Tips for Techies on Honeymoon

Sorry, this isn't a post about where techies should go on honeymoon. I don't think techies should go anywhere different than anyone else on their honeymoon. For example, I find this list on "Where Geeks Honeymoon" to be completely ridiculous. However, techies might find it harder to part from technology on their honeymoons. Personally, I would want to be away from all phone calls and e-mails while I'm traveling, but not everyone can survive without their daily dose of internet.

For people with iPhones, data roaming fees can be really expensive abroad. One option is to turn off data roaming on your iPhone and use WiFi hotspots instead. Another option is to buy AT&T's International iPhone data plan for the time that you'll be gone. If you do plan on using your iPhone overseas, it is good to notify AT&T, as it is possible for them to cancel your iPhone service "to protect you".

For those without an iPhone, the same WiFi hotspots listed can also be used for laptops. Additionally, you can find hotels with convenient high-speed access provided.

As for phone calls, I have found that Skype both works really well and is very cheap. Many internet cafés will already have downloaded Skype on their computers, if you don't bring your own computer with you abroad. A few years ago, I lost my purse in Slovakia. I had to make several calls to the US, informing my employer that without my passport, I would have to miss more work, being on hold with my bank and my credit card company to cancel my ATM and credit cards, getting information I needed to apply for my temporary passport, etc. I borrowed a friend's Skype account to do all of this since I couldn't put the charges on the cards I was about to cancel, with the understanding I'd pay him back. I still don't know how, but the amount spent of his credit after all my calls totaled to be less than a dollar.

I hope you all enjoyed my wedding series, from engagement, to wedding, and now finally the honeymoon. Addendum to the wedding post: I received an e-mail that I forgot about a wedding photographer! So it was proposed that this robot reported by the BBC should fill the role.

How to Hold a Robot-Themed Wedding

I used to think I wanted a Sony AIBO to be my ring bearer for my wedding (whenever it is that I'm finally ready to get married. Hey, every girl dreams of their wedding from an early age). I now have a very cute first cousin once removed, but I still like the idea of a robot-themed wedding. Here are ways to involve robots into different parts of your wedding.

The Wedding Official

You can start off with a robotic wedding official, as one couple in Korea did.

The Bartender

At the cocktail hour between the ceremony and the reception, a RC Beer Cooler Robot can serve as your bartender.

The Chef

Next, you can have a robotic chef prepare the reception dinner.

The Band

Instead of a band, you can use this amazing eletromagnetic music machine. It uses ping-pong balls and wine glasses played by a robotic cannon and little robotic fingers.

The Wedding Cake

There are plenty of creative wedding cakes you can get. Here I have pictured a gaming cake (okay not a robot but still neat), a his-and-her TiVo cake, and an R2-D2 cake.

The Wedding Favors

Finally, at the end of the wedding, the guests can take home these robotic USB thumbdrives. You can imprint them with your names and the wedding date, for them to remember the momentous occasion.

Since I included the R2-D2 from Star Wars, I thought I'd also point out a Star Wars themed wedding I read about. The wedding was planned to be on May 4th, so the invitations could read "May the 4th be with you." As horribly geeky as that may be, you have to give them credit for being creative.

See Monday's post for Techy Wedding Proposals, and look for Friday's post on Tips for Techies on Honeymoon.

Techy Wedding Proposals

Happy Memorial Day!

Since I went to a wedding this weekend, I decided to do a week-long series on what techies do when they get married, starting with proposals!

I will start with the people I know personally. Colin McMillen, who worked in the same robotics lab at Carnegie Mellon that I did, proposed to his wife using obfuscated Perl code. His program was written in the shape of a heart and ended with "be $mine for @ever" and when run, printed out "kristen, will you marry me?". Her response was "$propose++; Yes :)".

            #!/usr/bin/perl -w
            use strict;

                 my$f=           $[;my
               $ch=0;sub       l{length}
             sub r{join"",   reverse split
            ("",$_[$[])}sub ss{substr($_[0]
            ,$_[1],$_[2])}sub be{$_=$_[0];p
             (ss($_,$f,1));$f+=l()/2;$f%=l 
              ();$f++if$ch%2;$ch++}my$q=r
               ("\ntfgpfdfal,thg?bngbj".    
                "naxfcixz");$_=$q; $q=~
                  tr/f[a-z]/ [l-za-k] 
                    /;my@ever=1..&l
                      ;my$mine=$q
                        ;sub p{
                         print
                          @_;
                           }
                                     
                   be $mine for @ever 

_{code by Colin McMillen}

My big sister from my sorority has one my favorite proposal stories. Her husband Ethan is a roboticist who works with Sony AIBOs in a lab that cooperated with my former lab. His proposal involved three of these robotic dogs "stealing and hiding" the ring as he tried to propose to her. I will let you read her story as told with her own words.



And now onto a random techy strangers whose proposal stories I found interesting. Switched already did this topic with their Eight Best Techie Marriage Proposals, but here are some highlights.

Earlier this year, a Xanga user posted about his techy proposal story. Bernie knew that his girlfriend Tammy really enjoyed playing Bejeweled. He wrote a DS version such that once she hit a certain score, a ring would drop down.



One person used a iPhone ad spoof seen here:



Others included engraving an iPod and cooperating with a search engine.

If you're not tired yet of techy proposal stories, you can wander over to the Wikipedia entry on Online Proposals. Look for Wednesday's entry on robot-themed weddings and Friday's entry on Tips for Techies on honeymoons!

Video Game Review Sites

Where do you go to get video game reviews? Clear favorites for when you want to look up a game are GameStop, IGN, and Metacritic. But what if you want a review of a game that you don't already know about that may interest you? My favorite game review sites for this are Games for Lunch and Zero Punctuation.


Games for Lunch
Games for Lunch is a blog by Kyle Orland where every weekday, he spends an hour playing a game. He writes about his minute-to-minute experience of the game and at the end explains whether he would want to play this game for more than an hour and why. He also includes a one sentence "In a nutshell" about the game. This is definitely an interesting way to learn about what it would actually be like to play through a specific game and to learn about new video games that you may not already be aware of. He has an RSS feed, so it's easy to get updates.

Zero Punctuation
Zero Punctuation is a video game review video blog on The Escapist using cartoons, updated every Wednesday. It is done by Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw, a British guy who talks very quickly. He is very funny, and seems to like to bash games that otherwise get glowing reviews from everyone, balancing the mix. But he also does give positive reviews as well. His latest post (one of the positive ones) jokes about how now that the hype over GTA4 is calming down and MGS4 isn't out yet, this is the lull after Christmas break and before the summer games come out. Therefore he and other game reviewers use this time to review games they find in the bargain bins. I found this particularly amusing since Games for Lunch had just reviewed Metal Gear Solid (GBC), a game that Kyle admitted to getting from the bargain bin at GameStop.


To compare the style of these two game review sites, here are their reviews of Grand Theft Auto 4:

• GTA4 review from Games for Lunch
• GTA4 review from Zero Punctuation

Paper Money Needs to be Compliant for the Blind

The US Treasury has changed the look of US paper money too many times. Other countries have colorful money in all different sizes, and ours is still green and all cut the same. But something I had never thought about until reading this article is that different sized bills can help blind people distinguish between different bill denominations.

Being a software developer, I have been required to make webpages compliant for the blind by using alt tags on pictures and graphs explaining the images, and making sites understandable for readers. It makes perfect sense to me that something that is so essential to living in our society should also be compliant.

YouTube

I get a lot of links to YouTube videos from various people, but today was the first time I received one from my father.

The video my daddy linked me is a real eyewitness account of a battle of beasts in Africa. Growing up, my brother and I often accompanied our dad when he watched various nature shows on the National Geographic specials, particularly the ones about Africa. My dad watched so many of them and so often to be able to notice that certain scenes were always reused and spliced in no matter what story they claimed to tell. That is not the case with this video. No tech feat here. Just a video I'm linking because my dad sent it to me and I feel like that's special.

But YouTube really has been more interesting of an innovation than I gave it credit for when it first appeared. It has really contributed to the Web 2.0 concept, relying on user input for the content and meat of the site, and allowing easy embedding into other sites. It also has a release API, allowing developers to create mashups.

Another thing YouTube has done is given a chance to budding artists, allowing them to put themselves in front of the world without having to find an agency or promoter. The best example of this is Lisa Nova, a comedian whose YouTube channel gained her so many fans that MadTV hired her last year.

However, Marie Digby was criticized for seeming like she was just a hometown hopeful in her popular YouTube videos though she was signed to Hollywood Records. I personally don't see what difference it makes. Whether or not she had signed with a company, she was still an unknown hopeful trying to become known. And it worked for the gorgeous Irish-American with a stunning voice. I don't feel gypped at all, having a chance to discover her music where I otherwise might not have.

Win the Nobel Prize Playing a Computer Game

While becoming addicted to video games is generally considered a waste of your life, Foldit is a game where getting addicted enough could lead to a Nobel Prize! In this game, you are given a protein as an amino acid sequence that you can manipulate in all the valid ways, to fold into a protein. Your score can increase as you clear clashes, do packing, and increase numbers of hydrogen bonds.

So why could playing this game lead to winning a Nobel Prize? I'm not a biologist, but I'll explain my understanding of it. Proteins are made up of amino acids. We generally know the amino acid sequence that makes up a protein, but not the positioning of the sequence. Knowing the physical conformation can help predict how the protein would fit and thereby interact with other proteins. It can help us cure diseases ailing the world. This is called the protein folding problem.

The game is free, and starts with a well-done tutorial that teaches you about different maneuvers that can be done to fold the protein and obtain higher scores. Right now the game only presents puzzles already solved by scientists in the past 30 years of research, but it is finding that humans can obtain the highest score faster than computers have been able to do. Soon, they plan on posting unsolved puzzles to be solved. The creators imagine that there's a 12-year-old in Indonesia who can see [it all] in their head, and hope that someone out there will be able to help solve these difficult problems.

While I was logged into the game and playing it myself, I noticed other players chatting in a little window that pops up. One commented that this game has taken over his WoW addiction. This is really a game. And it can really do something to help save the world.

Geek Jewelry

I have heard a lot of my geek girlfriends exclaim about how much they want the Fuze Necklace found in ThinkGeek's tech jewelry. I am personally not as interested in that particular piece of geek jewelry, but I have found several other things that piqued my interest.

I was inspired to write this post when I found Stewart Jewelry Designs, which makes jewelry that actually looks like normal beaded jewelry, but when you look closer, it's actually a bunch of diodes resistors, capacitors, etc. Here is one of their bracelets:

Then I came across an Etsy shop that makes cute little charms. They have an adorable goomba one. My favorite though is the Wii-mote earrings:



Unfortunately, I don't think these Powerbook earrings are available for retail:



Though if you really like the idea of wearing parts from Apple computers, you can buy these tackier pieces. But if you really like tacky geek jewelry, I would say LED jewelry would be a better fit.

Even though I think these are hideous, I felt like I had to include them in this post because there just seem to be a ton of geeky rings out there. Of course everyone wants the One Ring from LOTR (I'm not even going to bother linking an example), but I'm not sure about the appeal for some of the rest of these. Earlier this week, I came across these Transformers ones. There's also a signet ring for Space Invaders. There's a bartender downtown with a neat D20 necklace, but a D20 ring?

I have to say though, these Pacman rings are actually pretty cute.



Then you get to wedding rings. These ethernet rings are truly dorky.



They seem way too bulky to actually wear. Though this anniversary band has some potential.

And finally we get to my favorite piece of geek jewelry... a piece that would be gorgeous even without the geek aspect of it: Philips/Swarovski Heart Beat 1GB USB Drive



Unfortunately I don't see it on the US Apple site, but the Irish site sells it as well.

Aperiodic Patterns

Last night, I was reading this Malcolm Gladwell article in The New Yorker. I read the whole article, but my mind was stuck on something the article mentioned in passing at the very beginning that had nothing else to do with the rest of the article: aperiodic tile patterns.

I had never heard this term before. Thinking about the words "aperiodic" and "pattern", it has to be a dynamic shifting pattern such that the phases of the pattern were irregular. In my head, I tried to imagine these aperiodic patterns. I fell asleep with my mind weaving these images in my head.

Naturally, first thing I did in the morning was to look up these patterns. And so I leave you with the pretty images of examples I found today.

Apocalyptica

On Wednesday, I went to see Apocalyptica at the 9:30 Club in DC. I have to say, this was the best non-arena live music show I've ever been to.

Apocalyptica is a band of four classically trained cellists and a drummer, playing heavy metal. They have many songs where if you were not watching them, you would not believe that there wasn't a single guitar in the song. The cello has one of the largest ranges in instruments, and the band uses the full range and use various techniques. They also have very strong forearms, being able to lift the cello one handed over their head waving it around as a guitar.

They played a good number of Metallica covers, and a bunch of their original songs. Both sounded amazing, and the band was great at getting the crowd going. It was really easy to enjoy the concert, even if you didn't know a single one of their songs. Knowing Metallica songs certainly helps, but everyone enjoyed their own songs just as much. Unfortunately, I personally don't think their recordings come out as well, so running off to download their songs right now will not really give you a full appreciation of them. If you like heavy metal, even if you hate classical music, trust me, you'll love the show, even without hearing a single song ahead of time. If they come to your town, look for tickets. They should be pretty cheap; at the 9:30 club they were $15. It was really spectacular.

---

Addenda from older posts:
I received another video to supplement the Nintendo Nostalgia post. This video has Mario playing music by hitting items.

Also, I received a link to the top 10 tech workplaces as an addendum to my Customizing your Cubicle post. Check out their cubicle spaces.

Smart People

I just went to see Smart People with a former coworker. It had very mixed reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, but I was interested in seeing it because it is set at Carnegie Mellon University (like Wonder Boys). If you haven't noticed, I am a big fan of my alma mater and try to mention it anytime the opportunity arises.

For other alumna of CMU, you will enjoy seeing accurate representations of the all-too-familiar buildings. Donner is used as a dorm as it is in reality. The outside and inside of buildings match up according to what it actually is (in Wonder Boys they would film the outside of one building, but then show the inside of another. Like the scene where you see CFA inside, they use a different building for the outside. This is a very common thing in movies. In Silence of the Lambs, Soldier and Sailor's Memorial (also in Pittsburgh) is used for the cage scene, but the outside of the building when the police raid shows the outside of a different building). The house they use is very much the type of house and neighborhood found in the surrounding areas of CMU. They use Allegheny General Hospital and the Pittsburgh Airport (PIT) accurately as well.

Before going into the movie, I was warned that it depicted smart people as "arrogant, obnoxious, and Republican". Based on that description I was ready to be annoyed at parts of the movie with that stereotype. But watching the movie, I did not have a single moment where I was annoyed at the movie for their depiction of intelligent people. While Ellen Page's character is strongly characterized, it didn't come off as extreme to me at all. She did an excellent job in her role.

I don't really want to give too many specifics of the movie, so I'll wrap up my review here. But I certainly found the movie enjoyable and if you were considering seeing it but were worried about the same stereotype problems I was, you should go ahead and see it.

If instead you enjoy watching stereotyping of CMU girls, then definitely check out this video:

I personally think it's very well done and enjoyed it a lot. It's a lot of fun, and funny even for those who know about CMU, even if they don't understand all the references. Watch it, and you will probably have a better idea of where I'm coming from and what sort of environment CMU was in general.

Baseball Nerds

Yesterday, I had the pleasure of attending my first game at the new Nationals Stadium (complete with PS3 pavilion) with one of my sorority sisters. It was a nice day and a nice victory.

As I've mentioned before though, I've always been more of a basketball fan than a baseball fan. In general, I think it's more likely for an engineering minded person to be more of a baseball fan. I think part of this has to do with keeping scorecards while watching a game. There's something about stats and numbers that gets the engineering mind interested. And in baseball there are lots of statistics you can keep track of.

Anyway, this all made me think of one of my friends, a fellow alumna of Carnegie Mellon, who really enjoys writing about baseball. Her name is Deanna and she is the blogger behind Marinerds, Dragonbutts, and Hokkaidorks (formerly called Seattle Marinerds). She has moved from Philly, to Pittsburgh (for CMU), to Seattle, and now Japan, being loyal to baseball throughout her life. She has done a lot of cool things, including getting to go on the field and meet Bobby Valentine. Honestly, I don't know where I'm going with this post. Basically, I'm fangirling about a fangirl of baseball. I mean come on. Larry Rocca calls her "the girl who knows too much about baseball". Too cool.

Twitter

You may have recently read the story about the UC Berkeley student who accelerated his release from an Egyptian prison using Twitter. What is Twitter?

I first heard of Twitter last year at a Sun Java Developer's Conference during a speech by CEO Jonathan Schwartz. Twitter is a site that allows you to make 140 character text status/blog updates. You can update through their site, using AIM, through text messages, or third part applications (Mac users may be interested in Twitterific). If you use Facebook, you can have your twitter updates become your Facebook status messages as well. You can also "direct message" a Twitter friend for personal communications.

I use Twitter to notify followers of when I make updates to blog entries. These posts also get added to the public twitter timeline, which could possibly introduce new people to the blog. For those who are obsessed with making AIM away messages, this is a way to be able to conveniently update your "away message" throughout the day from wherever you are.