" This post aspires to be README.txt for your career as a young engineer. The goal is to make you happy, by filling in the gaps in your education regarding how the “real world” actually works. It took me about ten years and a lot of suffering to figure out some of this, starting from “fairly bright engineer with low self-confidence and zero practical knowledge of business.” I wouldn’t trust this as the definitive guide, but hopefully it will provide value over what your college Career Center isn’t telling you."

"Simplifying things radically, you could say that there have been four fundamental changes in information technology since humans learned to speak. Somewhere, around 4000 BC, humans learned to write. Egyptian hieroglyphs go back to about 3200 BC, alphabetical writing to 1000 BC. According to scholars like Jack Goody, the invention of writing was the most important technological breakthrough in the history of humanity. It transformed mankind’s relation to the past and opened a way for the emergence of the book as a force in history. The history of books led to a second technological shift when the codex replaced the scroll sometime soon after the beginning of the Christian era. By the third century AD, the codex—that is, books with pages that you turn as opposed to scrolls that you roll—became crucial to the spread of Christianity. It transformed the experience of reading: the page emerged as a unit of perception, and readers were able to leaf through a clearly articulated text, one that eventually included differentiated words (that is, words separated by spaces), paragraphs, and chapters, along with tables of contents, indexes, and other reader’s aids. The codex, in turn, was transformed by the invention of printing with movable type in the 1450s. To be sure, the Chinese developed movable type around 1045 and the Koreans used metal characters rather than wooden blocks around 1230. But Gutenberg’s invention, unlike those of the Far East, spread like wildfire, bringing the book within the reach of ever-widening circles of readers. The technology of printing did not change for nearly four centuries, but the reading public grew larger and larger, thanks to improvements in literacy, education, and access to the printed word. Pamphlets and newspapers, printed by steam-driven presses on paper made from wood pulp rather than rags, extended the process of democratization so that a mass reading public came into existence during the second half of the nineteenth century. The fourth great change, electronic communication, took place yesterday, or the day before, depending on how you measure it. The Internet dates from 1974, at least as a term. It developed from ARPANET, which went back to 1969, and from earlier experiments in communication among networks of computers. The Web began as a means of communication among physicists in 1981. Web sites and search engines became common in the mid-1990s. And from that point everyone knows the succession of brand names that have made electronic communication an everyday experience: Web browsers such as Netscape, Internet Explorer, and Safari, and search engines such as Yahoo and Google, the latter founded in 1998."

"Warning: I am a designer by trade so I may get a little over excited about this bit. You do not have to slap an ugly QR Code on well designed media. QR Codes are just now going main stream so they tend to be the focus of the media they are included in. Big black and white squares positioned right in your face.  For now this makes sense since the marketers using them tend to need to educate their audience on what they are and how to use them. As they become more common they will become something people will look for, like a web address, allowing designers to integrate functional QR art seamlessly with their design. Just because they are traditionally black and white does not mean they should be. QR codes:

• Can be any color
• Can be any modular material
• Must have at least 55% contrast between the foreground and the background
• Should have a margin or “quiet space” of 4 units
• Need to have clear detection patterns in the corner
• Can have up to 30% of the code obscured if you use the highest error correction
• Can be read with any orientation
• Can put it in perspective
• Can be anamorphic (widescreen)
• Can have the cell shape distorted
• Can have the interior made of circle or other shapes
• can have the design reversed."

Farms in Dexter and Grass Lake

Someone actually asked me that once when I lived in San Francisco. For the uninitiated, Ann Arbor isn’t a woman, it’s a small college town in Michigan that at one time was as cool as say, Berkley, California, but has since slowly morphed into a dreary backwater of uptight Republicans and Liberal Elitists. Although it lays claim to being somehow hip and progressive, very little really happens here, and in spite of all the amazingly creative people in the area, nothing clever ever seems to escape the local scene. I jest a bit; I’m probably just being bitter because I’m tired of the place and too lazy to do anything about the fact. It’s actually a pretty cool town considering the fact that it’s only six square blocks surrounded by cornfields and strip malls.

nice portfolio site... also has the 7th and Washington web cam

"Alas, too many organizations when faced with the need to hide information do it inexpertly. Here's a set of cases on how to do it wrong, and the spectacular failures of process you can get when people do the simplest thing that could work, but don't actually work."

"Oddly, certain kinds of workers in Massachusetts cannot be shackled by noncompetes: doctors, social workers, and broadcasters among them. But why should a TV anchor be allowed to jump from one station to another, while we make an EMC engineer take a year of unpaid leave before he can form a new company? How does that benefit our economy? My biggest concern is that new legislation only requires noncompetes to be “reasonable,’’ rather than nixing them entirely. To ensure that we get there, individual employees will have to dive in to this debate - rather than leaving it to big companies who know how to lobby. And CEOs who are willing to think about the good of the state’s economy - beyond their own firm’s desire to avoid spawning potential rivals - should speak up."

Nice interview with Philip Myers explaining what northward mouse migration has to do with climate change, oaks, lyme disease, and geography.

A personalized muni train tracker in App Engine. "Personalized" as in specifically for a gent named Paul Hammond near Duboce Park, San Francisco. The interface would be ideal for other trackers elsewhere though, like the fabled AATA planner.

Umich bus info all mashed up: SMS, iPhone (iUI), email, mapping. Compare and contrast to the restrictive DDA policy on parking spaces.

A decade ago some community librarians in California initiated a great idea: why not lend tools as well as books? The idea slowly spread to a couple of dozen other US towns, but the most active and well-stocked tool libraries are still in the Bay Area -- one in Berkeley, Oakland and San Francisco.

So libraries are more popular than ever. Another unanticipated outcome of the end of cyberspace. But what's most interesting is just how different the activities of these 21st century undergrads are from what I used to do in libraries during the 1990s. Whereas most of my peers looked to libraries as a place of solace and quiet focus, for these students they are intensely collaborative spaces.