physically interact with the Internet, both in terms of producing and consuming content. With the proliferation of Internet access I think people will begin to come across more and more ways to access the Internet in their daily lives. Just a few years ago no one had unlimited data plans on their cell phones or netbooks that cost hardly anything. But now we can carry the Internet around in our pocket or backpacks without issue. But just because we can carry the Internet around in our pocket does not mean it is the best form-factor to actually interact with the Internet.

To begin, I think online content needs to be classified in small and large sizes. Small content is things like posts to Twitter, typical emails, or blog posts. Another way to think of it is it is no longer than two screens full of text on your typical smartphone. It takes no effort to scroll from top to bottom on a cell phone such that if you have to reference something at the top of what you are reading you won't think twice about scrolling back to the top. Everything else is large content.

For small content I think reading it on your cell phone is fine. The content is short enough that you will not be staring at the small screen for very long. Plus small content tends to be very timely and thus consuming it while out on the town makes sense as the longer it is until you get to it the less relevant it will be.

As for producing small content, your cell phone can also be fine, albeit only for really small content. I have no problem writing a paragraph or so on my cell, but I wouldn't want to go past that.

The next step up from cell phones is a tablet. If Apple were to create a tablet, it would be great for consuming all online content regardless of size. Something about 9" in diameter would be large enough to display text at a comfortable size for long-term reading. But it would also be small enough to easily carry around to any place where you might want to read such as the living room, bedroom, the local coffee shop, some bench outside, etc.

But I would not want to use the tablet to produce large content. While the on-screen keyboard would most likely be large enough that I could type several paragraphs without many errors, I would most likely get frustrated by how slow it would be compared to a physical keyboard (I am a fast typist). And so the tablet only slightly alleviates the content creation limitation of a cell phone, but it greatly improves the consumption experience.

This leaves us with laptop for consuming and creating all content. While it is not as convenient as a phone or tablet, it is still portable enough to carry around as long as you are not going hiking.

So, I want my cell phone for reading and writing emails along with reading short blog posts. I want a tablet for writing short blog posts but reading anything online. And I want my laptop for creating large content. Here is to hoping the Apple tablet rumor is true so I can actually start browsing the web on a tablet instead of having to always pull my laptop out.

Why I am so critical of women and their sunglasses

I have come to realize something about myself when I judge women on how they look. Having figured this out it puts into perspective why I have been so harsh towards women on certain things and not on others. Certainly it is why I absolute abhor poorly chosen sunglasses. What is this realization? I am very picky about what accessories women choose to wear.

When it comes to one's clothing, we all have days where we just don't necessarily have the options we want for that day (my mother and her expansive closet withstanding). I know I have had those days where I just had not gotten around to doing laundry and so my clothing options were rather limited. And one cannot go out in public without a shirt and pants. So I can understand a woman choosing a top or pair of pants one day that are not what I would have chosen for them.

This understanding even extends to shoes. I currently have my casual shoes sitting in my entry hall waiting to be taken to a cobbler as the soles are coming loose. Because of this I only have sneakers and my shoes I reserve for slacks or days I want to take it up a notch. Typically, if I think the nicer shoes might be too much I dress it down with the sneakers. So I can understand a woman making a bad choice in footwear.

But sunglasses? I don't care how sunny of a day it is, you don't have to wear sunglasses like pants. This is especially true in Vancouver where the sun is typically not out even when people are wearing their sunglasses. When you put on your sunglasses you are choosing to wear them. That means you are choosing to look how you do with those sunglasses. So if you look bad in them it says to me you made that conscious choice to look like that. Thus I judge much more harshly on that choice.

Same goes for other accessories such as earrings, any form of piercing, tattoos, etc. This helps explain why I react why I do to nose and lip piercing; you choose to look like that voluntarily and I really don't go for that sort of thing.

Now admittedly I have never had a conversation with a women with a nose piercing where I was saying to myself, "this person is amazing, but I can't ask her out because I simply cannot stand her nose piercing". But when I walk down the street or sit on the bus and I am judging women on how they look, those that choose to wear accessories that don't look good definitely get judged more harshly than others.

The two types of clapping

During my orientation at Cal Poly SLO orientation for my masters we had an ice breaker where you walked around the room trying to fill in a grid with names of people who have met some criteria (e.g. born outside of California). In the end completed grids were entered into a raffle and a winner was chosen. Once the name was pulled people clapped. I wondered why people were clapping, though, for someone who simply was lucky. Even if you assume it took some skill to fill in the grid (it didn't) people still clap when people when entirely random drawings that required nothing more than being present for the drawing.

I have asked people over the years why they thought people clapped to ackknowledge someone who has done nothing requiring skill. This question has actually been used by me to suss out whether someone actually thinking creatively about random crap like me or would rather shrug their shoulders at the question or ridicule me for asking "stupid" questions.

But regardless of the answers I have received I have never stopped thinking about it. But I believe I have finally reached an answer that I am happy with, and that is there is two different situations that cause people to clap. One instance is from the appreciation of someone's skill at something. When you see a performance that you consider great you will clap to let the person know how you feel.

The other instance is when you clap to let someone know you are happy for them. This is why we clap at weddings, when someone wins a prize that required no skill, etc. and this is what I witnessed all those years ago at Cal Poly.

Now I can't think of any actual difference between how we clap for the various instances of why we clap. People don't seem to use a different style or holler in one instance and not the other. It just simply happens to be two different reasons why we clap.

Which brings up an interesting point about clapping when you are happy for someone. What if you are not truly happy for them? What if you wanted to be the one who won the prize? You might begrudge the other person for winning, but you are not necessarily happy they won over you either. And yet we still clap. I think this is when people do the typical five lackluster claps and don't bother stretching out the applause. They don't want to come off as cold-hearted, but they don't really want to lie and say they are really that happy for you either.

This is exactly the type of stuff I contemplate when I stare out my window or go for a walk. How could I possibly still be single? =)

Fuck flying; take the train for short trips!

For the first time in ages I took the train for a trip that lasted more than an hour; went from Vancouver to Everett, WA to visit my father for his birthday. The total trip took 3.5 hours and none of it was bad.

Me being me, I got to the train station more than an hour before boarding. I got the desk, picked up my tickets, and then got in line to go through customs. For the train is entailed a check of my passport and an x-ray of my bag (without having to take my laptop out!). Otherwise I walked on to the train and sat in my seat.

So much leg room! I couldn't believe that I didn't have any space issues with my seat! This alone helps beat out flying.

But there is also the view. Since the train from Vancouver to Seattle is in the evening I got a nice western view of the setting sun along the BC/Washington coast most of the way.

There was an extra stop in Blaine, WA for another customs check where they take your customs form and ask you if you are planning to leave anything in the US, etc. But the border patrol people seemed to be in better spirits than there highway counterparts.

Otherwise the trip was nice going down. Got a bunch of reading done and simply relaxed.

Coming back, though, did have the drawback of having to get up early. Since there is only a single train that goes up to Vancouver each day I had to take the train that left at 8:30 in the morning from Everett. I am not a morning person so that sucked. Once I got back I took a two hour nap.

And that is the big drawback of trains; the schedule and restricted destinations. Only having a single run in either direction each day sucks. Plus I can't take the train any farther than Seattle which is a disappointment as I would happily take it down to Portland or Boise to visit family at either location. Plus I would still rather fly for anything that would take a very long time on the train in the name of saving time. But for these short jaunts down to Seattle the train works out rather nicely.

Should I learn French or Mandarin?

It's finally time to decide what foreign language I am going to learn: French or Mandarin. Each have the strengths and weaknesses, but I will try to learn one of them.

For French, it has the perk of me wanting to visit the country where the language is spoken. I have an interest in visiting France even though my father and Richard are the only people who seem to like visiting France and French is spoken in various other places in the world I might consider visiting. It also sounds rather nice; I have discovered over the years I prefer French jazz to any other form of jazz. I also happen to be living somewhere with a ton of reading material; walking through the grocery store I have plenty of French to read.

But French is not perfect. I have never been good at saying French words. It does not have the most reasonable grammar rules. I also will not have anyone to practice speaking with once I leave Vancouver.

For Mandarin I can actually speak the tones -- don't ask me how, I just can. I also have a lot of friends with whom I can practice with. Plus Mandarin would be a lot more useful in the Bay Area than French ever would be. The language is also much simpler when it comes to rules since it practically has none.

But reading Mandarin is not easy as it is all rote memorization. I also don't feel any great desire to visit China -- I would only do it if other friends were going who were Chinese themselves.

Anyway, I am going to see if I can't make a choice in the near future and then start learning by the summer.

I now have no car

This has been an interesting week so far. I drove down Friday to visit my father for the weekend and to pick up the remnants of what I had from SF and take it back home. I had scheduled a bunch of appointments for this week since I leave for PyCon on the 25th and I wanted to get things done, including my car registration which required a smog check.

But while pulling back on to the highway after lunch at the south end of the island, I heard a pop in my car and a sudden rattling. I pull over and pop the hood in hopes that something obvious simply dislodged that I could somehow reattach. No such luck, though, so I close the hood and start to drive down the highway.

And that's when I notice the car doesn't do a lot in second gear. As soon as the car accelerated to 20 mph and the car shifted gears there was no speedup in the car and the engine began to race. That spells transmission problems which are never cheap.

After parking in a parking lot right off the highway I figured out where to have the car towed. The car and I arrived at the garage at 15:00; two hours left in the garage's workday. The garage said they would try to diagnose the issue by the end of the day, but it didn't happen. And because it is the island they were closed all weekend. That left me plenty of time to reflect.

Transmission repairs are expensive things. Typically you either end up with your transmission rebuilt or you end up buying one already rebuilt. Either way it ain't cheap as the part is expensive and it takes hours of labor to deal with. Knowing this I looked up the blue book value of my car: about US$2,000 in excellent condition, but more realistically under US$1,400 for fair condition. So I set myself a ceiling price; if the car repairs came in over $2,000 I would not bother to fix the car. A slightly bold move on my part considering I learned how to drive in Los Angeles and was an active driver for about a decade before I moved to Vancouver.

Come Monday morning I get a call from the garage about the price: $2,385 + tax. Being over my ceiling I ask if they know whether a car registered in BC can be scrapped in Washington State. They didn't know, but said they would look into it. While I wait I make a smattering of phone calls (I tried to stay off the line as my father does not have call waiting and my cell gets no signal here; not exactly cutting edge here in terms of technology) and I find out I can't donate my car as no one wants the hassle of dealing with BC stuff. But once 17:00 rolled around and I knew the garage was not going to be calling that night I began to investigate. I mostly get a bunch of numbers of places to call in the morning (thank you very much Washington AAA!).

Tuesday morning I get up and start calling around. Turns out the local recycling company will take the car (it also turns out the garage asked what it would take to tow the car back to BC which I didn't ever plan to do). So I go to my car one last time, clear out what I want to keep, strip the license plates off the car, and then drop off the paperwork at the recycling company (since BC has the same crown corporation run both the registeration and provincial car insurance there is no title for the car, just the bottom part of your current registration). And at that point I no longer owned a car.

I have now inadvertently extended my stay here at my dad's by a week (he is not available to drive me back until then). That means I only get one full day back in Vancouver before I leave for PyCon. Ironically, though, the only thing I had to really deal with before I left was car registration.

I also need to choose a carshare service. I am not stupid enough to think I will not want to have a car available to me on occasion. In Vancouver there is Zipcar and the Co-operative Auto Network (CAN). Basically Zipcar has a few cars really near me at Safeway, but CAN has more cars overall nearby, just not none quite as close as Zipcar. CAN is also cheaper than Zipcar. But the big issue is that CAN wants a BC drivers license which I don't have. Since I am a student I get to drive under my California license. Now I could take the written test and surrender my CA license for a BC one, but that would mean getting a new CA license in two years (assuming I stay on schedule to graduate, I still plan on working for Google in SF or MTV, and I don't meet some girl that causes me to not move back to the Bay Area). I don't think CAN will save me enough to warrant the hassle. Plus Zipcar is also in the Bay Area so I would be able to keep my membership when I move back to the States. I am giving myself a few days to think about it, but chances are I will go with Zipcar.

What the heck I did in SF

November was not very eventful as I was sick the entire month. And at work there was a little bit of frustration as I was having to learn the Google toolchain again which slowed me down. But I did manage to see some friends during the month (as I did throughout the visit).

December I was finally up to speed at work and thus actually contributing. But during my off hours I was busy working on my AOSD paper as it was only "conditionally accepted" which, according the email, meant it was actually rejected (not exactly a positive way to inspire someone to put work into their paper to improve it). But in the end it was accepted and I will be the absolute talk given at the conference.

January was good. With nothing taking up my free time but what I wanted, I actually was able to relax. I actually noticed that I was laughing out loud again, which was odd feeling since I had not realized I had stopped.

February was more of the same. The release of 1.1.9 of App Engine actually contained code by me which was neat.

During my trip I managed to go to SF MOMA and the de Young. SF MOMA was rather contemporary, which meant I didn't like a decent chunk of the stuff. The de Young I didn't get to see enough of.

It was nice to see my friends again. I actually managed to see almost everyone at least once. One friend just never responded to my emails (taking that as a hint) and the other fell ill both times we were going to meet up (not taking that as a hint).

From this trip I remembered why I do and do not like having a roommate.

Overall the visit was good. I definitely was fine with the idea of just staying, but with two years left on the degree I once again fought the temptation of just staying at Google and came back to Vancouver.