My second I started in middle school with my father. I was a trapper and fur foot trader. We trapped a lot of gophers in the fields around where I lived. I spent a good 4 hours a week setting and collecting traps. Our county paid a pretty good price per gopher and I estimate I collected about $300 worth of gophers one summer.

My last business adventure was in the summer of 2004. My friend Ryan was working a typical cubicled internship and was suffering from a mild case of cubical claustrophobia (sometimes referred to as “Am I really going to do this for the rest of my life” syndrome) and had to go on frequent walks to stay sane. I was doing research in the cold dark basement of an optics lab and was really getting down about the lack of variety in the spectrum of light that I experienced throughout my day. It was also a time in my life where I was experimenting with several different vocations trying to find where I belonged.

Most people in technology have had to at one point decide whether to give up their love of the outdoors, or their love of technology. Ryan and I rarely follow the path of those most people and decided we’d get around that decision by making a rare company that does technology outdoors. Our business plan: a Computers and Lemonade stand!

We set up shop on my street and started fixing computers and selling lemonade. We were open for a good 8 hours before it got dark. Unfortunately my street is more like a county road and we only saw about 6 cars go by. None of them apparently had their computers with them, or at least the ones they did have weren’t broken.

We did fix 3 computers. Two were for friends we called during our telemarketing campaign. They had much better bargaining techniques than us (they were female) as they got our quality service for the price of two tacos and a chocolate frosty. I’m pretty sure it was all from the dollar menu. The other we fixed for my parents in exchange for a pitcher of lemonade, an investment that didn’t pay out as we never actually sold any lemonade.

One of the 6 cars stopped, backed up and said “Do you guys really fix computers?” We answered yes and then she asked “How much?” We hadn’t planned that far ahead and looked at each-other and I blurted out “20 dollars.” She said she’d be back with her computer and we waited nervously hoping it wasn’t an expensive hardware related problem.

She never came back and by the time it got dark we knew we had some serious flaws in our business plan. We decided to add a sound system to our outdoor computer setup and see if we could make it as an outdoor movie theater. A few people showed up but they all just brought chips and soda instead of money. We had problems legally monetizing that venture.

After that day we discussed the flaws in the plan and decided that we had stupidly violated all three rules of business, which are each titled “Location”. We decided to try it again someday in a better spot but were soon back to being wrapped up in our busy technology lives and that day has yet to come. I hope to one day find another business plan that allows me to do computer work outdoors. I think people need to be close to nature, and computer don’t have to change that.

Dave

1. Realization:  First you need to realize that the database design is a lengthy task that grows exponentially with the complexity of your web app.  Make sure you allot yourself a large chunk of time and patience for the task.

2. Site Planning:  Before making your tables you have to have your entire site organized.  Its best to draw out all of the viewable page types the viewer will see and get a concrete set of high level functions that the user will be able to do.  Its best to minimize these down to base functionality.  Forget about the million bells and whistles that you might attach on in a year or two, and concentrate on making just the bike …. err webapp.  After simplifying the main functionality you’ll find the database design much simpler to keep in your head and its usually easy to attach on the extra stuff later.

3. Research: If you’re not too good at database design, know very little about how SQL servers work or don’t know what manytomany relationships are you’d do yourself a favor by reading up on it.  Here are a few resources.

4. Divide and Conquer:  Having a good grasp of what you’re making and a feel for SQL servers its time to get to it!  We want to emphasize, that no matter how big or small your group is, no matter how smart or dumb they are, even if you have a pacifist on your team, its best to split up when designing the database.  Each of you go to your own corners and design what you think will work.  Then, after a day or however long it takes you, get back together and share what you’ve got.  You’ll find that each of you are missing a few things and many different ways of looking at the same thing.  Its best to merge these ideas at the end when everyone has a good grasp of what they’ve designed.  Its bad to merge them as you build, sparking debates that go on way too long and make everything feel larger and more complicated than it really is.

5. Cards:  When designing your tables we found it worked best to write them on note cards and rearrange them on the table.  Its really easy to edit or throw out cards.  Its also easy to visualize the different components and rearrange them in-front of you to fit better in your brain.  When you’re done, tape them to a piece of tag board and draw lines to visually demonstrate the relationships between the different tables.  It will also look much prettier when you go back and meet with the rest of your group.

6. Celebrate: You’ve accomplished a large amount of work!  It might not seem so.  You were expecting to be well into your hacking by now, but hey, it takes a really long time and now you have a great platform to build from.  Make sure you listen to a happenin’ tune and do a little jig.  This part is best done with the group.

Dave and Priyesh

Anyway, I’m setting up my macbook and and have to change all of my settings and download my favorite apps. Luckily, because of what I’ve shared the thingsilearned on this blog the process has been incredibly easy. I found my favorite version of emacs, added xml support, modified my terminal, altered my hosts file to combat my internet addiction, and dropped in my screw script so Jared3 can curse back at me.

It was just cool to utilize so much content, and its all still just 4 guys on a flat blog! Soon everyone will be able and encouraged to share and with the improved tools we’re building into JaredSIM. JaredSIM will be an awesome storage place for the thingsilearned … awesome.

Dave

Facebook has evolved as one of the most powerful way of social networking, sharing photographs, video, blogs as well as communicating with friends and networks. Fred Stutzman is a Ph.D. student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s who studied facebook and it’s usage at his university. As he goes to describe his plan of the longitudinal study over a period of one semester, some of his assumptions are totally reestablished through the statistics. He basically studies the social behavior of freshman at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Alarmingly, 85% of college freshman were already on the facebook as they joined as freshmen, and not only that, they also were already connected to on an avg 45 other freshmen coming in week one of the study itself. The increase in new users over the course of the semester came out to be up to 94% with student to student connections increased to about an avg of 100. Well … this should definitely have been the initial assumption anyway. College does mitigate the social networking abilities of students :p These statistics however lead to the speculation of spreading of facebook through orientation sessions for the school. This is supported by the initial links and connections between the students coming in being about 144,000 friend network connection (week1) and increasing to 370,000 (at the end of sem) just for the freshman class of UNC.

Facebook is an amazing way of interacting with acquaintances, friends, and learning about each other. Fred studies the personal information sharing tendencies of students along with privacy considerations. The users on facebook get to decide how much information to share and what type of information to share. Facebook provides a very flexible approach to networks and their situational relevance which allows users to change their network relevance and relations with change of demographics at the same time being connected with the old friends from another network. Not only that, it provides a great way of managing social connections without too much time investment. At the same time, the study finds out that a lot of time ends up being wasted online on facebook. The fact that users stay connected with others easily all the time, also tends to become addictive thus degrading productivity. If the whole communication between users could be made more informative and useful, rather than just a description, the wasteful addiction could be transformed into an even more useful. It could change the way people look at information via other users themselves and gain knowledge out of their own social networks or expand their networks based on knowledge and information.

Priyesh

What gave us the advantage was we went with the CMUcam2, an awesome device that does color tracking and has an onboard controller for up to 5 servos or DAQ outputs. The controller was a life saver for the guys making the robotic arm, and for me being able to easily use the camera and control the robotics through the same programing interface. The CMUCam2 advertises color tracking at an exciting 50 frames per-second but in reality you can only get 25fps unless you’re using only a quarter of the window size, which proved too small for our needs. However, with some extremely advanced *sarcasm prediction algorithms I designed and called the Dave Transform (DT as FT was already taken) we were able to get some awesome results. Here’s a diagram of the DT prediction algorithm…

You can check out the jared source here. It includes a nice python module for the serial interface with the CMUcam2 that might be useful to robotics or AI enthusiasts out there. For more detail check out the powerpoint and final paper. Unfortunately the group that took over the project after us decided that despite our impressive results and the excellent prediction, calibration, and testing code, learning python was much more difficult than just starting over with C++! Our code is now wasted! Gotta love Senior Design.

So what were the results? After 3 months of team work on the project (not a ton of work, it was only 2 credits) Jared.hockey could block almost everything chucked at it with incredible accuracy! Unfortunately the arm offensive mechanism proved inadequate. Though it was properly configured and timed to strike the puck at the right moment, it was not strong enough to return it with any force. For future reference I personally think the two joint arm system (like humans) is better than one joint and a flicking device. You need one serious solenoid to return a puck at 30 miles an hour.

Anyway, we got it to block everything but were unable to get it to return any volleys. All in all, I currently rank it at Jared.hockey v0.4, where v1.0 would mean it was skilled as the real Jared. Check it out for yourself!

Dave

Lets start from the beginning with the childhood of a one Mr. Jared Lee.

[The setting: a small private lake in northern Wisconsin. Camera zooms in from helicopter view on a young curious boy floating in an old tire tube reading an article on nimbostratus clouds in the N volume of the Encyclopedia Britanica. Que Narator]

Narator: In a world of common people, going about their common tasks in their common everyday ordinary regular ways, a young boy was born and raised away from its influences…

[kill narator]

Ok, I went a little overboard, back to regular story telling style. Jared was home schooled the majority of his childhood. His older brothers were moved away to college and he spent all of his time with his parents enjoying the frills of life that typical 50 year olds enjoy. Jared loved reading non-fiction, politics, religion, nature, radio, talking about the weather, photography, watching sports and other mature activities. It was during this time that, with the learning power of youth combined with the interests and intelligence of someone well beyond his years, Jared acquired almost all practical knowledge. Note: you might have to back over that last sentence, it was a big one.

After graduating high school Jared decided to go to Gustavus Adolphus College and obtain a degree in physics, one of the few subjects he hadn’t already learned. It was there in the dark rooms of Olin Hall that Jared and I, along with the other physics majors, would study all hours of the night. As would be expected with long periods of study tons of questions, both physics and non-physics related, were posed to the group: “Who was the 8th president of the United States?” “How much does a pizza cost at the caf?” “What’s the name of that girl that Cory made out with last week?” “Where are the beer specials today?” “What day is it?” “Is Jolene Right?” “When is our next frisbee game?” etc.

Some of those are easier to answer than others (Cory’s dating habits have never been tough to follow and if it’s not physics related, Jolene doesn’t even get rhetorical questions right.), but miraculously, no matter the difficulty, Jared could answer all non-physics questions.

It was a feat that remained unappreciated and even unnoticed until the semester Jared studied abroad in Australia. Suddenly when posing similar questions “What will the weather be like in by the time i go outside?” “Who shot JFK?”, the group wouldn’t know. We were lost, and decided that we’d have to start going downstairs to the computers and using a rising technology called the Internet and a search engine (Google) we had heard about others using to solve similar queries. After several unanswered searches (“Is Jolene Right?”), it was obvious that no technology existed that could adequately replace Jared. We had temporary hope that soon Jared would return but also realized the loss we would experience upon graduation.

It was then put on me, the sole member of the group with computer programming skills, to simulate Jared so that we all, and the rest of the world, could have the advantages of those in his presence. The project/life task was called JaredSIM and is being carried out in several different sub projects. So far the following have been kicked off with varying successes: Jared.trader, Jared.survivor, Jared.hockey, and now Jared.learn. So you see the goal of JaredSIM is the mass production and distribution of the resources of Jared Lee and the goal of ThingsILearned.com is to acquire all of the things that Jared has learned in digital form.

So you see there was a very simple explanation. I hope it got you excited to help teach!

Dave

The four of us along with Jame’s girlfriend Anna are subletting a condo in Daly City, just 10 minutes south of San Francisco. The place is big and the complex has two pools and a nice club house that I will make my office as soon as we can figure out a way to get our internet out that far. We have few furnishings except for a kitchen table and a few things we brought and have collected: air mattresses, couches from bay area family, homemade computer desk from the side of the road, some lamps, a foosball table. I was expecting a bit more hustle and bustle from the area but our complex happens to be in the middle of a mile of cemetery in each direction. Seriously, check the map. In the case of any sort of zombie attack we’re pretty much screwed. James says that with our surplus of Cosco food we could hold out for quite a while, but especially after seeing 28 weeks later I’m not naive enough to think they wouldn’t fireball the whole place.

Anyway, you can send us packages (hint: food) at that address though it probably only had a 50% chance of actually getting to us. There seems to be a lot of problems with the way packages are delivered around here.

The good thing about our location is that its only 2 miles from the BART which goes all over the place. I’m going to have to take that and the Caltrain to get to Stanford twice a week for my class. I bought a bike today to make that trip a little shorter. I rode the BART a couple times into San Francisco already to hang out with my friend Josh Aas from Firefox. Unfortunately we weren’t out seeing Caroline Smith but he was in town for the amazing WWDC and invited me to hang out with some cool people afterward including some Camino developers, another GSoC student and Ben from the awesome startup Songbird.

I’ve also been to Stanford twice where we recruited our friend Zain for the team. Zain is a super bright guy who’s in the middle of his PhD at Stanford under Mark Horowitz, a founder of Rambus. Zain’s hooking us up with a server on the insanely fast stanford network, the original ISP for google! Stanford is an awesome awesome place. They get tons of money from wealthy alumni and venture capital. Their president is an EE professor supposedly worth over a billion dollars. There are startup clubs, classes, and recruitment posters all over. Its an incredibly exciting place. I’m glad I decided to take my summer course there instead of online.

As you can see its been a crazy week, and somehow among all of that we still got quite a bit of work done. More to come on the project soon.

Oh, and a shoutout/congratulations to my friend and reader Zack Garbow. Zack’s been somewhat of a patent mentor to me at IBM and just became IBM’s youngest Master Inventor breaking the previous record by 4 years! Way to go Zack! You may have 60 more patents than me but I’m still racing you to 100.  He also wrote an awesome facebook app.  If you’re cool you’ll add it.

Dave

Perhaps more could be said on best practices for business cards. I would not be the one to ask. Rather, here’s what was used to make some of the effects seen above.

The logo: A free font was used, with blending options set to inner shadow, gradient overlay, and stroke. In order to keep the logo consistent with any future color choices, I used transparent blend modes like overlay and multiply.

Shapes: By keeping them as vector-type shapes in their own layer, I could quick edit the position of the vertices without loss of quality.

The figure: Solid black lines over layers of solid colors with no dodge or burn layers, painted at 300% resolution and down-sampled for the business card, which was further down-sampled for web viewing.

Color: A case study in trial and error. The color will probably be tweaked for a while to come. (It was suggested that bright colors would look friendly and personable, like our friend Jared.)

Vu