KLog

“Let your dreams outgrow the shoes of your expectations.”
—Ryunosuke Satoro

“I don’t wish to be everything to everyone, but I would like to be something to someone. In my life you made me feel as if I truly meant something to someone”

—Javan

Day 2-3. Nov 21-22. 2010

The past two days were just about fb.

1. A friend called me yesterday (Nov. 21) and asked me to check out a cool video that he posted on his fb wall.  I said no, I can not, because of this experiment I am doing.  He was like, ok, fine, I’ll send you a link.  Two hours later, nothing.  So I had to call him and ask him for the link, then he sent it over.
2. OK, today again.  Someone called me and ask to borrow my jump-start cable for his car, whose battery just died.  And he said, can you send me your address on fb so I can come and pick up the cable?  OK, I can’t because I am*@#$%^&.  Alright, he had to give me his email address so that I can use this obsolete emailing system to send him an message, sounds like last century?
3. Now, someone just added me on fb.  A very old friend, probably haven’t met for 5-6 years.  Sorry buddy.
4. Life is just so hard without fb!
5. Yesterday, I was doing research for some numbers that I could use in my slides, comparing the growth of different image sharing sites.  Flickr.com has grown from 2 billion image upload to 4 billion from 2007 to 2009.   Impressed?  They should be shy when meeting fb, which has 2.5 billion image uploads per month (2009) and growing!

Intro:

I really need to concentrate on my thesis proposal which is due in 10 days.  It seems a good opportunity also to test out how it feels like living (surviving ??) without social media. I am not anti-social at all, in the contrast, I am a pro-social and tech evangelist.  The purpose of this experiment is to understand: what is social media? to which degree it has reached our everyday life? is there still anything missing? how can it be improved?

Day 1: Nov 20. 2010

1. Posted a message on fb about my temporary shutting down social media. My current list of social media include: fb, IM clients (MSN, QQ), and counting.
2. My officemate bet that I will compromise before Tuesday.  We’ll see.
3. Experienced the first temptation from social media: I was craving to see how people would react to my status update. Poor me, why would I care so much about what other people think?  One need for social media: people’s desire to share themselves with the others, the basic desire to find friends, similar to love.  It’s the basic desire as a social animal, engraved in our genes.
4. While I was doing research for some image materials that I can use for my presentation, I was crawling images from one of my professors’ website.  And following one of his album link, it goes to his fb album!  This shows how deep social media has rooted!  You might not noticed, but large part of the web has integrated with social media! I also realized I did not log out my fb session, clear the browser history, cookies and everything!
5. Uninstalled fb from my iphone.  It’s just so tempting!  Handheld devices are penetrated by social media!  You are wired-into the matrix through mobile devices constantly.  Why iPad is such a big thing?  It completely changes the dynamics of how we consumes the internet.  The convenience of one tap access is just huge.
6. If I share this post with my close friends, does it count as a form of social media?

Biking from Redmond to UW is very enjoyable, I have been doing it almost every weekend recently.  It is a great work out, has nice lake view, and plus you can enjoy some cheap but nice food at the University Ave later after

The route: Sammamish River Trail + Burke Gilman Trail
Distance: 25 miles (40 kilometers)
Time: 1:35
Average speed: 16.6 mph (26.6km/h)
Bus to take when you come back: Metro271 + Metro253, transfer at Bellevue Transit Center

KML file

To me it was a relief just to realize it might be ok to be discontented. The idea that a successful person should be happy has thousands of years of momentum behind it. If I was any good, why didn’t I have the easy confidence winners are supposed to have? But that, I now believe, is like a runner asking “If I’m such a good athlete, why do I feel so tired?” Good runners still get tired; they just get tired at higher speeds.

—http://www.paulgraham.com/wisdom.html

 Just got my American Red Cross certificate. Now I am certified to rescue

16 days, over 3000miles

Route:

PIT, PA->LAS, NV->Grand Canyon NP, AZ->Monument Valley, AZ->Lake Powell, AZ-> Moab, UT-> Canyon Lands NP, UT-> Arches NP, UT-> Bryce Canyon NP,UT->Zion NP, UT->LAS, NV->Yosemite NP, CA->SFO, CA->Santa Cruz->Big Sur->Santa Barbara->Santa Monica->L.A. -> LAS, NV

“I heartily recommend that when you find a good film, or a good film and developer combination, you stick with them. Too many photographers have to try every new film that comes on the market; they are forever testing, and so they never achieve the consistency that is mandatory for good results.” —How I Photograph Wildlife and Nature, by Leonard Lee Rue III

I have been tediously debugging today…

Use fflush(stdout) after the command of printing debug information.  Because the program might have crashed before the print information is sent to the terminal(Yes, it’s possible, and that’s what costs me 2 hours debugging!)   And finally it turns out to be an index running over the boundary.