Thoughts of a Psych/Code Monkey/Guitarist

For those who hadn't heard, Blogger recently launched the feature I'd been working on for the last few months - threaded commenting:  http://buzz.blogger.com/2012/01/engage-with-your-readers-through.html This post is mostly just a call to everyone reading to comment more on blogs - Blog authors like it when they get (non-spam) comments, and commenters get to engage with the author and hopefully discuss with someone who shares an interest. More on this later, but first I have to say, a big thankyou to our users; for both their patience in getting this feature, and the positive reaction to it. What do I mean by the latter? I was a bit of a social-network junkie after launch, searching for reactions, and so throughout this post the images I'm using will be screen-shots of a choice few (click to enlarge): *Squeee* I love reading feedback like this, and just want to keep doing stuff people will like!  My hope all along was to give people what they wanted - inclu...

(Sydney, looking at the CBD and bridge, with some effects added to the image). I've been using Google+ more recently - e.g. see my profile here ; which may explain why the already-slow output of posts has gotten even slower. Then I was looking through various sections of our Blog UI and realised that (a) I'm getting enough views of the posts here to make it worth posting stuff, and (b) There are enough readers / followers that might not read G+ that I feel I should add things here too. So I've added the followers widget to my blog ( check over on the right there >> ) and decided to cross-post interesting G+ posts, starting with this: Here's a thought puzzle....where's the error? 1) There are many many species in the universe, some much more advanced than us, some less. 2) It's possible for an advanced enough species to make a technology that destroys all species in the universe. 3) Any technology will eventually be used for a malicious pu...

My job certainly lets me work on interesting things, but also as part of being on a globally distributed team I get to visit a lot of places too - most recently was a visit to the Google office in Tokyo to catch up with some engineers over there; and while not part of my earlier trip around the globe, I figure it's best to keep this Round-the-World series of city summaries going for as long as I'm able to travel to them! Firstly, Tokyo is certainly a Megaopolis (well, part of one); and of the previously mentioned cities, I'd place it between London and New York in terms of style and population density. That said, due to the size it covers, and the height of most of the buildings, it didn't feel quite as tighly packed as New York - certainly there were lots of smaller back areas where the roads weren't as busy, and plenty of parks / palaces to look at. On the left is an example of one spot much closer to the Barcelona feel of quiet, small one-way streets, of ...

So for those wondering where I'd got to, I'd been rather busy involved in a couple of launches at work - the blogger.com redesign and dynamic views visualisations; I'd recommend checking them out if you haven't already, e.g. my blog can alternatively look like this!  This is actually my first time writing a proper post in the redesign, so it'll be interesting to see how it goes. But enough of the product placement - this post is mostly to summarise something I noticed in Barcelona - mostly, how much it looked like an awesome place to be a kid.  So, not only does it guarantee you'll be good at soccer, flamenco guitar, and tanned, but there were a few photos I took of evidence: [For some context, see  this early post  about my visit there.] This first one is a school - it looked more like an old cathedral that had maybe been converted into a museum, and overlooked a large park and more fancy looking buildings, but yes, it's a school. It might be a t...

London was interesting on this trip as, unlike New York and Barcelona, I'd actually been there before (in this millenium, even), although I didn't remember too much of it. The main reason was to visit a friend who I know from Sydney but had been doing research in Southampton for many months, so my itenerary was: arrive very late at night, train to Waterloo (catching the Heathrow express was pretty nice, even at 11pm at night after a flight. thankfully, everyone speaking english helped, plus free Wifi on train!) then walk to my hotel and finally check in at 1am. I managed to find a fairly reasonably priced place called the Mad Hatter, which felt very British-y including the pub downstairs (always busy, a good sign) and tea everywhere in my room. The type of place I was pretty sure noone would bother trying to steal my stuff, a welcome change given the events in Barcelona. Early morning checkout the next day, then carrying a backpack of stuff back to Waterloo (for I'd ...

Between meeting friends in NY and London I had two spare days, and having never been to Spain before, and making feeble attempts in the past to pick up some of the language, I thought I'd spend those two in the seaside city of Barcelona - home to the Spanish F1 and the current #1 soccer club in the world. I was staying at a hotel up Montjuic , a very green hill just south of the main town area, and so could look down over the densely packed flat city flowing from neighboring hills down to what seemed an active Mediterranean port (both for tourists and shipping). One thing that others had told me to check out, and that really struck me in Barce was the Gaudi architecture, including the most famous Sagrada Familiar pictured above (click to enlarge) - the unfinished cathedral with thousands of little building details everywhere to be seen (and is nearly complete now it's being worked on again!). So my first day was a 5-hr walk to see it and various other interesting sites, inc...

Some of you may already know, but a few weeks ago was Google IO , a big developer conference run by my employer, and this year I happened to be working on something which I could talk about . The other nice thing was that it was held it San Francisco, and as I had a few people to talk to in NY, I ended up taking an entire round-the-world tour also through Spain and England. I'll be covering each city in turn, but today's post is about my first trip to New York, the big apple. My first day was mostly work-filled, meeting up with coworkers in the Google office but I had organised a visit at night to the Galapagos Art Space in Brooklyn where they were holding a 'geek nite', including quiz and some interesting talks on perception, diet & lifespan, and a powerpoint karaoke on pearls. After the talks, I took a bit of a walk around a park on the southern side of the Huds on, with a nice night view of Manhattan including the shot above of the Brooklyn bridge. Sa...

Really short update to say: my team just launched something you might be interested in :) The blog post describing it is here: http://goo.gl/oExpn In short - it's a new way of viewing blogs! For instance, you can view this blog at: http://padsterprogramming.blogspot.com/view/sidebar That's not all! For a look at some of the new stuff, and what's coming, you can check out http://buzz.blogger.com/2011/03/whats-new-with-blogger.html Message complete, back to normal about-me post next time, have fun viewing!

It's amusing, as part of my work for Blogger I've been learning about what it takes to make a good blog; lots of posts, lots of linking, lots of pictures, lots of communicating with comments, etc... and other than the pictures, I'm pretty far behind on all of them. Anyhoo, here's my (rather late) update for January: On the whole, most of it was same as usual - work, quiz on Wednesdays, miscellaneous on weekends including some guitar playing, some coding, etc... Both my housemates were away for a week at the national computer science school ( NCSS ), if you're a coding student I'd recommend checking it out. So there's a link, time for pictures: Probably the most interesting thing I did was a weekend hiking trip up to Mt. Kosciusko, the highest peak in Australia! The image above is from some of the rocks near the top - you can probably tell it was the middle of summer, so not much snow up there. Recently (I think a year or so ago) the area was hit by some...

Last week we had the problem setting weekend for the next few AIOC high-school algorithms contests (fun & productive, the contests are looking good) so there wasn't much spare time to blog about my Seoul trip, but as this weekend has been much more relaxing (lots of Rock Band and Gran Turismo games...) without further ado, and mostly with pictures... SEOUL ( 서울) As I'm now working closely with a number of blogger teammates in Seoul, it was decided I should spend two weeks with them in person in the Korean office and meet them in person. The overall experience was great (it's certainly much easier to work with all these people now that I know who they are and how they work) - though this post will mostly cover some thoughts of the city itself. I was staying and working in Gangnam-gu, a financial district South-East of the center of town and overall not too populated. Other than the dozens of US chain coffee places, the local main had lots of greenery and provide...

It's been a while since my last update, mostly because nothing much has happened over here, but I thought I'd post to let everyone know that I'm now migrated and settled in my new project: That's right, it's Blogger, the Google product that you're currently looking at! As a long-time Blogger user, I'm aware there are a number of places where it can improve, and hopefully I can bring my website-building experience from Wave into improving the experience using one of the top-10 visited sites on the net . So, watch this space. Also, if you're a Blogger user or frequent reader, do let me know if anything you think can be improved. Meanwhile, Google's also announced it's working on a self-driving car . Fun times

It's Winter! Well...the end of it, and being neither school nor Uni holidays it seemed the perfect time to go to Mt. Perisher for some skiing - although technically I was going Snow boarding, as I find it much more natural feeling and fun. So, myself and a number of friends - both Googlers and not - drove down one weekend with the intention of staying for the week. As it turns out, the weekend we arrived was apparently the best conditions of the season, with loads of snow falling yet clear skies during the day. The conditions were indeed great, with this view from a black-run on the second day: (somewhere off to the right is Kosciuszko) Sadly, it clouded over on the Tuesday and things got a bit icy, with the forecast of bad weather on the Wednesday so I decided to head to the two runs up to the Perisher peak while others did lessons in the morning. On the bottom of the first run I found out how icy it was the (literal) hard way, falling near the lift and landing rather badly for wh...

Now for the second half of my South Africa tour - after JoBurg, we migrated south to the warmer weather of Cape Town for the third match and a few days of relaxation. After arriving at the lodge we were staying (the very friendly Afton Grove ) they helped set us up with a rental car, and following a small bit of local walking we made our way down the scenic motorways towards Simon's Town and Boulders beach . The latter is a popular tourist spot due to the friendly and large penguin colony, and it did not disappoint: Note that after my Antarctica trip, this was the third continent fo the year I've seen penguin's on - the only one left in the southern hemisphere is, stragely enough, Australia! Hopefully a trip to SA at the end of the year can fix that... One other great thing in the timing of the visit to Boulders beach was that we saw not only penguins, but also a pack of about 50 dolphins swimming past in the distance, plus a pod of three Whales (apparently very uncommon t...