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Today I Learned: Two True Things I Didn’t Know About 9/11

  • Rick Rescorla, security director for Morgan Stanley in the WTC, predicted airliners crashing into the towers, drew up a detailed plan accordingly, and used it to swiftly evacuate all but 13 of 2700 Morgan Stanley employees and hundreds more. He died when the buildings collapsed.1
  • Alicia Esteve Head fabricated a story about being on the 78th floor of the south WTC after it was hit. She became the president of the WTC Survivors Network. She was in Spain during 9/11.2

  1. via reddit ↩

  2. via reddit ↩

Physical Face Cloning

The most interesting thing was how they used physics simulation of the materials to determine and optimize the material geometry and actualization parameters for the servos.

The result: cloning a real humans’ face onto an animatronics figure.

The top comment is perfect as well:

mas8705: So Disney is Skynet. You would think we would have seen this sooner…

Moon at 600mm

Even now, I still love gazing at the moon. It takes light 1.3 seconds (on average) to go from the moon to me. So close, yet so far.

I took this picture with The Beast.

Blue Angles at Seafair

Pictures from Seafair have arrived! I worked really hard to cut the field down with this batch. Of the 921 pictures taken, only 29 made the final cut (3.14%).

The shot I really wanted was of the Blue Angles in front of Mount Rainer, I got a couple of good photos, but I want to try again another year. I think I need to be a bit closer to the action in order to get the framing I want. I’m not sure exactly where I’ll need to be, but it will have to be north of I-90 and on the west side of the lake.

All of these pictures were taken on my D7000 with a Nikon 600mm f4.0D AF-S II VR (which I affectionately call “The Beast“) that I rented from Glazers. It was sort of a spur of the moment thing. I literally walked into the shop and asked for the largest lens over 300mm. It was either this or a 400mm zoom lens. Rachel pushed me to get this one, and how could I say no! She was advocating me spending more money on a cool toy! The Glazers rental guys upsold me on an L-mount, which was actually worth it.

I have some video too, but will need to spend some more time to edit it.

I also want to spend some time maturing Aerotags to include some standardization for military planes. I found an amazing collection of military serial/bureau numbers from Joseph Baugher’s that can be searched with Jeremy’s Aircraft Serial Number Search. It takes a little bit of leg work to understand the numbering scheme, but it’s pretty easy to figure out the full serial/bureau number with just the last three digits of the number and the type of aircraft it is.

Facebook Integration Philosophy

I’m trying to figure out if and how to best integrate Facebook into AFdN (which I would then presumably roll in to AnRdC), as well as to also gauge understanding in the necessity of pushing to Facebook (via user participation, or lack thereof, in the form of comments/feedback).

For several months now, I’ve been using the Social plugin from Crowd Favorite to push posts to Facebook (and Twitter), but the integration is not exactly what I want.

The ideal scenario is that a post on AFdN is also posted to Facebook (and Twitter) in full (syndication), but comments (and “likes” and retweets) are captured by and centralized at AFdN. Social does a pretty good job of this, but comments are still fragmented because while AFdN can capture comments from Facebook (and the like from Twitter), it doesn’t do a good job of integrating comments from AFdN back into Facebook (or Twitter)–the syncing problem.

I think my end goal is to use my Facebook timeline as an RSS feed of sorts for my friends, and drive any comments here to be published. I’m not sure if that’s possible though. I don’t want comments to be fragmented or lost though. I may end up saying screw it and not worry about Facebook at all.

All of this also presupposes that maintaining connectivity with Facebook is what should be done to begin with. Historically, Facebook has been the social gathering place for people my age. And Back In The Day™ (when it was called The Facebook), Facebook reached this sweet spot of with a super high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). It aggregated all the basic data, connections, and updates of friends (high signal) while also being easy to use and free of cruft (noise). Facebook, though, has always been marching towards something else: profitability. However, their stock price since their IPO has been lackluster at best. And their SNR has continued to deteriorate. Facebook has fallen to serve the lowest common denominator (LCD): people who play FarmVille.

Well, actually the LCD is money. Facebook’s product is its users, in particular selling the users to advertisers. And generally most of us are okay with that, as long as we get some value for it. The problem for Facebook is the users aren’t getting the value from Facebook they once did. This poses a problem for Facebook because if they can’t keep their user base engaged, they don’t have a product to sell.

Anyway, for now it seems Facebook remains an integral part for many of my friends. I want to be able to keep my friends updated. Ergo, Facebook seems to be a good vehicle to do that.

I’d welcome any comments to the contrary, especially from those who see this on Facebook.

You’re Not Listening

I relish articles like this not only for the off-chance I somehow get thrown into a leadership position, but also because it’s a good life skill. Rands does a consistently good job of mapping engineering speak to life, imagine a career counselor who not only was good as his job, but also spoke geek—it’s as awesome as it sounds1.

The problem starts with the word: listen. Of course you know how to listen. You sit there and let the words into your head. Perhaps your definition is more refined. Maybe your definition of listening involves hearing because you’re aware of that switch in your head that you must flip to really hear what a person is saying. It’s work, right? Pulling in all the words, sorting them in your head, and mapping them against the person who is speaking. That is listening, that is hearing, but if that’s all you’re doing and you’re a leader of people, then you’re still only halfway there.

Let’s start with the most basic rule of listening: If they don’t trust you, they aren’t going to say shit.

  1. the correct answer is: very awesome ↩

Sometimes you get a call from your managers, manag…

Sometimes you get a call from your managers, managers, manager that he needs you on a conference call at 8pm tonight.

Sometimes you get instructions to be on a flight to the east coast in 14 hours.

Sometimes you realize that if there is a problem, if no one else can help, and if they can find you…you will be called upon.