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9/10/2010 Personal Update Back from Germany
My summer working at Deutsche Bahn, the state railway of Germany, is over. I worked on the PPX/Touch&Travel team. I worked on the design for the new smartphone version of T&T and I prototyped out a map/GIS platform. Hopefully they will like what I built and what I helped develop will be seen by millions of people. Working at Deutsche Bahn was real a change of pace from MIT; I did not even have access to my DB email outside the office. It was challenging to work in German and I learned a lot about what it is like to work in a big company. Hopefully I brought some American-style thinking to the team to help create the next version of Touch&Travel and improve people’s trip planning.
During the summer, I had a great time going on trips to Berlin, Venice, Verona, Nuremberg, London, and Hamburg. I also went to smaller day trips to Mainz, Geysir Andernach, Wiesbaden, the Rhine, the Opel Factory, Holiday Park, and Worms, plus plenty of random photos. I also took lots of photos of trains and transit systems This trip help boost my flickr count to over 50,000 items! Almost all of the photos are geotagged. Over the summer I bought a new geologger, the I-Blue Tripmate 850 GPS Logger. This new logger is a lot more sensitive and accurate than my old AMOD 8050 GPS Logger. In addition it has a screen and a Bluetooth connection so you can see live data as it is recording. I’ve included a geotrack of my time in Venice, to demonstrate how good this logger is. Geoov should be up and running again with my latest photos. I built it last summer so I and others could see where I have been by displaying all of my geotagged photos on one map. I love seeing more and more areas being filled in!
I also built out my wiki with some new features and content. I extended the FlickrSet Extension to help meet some of my needs. I also built a Delicious Extension from scratch. In both cases I want to display more of my content from other sites directly on the relevant page on my wiki. I have not made much use of the extensions, but I am now able to pull flickr items and items tagged on delicious straight into certain wiki pages. I also wrote some new content about the Laptops, Cameras, GPS Loggers, MP3 Players, and Cell Phones devices I have owned.
I also figured out a way to once again display OneNote notebooks. This new method uses Microsoft Office Online/SkyDrive and it works in all browsers. However I could not trick it into embedding into my site, so you will have to click to go offsite. Also, ink will not display. I’ve uploaded ink notebooks from first semester in the legacy 2007 web export style. This displays ink, but only works in IE and Opera. This works out well since I was switching to scanned paper anyway and my tablet broke in March. Some of my notebooks from second semester were all in paper anyway, so I just uploaded a series of PDFs with the pages scanned in. I know this is lower tech, but in my experience, this is how I learn best. So check out my notes from freshmen year.
I am still covering the latest in tech news on The Weekly Spin podcast. With the start of episode 68, I wanted to redouble my effort I put into the podcast to be better prepared with the issues and stories. I am very interested in the things I cover and along with some of my classes this year I want to be able to understand the issues better. Hopefully this extra effort will pay off in the show’s quality. Being on a better internet connection should help as well.
It looks like I will be shutting GridView down at the end of the year. Facebook recently discontinued the “Boxes” tab and they will completely remove application tabs from your Facebook profiles by the end of the year. You, and you alone, will still be able to see your GridView on the app’s page. I don’t think this small bit of functionality will be worth continuing to maintain GridView and keep it alive. I originally envisioned it as a way to show off your Facebook friends on your Facebook profile. With this change, Facebook will be prohibiting the purpose of the application. If you object, and think that being able to see your grid is still useful, please send me your feedback.
It is also time to look forward to next year. It my first year taking Management classes, since I got general requirements out of the way my first year. The department strongly suggests I take 15.279 Management Communication for Undergraduates. I just did 2 communications classes last semester, so I am grudgingly going along with their recommendation. I am also doing the requirement [[15.501|15.501 Corporate Financial Accounting] to get it out of the way, and I want to understand all of the financial terms, as well know how to manage the money in my own business. I am also doing [[14.01|14.01 Principles of Microeconomics]. I believe this is a requirement, and a fairly introductory class. I took a similar class in high school, but I have heard that the MIT version is very different! I am also taking a graduate-level management class [[15.567|15.567 The Economics of Information: Strategy, Structure and Pricing] which is about the internet and the sale of information. At MIT most of the detail classes are grad classes, so I wanted to try one out. This is my one interesting, somewhat discretionary class this semester. I have to take another math class [[6.041|6.041 Probabilistic Systems Analysis] for the management degree, so I have to do this one. I never really learned probability, which seems more interesting to me than Calculus. At HHS, the probability class was an easy math option, but I have my doubts at MIT. I also want to get a better understanding of computer science by taking a few classes, although I am not planning on majoring in CS. So I am taking the first class 6.01 Introduction to EECS to get a well-rounded introduction to computer science. This should help improve my programming by giving me a theoretical base to work from. It will be a fair bit of work, but I hope this will positively shape how I think, like 8.01/8.02 did for me last semester (see Learning to Learn at MIT. So this is 69 units, which is a lot. I may drop one of the classes if it becomes too much work.
This summer I did a bit of work on my UROP at the Media Lab on SocialSaver. If you are at MIT you can help by joining the experiment. I do not plan on continuing to work on that project. For MAS.111, I presented on my experience. I will be continuing as VPFS at Baker House and I will be picking up a job working on the Baker Website. I also plan on continuing to work on the Athena Committee for UA CSL. MIT has already started implementing some of our recommended changes to upgrade printers and move dorm printers under a full support model. I also plan on becoming more involved in SIPB, the computing club at MIT.
So that is all for now, with classes starting up at MIT, that will be taking up my time. I still have to update my bio to cover the full scope of the things I am interested in. --ThePlaz 01:15, 10 September 2010 (EDT)
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