Ed Words

Do you remember the last time Facebook sucked? Facebook tends to suck every now and then, with the spikes coming whenever they change something. Well, anything really.

I got invited to the Facebook launch party tonight. It all started with an email from Blake Ross which you don’t really get every day. We got a tour of the campus and they dropped us off at the cafeteria for food, drinks, and talking to buddies. There were strange moments where you would look out the cafeteria doors and see the fluorescent office lights or look at your watch and realize it was still before 8pm. But overall, it was really fun. I wouldn’t have expected anything less from Facebook.

So, the idea of the night was still a launch party. They had monitors with a countdown that eventually hit 0. Mark Zuckerberg had a little spiel about the origins of Facebook, launching products, and so on. Random side note, he is not that tall, but he has about 40000 messages in his inbox and over 400 friend requests. He went on to introduce 6 new products. Let’s see if I remember them:

1. HipHop for php
2. New photo uploader
3. New homepage
4. Application dashboard
5. Games dashboard
6. New search functionality

It’s awesome how self-aware Facebook is. During their first big launch, when news feeds first came out, they did not expect the negative feedback that they received. It seems that by now, it’s something they completely expect and welcome. To this point, they set up live feeds of news containing the string “new facebook”. Right when all the products were pushed live, they projected these feeds on the walls and TV screens.

“Fuck the new facebook. I’m so confused. @#!@#%& giggity”.

It’s amazing how much people hate change. I mean really, how confusing can it really be? Have you ever walked to class only to find that the sidewalk your on is closed because they are repaving it? Sure things move around a bit and I’m sure the first time you get ready to click on a button you thought was top-left only to find it top-right it’s jarring, but is that something you’d really say confuses you?

Or maybe it’s confusion about why to even change the homepage. A lot of the results that showed up were along the lines of “why fix what isn’t broken?” I’m sure they said that last time Facebook changed, only to eventually accept that it actually is better now. Sure it may not be broken, but that’s no reason to stop trying to make things better. Much like life.

Also, who says “giggity” when they’re confused?

“I hate the new facebook. stop changing my life”

Like I said in my last post, Facebook still comes out winning. First of all, tons of companies would kill for any sort of feedback from their users. They would kill for their users to respond within 15 seconds of them pushing a change. What’s better though, is that all these pissed off people want to tell all their friends. Here’s how:

1. Change your status on Facebook.
2. Facebook News Feed picks it up and delivers this to your friends’ homepages.
3. Your friend notices the Facebook homepage has changed. He decides it also sucks and decides to go to step 1.

It’s great for Facebook that all of this occurs without anyone leaving the site. Sure, there’s lonely people out there that have ditched Facebook altogether because they changed their homepage again. I’m sure they are living less confusing lives now because of it. Maybe this time around, people will realize that complaining about the new Facebook homepage is actually more annoying than the new Facebook homepage.

It totally sounds like I work at Facebook.

It’s getting near the end of the year which means its about the time people start going crazy with lists:

• Christmas Lists
• Best of 2009 compilations
• Best of the decade compilations
• New Year’s Resolutions

I’ll just go crazy with an end of the year rant. I remember a while ago, I wanted to make a site that only focused on lists, but I would do it right. You know, easy to create, edit, share, and all that good stuff. My friend laughed at me. To this day, I still hope that I will show him up.

I’m not going to have any list for 2009 (at least not for now), but listening to All Things Considered compile the best music of the decade got me thinking. This is the first decade that I can begin to say I’ve experienced. Like, really experience.

Your first decade, either you’re overly sensitive and you have no memory, or you’re numb to your senses, giving you nothing to remember. I think starting from middle school, you begin having some taste. Music, food, movies, whatever. And it’s not just media. I think for me, that was the time I started to really enjoy math and computers.

My girlfriend says I’m overly nostalgic. She’s totally right. I just asked my best friend for some old CDs: something from Ice Cube, something from Method Man, and Krayzie Bone’s, Thug Mentality 1999. Ten years ago, I listened to gangster rap. Somehow, I journeyed from there, to trance, to punk rock, to whatever I listen to now. A mix of indie rock and public radio.

And movies! My favorite movie used to be Romeo Must Die. How did I get from there to Lost in Translation?

I wonder if the internet will change any of this. The next generation will seemingly grow up plugged in to Facebook and Google. Can you imagine that? Ten years from now, Facebook could remind you of what you were like 10 years ago. Good luck erasing Mo-Thugs and Sugar Ray from Facebook’s memory. And Google could show you what celebrities you had a crush on.

Just like all the best things in life, I find it both awesome and creepy.

And by the way, (Will, I’m talking to you), back to my whole list site idea, you could have the internet auto-generate these “Best of” compilations for you. last.fm and pandora probably could do a better job at it than you. God, I’m awesome.

I spent last weekend in New York City. It was my second time in New York but the first time I really got to see more of the city. Despite almost being kidnapped by the sketchy limo, it was a lot of fun! I got to spend a lot of time with my friends who actually knew the city. I had good eats on Bleeker Street, checked out the booming NYC Ukelele scene at Banjo Jims, visited the MET (where they have a Vermeer exhibit), and watched a disappointing Big Game with tons of Stanford fans and one Berkeley fan. The loss wouldn’t have been half as bad if we didn’t come so close to winning. I didn’t do any touristy things, even though I desperately wanted to. I guess I’ll have to visit the Statue of Liberty and skating in Rockefeller plaza will have to wait until next time.

My life has been crazy and it looks like the weeks will only get even more hectic. I always measure how busy I should be by my course load. Clearly, that is not a good metric anymore. I’m currently in two (relatively easy) classes, but on top of that is TA’ing, job applications, bouldering three times a week, and cooking dinner. School life is weird in that no matter how much free time you plan to have, it always fills up with stuff. For some reason, school follows you everywhere, whereas at work, you leave it in the office (well, sometimes).

What does the “alt” in keyboards mean? It’s supposed to be alternate, but it hardly seems to correspond with how we use it. On a random note, Matt Fisher showed me something neat that they should implement in Windows. When you alt-tab, you should be able to move around the icons using your keyboard instead of just going forward and backwards with tab and shift-tab. I wonder how many engineers at Microsoft would work on adding a feature like this. If I recall correctly, I once interviewed with the Start Menu and Control Panel team at Microsoft. I think Apple’s OS Performance team was just slightly larger.

I was talking to someone today and they told me how they couldn’t locate an email I had sent them a week ago. They checked all three inboxes, but to no avail. (I had actually sent the message via Facebook). It was weird to hear someone respond, “I only have three inboxes.” Not too long ago, Talk of the Nation had a show on not deleting information and how that may not be the best thing for us. Storing everything is actually really unnatural, and forgetting is healthy for the brain. You can almost see it here. Saving everything in multiple inboxes just makes you look in more places for the things you want to keep.

Despite the lack of activity on this blog for so long, I was surprised to learn that I still am getting more traffic than before. Apparently, I’m still getting on average of 12 visitors a day or so. I know these can’t be real visitors because I’m almost certain the maximum number of friends that know about this is 10. And there is no way all (or any) of those friends actually visit my blog every day.

I’ve been trying to figure out where all this traffic comes from. I mainly suspected crawlers or other bot-like entities. I would suspect that Google Analytics (the tracker I have setup) would know to ignore those visits. I looked into what Google Analytics said about my traffic sources and a surprising number of them come from searches—the top hits being “facebook sucks” and “I wanna be the guy”.

I started thinking that maybe it’s not that unlikely. There are so many people on the web, some are bound to stumble on my site. I guess for me, 12 visits a day is a lot, but that’s really nothing. To think that each day, 12 random people spend 16 seconds on my site still makes me feel incredibly popular. I hope those internet is ready for my comeback.

This has just been another point of re-calibration in my life. I received my first full-time job offer today and I was so confused as to how to respond. The recruiter spoke to me on the phone, happy to deliver great news. We discussed the usual details of the offer and at the end she said something along the lines of “I hope you’re excited!” I responded, “Oh yeah, that’s great.” I’m not exactly sure about my tone, but I’m sure I just sounded tired.

To be honest, I wasn’t sure what to think. I had to consult my girlfriend and best friend to figure out what it meant. I have no idea about the implications of this or that amount of money per year. It’s not that I don’t get the value of money (I do! A twenty dollar bill is worth twenty one dollar bills!). I think I’ve just been trying to avoid thinking about these things for as long as possible.

Well, with one job offer, I can at least calibrate my expectations if I get any other offers. I’ve applied to probably 10 companies this season. I hope to God they aren’t the ones reading my blog.

Sorry. I was gone for a long time. Blogging is a paradox. You can never be doing interesting things and blogging at the same time. When you’re out having a good time, the last thing you want to be doing is writing in your blog or tweeting about it. An empty blog either means there’s nothing to talk about or there’s too much to talk about.

This past summer, apparently from July 10 till now, was a blast, and I just couldn’t keep up with myself to blog about it all. I’ll try to resume blogging to some extent and maybe over time, I’ll slowly recall my summer experience as well. I’m not sure what sparked my interest in blogging again. I visited my old buddies at Apture last Friday. Maybe that had something to do with it.

Anyhow, I’ll try to be back on the internet. No promises about the frequency for now though.

It was my girlfriend’s birthday today and to celebrate, we went out to eat at a nice restaurant in Sacramento. Sacramento had a wine-and-dine week so a handful of restaurants offered special tasting menus that are reasonably priced. Also, we don’t usually frequent overly expensive restaurants so we can appreciate fancy ones now and then. I wasn’t entirely prepared in terms of clothing—as usual, I was dressed the worst. But the point is that I tried extra hard. I wore shoes instead of flip-flops!

The service there was crazy. Our food came out really quickly and the workers there were really good about replacing our utensils and placing them perfectly parallel to one another. Probably one of the craziest things was how quickly water was refilled. Granted, the place wasn’t crowded so they didn’t have to keep an eye on that many people, but my glass never got near empty. I even made a conscious effort to empty my glass. I took a few gulps and set my glass down for a second and someone was already there refilling it. It could not have been on the table for more than 30 seconds.

I went back and peed for 23 seconds. And then I had go again 10 minutes later. The second time was only 9 seconds.

Two interesting tidbits for today. First, on reddit, I saw a thread that asked people to take a picture outside their window and comment about it. I later found out that there is a whole subreddit dedicated to this, but it was still a new idea to me at the time. It’s pretty neat to see what great views some people have. Sure, it’s a bit skewed—people with nice views are more likely to show that off. But it made me wonder if those people can still appreciate what they have every morning on their way to work. I don’t think I would. I’m glad I live with a boring view. It makes every other beautiful landscape that much more magnificent. I’m sure I won’t stay with this position when I’m buying a house though.

The next bit is about firsts. Today, I went experienced a lot of firsts. Here is a list of just a few of them:

1. First time in a Mormon church. Also, first time falling in one, sitting on the roof of one, and watching someone breathe fire in one.
2. First time playing Settlers of Catan. Also, first time winning a game of Settlers of Catan. I have yet to lose.
3. First time doing doughnuts around a round-a-bout.
4. First time I’ve seen an Independence Day fireworks show that did not have any blue fireworks. We had several hypothesis for why this was the case, the most common one being the economic crisis that made blue fireworks too expensive. Another popular one was that they accidentally ordered Red, White, and Green fireworks, instead of Red, White, and Blue. The final one was that people at the shows were given tinted goggles. This is to prevent people from enjoying the show without coming to the carnivals.

Facebook is starting to show ads for art school to me. They claim to be able to unlock the animator within me. Could it be that they know more about myself than I do?

When I was younger, my parents sent me to a bunch of art classes over the summer. I think I had shown some potential when I was younger. I took some classes on drawing, comics, and even some 3d wire building. Throughout middle school, I drew constantly. At a school where there was virtually no academic competition, you became known for different things. I was one of the artistic kids.

I was a small fish in a small pond back then. I can’t help but wonder if I would be any good if I had kept trying. Lighting would be cool to do someday too.

I’m just about finished with the first week of my internship at Pixar. The group of interns they’ve collected is amazing. Everyone is so good at what they do—it’s really intimidating.

We’ve done mainly training this first week. We’ve been told to be a little bit hush-hush about pretty much everything we do here. Quite different from the academic world but Pixar has its secret sauce that it has to protect. I really don’t think it’s the training or the software or any of that. Well, no one thinks it is. Pretty much everyone realizes that it’s the people at Pixar that make it the place that it is.

One of the cool things I’ve done this week is interact with artists. It’s a pretty interesting exchange—programmers really respect the work of artists and artists really respect the work of programmers. But this goes out even further. I had no idea what kind of curriculum you would have at an art school. And the artists I were surprised at the curriculum I went through as a CS major. It’s a healthy mix of respect and amazement. Kind of like meeting Donald Knuth. Then taking a picture with him during graduation. Kind of.