Over the past week, especially on April 1st, as I sorted through my RSS feeds I found a couple of nice links (both written and video) I wanted to highlight, in no particular order.

• Patrick Rothfuss' Photo Contest II--Patrick Rothfuss, author of the awesome The Name of the Wind and The Wise Man's Fear (if you are at all interested in the fantasy ( Read more... )

As a long-time Mac user and Apple fan, I've tweaked my system a decent amount and have a lot of special-purpose apps, although I also use a lot of Apple's built-in software. I was asked by a new Mac user whether there were any "must-have" apps I'd recommend. Not really (besides Office); most of my apps / tweaks are so special-purpose I wouldn't say ( Read more... )

Wait, I have a blog? What...

I was going through and clearing out all the items on my desktop (and archived-desktop folder) and went through a whole bunch of links from 2008 onwards. There are a couple of gems I wanted to highlight here in the hopes others might find them interesting and I'll remember them for the future:

• An Office User Interface ( Read more... )

As most of you know, this is an unusual summer for me. For the past six summers, I’ve gone to Lille, France with my mother’s study abroad program and spent the majority of the summer abroad in Europe. This year, however, I’m in Mountain View, California (Silicon Valley, near San Francisco) and am spending my summer working as a summer intern for ( Read more... )

And now, in a shameless rip-off of Daring Fireball's Linked List, I present to my faithful blog readers a list of articles I found interesting over the past couple of weeks (some of which I believe are actually stolen directly from the aforementioned Linked List):

• We Pretend We Are Christians--an very interesting blog post/reader email on the ( Read more... )

Wizard Rock videos on Youtube makes everything better. Too bad I'm probably not going to Sonorous this weekend. There better be wizard rock in California this summer, is all I'm gonna say. (Oh, and HTML5 Youtube FTW. Less Flash == much more happy and responsive computer ( Read more... )

Yesterday, I was offered a paid summer internship as a SDET (Software Development Engineer in Test; a tester) with the Windows Live Communications team (who run Hotmail, Messenger, Calendar, and other services) which is based in Mountain View, California on Microsoft's Silicon Valley Campus. (Yes, the campus is a couple of blocks down from Google's ( Read more... )

Just wrote a protected (as it was rather personal) reflection on friendship and social encounters. If you can't see it but want to read it, comment here and let me know so I can give you access.

So, fellow readers, I beg of you to offer me advice on my course schedule for next semester.

Abbreviated Background: Next semester I'm working for ResNET, serving as co-chair of the Technology and Web Services committee of the Executive Branch of Student Government; and plan to start a research project (of which Noura has convinced me to do for ( Read more... )

I've been creating a list of books that I've been running into here in Europe that I want to read / get from the library. While I know Davis is an enormous library, since UNC isn't particularly strong in computer science books (which is what I generally look for), I haven't thought amazingly highly of UNC's library. However, the books I've been ( Read more... )