In other news, I’m probably going to stop posting pictures on Picasa, and start using Flickr. It just seems more beterer.

Click here for full screenshot

For a long time I wanted to create a combined feed of my posts, twitter, and tumblr content. Being bored, I finally took the plunge with Yahoo Pipes. I passed the end result through FeedBurner so I can track subscribers, and here’s the combined feed.

It was a little bit confusing to get started. There’s documentation, but I just wanted to see some tutorials on common tasks, such as combining a feed. There are some videos, but they didn’t play for me. Their tutorials page actually links to articles people have written outside of Yahoo. I wonder what the learning curve is for an average user.

Other than that, Pipes is really cool – I wish I had looked into it sooner. It can take csv data and turn it into an RSS feed. I’ve wanted to monitor work data via RSS for a long time, and it looks like it can do that for me securely. The builder interface itself is interesting – I wonder how they did the curved node connectors without flash.

By the way, the image above is how you combine separate feeds while attaching labels to the titles. In the end, the best way to learn this tool is by looking at screenshots of sample feeds.

Pictures off my Picasa Album

I feel like Japanese, or at least what I’ve been exposed to, is a lot easier that English and Spanish. Or to put it another way, I feel like it’s more disciplined. It’s not an exception minefield like batshit crazy English. Spanish has some strange rules and exceptions – for example, the fact that words have gender. You have to say “el carro” (the car, male, ends in o) or “la pluma” (the pen, female, ends in a), but you have to say “el mapa” because it’s a greek word… what? With most western languages, the verb “to be” is all fucked up, since it’s the verb that people use the most and it’s evolved unchecked. In English it’s “am, are, is, are, are”. In Spanish it’s “soy, eres, es, son, son”. The Japanese equivalent, “です” or desu, is just that. And it’s like that with all verbs, they don’t depend on the subject (they are modified based on other things, but that’s predictable). I can appreciate how hard it is for a Japanese speaker to learn all the (batshit) crazy rules and exceptions of the English language.

Another thing that I love about Japanese is that it’s spoken like it’s written. Syllables are always said the same way, and as far as I know, there are only two exceptions – ha is pronounced “wa” when used as a topic marker, and wo is pronounced “o” when used as a direct object marker. Spanish is the same way, but with more exceptions. English though? Man, it’s just batshit insane when it comes to pronunciation. There’s just no rhyme or reason. I was very young when I learned English and I don’t remember having a lot of difficulty, but I can understand why older folks have problems. E sounds like “ii” in “meter” but like “ee” in “metro”? Or the word “bait”, how did that a turn into an e?

Latin has been incredibly helpful. I studied it in high school, and it’s probably the most useful thing I got from there. It’s very helpful with grammar, because you learn that language can be very different. Latin declension prepared me to expect words in any order, as long as its role is clearly defined. Japanese is a Subject Object Verb language. It only requires that the verb go at the end, but still, the order of words is completely different from English and Spanish. Anything other than the verb can be in any order, but the role of a word is indicated by the use of particles, syllables like wa, ni, or o, attached as suffixes, which is very similar to Latin.

Anyway, enough about language, here’s my speech.

私は　ボストンに　すんで　います。
Watashiwa bosutonni sunde imasu
I live in Boston

そして　父は　マイアミに　すんで　います。
Soshite, chichiwa miamini sunde imasu
and my dad lives in Miami.

父は　先生で、五十二さい　です。
Chichiwa senseide, gojuunisai desu.
Dad is a teacher and 52 years old

大きい　めがねを　かけていて　ひげが はえて います。
Ookii meganeo kaketeite higega haete imasu
He wears big glasses and has a mustache

わたしは　一人子 です。 でも、私の　メキシコに　すんでいる　家族は　にじゅうごにん　ぐらいの　家族 です。
Watashiwa hitoriko desu. Demo, watashino mekishikoni sundeiru kazoku nijuugonin guraino kazoku desu
I’m an only child. But, my family living in Mexico is around a 25 person family.

大きい　家族ですね。
ookii kazoku desu ne.
It’s a big family, no?

父は　兄弟が　七人　います。 父は　上から　三番目　です。
Chichiwa kyoodai shichinin imasu. Chichiwa ue kara sanbanme desu.
Dad has 7 siblings. He’s the third one from the top.

私の　家族は　プエブラや　メリダに　すんで います。
watashino kazokuwa pueblaya meridani sunde imasu
My family lives in Puebla and Merida.

プエブラは　メキシコ シティの　となりで、　メリダは　クバの　となり　です。
Pueblawa mekishiko shitino tonaride, meridawa cubano tonari desu.
Puebla is close to Mexico City, and Merida is close to Cuba.

まいとし　十二月　ごろに　メキシコに　いきます。
Maitoshi juunigatsu goroni mekishikoni ikimasu.
I go to Mexico every year around December.

私は　メキシコりょうりが　だいすき です。 とても　おいしい　ですね。
watashiwa mekishikoryooriga daisuki desu. Totemo oishii desune.
I really like Mexican cuisine. It’s very delicious, isn’t it?

ボストンに　いい　りょうりが　ありません　から、 ことし　なつにも　メキシコに　いきます。　
Bosutonni ii ryooriga arimasen kara, kotoshi natsunimo mekishikoni ikimasu.
Because there isn’t good (mexican) cuisine in Boston, this year I’m going to mexico in the summer as well.

そぼは　りょうりが　じょうず です。
Sobowa ryooriga joozu desu.
My grandma is good at cooking.

Update: iamawesome and deb posted it in the comments! Thanks a lot! Here it is:

I’m sure that I will always be
A lonely number like root three

The three is all that’s good and right,
Why must my three keep out of sight
Beneath the vicious square root sign,
I wish instead I were a nine

For nine could thwart this evil trick,
with just some quick arithmetic

I know I’ll never see the sun, as 1.7321
Such is my reality, a sad irrationality

When hark! What is this I see,
Another square root of a three

As quietly co-waltzing by,
Together now we multiply
To form a number we prefer,
Rejoicing as an integer

We break free from our mortal bonds
With the wave of magic wands

Our square root signs become unglued
Your love for me has been renewed

“Geez, my ring finger feels really empty without a ring.”

First of all, I changed over to a slightly modified template. I wanted to have a liquid layout with a static side bar on the right, and achieving that surprisingly not straight forward. I wanted to place the content above the menu in the html code, and that affects the css implementation.

Second of all, I started a tumblr blog. I wanted to somehow achieve the same kind of blogging style using wordpress, but tumblr is just way too far along, and the fact that tumblr is embeddable made me sign up for one. We'll see how that goes.

By the way, tumblr doesn't give you any information on the css you need to stylize the embedded content. I'm not sure how they expect people to figure that out, given that browsers don't display HTML generated by javascript. Luckily I have Firefox and the Web Developer Toolbar. I can just hit View Source > View Generated Source and see what the tumblr javascript generates. These is css styles I've created for the tumblr sidebar so far:

Read:
Installing and Using IME
Language Keyboard Shortcuts

The next day I woke up with a pain in my stomach that got really bad as the day went along. I felt like I was dying, I can't remember a worse experience in my life. Unfortunately I couldn't go to the emergency room since my new insurance hadn't kicked in yet. My girlfriend took me to get some medicine and after lots of water, motrin and heating pads I was finally able to get some sleep. When I woke up, the pain had subsided a little bit. I repeated the process a couple of times and I'm completely fine now.

The experience has me thinking a lot about my health. I'm the kind of guy who doesn't like seeing a doctor, and I've never been really really sick. I didn't have insurance for a while and I didn't really do anything about it. When something that you take for granted fails everything else goes to hell. I'm very lucky that I didn't have something serious, but one shouldn't have to be worried about money during sickness.

So lessons learned:

1. Never go to a food court near closing time
2. Never eat from Panda Express... ever
3. Don't play games with insurance.

Or wait, what the hell, maybe I should move to one of the MANY COUNTRIES that have universal health care.

Since the company's been growing we decided a couple of months ago to improve our image. I've been working on the site for quite a while now, it's gone through about 10 different revisions but we finally have something everybody's happy with, and it's a big improvement from our previous site. It's been different from my previous web publishing experiences in that I shaped a large part of the message, usually I leave that to the big wigs. There's still some work to be done, and I'll be adding awesomeness as time goes by, but I'm glad it's finally up.

The funny thing about this is that I know very well the episode of Batman that they're talking about. It made a big impression on me and its something I think about every once in a while. In that episode the Mad Hatter trapped Bruce Wayne in a dream where Batman was constantly persecuted. Bruce realized he was trapped since he wasn't able to read the newspaper, and he escaped the trap by committing suicide.

I've found that I can read while I'm sleeping. The words make sense but the sentences do not, and the interesting thing about it is that I realize that the sentences are crap and I'm aware of my brain making things up. Sometimes I keep things going to see how ridiculous things get.