The French Press

The french press coffee maker is officially my favorite investment this fall! The coffee it yields is so much more flavorful and aromatic than a regular drip-brewed coffee maker. Why? Because the direct contact of coffee and water traps the essential oils and flavor that is otherwise lost in the paper filters of regular coffee makers. 

To brew the coffee, I start off by stirring the ground coffee and boiling water together in the beaker, let it brew/steep for 4-5 minutes, then press the plunger to trap the coffee grounds towards the bottom of the beaker. I use my favorite standard coffee which is Starbucks Expresso Roast whole beans. To prepare it, I add to the coffee a tbsp of condense milk and a tbsp of milk in a medium sized mug or tumbler. Topped with some whipped cream or milk froth and you have a yummy concoction!

So what are you waiting for? Join the bandwagon, get it at Amazon.com for $19, and enjoy!

Smart List

Smart List was an idea my friend and I came up with for our senior project. We wanted to take advantage of the Google Places API that was recently released to the public as of May 2011, and create a unique and useful Android app. Hence, we decided on the idea of a task managing system/to-do list which would voice alert  (proximity alert) you whenever you're near your errands' locations. You need only to enter the name of a place such as Wholes Food and it would return a list of all Wholes Food in the area which you can pick from and view on the map to do a task such as Groceries. Additional features include displaying a map of where all the tasks are located, an alarm system to set when the errands are due, and the option to email the list of all errands. 

After 3 months of careful design, implementation, and user testing, we finally have a finished and working product! It has been an amazing experience getting to work with Android. We definitely faced some problems with how often to poll for the GPS location so as not to overload the battery consumption. Our solution was to set different polling rates based on whether the users' position (longitude and latitude) changes over time. If the user is at home, the GPS will poll every 10 minutes whereas if the user's location changes rapidly (perhaps he/she is in a car driving), we would poll it every 5 seconds. It manages to work pretty well, I would say.

Some Views of Smart List

Add Task Activity

Home Activity

Proximity Alert

Map of all Tasks

RIP Dennis Ritchie

Only days after Steve Jobs' death, we also lost the inventor of the C programming language and the Unix operating system, Dennis Ritchie. Not many has heard of him and certainly no biography has been released only 2 weeks after his death, but let us pay a tribute to the genius whose shoulders we all stood on. RIP Dennis Ritchie, the king of the invisible world.

"Ritchie was under the radar. His name was not a household name at all, but . . . if you had a microscope and could look in a computer, you'd see his work everywhere inside." - Paul E. Ceruzzi

Philosophical Musing

I've always been an idealistic person, always intrigued by things, feelings, and situations that are sensational, captivating. I like reading books with an exemplary hero, an element of magic, adventure, or flights of fantasy. I like associating love with those rare magnetic moments that envelope your entire being. More wildly, I like imagining the fate of the universe and mankind resting on our own creation. That is, I’m speaking of sentient machines. Artificial intelligence has always been a fascinating subject to me. Of course we are decades, possibly centuries away from true AI. But, if we are to create sentient beings in the image of our likeness, as it is the only way we know how, we must first reverse engineer the human brain and decipher our own intelligence, which in itself is another phenomenon.

The other day in AI class, my professor brought up something very interesting. He asked us to tell him the phone number of the White House. We immediate acknowledge that we do not know. And that, quite frankly, is the genius of the human brain. We did not have to search our memory bank to come up or not come up with an answer. We instantly know that we do not have that information; whereas, computer systems must have a searching process in their database. If we are able to understand how our human brain can bypass this search method, perhaps we can shift the paradigm of how knowledge can be attained.

RJ and I often discuss about living forever by preserving our brain and reconstructing our memories onto another stronger body/host. He believes that if something has all the same memories as you, then it is essentially you. I, on the other hand, believe that just because a host has all of your memories does not make it you. It’s like cloning a person, you’re missing an important element and that is the human consciousness. If my conscious no longer exists, it is just someone else with my memories. Perhaps if we were born in the next century, we would have the answer to this puzzle. I often question if it is a blessing to be born in my age for the reason that I do not have to witness some sort of Apocalypse that would end my race, or that it is a curse not to be able to witness the ultimate advancement of my species.

Emo Philips: “I used to think that the brain was the most wonderful organ in my body. Then I realized who was telling me this.”