Ruth is my sister. Plugs are her art.

My older sister just posted a recent exhibition of hers online and is selling most of the pieces. 

She has RuthWhiting.com which forwards to the online gallery at the moment. 

Robotics Nerd

Long ago and far away I was involved in a robotics team at Eastside High School. This is an image I found the other day in one of my old drafting text books from that period. 

Those things are not awards they are badges from other teams. My team was on a winning alliance at a regional competition but the badges were just for fun. :-)

My hair is not naturally that colour and naturally this is not the only coloured hairdo I have had. I look more human now too.

Grey For China

In mourning for the global destruction of the past few weeks.

This is a photo near the affected area from my trip there last year.

Permanent Sleeping Bag

An example of a bed involving a balance between the blanket and the mattress and few distractions or complications. 

The other day I was thinking about this issue in life which is that I really like beds that are just 2 parts. A mattress or futon and a heavy blanket. This is how I like to sleep 100% of the time and it is a form factor that I think looks quite neat of done in the right way. 

An example of a bed with rollup blanket. Click for a larger image.

So I was sitting considering life and blankets when it dawned on me that one of the reasons I really like this schema is because it is so easy to clean and aesthetically balanced, however one problem with it is that it is hard for tall people like me to not end up with cold feet. So I suddenly realised the perfect (not really) solution. Have a single roll up blanket at the end of the bed. This way my feet would be locked in and not get cold (this is really a big problem for people like me) and it would be sort of a self cleaning bed. A friend of mine also brought up that it could be used as a padded seat when rolled up but I am not sure if that something I am eager to take advantage of. I was also considering making it with the roll under the end of the bed but Zen told me no. 

Budgeting

So I have been using mint for a few months now and more recently I have been spending a fair bit of time planning and budgeting my upcoming trip. During this process I have experimented with a hole bunch of information models and approaches to money. Not really thinking about breakdowns and contingencies but just trying to work out really effective ways to visualise the data at hand and also ways to work with it. Part of this has included considering sources of data and how the data will be used at different times during this process. 

A scenario of what I am thinking about is as follows. 

A person planning a trip around the world must consider a number of things; travel costs, passports and visas, projected income, projected living costs in each location, and accommodation. They can map these things out pretty easily before they start actually making reservations and so forth so they can just get a rough idea about weather or not it will work with the money they have. This is not hard, essentially writing documenting dates of events, like the start of a trip and so on, and costs of things that can be estimated or referenced online. As a side note, I really think travel sites should give an estimated cost per day living, at perhaps 3 different tiers of luxury. That would help so much. 

After getting an estimate cost model and realising whether or not the trip is even remotely viable they need to start actually buying tickets and so on. At this point I think the common visualisation methods, such as daily balance spreadsheets, begin to fail because they do not let the user really represent the information the do and do not know in a realistic manner. I may be very sure that I need to leave a specific country by a certain date, or meet a friend somewhere at some time but for the most part I think there are just too many variables to construct a good model in this way. This really is quite a wicked problem, too much potential to change. 

I guess what I am really getting at is that there is a gap between having an idea of what should happen and making it happen in naive budgeting methods because they do not seem to accommodate indecision well.

I also think as one lives the process of spending money the budgeting model should be a tool that can continue to provide feedback and help with contingency processes. 

So the end product I think should exist is some kind of thing where costs have various statuses of certainty, as do most other details, like dates. This should also be applied to income as so many people work on hourly wages. This would basically let the user forecast a cost or profit and as time comes close establish greater detail, then as the expenditure occurs it can be represented within the system in absolute detail. I think beyond that the role of such a product is just to provide a hole lot of really useful ways of looking at the data at hand. I really think people miss a lot of info about their money information because they do not look at the data properly. This is something a good money product should help with.

Oh gosh what a scrambled set of thoughts. Luckily I can blame my concussion for this post. 

In other news, I obviously lived through the night re. yesterday's post on my Concussion. 

In other other stuff, why on earth do more spell checkers not use Google's spell checking technology. Apple's sucks so much in comparison to Google's. 

Brain Damage

Earlier today I had a grade one concussion a few minutes after hitting my head on the floor during a kung fu drill. As the concussion set in I realised I did not know where I was or what I was doing and a few other things like that. Luckily the person I was doing drills with was a neurologist and he quickly analysed the situation and started to explain what had happened. As the evening went on I think I remembered most things that happened before hand but I do not really remember some of the time from initially realising i was concussed and then sitting down and talking with this guy about it. I am not sure if that is a serious problem though. 

So my parents are supposed to wake me up 4 times to check if I have not fallen into a comma and I am not supposed to not do anything to hurt my brain. We will see. If I am not alive tomorrow I am sorry to all of you who I owe money and the people who's stuffed creatures are not yet in the mail. 

In other news, there were some really interesting articles on China in a Boing Boing post I read today. Check out the links in this post. 

Projecting Costs for Mint

I think it would be really great if Mint let you project costs for things as this would essentially let you make a full budget. I also think there should be a little more in the way of consolidation and a manual input so you can input expenditure that has not appeared independently. One feature of forecasting would be that Mint could automatically consolidate actual earnings with expected earnings, when your bank sends the info out. 

All in all I think Mint now does something that is not that useful in a way that is not that great. It is a good idea as a product but I think it needs a bit more energy and a more features to really push in this market. 

Google Sites and Zen Products

Today I think I have started actually using google sites a little bit which is good fun. I am using it to help manage a project I am on with some people in australia, for now it is private but there may be some stuff for public view in a bit. 

Also, I have recently begun to realise I really like some aspects of Zen, especially when they are represented in products and systems. I think a big part of my interest in these systems is the sense of really robust simplicity, not ephemeral or short sighted simplicity. There are a number of things I think fall into this category nicely so I was thinking of starting a list of Zen products and systems and services. I think the first thing to go on the list will be Sakura Systems because they are just so Zen. Does anyone have any good things to add on? 

I will just add that I think [good] one page sites could be added to this list. I will see what I can find. 

Stupid White People

This is a great TED Talk about cultural diversity. I wish there was a way to stop stupid white people. Good blog too. 

Also, Google has added some more sharing features recently and I am going to start using them a little to see if there is any value. Here is my shared items list so far. 

User Centred Dogma vs. Design that is Good

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So this is a really lovely talk by some guy. I completely recommend everyone in the world watches it. It is about an hour and fifteen minutes long but I think it is worth it.

Just in case you were wondering, it is about how user centred design is not as effectual as it is claimed to be and is often used to justify useless endeavours. The speaker (who is actually Jared Spool) claims that simple good design with a strong interaction with people actually using the outcomes is a better model.

I agree. But hey I love doing dissemination maps so I am not going to drop trying to work out how people think yet. Also, I think his model is a good proposition but I think it could be made better by tailoring methods for this kind of work; "Release Early, Release Often" as Google often says.

Persistence of Vision with Tag Clouds and Whatever

I was just thinking, setting stronger standards in where, for instance, a specific tag is found on a blog post or whatever item we are talking about is could make a nice difference to workflow. I was thinking specifically in the context of Highrise in which contacts have tags referencing their importance and I thought if it was possible to do something like put common tags in the same relative place per contact it would be a lot easier to quickly analyse the list. 

I don't actually use Highrise but I think this kind of interface optimisation would be useful in a lot of contexts. 

I wonder if there is a way to implement such a thing in Blogger.