Wednesday, December 12, 2007
So I’m sitting and preparing “essay” questions for my organizational design exam a few days ago and I’m writing the paragraph you see on the right. I write the word entrepreneurial, and I really expect to get the spelling wrong, it’s just one of those words that I never get right. Plus it’s 11PM and I’ve been writing for a few hours. So I write the word entrepreneurial and I’m waiting for the little red line underneath it to appear so I can find where my mistake is and fix it. Lo and behold: no little red line appears under the word. As I finish it off I think to myself “Whoa! Dude! I can’t believe I just spelled it correctly. Maybe it’ll take it a second…” Nothing.
After a few seconds of blinking and waiting I smile a smug smile and continue on with the word spirit.
Having finished my sentence I give it another look, still surprised at the lack of a red line. After a few seconds I realize that I’m writing on paper.
Thursday, December 6, 2007
Wednesday, December 5, 2007
So…
It’s finally almost time to be done.
Yesterday I wrote my last test. Eva. If you must know it was the operating systems term test, and it was pretty damn horrible. Enough said. Anyways, that wasn’t the point.
I’m not usually very feely-touchy about these things and when I saw other people who were about to graduate being super excited my reaction was usually: meh. I totally didn’t expect to be counting all the “last” things. Last week was the last assignment I would ever hand in. This week is the last test. In a week in a half it will be the last exam I will ever write.
Wow.
It feels like I’ve spent all of my life at UofT. No wonder, considering that I’ve been here for the past five and a half years. I kinda stopped even thinking that there’s life beyond this stage, I tend to go between one assignment/test rush to the next. Finally there’s a light at the end of the tunnel and it took me a bit of time to even figure out whether that’s good or bad.
At the beginning of the semester when I realized that it was the “last” I was kinda confused. What comes next? Yeah I knew I’m gonna go to an internship at Google, but that was only a temporary thing. Then I’ll come back to Toronto, and then what? Good question. I was still considering whether I should go to grad school or not at that point, but as the semester wound up I realized that I’ve had enough of this for a while. And that’s where the finality of it all started setting in. What happens next, after the summer? I still don’t really know the answer to that question, but now I think I’m getting over that tipping point of being excited instead of just confused.
I think it’s time to take over the world. Take no prisoners!!1!
(Photo: by Laurie McClanahan, under 
)
Tuesday, December 4, 2007
Today I presented a similar presentation to what Mike, Pardis and I presented 2 weeks ago at Eclipse DemoCamp.
I managed to squeeze our 15 minute presentation to under 5 minutes (I don’t know exactly how long I took, anyone keeping the time?), which was a bit of a challenge. I’ve got to admit that I almost got a heart attack right before the presentation. After bringing up all the software that needs to run, I tried to create a new assignment (because I had wiped the DB) but nothing happened. Queue panic attack. Literally nothing worked. Full stop. After some useless clicking around I was about to give up. As a last resort I decided to switch browsers and try with Camino instead of Safari. Insert long sigh. Turned out that for some magical reason authentication stopped working with Safari (even though it worked perfectly an hour before). Lesson: never wipe the DB right before the presentation, have everything exactly configured an hour before.
Overall the presentation went really well and I got very good feedback from people in the audience. One of the criticisms that I heard was that I never said what problem the software was trying to solve. Fair enough, I think that would be a good point to add to this presentation. I was kind of disappointed that only one question from the audience was asked. I guess for next time I present I really do have to plant people to ask at least one or two questions. 
Overall the demoes were much better this time than the last few times that I attended. I was very impressed. The demo of ShapeShop was pure amazing. I remember trying to play with 3D Studio MAX and Maya in high-school and even though I could figure out some stuff it was really inaccessible. There was just no way I could have come up with anything more than what a retard-3-year-old would have doodled on a piece of paper. I think that software like ShapeShop could play a similar role to what digital cameras have done for hobby photographers. We could potentially see people start doodling 3D models and being able to form communities like flickr, but for 3D models. What about iStockPhoto for 3D models
The HealthSpoke demo was pretty interesting too. The demo looked pretty slick. But I have pretty big concerns about doctors sharing patient records. Forget sharing. What about even storing medical records off site? I don’t remember the latest on this but I’m pretty sure there’s legislation that deals with this specific issue. When the presenter said “according to my interpretation of the law…” I got the impression that they didn’t really look into it. Of course if this is mostly targeted towards alternative medicine providers and personal trainers, then no worries; but it shouldn’t be marketed as a system for medical doctors then. The other problem I see with this idea is importing data from legacy systems. Read: paper records. For this to be even somewhat effective doctors would have to import thousands of patients’ records from pen-and-paper systems into the system. That’s just not going to happen. I remember thinking of this kind of easy-medical-record-keeping system for a startup several times over the past few years, but the problem was always of how to get the existing information into the system.
The other thing that I really found interesting yesterday is Mark’s mention of FixMyStreet. Which is a website where people can report problems (like a bug tracker) and it is linked on the backend with the city’s systems and lets them find and prioritize problems. Crowdsourcing city inspection! Genius!
All in all a great DemoCamp, too bad I won’t be able to attend the next few, but I look forward to attending them again in the summer.
democamp, democamp16, torcamp, utest
(Continued)
Thursday, November 29, 2007
From Michael Geist’s Blog (and others): Canada to Create Spectrum Set Aside in Wireless Auction
Industry Minister Jim Prentice has just announced that the government
will put in place measures as part of the forthcoming spectrum auction
to encourage greater competition within the Canadian wireless market.
Prentice acknowledged that Canadian wireless pricing is too high,
particularly for data.
Whoa. I’ve been huffing and puffing about Canada’s ridicu-crazy data rates and the general oligopoly in the wireless industry for a couple of years, so this comes as a very welcome announcement.
It’ll be interesting what comes out of this. In particular with OpenMoko becoming usable for phone use, reasonable data rates will make a huge difference in adoption of phones like this. Google’s Android is also really interesting. What I’m wondering is if any of the newcomers that might bid on/win spectrum will use these new open phones and embrace openness as a competitive advantage against the old Bell/Rogers/Telus triumvirate. I sure hope so. I think it’s really important for these player (the Open Handset Alliance, and OpenMoko/Fic) to lobby new entrants to use their technologies in this way. Newcomers win (maybe). OHA/OpenMoko win (for sure). Consumers win (for sure). Fun times, fun times.
Saturday, November 24, 2007
On Thursday Pardis, Mike, and I went to Eclipse DemoCamp Toronto to present UTest. There were 4 demoes in total including us, and I think that it went really well. Of course the weather had to get bad that particular day. So it took us almost 2 hours to get there, through snow, rain, hail, ice, and fire. Uphill both ways of course. The atmosphere was really nice and everybody was friendly. And all the demoes were actually interesting and technical, no marketing. That was a big relief from the recent demoes that I’ve seen at DemoCamp, some of which were either marketing or just babbling.
Our demo went over very well. We managed to show everything that we planned to show without any major hiccups, and had some pretty intelligent questions thrown our way. So at least people weren’t sleeping.
The only thing that I didn’t like is the lack of a buzzer. At DemoCamp there’s usually a buzzer or some other way of signaling to the speaker that his or her time is over. At that time, people ask questions for a few minutes and any other talk is delayed until the pub afterwards. That’s definitely the way it should be. Unfortunately there was no buzzer on Thursday and even though most of the demoes managed to finish in 15-20 minutes (the official limit was 15), one demo lasted for over an hour. That is just wrong. I guess no one was rude enough to interrupt, but looking around it was evident that many people felt uneasy and needed to get out of there, even though no one said anything. Oh well. Lesson learned.
In fact it was so fun that we decided we should do the same presentation at the next DemoCamp. I’ve submitted our demo proposal and hopefully it gets through. Of course we’d have to scale the demo down from 15 minutes to 5, but that should be doable. So anyone who hasn’t been at DemoCamp for the past few months needs to attend 16 to see us present :-).
