Posted by Skrud at Sunday, June 10th 2007 at 10:28am
Here are some of the things I’ve been up to recently:
- Moved out for the summer, and am now living downtown, in the McGill ghetto, with Harley. What’s so awesome about the ghetto? I’m within easy walking distance to all the Crescent bars and all the St-Denis bars. I can get to the Plateau as easily as I can get to Concordia. And I’m only two blocks away from Benelux.
- I started working at IBM in the Extreme Blue program, and it’s been incredible so far.
- I was elected VP Academic of the ECA and already started working on getting stuff done for the new year with an awesome team of execs.
- As I write this, I’m waiting for a taxi to come take me to the airport. I’m off to Seattle for a full week to participate in the Imagine Cup North American Finals.
I’ve got so much more stuff planned for this summer I just hope I’ll have time to do all of it!
Tags: events, metablogging, school, summer, travel, work | no comments
Posted by Skrud at Friday, February 9th 2007 at 8:27pm
Kathy Sierra at Creating Passionate Users is looking for stories about how the web (or some other app) changed people’s lives. I was writing this up in an e-mail to her project when I realized it would make a good blog post, too.
There are two instances of huge importance that I can think of.
The first story one dates back to … oh, early spring 2003, on the ol’ IRC. I used to be an operator in a heavy metal IRC channel. At the time, I was 19 years old and just finishing up my CEGEP curriculum, planning to attend university in Computer Science in the coming fall. By chance, I was discussing my future goals in the IRC channel with one of the channel’s regulars, “FiG”. I mentioned that I would be heading to Concordia University in Montreal. His response was something along the lines of “No way! I’m the president of CCSS: the Concordia Computer Science Society! I can get you free beer! Come by our tent at Frosh or drop by the office some time!”
On the first week of school, I made sure to drop by the CCSS office where I met not FiG, but some other geeks. We had a friendly chat, and I continued to drop by there regularly, eventually meeting FiG. I started participating in all their events (camping trips, coding competitions, etc.). The following year (even though I had transferred into a “Software Engineering” major as a direct result of CUSEC 2004’s influence) I ran for a VP position and got elected. We were shorthanded a few executives so I actually took up extra work myself. I networked and befriended people all across the university, including students in various disciplines as well as the faculty members. I brought in speakers and recruiters from local companies (Ubisoft and EA, for example). My efforts even got me a faculty-wide award “for outstanding contribution to Student Life”. The year after that I was President of CCSS, running the society myself with a team of executives. (I wasn’t a very good president, but that’s another story.)
I’m still heavily involved in student life at my school, I’ve met some amazing people and have a wonderful group of friends. It’s reached the point where the thought of graduating actually produces tears – I’m going to miss everyone! And all this because of an IRC conversation almost 4 years ago.
As for FiG, we are still very good friends and talk regularly… which leads me to story number 2.
Around November 2003 I started a blog. There was a hosting company (1and1) which was offering a full-featured hosting package absolutely free for one year. It was just the excuse I needed. I bought a domain name (skrud.net) and set up a simple blog. As an afterthought, I installed a simple forum script and promptly forgot about it.
After a couple of months, people actually started posting in it. Edward was the first, and then a few more of my friends (including the aforementioned FiG, who also brought along his own friends). And then people started signing up whom I had never met before. These were people who were new to Concordia in some Computer Science or Engineering discipline and found the forum and blog by chance, by Google, or by looking over someone else’s shoulder in a computer lab or classroom.
Now the forum is a modest-sized community of friends, and even one professor. We get together every so often as a big group and take over a bar, restaurant, or house. The forum has become the online presence of my circle of friends – which has expanded to include friends from before and during university life – and it keeps growing! Some of my favourite people and best friends I might have never met were it not for the forum. And the cycle continues! A number of the newcomers to the forum end up becoming actively involved in student life; the people who ran as my team of executives when I was president of CCSS were mostly forum members.
And there you have it – the internet has played an extremely integral role in making me the person I am today. :)
Tags: geek, internet, life, metablogging | 6 comments
Posted by Skrud at Tuesday, February 6th 2007 at 12:00pm
I subscribe to a lot of feeds. According to Google Reader, exactly 65 of them. A lot of those feeds are the rarely updated blogs of friends (or in the case of Angelo and Heather, regularly updated).
The nice thing about Google Reader is that it has a “shared feed” feature, which lets me choose posts out of any of the feeds I’m reading and share them. Those posts get packaged together and displayed, even given their own feed). You can notice that little feed widget on the left side of the screen for my shared posts, too.
On top of the geek and programming blogs and webcomics, there are bunch of feeds I follow that are – for lack of a better word – uncharacteristic. At least, they’re feeds that you probably wouldn’t think I would read. I figured I’d profile them here…
Cognitive Daily
Cognitive Daily is a blog about cognitive psychology, published by Dave and Greta Munger. Greta is a professor of psychology at Davidson College and Dave is a writer. Together they report on peer-reviewed papers in the field of cognitive psychology – stuff like What we hear, how it affects what we see and Insight into how children learn cultural values.
I have no idea why I’m interested in this stuff, but I love it. I suppose on some level, my interest in the subject was piqued with Kathy Sierra’s presentation at CUSEC 2006 (listen to the podcast, though it’s not as good without the visuals). Kathy brought up interesting insights about how pleasing your users, and creating passionate users, is about understanding how humans think and feel and react. Although I know I’m more of a head-buried-under-the-code type of programmers and probably don’t think about users (other than myself) nearly often enough.
Deep Astronomy
I discovered Deep Astronomy thru Digg, when there was a post about How to Destroy the Earth with a Coffee Can. Astronomer Tony Darnell writes about various aspects of astronomy and cosmology, with a lot of tongue in cheek humour that makes it entertaining (and you learn a ton) – like How to Avoid Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation Sickness in which he describes the universe as “one very big microwave oven.”
Retrospectacle: A Neuroscience Blog
Retrospectacle is a very recent addition to my feed aggregator. I discovered it when there was a post on microscopic images of beer. Beer is extremely pretty up close. The blog is written by Shelley Batts, a 3rd year PhD candidate who researches hair cell regeneration in the cochlea, in the opes of using it as a therapy for hearing loss. She recently had a post about the basic concepts of hearing that was a great article about the ear and how hearing actually works.
Again, I have no idea why I find this stuff fascinating, but Retrospectacle is definitely an interesting and fun dose of science.
Seed Magazine - I Can’t Believe It’s Science
Astute readers will notice that two of the above three blogs are part of Seed Magazine’s “ScienceBlogs” section. Well surprise, surprise, I subscribe to Seed’s main feed as well. But the only thing I really read from this feed is Maggie Wittlin’s weekly ”I Can’t Believe It’s Science” column which documents interesting and weird sort-of-related-to-science things.
Tenser, said the Tensor
Named after a song from Alfred Bester’s The Demolished Man, Tenser, said the Tensor is a blog about linguistics. Unlike more generalized linguablogs like languagehat – which I used to read – Tenser, said the Tensor focuses on linguistics in science fiction. One example is a post about the language of the Children of Tama in Star Trek: The Next Generation’s “Darmok” episode. Linguistics is a subject that’s always interested me to varying degrees. In fact, I probably would have gone into Linguistics or English Literature if I didn’t get accepted into Computer Science when I started university. (Just imagine! Skrud the linguist instead of Skrud the programmer!)
Mind you, I don’t think linguistics and programming are all that different. At some level, you’re still dealing with grammars, syntax and semantics. The only difference is that computer languages are context-free. (Mmmm… finite state automata…)
The Dilbert Blog
The Dilbert Blog is Scott Adams’ blog, and thusly named as he is the cartoonist behind Dilbert. Scott Adams is hilarious. His blog covers tons of things I’m not interested in at all (politics, philosophy, etc.) yet with the delivery of a stand-up comedian at a Just for Laughs gala. Sometimes he posts about current events and warns asexually reproducing Komodo dragons to stop giving our human women ideas. Or he’ll write about a gender test and how ridiculous a test like that might be.
TVInJapan
Finally, there’s TVInJapan. The best thing since prepackaged, sliced bread. TVInJapan is loaded with tons and tons of random, hilarious, interesting and often absurd clips from television in Japan. Clips can be loaded with Ultraman doing the Scatman, or the reproduced-everywhere Hand-made Star Wars. Sometimes there are television commercials with the infectious Tarako Cupie Girls or Superpowered School Girls. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Greased-up movers, Surprise crowds of 100 people chasing random pedestrians and much, much more. On TV. In Japan.
Unfortunately Japan is pretty anal about copyrights and those clips constantly get removed from YouTube, so in order to make sure you really get the most of TVInJapan you definitely need to subscribe to the feed.
And there you have it … a small subset of blogs that I read that have nothing to do with programming – though I guess they could still count as geek blogs given how heavily science-oriented they are.
Enjoy!
Tags: geek, internet, life, metablogging, reading, science | no comments
Posted by Skrud at Friday, August 18th 2006 at 5:12pm
- Opening paragraph containing mundane phrases like “Lately I’ve noticed…” or “Recently…” or “Since a couple of weeks ago…” or “I’ve been thinking…”.
- Many sentences beginning with “I think”, “I feel”, or “it seems” and other such subjective verbs because I’m too timid to make an assertive statement. (It also gives me a coward’s exit should someone point out a flaw in my arguments in the comments section).
- Too many sentences that begin with the words “And”, “But”, “Also”, “So”, and other typical bad-words-to-start-sentences-with.
- Excessive use of English singular past perfect tense and use of the contraction “I’ve”
- Mention something esoterically geeky in an attempt to achieve dominant alpha-Geek status.
- Complain about one of the following topics:
- Make sure I don’t say anything mean about anyone else, because I never know who might by chance come across this blog. (I wish I had to guts to be as open and honest with my blog as Heather is with hers).
- Recount tales of un-Skrudly behaviour.
Did I miss something? Then leave a comment. :)
(And since I can’t think of anywhere else to mention this, if you want to have an avatar that appears in the comments next to your post, hit Gravatar and make an account using the same e-mail address you use when entering a comment.)
Tags: introspection, metablogging, random | 4 comments
Posted by Skrud at Monday, August 7th 2006 at 7:29pm
First I saw Angelo do it, then Heather, now Guillaume … so I’m giving in and copying their big list of things to do, bolding the ones that I’ve done. I’m only copying one list, though, so that’s going to be the one I saw from Angelo and Heather because I saw those first (and Guillaume’s is too long).
- Bought everyone in the bar a drink (but it wasn’t my money … :P)
- Swam with wild dolphins
- Climbed a mountain
- Taken a Ferrari for a test drive
- Been inside the Great Pyramid
- Held a tarantula
- Taken a candlelit bath with someone
- Said ‘I love you’ and meant it
- Hugged a tree
- Bungee jumped
- Visited Paris
- Watched a lightning storm at sea
- Stayed up all night long and saw the sun rise
- Seen the Northern Lights
- Gone to a huge sports game
- Walked the stairs to the top of the leaning Tower of Pisa
- Grown and eaten your own vegetables
- Touched an iceberg
- Slept under the stars
- Changed a baby’s diaper
- Taken a trip in a hot air balloon
- Watched a meteor shower
- Gotten drunk on champagne
- Given more than you can afford to charity
- Looked up at the night sky through a telescope
- Had an uncontrollable giggling fit at the worst possible moment
- Had a food fight
- Bet on a winning horse
- Asked out a stranger
- Had a snowball fight
- Screamed as loudly as you possibly can
- Held a lamb
- Seen a total eclipse
- Ridden a roller coaster
- Hit a home run
- Danced like a fool and not cared who was looking (only while plastered)
- Adopted an accent for an entire day
- Actually felt happy about your life, even for just a moment
- Had two hard drives for your computer (and installed a 3rd yesterday)
- Visited all 10 provinces and 3 territories
- Taken care of someone who was shit faced
- Had amazing friends (still do)
- Danced with a stranger in a foreign country
- Watched wild whales
Stolen a sign Set a sign on fire- Backpacked in Europe
- Taken a road-trip
- Gone rock climbing
- Midnight walk on the beach
- Gone sky diving
- Visited Ireland
- Been heartbroken longer then you were actually in love
- In a restaurant, sat at a stranger’s table and had a meal with them
- Visited Japan
- Milked a cow
- Alphabetized your cds
- Pretended to be a superhero
- Sung karaoke
- Lounged around in bed all day
- Posed nude in front of strangers
- Gone scuba diving
- Kissed in the rain
- Played in the mud
- Played in the rain
- Gone to a drive-in theater
- Visited the Great Wall of China
- Started a business
- Fallen in love and not had your heart broken
- Toured ancient sites
- Taken a martial arts class
- Played D&D for more than 6 hours straight
- Gotten married
- Been in a movie
- Crashed a party
- Gotten divorced
- Gone without food for 5 days
- Made cookies from scratch
- Won first prize in a costume contest
- Ridden a gondola in Venice
- Gotten a tattoo
- Rafted the Snake River
- Been on television news programs as an “expert”
- Got flowers for no reason
- Performed on stage (I rocked out.)
- Been to Las Vegas
- Recorded music (… on GarageBand…)
- Eaten shark
- Had a one-night stand
- Gone to Thailand
- Bought a house
- Been in a combat zone
- Buried one/both of your parents
- Been on a cruise ship
- Spoken more than one language fluently
- Performed in Rocky Horror
- Raised children
- Followed your favorite band/singer on tour
- Created and named your own constellation of stars
- Taken an exotic bicycle tour in a foreign country
- Picked up and moved to another city to just start over
- Walked the Golden Gate Bridge
- Sang loudly in the car, and didn’t stop when you knew someone was looking
- Had plastic surgery (plastic yes, but not cosmetic surgery)
- Survived an accident you shouldn’t have
- Wrote articles for a large publication (Assuming e-Zines count… :P)
- Lost over 100 pounds
- Held someone while they were having a flashback
- Piloted an airplane
- Petted a stingray
- Broken someone’s heart
- Helped an animal give birth
- Won money on a T.V. game show
- Broken a bone
- Gone on an African photo safari
- Had a body part of yours below the neck pierced
- Fired a rifle, shotgun, or pistol
- Eaten mushrooms that were gathered in the wild
- Ridden a horse
- Had major surgery
- Had a snake as a pet
- Hiked to the bottom of the Grand Canyon
- Slept for more than 30 hours over the course of 48 hours
- Visited more foreign countries than the Canadian provinces and territories - 13
- Visited all 7 continents
- Taken a canoe trip that lasted more than 2 days
- Eaten kangaroo meat
- Eaten sushi
- Had your picture in the newspaper
- Changed someone’s mind about something you care deeply about
- Gone back to school
- Parasailed
- Petted a cockroach
- Eaten fried green tomatoes
- Read The Iliad - and the Odyssey
- Selected one “important” author who you missed in school, and read
- Killed and prepared an animal for eating
- Skipped all your school reunions
- Communicated with someone without sharing a common spoken language
- Been elected to public office
- Written your own computer language
- Thought to yourself that you’re living your dream
- Had to put someone you love into hospice care
- Built your own PC from parts
- Sold your own artwork to someone who didn’t know you
- Had a booth at a street fair
- Dyed your hair
- Been a DJ
- Shaved your head
- Caused a car accident
- Saved someone’s life
Tags: Friends, life, meme, metablogging | 3 comments
