Walking on the beach. I'm always amazed at the ability to walk barefoot at a normal pace on a rock covered beach while talking with others, and yet not stepping on any rocks. It seems our visual system has a "low level" background process to watch where we are placing our feet, and to advise us without us noticing consciously that it is doing this. Try walking backwards just a few steps, or forwards with your eyes closed, and you'll quickly see that rock avoidance is not due to rock sparsity, but instead due to some visual processing. Bob points me at this paper. ¶8:24 PM; digg

Wall Street Journal briefly mentioned today the company I work at, kayak software corp, in an article about travel search tools. Kayak is still by invitation-only and we did not give access to the reporter for this article, but watch this space for our public unveiling sometime in the weeks ahead.
¶10:34 PM; digg

Pan-Mass Challenge: I rode 90+ miles yesterday and 70+ miles today to complete my first ever physical fundraising, in this case for the Jimmy Fund and the Dana Farber Cancer Center. I raised over $6,000 and more donations are still coming in. This was probably the toughest physical thing I ever did in my life, as I've pretty much been a couch potato up until now. :)


It was inspirational to meet so many cancer patients, survivors, friends and family membes on this trip. And the roadside volunteers and "cheerleaders" were just incredible.


I highly recommend this ride. I only did about 10-12 training rides over a 2.5 month period, and did the ride just fine. (Well, the first day was fun, the second day was hard.) Next year I'd like to train a little more.


Thanks to everyone who donated; I will be sending a letter to each donor with more info about this.


--Paul ¶5:24 PM; digg

I would rather have a virus than use anti-virus software.

Or, can someone make anti-anti-virus software, that defeats the incredibly annoying things about most anti-virus programs:

1. Run update only when I'm sleeping; do not ever interrupt me to run this.
   
2. Do not install any extra menu items, browser links, outlook links, tray icons, desktop icons.
   
3. Do not try to upsell me on more of your shitty software each time you run.
   
4. Don't make me reboot so often after updates.
   
5. Give me better granularity over what should be checked and what not.
   
6. Don't be so slow on email attachment processing.
   
7. Basically, just stay the hell out of my way, and work in complete silence.
   

If anyone knows of any anti-virus software which meets all of the above objectives, let me know.

¶9:31 AM; digg