It’s been almost two weeks since I left mixi where I literally had a great time for the past 3 years and 8 months. Here’s what I’ve been up to lately.
- Having dinner every night with life-long friends that I made through working at mixi.
- BBQ in the Mountains of Chiba with friends.
- Riding my new road bike (bicycle).
- Day trip to Kamakura.
- Studying relevant technologies for my next gig.
- Searching for a new apartment to rent in Tokyo.
- Throwing things out to make moving easier.
- Cancelled my gym membership due to moving.
- Writing final evaluation for Djellel on Google Summer of Code.
- Retired my iPhone 3G that I’ve been using for over two years.
My free time comes from a surprise stack of unconsumed vacation time that I had left at mixi. You see, I hardly used my paid leave while I was at mixi due to working on exciting projects and having fun people around me. Time just flew.
As a replacement for my iPhone 3G, I bought a BlackBerry Bold 9700 which now makes me a BlackBerry + Android user. I don’t have anything against the iPhone as a product (although I have improvement suggestions) but I wanted a change after using it for over two years. I’m also hoping that the new iPod Touch will come with a camera which eliminates my desire for an iPhone 4. I still actively use my HTC Magic for mobile web surfing and tethering my b-mobile on the field.
My opinion on the BlackBerry so far is that it’s a powerful email machine combined with Google Sync and Google Contacts (now part of Gmail). I’m certain that I’ve been replying to more emails while I’m out than when I was using the iPhone. The web browsing experience on the 9700 is poor but I have an Android to fulfill that void.
Anyhow, I just wanted to let my readers know that I’m doing fine. My vacation ends next week so until then, please feel free to ping me for a hand on your project, drinking or whatever :)
Toru Maesaka random life, phone
The concept of web services to interoperate and broaden the ecosystem is a beautiful thing. I agree to this concept but lately I’ve found myself being frustrated to a certain subset of this concept. Where does my frustration come from? It comes from cross-posts of micro blogging messages. To be more specific, seeing significant amount of Twitter updates on my Facebook news feed.
Living in Tokyo, I usually check social updates and RSS feeds on the train. It often begins from checking unread tweets then firing up whatever I feel like checking next (usually Facebook, Google Reader or Mixi). What disappoints me here is having to rip through tweets that I’ve already looked at on Facebook. Tokyo is a busy place so it’s important to gain information efficiently.
On Facebook I have various types of connections from childhood friends to acquaintances. Some of them are on Facebook and not on Twitter (and vice versa). I guess this is to do with user demographics but the important thing here is that I’m gradually finding it hard to pickup content from my friends outside of IT. I’m saying IT because it seems from observing my news feed that it’s mostly my friends in the IT industry that have setup cross posting.
There is probably some sort of content balancing gimick in the news feed code but this seems to not work well against my heavy Japanese twitter user friends. It’s a shame because my cross posting friends are completely innocent and aren’t trying to deliberately cause noise. Last thing I want to do is defriend people just because they are innocently causing noise.
Further Thoughts
This is what user specified content filters are for! If there’s a ‘block updates from xxx service’ option I would use it. Or perhaps I’m missing something and there is a way to filter out content from certain web services in the news feed.
If there is such an option, I would love to be enlightened!
Toru Maesaka random, webservice interoperability, usability, web
Last minute Christmas Shopping for myself. 23″ Full HD monitor with HDMI input (Mitsubishi RDT231WLM). I’ve been looking for a reasonable new monitor with HDMI for sometime so I’m pretty happy with this purchase. This is going to be used for PS3 and watching movies.
Merry Christmas.
Toru Maesaka random gizmo, monitor
Jotting down my occasional random thought.
I think being a programmer is about constantly thinking. For instance, when I’m doing the dishes, I look at the sink as a buffer and the dishes as blocks of data to be copied. Even when I’m playing a video game, I try to guess what kind of data structure is used in certain situations. Eating, laundry, dating, shopping… you name it, you always end up algorithmically reasoning (this doesn’t work too well when you’re dating though… too many anomalies).
Humans suck at context switching, as do computers. So, I try to organize my daily tasks into a priority queue and spend my concentration on consuming one task at a time. Whether you call this mental set a curse or not is up to you but when you realize that you’ve stopped thinking, I think it’s time to take a vacation or review your career path.
I hope I won’t stop thinking for at least another decade. ALTHOUGH I will claim my vacations!
Toru Maesaka random thought
