Jax and his webcomic

Everyone go to my friend Jackson's webcomic, Majestic 7. I fully admit that most of the reason I'm writing this is because I'm hoping it shows up on the first page when I do a Google search for Majestic 7. You know because I'm way too lazy to just remember the address or bookmark it or something.

But yeah, it's fun. It's made with legos! Check it out.

... Majestic 7

Google All-Nighter (or, I am so tired I feel like I'm about to die)

Well, I decided to go ahead and enter the contest, and I'm glad I did because we ended up winning some prizes! We mashed up the data from Citysearch Los Angeles (screen-scraped... shhhhh!) and Google maps, so that users could find restaurants in their area, and find out how much money they would spend in gasoline to drive there from their house, as well as how much CO2 they would be releasing into the atmosphere over the course of the drive, which is how we tied it into the theme of the contest, "Think Green." We ended up with a really good team. Ben pulled the data from Citysearch, I did the mapping stuff, Josh did the HTML, CSS, and processed the data so that I could use it, and David designed some awesome icons to use as map markers. In the end, we won "most useful" and I got a beanbag chair and a sweet Google lava lamp. Now I'm extremely tired, and I still have philosophy homework due in about 13 hours.

Google All-Nighter

There's a contest this Sunday and Monday, taking advantage of the long weekend, called the Google All-Nighter. You have 24 hours to write an application that uses one of Google's APIs in some way, and fits the theme, which will be announced at the start of the competition. It looks like I'll probably team up with this kid Ben I met, and I'll have to leave in the middle of it for the big ucla game, but it should be pretty fun. All this week, Google and USC UPE have been holding workshops on the various Google APIs and other technologies that may be useful in the contest, like Javascript. On Tuesday, we learned how to use the Google Maps API, so I made a little USC trivia game, where a marker appears, pointing at a building on the USC campus, and the user is supposed to guess the name of the building. I'll post a link once I get it working better. Luckily, a lot of the data I need, including a couple of really nice USC map overlays, already exists, but I didn't realize that when I started writing, so when I get some time, I'm going to rewrite my code to deal with that data, and it will be awesome. Perhaps the hardest part will be making it forgiving, so that if the user misspells something, or adds a tiny bit of extra whitespace, the game will still count it as right. I guess I could make it multiple choice instead. What I really want to do is learn the Google Calendar API since I could probably make things that are actually useful, rather than just fun, with that.

In other news, the white-space-phobically named LetMePracticeAtUSC system could be improved so much by a couple of tiny changes, and I have a feeling that, given several hours to understand the code, I could fix it. It appears I would have to learn ASP, and the source code isn't publically available, AFAIK. Which makes it a lot easier to say that kind of thing, I guess.

Cloud Appreciation Society

Through my youtube subscription to AtGoogleTalks, I found this talk by Gavin Pretor-Pinney, a man who started the Cloud Appreciation Society. From their website:

You love lying in the park on a summer’s day and looking for shapes in the cumulus clouds. You think a mackerel sky of puffy altocumulus stretching off towards the setting sun is one of the most beautiful sights in the world. In short, you love clouds. And yet everyone else just seems to complain about them. Are you the only one who thinks life would be poorer without these glorious ‘patron goddesses of idle fellows’?

No, you’re not. There are others like you. And together we’ll fight the sun fascists and their obsessions with ‘blue-sky thinking’. As a member of The Cloud Appreciation Society, you’ll receive a free membership certificate and a badge (as shown to the right).

The badge is a little pin, and the certificate says:

The Cloud Appreciation Society

We do hereby certify that [name] was elected as a member of this society on [date] and will henceforth seek to persuade all who'll listen on the wonder and beauty of clouds.

I don't want to get in the habit of just posting links without adding my own insight or comments, but the main reason I want to post this is that I think it's extremely amusing that this exists. It's not a joke either. Mr. Pretor-Pinney seems completely aware that this is a rather whimsical idea, but he also seems completely serious about the goals of the society, and fighting the sun facsists. As I'm typing this, I'm almost halfway through his hour-long talk at Google, at which he apparently just talked about clouds, showed pictures of clouds, waxed poetic about clouds, on and on, in his British accent.

But if you think about it, why shouldn't there be such a society? Clouds are amazing if you don't know how they form, and arguably even moreso if you do. Why should we think of it as childish to appreciate them? It's no weirder than birdwatching, or mountain climbing, is it? Why aren't there millions of societies out there for the appreciation of each different natural phenomenon or flower or animal? (I realize there probably are such societies, actually.) I probably won't actually join, even though that pin is kind of awesome. I have a tendency to lose pins, anyway. But it's great that this website exists and everything.

Okay, what's my point in posting this? Besides just saying, "Hey look at this. Look at how silly this is." I suppose my point is this: Clouds are easy to see, it only takes a little bit of imagination to enjoy them, and if you take the time to enjoy them, you can see all kinds of different shapes. Maybe this guy is really onto something important, or at least something fun and obvious that everyone has forgotten.

Entering the blogosphere...

I've recently started using Google Reader and reading a lot of blogs, mostly about science or programming, and I thought I'd try to start my own and see where I can go with it. I hope to post fairly often, and perhaps even establish a base of regular readers.

These first posts are boring, so I'll try to keep it short.

I am Tyler, better known to some as TJ. I'm a sophomore at the University of Southern California, majoring in Physics and Computer Science, unless of course I change my mind at some point down the line. I play alto sax in the Trojan Marching Band. After college, I'm not sure what I'm going to do. Keep reading and you'll find out, I guess.

Please feel free to leave comments, links you think I'd enjoy, or anything else that comes to mind, or to link to posts on this blog.

Fight on!