I used to take my wife out to expensive restaurants on our wedding anniversaries.  This year, I told my wife that I'll cook for her on our 11th wedding anniversary coming up next weekend.  This is a big deal for me because, raised in a traditional Korean family, I have never cooked in my entire life.  So I am googling for easy yet memorable receipies when I can.  This is going to be quite an adventure.  If you have a good suggestion, let me know.  Yes, I do have a barbecue grill that I let my wife use all the time.

Jon Udell discovered the chunking and scanning issue that affects news aggregator UI.  This is why I didn't finished my own Outlook-based news aggregator.  News is different from e-mail in that people read them differently.  People are used to picking up a newspaper and scanning the headlines in a specific order, front to back or a quick frontpage scan followed by favorite section and then the remainder.  While scanning, they move quickly across vertically or horizontally, briefly stopping to read first paragraphs of articles with interesting headlines.  Similar thing happens with blog websites, a quick scan down the page looking at the headlines and first few lines of each post.  The way an article looks also matters since a blogger will typically have several types of posts.  Some go for in-depth comments, others concentrate more on links.

News aggregator style I am playing with now is a browser-based UI with three columns.  The leftmost column lists subscribed feeds.  Middle column lists headlines from feeds or categories (feed groups) selected in the leftmost column.  Short preview paragraphs are also shown below each headline.  Rightmost column is used to display articles or links related to headlines.

Chunking and scanning RSS feeds. I've been somewhat surprised to find myself preferring the Radio UserLand aggregator to the others I also use: NetNewsWire and NewsGator. Last night I realized why: it's a matter of chunking and scanning. In RU, I scan and dismiss batches of 100 items. On a typical day, when I receive a few hundred items, that's just a couple of clicks — modulo any additional effort to save or respond to an item. In NetNewsWire and NewsGator, it's more of an item-by-item thing. There are consolidated views available, but they display headlines (or truncated previews) only. Processing a lot of feeds feels like more work. … [Jon's Radio]

Last night, I ran into a slight problem while using RadioStation.  It seems to get confused when I edit my post too often.  When I write a blog post, I often find little errors so I go back to fix it.  Then I don't like a sentence so I go back and zap that.  At some point, RadioStation starts returning an old version of my post.  I am sure this is a bug that will get fixed before the final version, but its almost annoying as Radio blowing away my half-finished blog post.

Another annoying problem is actually a Radio problem.  Radio news aggregator can't seem to remember which news articles I read or deleted if I exit Radio.  RadioStation relies on Radio news aggregator so mark-as-read feature is useless.  RadioStation needs to have its own news aggregator.  While at it, allow me to manually fetch one or more RSS feeds.  News is not news if its not the latest.

Tim Bray talks about how he can tell whether an asian person is a FOB (fresh off the boat) or not.  As a former-FOB, I know he is right.  In case he is still wonder, it is the primarily the facial expressions, body posture and the way a person move that gives it away more than the clothes.  My facial expression has changed drastically within a few years after immigrating to America.  When I shrug in Korea, they don't understand the jesture.  When I raise an eyebrow like Mr. Spock to express amusement or slight surprise, Koreans are often amazed.

The Faces of Asian Women. This may sound nuts, but I think people's faces reflect the language they speak. Perhaps because of my Pacific Rim base, I find this particularly obvious in the faces of Asian women. A huge number of the people here in Vancouver are of Chinese extraction, resident for periods anywhere between four generations and a few weeks. Being a normally male sort of person, I'm given to looking closely at women's faces. And quite often, when I look, I can tell instantly "she speaks generic North American English" or "she's a recent immigrant and has a heavy accent."… [ongoing]

There are inconsistencies though.  Once in a while, I get surprised when I see a person, whom I thought to be a FOB, speaking in fluent English.  This is the downside of using generalization and steotyping as a tool: you see what you want or need to see.

I used to enjoy reading Slashdot, but it has turned pretty sarcastic, silly, and pointless for the past year.  Useful replies have become rare gems.  Idiotic uninvited jokes reins.  I am turning off Slashdot because the noise has risen above the message.  So long /.

What follows is a going to be pretty controversial and I don't have hard numbers to back it up, but my instinct tells me it is true.  Blogging will ruin Google's PageRank algorithm.  Bloggers are highly clustered group with unusually large number of interlinks between each blogs.  Bloggers also tend to cover pretty wide variety of topics.  Google was not designed with the rise of blogging in mind.  I predict that blog sites will rank high in almost all topics in the near future, rendering Google useless unless blog pages are treated differently.

Went out the Half Moon Bay with my wife and son this afternoon.  Half Moon Bay is about a small bay facing the Pacific ocean in the middle of San Francisco Peninsula.  It was only 15 minutes away from my house in Redwood Shores.  My wife tells me that I need to be near water to be healthy according to my Sa-Joo.  Sa-Joo predicts the future based on exact time, day, month, and year of birth.  Lunar calendar is used.  Any way, this is why I live in a water-front home although I think I would be happier living in a mountain with lots of trees around me.

Back to the visit to Half Moon Bay.  Weather was great with only a bit of wind.  We saw a dead sea lion on the beach rotting away.  We also saw many seals near the beach.  One even came within 10 yards of where we sat.  I clapped and it looked at me like "Hey, dork.  Never seen a seal before?"  I have seen a few seals swimming near the Oracle Headquarters just five minutes from my house when the tide was in, but I have never seen one from my house.  They probably blocked the waterway.  It would be troublesome to have lost and hungry seals invading my deck.  Get invaded daily by ducks, geeses, swans, and racoons is enough trouble for us.  This is how I got bitten by a racoon.

At the beach, I saw some USO (Unidentified Swimming Objects).  They seemed to be about the size of tennise balls and large swarm of them were riding the waves at the beach.  I didn't have a binocular so I couldn't see what they were.  I never seen anything like it before.  This leads me to my thought of the day: what is the function of mundane?  When we get used to something, it becomes mundane.  Is this an effect or does it serve some useful role in the way a human mind works?

Its a funny joke for people who reads argues and laughs.  I like Pandas but, having been bitten by one of their cousins, Racoon, I don't feel the urge to pet them.  Oh boy.  They sure have powerful jaws and sharp teeths.

I am back from the poker tournament.  19 players showed up so there were three tables.  To make the long story short, I crashed just before the 6th hour, the final no limit game.  For 5 hours, I was doing great, sharpshooting weak players and pumping bets when I had good hands.  I built up a large pile until I went against my instinct when faced with a bluff.  That put a crack in my confidence and I started losing slowly.  I missed hands I should have been in and even forgot to squeeze when I should have.  By 6th hour, my stack was too low compared to the ante which kept rising hour by hour.  So I got impatient and attacked with a shaky hand.  That stupid mistake and one good player was enough to clean me out in one hand.  It was my first poker tournament and I learned a lot.  I'll be more ready when the tournament comes around again next year.