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a href=http://www.flickr.com/photos/popebe/2929817316/ title=photo sharingimg src=http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3162/2929817316_1c1c60437a_m.jpg alt= style=border: solid 2px #000000; //a
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a href=http://www.flickr.com/photos/popebe/2929817316/The lab/a
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(hopefully this works… Blogging from my phone is new to me)br /
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This is a pic of my work from this morning. I’m studying crystalbr /
growth orientation and latent stresses in string-ribbon silicon,br /
before and after breaking the wafer.
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(This post was inspired by the fact that I was directing someone to pictures from Antarctica, a website I hadn’t visited in at least a year and a half.)
3 years ago, when I traveled to Antarctica, I was asked to keep a photo journal and write entries for a website every few days or so. So, I drew the outline of what I wanted my website to look like, and how I wanted things posted, and the BSA’s webmaster dealt with the rest. All I had to do was post photos and text to an FTP site and he did the rest. Looking back, what strikes me now is that during that entire process (4 months of planning and 4 months of travel) not once was the word “blog” mentioned.
Contrast that to today: you can’t go an entire day (at least, in the community that I am part of) without hearing the word several times, reading posts from several other blogs, or posting to one yourself. It’s incredible that everything that I asked an ‘expert’ to take care of just a couple years ago, anyone can do now. What’s even better is that current tools allow for the process to not only be easier, but also better! Whether you use wordpress, blogger, or some other tool, it has become exceedingly simple to publish as much or as little as you want with minimal effort.
If you’re still reading right now (and I’m going to guess that maybe 2 people are/will), you’re thinking…”yeah, no kidding…web publishing tools are growing exponentially, now you can post from literally anywhere with mobile applications” which leads me to the really cool part of this…what are the possibilities in another 3 years? will people continue to push to more easily share more and more of their lives? I’m going to guess the trend will be towards compartmentalizing what is shared, and directing information such that it is more easily shared with certain target groups of people. (Of course, if there’s a way to monetize publishing on a personal level, that would be huge too.)
I’m using Flickr to add this directly to the blog…hopefully it works out well.
This pic is from way back in April at Red Rock Rendevous…the desert a bit outside of Las Vegas.
Thanks to @campo, I’ve started using twitter. As usual, I placed signing up for new techy things at the bottom of my priority list. So, he merely re-prioritized for me: set up my profile and threatened to abuse my good twitter-name until I changed the password.
We’ll see how the twitter thing goes. For some reason, I don’t immediately dislike it the way I dislike Facebook status messages. Or, perhaps, this will be the beginning of a conversion and I’ll start liking other forms of broadcasting myself (including status updates).
Anyway…follow me at twitter.com/benpope
…of me not posting to this site. So, it seems only fitting that I should put something up.
This weekend was a pretty a-typical weekend for me, with the icing on the cake being some improvements to my workplace. I just wanted to share the handiwork that a fellow intern and I put up: the Dave Cave.
We gave him a mailbox too…
Dave plans to work there until our boss forces us to take it down.
For years, I (and I’m sure many other people) have dreamed of an LED billboard on the back of my car, or the front, to express what I really mean to other drivers. Only things like “thanks for letting me in” or “you’re an excellent driver,” of course. Never anything bad, I promise.
So, when I saw the “Drivemocion LED signs for cars” headline on Gizmodo, I got a bit excited. Of course, it was for no good reason. I had conveniently missed the “Emoticons” precursor to the headline. Apparently all this sign does is display one of 5 emoticons depending on what you input on your dashboard-mounted cntroller. Seriously, if I want to let some driver in Boston know that his/her tailgating is not appreciated, flashing a sad-face through my back window is just going to encourage that behavior.
Check out the link for a video if you’d like, and you can be just as disgusted as I was…
Maker Faire is a two day festival that’s all about DIY (do-it-yourself), and yes it’s really spelled that way. I went with Dave and Adam (two guys from work) and their girlfriends (yeah, being the 5th wheel is pretty awesome).
Anyway, it was pretty incredible…there were people driving around in cupcake cars, huge steel sculptures (pictured above), battle-bots, steampunk everything, a larger than life rendition of the Mousetrap game, lots of things on fire, a lego covered Jeep, torque driven spheres…and I probably missed the vast majority of what I saw there. Check out more photos via Flickr, either a set or slideshow.
It’s been almost three weeks since I posted, and it’s definitely been nagging at me. Work and life, however, have been very busy, so I’ve chosen to spend my time in other ways.
In any case, this article in the Wall Street Journal, of the same name as this post, is not an entirely new concept. Most of us have heard before the stories of very successful people initially failing: Michael Jordan, Thomas Edison, Steve Jobs, etc. I did, however, particularly identify with one paragraph:
Self-efficacy differs from self-esteem in that it’s a judgment of specific capabilities rather than a general feeling of self-worth. “It’s easy to have high self-esteem — just aim low,” says Prof. Bandura, who is still teaching at Stanford at age 82. On the other hand, he notes, there are people with high self-efficacy who “drive themselves hard but have low self-esteem because their performance always falls short of their high standards.”
Now, I don’t mean to give the impression that I necessarily have low self-esteem, because I don’t think I do. Though, as those who know me recognize, I tend to be constantly disappointed with myself in at least one aspect of my life at any given time, and so I found it particularly interesting to read a description of this feeling.
Anyway, I think I’ll go back to work now…that report could still be a bit better…
For those of you who haven’t been paying attention, the Olympic torch is on it’s relay around the world prior to this summer’s Olympic Games. As it passed through Paris, London and, most recently, San Francisco, the torch has become a magnet for protesters hoping to highlight the human rights violations perpetrated by the Chinese government upon the people of Tibet and the fact that the Chinese government is complicit with the Sudanese government’s ongoing atrocities in Darfur.
I wholeheartedly that both of these causes deserve attention on an international scale and that, in some way, the Chinese government must be made to realize that the way they’re going about things right now just isn’t right. Of course, international politics is a complicated business and nations as big as China can’t really just say “Oh, people are protesting, we should change our policies.” That would undermine the authority of the people in charge, therefore the people in charge have no incentive to do such a thing. I’m guessing they like being in charge more than they like being responsible custodians of their nation.
Getting back to the torch: I think it’s really too bad that such a great tradition is being undermined by protesters. As I already said, I think the causes are worthy and attention necessary for those being oppressed, but what’s the point that point of a torch relay if the torch is really just playing hide and seek with crowds? This is supposed to generate excitement and world unity, not dissension and apprehension. That is decidedly not what the Olympic Games are about.
Really, I want both: I want a torch relay that I can be enthusiastic about and I want attention to be paid to maintaining basic human rights. In the long run, the dousing of the torch relay may place more pressure on the Chinese government to be responsible, and the possibility of reducing those people’s suffering is far more valuable than the enjoyment any of us might gain from the torch relay, so I suppose it’s worth it.
It will certainly be interesting to see how the Games will work out this year. I wish I could be there myself…
For those of you who didn’t know, I’ve got a bit of a problem with my right eye: it’s got 20/200 vision (that’s not an exaggeration). The plus side is, you only really need one good eye to function normally, which is how I’ve been going about things for a while now. In any case, the fact that my right eye sucks isn’t anything new. The new news to me is that my condition might not actually be a physical deformity of the eye. According to my dad, if you’ve got poor vision or an injury in one eye while kid, your brain starts using it progressively less and less. As the brain uses it less, those synapses fall into disrepair and the eye is essentially ignored. So, it’s possible for one eye to go blind (essentially) for no particularly good reason. The medical term for it is amblyopia. Recently, at my father’s prompting, I looked into it a bit more and found out that with treatment, vision can actually be restored in the bad eye. If left untreated, vision in that eye gets even worse and muscle control of that eye follows suit (hence the term “lazy eye”).
Long story short, it was about time I did something about it. Since my left eye’s fine, I figured the best possible solution would be a monocle, like the pimp we all know from childhood:
Unfortunately, I’m not a count, so I can’t really pull of the monocle, and glasses have so long been a distinguishing characteristic between me and Allen, I opted for the single contact lens. Surprisingly, I am actually noticing a difference in vision; I’m not really seeing things all that much better, but I definitely notice that both eyes are actually paying attention (instead of my right eye just being along for the ride). In the words of Carl Spackler, “so I got that goin’ for me, which is nice.”
