what I've been up to

Though I doubt it will mean anything to anyone… I threw this diagram together Monday night. It’s my application design for a default NCBI application. I’m pretty excited about it. Not too fancy, but a nice start.

I’ve also been thinking about writing a Firefox extension. It’s about time that I play around with it, and I was thinking that a pretty simple app (like twitbin) would be a good place to start. No plans yet, but… ideas.

Speaking of ideas, when is twitter going to become open source and (then) de-centralized? That would be awesome…

Alright, now time to take the design and make it generic… woo hoo overloading!

Website usability annoyance no. 1

When you do a search, and you click on a deep page. The website makes you login, which you do begrudgingly. Where do they take you? To your home page. Do they even offer to send you to the page you were looking for? Almost never.

Come on, guys & girls. That’s just too easy…

Update to some random thoughts

1) I took a look at the book on Processing, and it does look quite nice. That being said, I’m not quite sure what I’d use it for. So it fell a bit on my list.

2) Letterman is still pretty much the same. I haven’t seen Leno. Jon Stewart, however, looked TOTALLY crazy last night. It was really quite scary.

3) Rob Coburn, you had better hang out with Raluca and I pretty darned soon….

4) Despite ordering the Python in a Nutshell book, I have semi-officially decided to put off learning Python for a bit. I think that I am going to re-focus my attentions on Scheme, and work my way through the Little Schemer, The Scheme Programming Language, and SICP. I’ve been through some of them, but haven’t gotten to the end of any of them.

5) The Giants won! Beat the Bucs, and are going to play the Cowboys next week. I hate the Cowboys, so this is going to be a big deal. I’ll probably try to watch it.

6) Steve, congrats on the potential new-old gig!

Back on two wheels

I rode my bike to work today. It was the first time I had done that in an excruciatingly long time.

It turns out that neither would have killed me. I made it up the rather stiff hill in front of NIH quite easily. Didn’t get to work gasping for air, feeling sore legs, anything. Really quite boring, come to think of it. But it was a great day to be outside. It’s too bad that the trip is so short as it wasn’t quite the work that I would like, but I can only take what’s given to me. The next day I have more time, I am going to venture around downtown Bethesda. Seems like a fairly bike-friendly town. I don’t really make New Year’s Resolutions, as they’re more birthday resolutions to me, but I am definitely going to ride more this year. Last year was a long string of mistakes. Beach road, here I come.

Not that I want to jinx this beautiful weather, but I have gloves, my head warmer and all the rest lined up for when it returns to normal January weather.

Thanks

The coolest part of having a website is seeing that people I’ve never met, from places I’ve never been, have looked at something I’ve done. For the last day of the year, I just want to list the places that have sent traffic to this website. I think this is really exciting, and really interesting. Thanks!

United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Netherlands, Germany, Sweden, Belgium, Austria, Indonesia, France, Italy, Singapore, Brazil, Romania, India, Finland, Japan, Portugal, Poland, South Korea, Spain, China, Malaysia, Peru, Pakistan, Latvia, Lithuania, Iceland, Morocco, Serbia and Montenegro, Myanmar, Ukraine, Turkey, Thailand, Mexico, Slovenia.