Last week was Spring Break for my friends at WSU, so they came down to visit. A couple weeks ago I realized that the nicer it got, the more I would want to be outside. I quickly realized that I had a good size back yard with grass up to my waist and weeds covering so much of the yard you couldn't see the bench, wheel barrow, lawn mower and tons of very nice deliberately placed plants. However, you could see the 6 foot tall piles of dirt and massively overgrown compost bin. To get to the point.. I rescued a lawn mower and mowed the place like crazy. I then manually smoothed out both piles of dirt and saved all of the huge pieces of concrete to be used later for my fire pit. I bought a BBQ and some tiki torches and then threw a huge party. Tony's birthday was Thursday, Megan's was yesterday and it was time to throw a gathering backed by 8 bottles of champagne and a keg of Boont Amber :)

My sweet Oasis in the heart of Oakland:



All kinds of wildness went on over the last week but I am currently too tired and busy catching up to write about it, but you can look at the pictures and imagine.

(Pseudo) Spring Break Photos

To be continued when I catch up on my sleep..

I read a pretty interesting paper done by Naomi S. Baron a student at American University that answerd some of the questions I had about the way Instant Messaging has integrated with 'real' life. You can view that in a pdf format HERE. As I was sitting here staring at my IM list that I have been accumulating since I was 14 I realized that a large portion of the people on my list are fellow techies or people a few years younger than I am. This is strange because you have to realize that my list contains hundreds and hundreds of people that I have accumulated over the years and at one point it was every person my age that I was even midly friendly with. As I am now almost a year out of college I am realizing that all of the people who are my age that don't work in tech are at work all day and somehow they aren't connected to the service.

I don't think the reason these people are neglecting the online communication is because they aren't allowed to access it at work, I think it COULD be possible that people are out growing the need to be in instant communication with everyone they know. I know, I know, take a deep breath - it is a shocking thought. In the evening I do see a much higher percentage of my friends from the old days connect to IM for a few minutes to catch up with people, occasionally my parents sign on to ask a question or catch up but really... isn't the phone much more personal?

This brings me to another point that people who don't spend all day on the computer have a hard time understanding which is the world within the monitor and the way a programmers work flow is structured. When I am working on multiple things on my computer with my head phones on I completely lose track of anything off the screen or.. sometimes screens, as if nothing else exists. If you want to communicate with me its really easy to pop over to an instant message, read, reply and cmd tab back over and continue right where I left off without loosing any time trying to catch up where I was. I really do feel this has to do with the fact that the human mind can only keep so many things in short term memory for a finite amount of time. If I am physically interrupted or I have to answer the phone I have to pull out my ear phones, look away from the screen in that action I instantly have to mentally process the people around me, any noises or things happening, possibly any text messages or other calls I missed etc. This fills up my short term memory buffer and now all of those projects, browser windows each with mutliple tabs, irc conversations, half written emails and incomplete lines of code are pushed out of the buffer and are lost forever in respect to the way that I had them organized at that specific time. The frustration is that I knew exactly what I was about to do with each of these different "things" and now to remember what I was doing and how they all corrolate to each other becomes very time consuming, frustrating and sometimes impossible.

In many cases it would be easier for me to re-write a chunk of code than to continue back to where I was. So again, this is why I need to use IM to communicate during the day.. simple productivity. For those of you who are thinking it; this is in no way related to the way I zone things out when watching TV.. that I cannot explain.

Mikeal and I had a relatively amusing experience the other day that I can use to demonstrate how powerful this zone can become. We had our afternoon QA meeting and once everyone left the room we remained just the two of us digging back into code and emails that had been staring at us all meeting. After a few minutes we were in the middle of a very intense conversation which required many lines of text in the IM window to communicate. Half way through my 4th or 5th response to him he started laughing which hit me the same way a dog barking starts to annoy you when your sound asleep at 6 am. As you become more awake every time it barks and annoys you a little more eventually your wide awake and totally pissed off, well it was like that but I wasn't pissed off. When I finally realized why he was laughing, and it was because we were sitting right next to each other, in a room with only the two of us and the door shut and we were in full on conversation via instant message which in reality could have taken about 2 minutes verbally. If you can see this mental image its absolutely rediculous and since has made me laugh multiple times, but accurately depicts the power of the zone.

In a summary, I would like to state my hypothesis. I believe that non technies are starting to out grow instant message, and are reverting to a much more inconvenient forms of communication because they feel they are more personal... which they are. And the other - please be nice to your techie friends when they are trying to be productive and just can't seem to explain to you why they cannot talk to you, and work, unless you go into the other room and send them an instant message. OH and read the paper.. its pretty interesting read that delves into gender based communication via the internet, I guess that takes relationship communication issues to a 3rd dimmension.

I've been thoroughly intrigued and entertained by the young cat that lives in my house. She constantly wants to know how the computer monitor works because items there are impossible to touch, aren't 3d and have no smell or texture. However they are visually stimulating and she clearly knows that they are very interesting to me and are requiring lots of my attention.

The other thing that I find funny about this is that my MacBook Pro is extremely hot which makes for a great belly warmer until I need to type and she think that its perfectly okay to streatch her self right across the keyboard. But from a perspective of someone who has never seen an image drawn by pixels it must be amazing. She constantly tries to touch an icon, or the mouse cursor and when I move to the edge of the screen she sits and ponders how it doesn't simply fall of the edge... (the way explorers thought about the world.. before we knew better) and how when she pushes on something it doesn't pop out the back.. so she puts one hand on the screen and another on the back side and again sits and ponders. It's a very simple concept.. but think about it?

Class is in session!







Pretty cute huh! Animals are great.

Finally, Cosmo 0.6.0 is out the door for anyone to use who is interested. A lot of work went into this release and some really neat new features are there including read/write web ui calendaring, time-zones, recurrence massive amounts of bug fixes and cosmetic changes. I really recommend everyone go check it out because it is free and available to the world at osaf.us.

You will notice that newly in my links section is 'My Calendar' and 'Collaborative Calendar'. 'My Calendar' is the calendar I actually use on a day to day basis, it is 'read only' unless I have specifically given you access.. it's very accurate as to where I am and what im doing... I'm not particularly sure why anyone really needs that out in the world wide web.. but there it is. On the other hand -- the 'Collaborative Calendar' is 'read/write' so anyone who wants to add to it can and should. I'd prefer it if people didn't make a mess of it and put actual things going on up there. The work flow is actually pretty cool as well. I am using the trunk build of Chandler the desktop PIM application that can be found at the Cosmo site, using the Cosmo Sharing Service built in I can subscribe to osaf.us and my account there to download my calendars, which become collections in Chandler. I can then download both my real calendar and the collaborative calendar and move events to my real calendar that I think should be kept around, then I can sync my real calendar back up and stay up to date.

I actually didn't know this worked, but to get my real calendar in Cosmo to be an exact copy for the shared calendar I just downloaded my real calendar to chandler, unsubscribed, re-named it and shared it back to myself and there it is. Cool huh?

There are some sharing issues with the Chandler trunk, which will be the main purpose to the 0.6.1 release which is expected to fix all of those issues. That leaves 'Preview' or 0.7.0 left to build, and it has a huge feature set which will just blow everyone away with it's coolness.. but unless you want to go read the specs you will have to wait till mid-late April.

My cousin Jillian also has caught a bit of the Blogging bug, and since a few people read mine I think its an easy way to connect everyone else who is interested with hers! I was supposed to do this a few months ago.. but I forgot, so now she might have a little more motivation to start updating it. You can check it out at Jillian's BLOG.

Another BLOG of interest for those techies out there is that of Mr Mikeal Rogers who writes very specifically about emerging technologies and specifics on specifications and protocols, that can be read at Semantic Mikeal, The mumblings of Mikeal Rogers.

Flickr is now working again and I will be adding my flickr albums to the links bar on the side, but to get directly to the California Coast album you can visit California Coastal Pictures!