The crew has been working hard to get the foundation ready for next week’s pouring. The pillars have been poured already so those 10-17′ holes from last week are all filled.

The plywood that is there is along the outer wall of the house and the floor will be about 4″ above it.

There were some serious mud that gushed up as the pillar were drilled:

We engineers tend to be well educated and often very confident in our own abilities in and outside of our area of expertise. We often straddle the fine line between confidence and arrogance. How often have we rolled our eyes at lawyers and judges requesting our source code thinking, “Do they really think that they can just pick it up, read it and understand?”

Computer source code is very precise. It has to be so that a computer can process it and do exactly what we instruct it to do. “a = 1″ is precisely what it says. This should make computer code easier to understand then the english language which requires a lot of context. “It’s cool” — what does that mean?!? Those of us in software engineering know that code is not necessarily easy to read or understand because even if the language is precise the meaning can still be difficult to decipher.

Just like programming languages in software engineering, Legal and Politics have their own language. Legal language is especially difficult because even though it uses English its structure and sentences have a precision that doesn’t necessarily match that of common vernacular.

Just like how we know that a lawyer can’t just start an text editor, read the code and be able to understand, how come we feel that we can read proposals and half researched news articles and declare ourselves as experts?

Here are my last 3 projects and resulting in my new garage work space.

Recently I’ve started to do some wood working projects around the house as can be seen in some of my previous post (stand, desk). I’ve really enjoyed working on those projects, but the work surface I was using was just two sawhorses and maybe some plywood on top. There are still some projects that I would like to do, but first I wanted a more stable and solid work bench. The cost of good workbenches are pretty high and the main point of doing a lot of the projects myself was to cut down on the cost of buying pre-made items so I decided to build my own workbench.

It took me a couple of weekends because I wanted to make a workbench that can be disassembled easily when I move. Again, I had the lumber yard cut the wood to length and did the drilling myself. It feels really really solid and I left an overhang so that I can install a vise in the future.

Here it is before any finishing is applied:

Here is one of the joints:

I’m still considering what kind of finish to put on it. The wood looks nice so I don’t necessarily want to conceal that, so maybe a clear oil varnish?

There’s obviously been a lot of discussions on the Miami Heat’s teaming of Dwayne Wade, Lebron James, and Chris Bosh. A lot of focus has been on Lebron James and how he handled “The Decision” while humiliating the city that adored him, but a bigger question has come up on how this impacts the NBA. Will top players now be trying to form “super” teams? What will happen to the competitive landscape of the league?

I had just read Magic and Bird’s book a couple of months ago and they credited having each other as opponents to pushing themselves to excel and get better. Jordan said as much in his recent comments. We like watching competition and the ones such as those between Magic and Bird was what made the NBA great. While we might enjoy the occasional All Star game, it’s not something we want to see night-in-and-night-out.

A lot of people are going to be watching the Heat next year, but are they going to watch basketball or are they going to watch celebrity players? While some people are criticizing Jason Kidd’s comment, I kind of agrees with him that the NBA might get a short term boost from the Heat but it might not be good for the NBA in the long term.

I’ve been itching to try to build my own computer desk, but I’m a total newbie when it comes to woodworking. I haven’t done anything since probably middle school shop class, but it’s something I wanted to try. I went to the local hardware/lumber store and bought myself some wood which I got the store to cut to size. I bought pre-built legs and just made the table top. The main thing I wanted was to have a way to conceals all the cables on my desk while still having easy access.

I used a power drill to make the holes for the wood dowels that holds the top of the table to the side supports. The top is plywood so it has that rough edge which is covered with wood edge strips that you use an iron to fuse it to the wood. Since it is real wood, you can stain it like the rest wood and have a smooth edge.

It took me about an afternoon to put this all together, but the staining took another 3 days as I had to wait for it all to dry, but for my first effort I’m pretty satisfied.

It’s fascinating to me how some salesmen can spin words to make the a bad situation sound wonderful and they can do it with a straight face. Take, for example, the sales pitch that comes from Summerhill’s blog (a bay area home builder) which disguises itself as an informational site but is really a commercial.

In one article, they are reporting that the real estate market has turned around. The message is clear: better buy their houses now as they are flying off the self! For “evidence”, they use their own sales figures such as how they’ve sold 14 out of 30 homes… over 12+ months. So that’s a rate of about one a months, so hurry up before another 16 months go by and the last house is gone.

Notice that they they spin the words so that it says “40% sold out”. What does it mean to have 16 houses available but is 14 houses sold out?

Seriously, though, do they really think consumers are that stupid?!? Do they really think that we don’t know what these terms really mean?

Temporarily sold out – The market is bad and so we stopped construction and there is nothing to buy.
Next sales release – We don’t have anything to sale now but give us some money and encourage friends to give us money and we might give you something in the future.
Priority list – Please, for the love of green points, please just say you’re interested.
Sold Out – We’re sorry but there are no more homes of this plan or this community available for sale by us, but there are 16 other similar plans next to it that isn’t sold out.

Social networking sites come and go. There hasn’t been a social networking product that has really lasted. I believe it is because they were only a single product company and eventually people lose interest and move on to another product. Facebook, despite what they say, is also really a single product company. Everything they do is meant to get you to continue to use that single product whether it is with new features or apps (which are essentially features of FB that they got outside developers to build).

How can Facebook avoid the fate of other social networking sites? They only have to look to Yahoo. Facebook is not the next Microsoft, Apple or Google even though they’re trying to be. The product and business offerings are just too different. What they are is really the next Yahoo. I think it’s fortunate for them that their user demographic has changed to an older crowd similar to Yahoo’s. If they didn’t attract this crowd, they’d be like MySpace who lost the mindshare of their demographic and couldn’t attract new users. The current Facebook/Yahoo crowd tend to not like change as much and are more conservative. At the same time, they also tend to be pretty loyal to what they know. While the media love to talk about the demise of Yahoo, the reality is that millions of users are used to going to Yahoo for news, sports, horoscopes and nothing will make them change their daily ritual.

This benefits Facebook even though there are short term pains as this group tends to be less open and more concerned about privacy so Facebook has to change itself to fulfill the needs of their current user base. Thus, I believe that Facebook has to decide if that is a future they want. Facebook likes to point out that they have surpassed Yahoo and they did it by becoming the next Yahoo. Now they just need to accept it.

There are a lot of talk lately about Apple’s iPhone vs Google’s Android. There are comparisons on features, prices, market share, and growth. Since Google I/O, I’ve also started noticing that there is also a growing focus on the cultural differences between the two platforms.

Apple is, and has always has, been an advocate of control. They follow the school of thought where choice is not good for the consumer because consumers find it difficult to make decision when there are too many choices. It’s a lot like Henry Ford’s quote “Any customer can have a car painted any colour he wants so long as it is black.”

Google believes in providing technology to the masses and letting the masses guide the direction and use of the technology. The consumer might not like having to chose between between 100 nearly identical choices, but the consumer will also eliminate the weak choices until the right amount of choices are left for them to comfortably choose from.

Between these two cultures, who will win? Both? Neither? Google? (Usual disclaimer: I’m an employee of Google but any thoughts here represent my personal views and are not necessarily that of my employer.)

A few months ago, I made a commitment to learn the VIM editor. I was primarily an EMACS user, but I wanted to become proficient with VIM since EMACS is not always available I found myself too slow when using VIM. To learn it, I pretty much told myself that I’m not allowed to use any other editor while programming and just immerse myself in VIM. For the most part, it worked. I’ve been using VIM daily for about 4 months now and I’ve gotten used to it… mostly.

I can see the reasoning and benefits of having a separate mode for inserting text, but for me it isn’t as intuitive to use. Maybe my fingers are just to conditioned to be able to write chunks of text and still be able to copy, paste, etc. The way I work, I edit text while jumping around a lot and that mode leads to a lot of hitting ESC to the point where I’m using more key strokes then on EMACS (where the criticism is that it requires mult-combos to do an action such as ‘C-x C-c’). So I found myself editing text, ESC, move around, ‘i’, edit text. For the most part, I was willing to live with that, but the breaking point is that I just kept making mistakes editing. I’d hit ‘i’ when I’m already in edit mode or be typing outside of edit mode leading to typos and jumping to another part of the screen. I figure that 4 months is enough and while I’ll stay with VIM, I’ll likely be in Insert mode a lot and so I want to reduce bouncing back-and-forth between modes.

I made the following changes to my .vimrc to allow me to do things like move around (without using the arrow keys) and copy/paste without leaving Insert mode: