Thoughts of a Psych/Code Monkey/Guitarist

While compiling the page for this blog linking to all my round-the-world cities posts, I realised I was missing one continent - Australia! Just the continent I've lived on for the last 25 years... According to some folks from my Antarctica trip, Australia's often one of the last continents visited by people overseas due to its remoteness, so given some readers may never have visited, it seemed like a situation I should fix. It seemed unfair to write about the two cities I've lived in (Adelaide and Sydney), but thankfully I recently had the chance to visit Brisbane for two days for work, only my second visit to the city after a school sport trip a long time ago, so thought I'd take that opportunity to cover it in the same manner as London and Barcelona before. My first thought while taking the taxi from the airport to the CBD, was how much like London it felt - a combination of the styling of buildings, how high they were, how randomly they were laid out, the ...

The most recent city in the Round-the-World series is one that I got to spend a day in during my most recent America trip; having a free weekend, and friends from Sydney who recently moved to the area, I flew my way north from San Jose up to Seattle, Washington, home of the Space Needle (pictured left). It's an interesting place - being located so far North (bordering Canada) it's much closer to my preferred environment (dark-green trees, mountains, snow peaks, ...) and a welcome change from California - what's more, being winter, I did get to experience snow / frozen-rain, a climate I actually quite enjoy. Before visiting, I didn't really know what to expect - I'd heard of Sleepless in Seattle , but having not watched it, the only cultural reference that gave me any insight into what it would be like was Grey's Anatomy, based in a fictional Seattle hospital -  so I'd heard of the Space Needle, but that was about it. My first impression was that th...

This is a follow-up on my first post on Planned Obsolesence - the design principle of making things last shorter than they need in order to drive demand and increase production. There's some good discussion on the related Google+ post on both negatives and positives; e.g the increase in waste vs the extra cost of inventing/making materials that will last that long and providing support. Today's post instead features something I've mused about before - automation of jobs. You see, as mentioned last post, we have the Man-in-the-White-Suit issues where making stuff that lasts longer negatively impacts both manufacturing companies (selling fewer things) and their employees (less stuff to get paid for making). With the increase in automation, we're still making as much stuff, but the employees don't get to make it. It's easy to see why it's happening, but hard to know whether it's good or not - take content distribution for example. It used to be t...

What do the following have in common: Lightbulb, Printer, Nylon, iPhone? As you may have guessed by the title of this blog,  they've all been designed to live an artificially short life, and be expensive to 'fix' properly, so you end up just buying more; anyone who's upgraded a smartphone knows what I'm talking about (iPhone 4 -> 4S anyone? Apple's turned it into a business model ...) It's such a ubiquitous practice that there's a name for it - Planned Obsolescence , and there's a lot of things written about it so I won't go too much into the background, but after watching The Lightbulb Conspiracy documentary on the plane about it, and realising it lined up with a few earlier concepts I'd mused over, I thought it relevant to document my thoughts and see what others thought. There's a 1951 Alec Guiness movie about it: The Man in the White Suit , where as a scientist he invents a fabric that doesn't break or get dirty, bu...

This post is from a series of review posts - for the whole list, see my Kindling page . My posts of late have mostly been about cities around the world, and I have one coming up about Australian cities, but I thought I'd take a temporary break from that to update you on what I've been doing most recently - reading. I have a few friends that are bibliophiles , but since high-school, during my Maths/CS degree and the first few years of work, I slowed to almost nothing read. ...but then I discovered e-books! More at the end, but in short, I was using Apple's reader on my original iPad for a friend's fanfic and some old scifi classics; Sadly that was stolen , but after realising that's mostly what I used it for (plus Tiny Wings and Angry Birds), I opted for a Kindle instead, and am now 14 books through, averaging probably 30min-1hr each day! So without further ado, because it's what bloggers do (it seems) and because it might help someone, some time, who is st...

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...