Oct 9, 2012
Google Maps and Apple Maps comparison
When Apple Maps came out, there were a lot of anecdotes about its problems, but not a lot of systematic comparisons with Google Maps. The only one I know of is of town names in Ontario, Canada (Apple Maps, Google Maps), and that wasn’t particularly relevant to me. First, I live in the United States, and there’s a good possibility that Apple’s data is better here because they’re a US company (sorry, Canada). Second, and more importantly, I hardly ever search for town names, I almost always search for addresses or business names. The quality of Apple’s address data is much more important to me than whether I can find Beeton, Ontario.
Jul 8, 2012
Pat and I just got back from two weeks in Germany, and we had a fantastic time. We visited Heidelberg, Munich, Hamburg, and Berlin.
Feb 25, 2012
I finished My Life In France, which was truly delightful through to the end. My strong recommendation remains, and I continue to reflect on it. Among other things, I’m curious why it’s had such an effect on me.
Feb 14, 2012
I’ve been reading My Life In France recently, and it’s made me very reflective about the state of my own life.
Jan 4, 2012
Like last year, here is the list of cities I visited during 2011, in chronological order.
Nov 8, 2011
Is A Humanities Degree Worth It?
Yesterday I encountered a couple articles that questioned the value of going to college for a non-STEM (science, technology, engineering or mathematics) degree, both on a personal and societal level. Ignorning the societal questions, my girlfriend and I were curious about whether the claim that humanities or social science degrees aren’t valuable from a personal perspective was borne out in the data.
Jan 2, 2011
Like last year, here is the list of cities I visited during 2010, in chronological order.
Dec 31, 2009
Like last year, here is the list of cities I visited during 2009, in chronological order.
Nov 21, 2009
Yahoo Pipes is a really awesome product that a lot of people don’t know about, and I feel like Yahoo hasn’t really done a lot with. It’s basically a node-based data editor, but it can fetch source data from places on the Internet, which means you can have pipes with dynamic output. And then, you can subscribe to the results of those pipes or request them via JSON, which gives you a huge amount of flexibility.
Sep 5, 2009
Last week Monday, in the earliest hours of the morning, my girlfriend and I touched down in Orlando, Florida. We immediately picked up the rental car and drove out to Cocoa Beach, situated along the Atlantic coast, where we were planning on staying for the week. Then we slept. We were in Florida to see the launch of Space Shuttle Discovery on STS-128, which we expected would be pretty cool.