Grant Hutchins

Tonight I went outside. There was no wind. I saw a tree and was impressed by its stillness.

Lately I’ve been thinking about getting into open source development. Right now, I’m thinking about diving into a project that I like a lot. You’re using it right now, if you didn’t know! It’s the Typo blog engine which is based on Ruby on Rails. I’ve been running this blog, for better or for worse, on Typo for some time now.

Typo has been coming into its own recently but still needs some good help. I’ve been studying Rails along with Ruby in general and I think it’s time I get my feet wet. I’ve been listening in on the mailing list and might submit a patch to the Trac site sometime soon.

Have any of you done open source development? Do you have any tips or things I should read before I get going?

I’ve graduated with my Bachelor of Science in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Olin College, which means I’ve finally moved out of the cool climate of Needham, Massachusetts.

For the time being, I will be living back at home with my parents in Oklahoma City. As soon as I find a job, I will be relocating to who knows where!

IEEE Spectrum, the magazine of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, ran a feature article on Olin College in its latest issue.

Read about The Olin Experiment to get a surprisingly accurate description of life around here. I’ve got just over a week left.

Lately people have asked me frequently what I want to be doing once I graduate. I’ve finally found a quick answer that I believe encompasses all of the different areas in which I’m interested.

I’d like to go into interaction/interface design, web application development, user-centered product design, or some similar area.

I’d also be happy doing some sort of audio-oriented digital signal processing, audio synthesis, or audio electronics sort of field as a backup.

On top of all this I hope to become politically active somehow at the local level, wherever I end up. Possibly I could even work for a think-tank that deals with technological issues.

These fields are fairly disparate, and I don’t have a good sense of which one or ones I will end up in. But they do all hold a common thread.

So when people ask me, now I answer, “I want to ensure that my work treats people as humans, rather than mindless drones.”

Any engineering work that I do ought to make technology more accessible and natural to use for real people. Any audio work I do should focus on making things sound natural and pleasant to real people. Any political work I do should help bridge the gap between arcane policy, political wrangling, and the real people who are affected.

So that’s my new answer. It’s not too focused, but then again, it finally makes my plans cohesive in some manner.

By the way, sorry I’ve been gone for a while. My blog software should work properly now. I had to revert to the default theme. Hopefully the problems will get fixed soon because I liked how it was before.

“Dining moves up on the college priority list” is an article that talks about the improvement of dining halls at colleges, especially highlighting Olin College’s dining hall, my personal dining hall.

The real question is, if dining really has moved up the college priority list, what did it surpass? Hopefully not anything like actual academics! I’m one to believe that there really isn’t such a priority list. Silly North Jersey Media Group. In the original Washington Post publication of this article, the headline was instead “Yes, Sushi’s on the Meal Plan”

I was just featured as a good commenter on the popular blog Signal vs. Noise. 37signals is a pretty popular up-and-coming company that makes web-based software. They also created Ruby on Rails, the web framework that I’ve recently learned and actually made good use of recently, including on this Typo blog.

Anyway, sorry to bore you with all of that technical mumbo-jumbo. Here is the comment I posted:

I think that the competitive success of a good phone UI would be a watershed moment for interaction design. I feel like the general public would finally understand the idea that having lots of features is not what they want. I’m still shocked that none of the phone companies has stepped up and been bold enough to do it.

I really do think this is true. All of the cell phone companies are running around with their heads cut off not giving anyone what they really need.

There’s a reason my mom faithfully sticks to her old Motorola StarTac.

I spent a few hours today walking up and down Venice Beach and reminiscing on life. I’ve always preferred heat to cold and so I appreciated being out of the Boston weather. I doubt I will ever choose to live so far north again after I graduate.

All of my friends out here are hired for jobs that last a few weeks, a month, or just a couple of days. My mom has also recently picked up this style of employment. Being raised by a salaried father, I realize I haven’t been exposed to the contract worker lifestyle, which is a lot different. Each week brings something new and the days off might be the weekend one week and weekdays the next. Not sure if I would prefer the randomness of this style or the regularity of a salaried Monday-Friday job.

Either way, it’s looking like I’m headed toward the entrepreneur lifestyle, which seems to be some weird mix of the two. Each day during the day I ought to be expected to contribute some real value to the company, anywhere from product design to keeping on top of everything else that’s going on. But when something big hits outside of the normal hours, there’s still work that needs to be done, sometimes on really short notice.

In a way, it’s a lot more work, but I love the diverse challenges, the freedom, and the do-it-yourself attitude, so I should be fine.

I’ve just discovered SketchUp, a fun 3-d drawing program that Google bought out today.

Anyway, I gave the Mac version a quick try, and after about 15 minutes I finished this mockup of Olin’s Academic Center.

It’s pretty fun to play with. The interface is golden.

I have found a watch that I just love! It gives a relative time readout on a handwriting-styled LCD display. The letters are based on Frank Gehry’s handwriting. I’m not a huge Gehry fan but I love this concept.

Lately I’ve been checking out a lot of books from the library. I used to be quite a book person when I was young, especially in elementary school. Most of my fondest memories from when I lived in Enid, Oklahoma, and went to Hoover Elementary School involve me in the library reading a book on language or music or computers or something else that I’m still interested in today.

At the time I had no idea that I was probably seeding ideas and thoughts that would recur throughout my entire education. The ideas that have come most readily to me over the years often involve pieces of my experiences from a few key times in my life in which I immersed myself in some sort of media, such as all of the digital stuff my friends and I toyed around with in high school.

Reading all of these books lately has gotten me thinking about how I want to keep up after I leave Olin. With Wikipedia to whet my tastebuds, I have found countless subjects that I want to learn more about, but each thing I find leads to three more. I’m a bit overwhelmed with the sheer amount of stuff I want to know about.

I think once I graduate this May I will initially fill most of my newfound free time with books and music and perhaps some documentaries. Fiction doesn’t interest me much, so I will probably spend only just a little time with my Thomas Pynchon books.

If I had all of the money in the world, I would buy music all day long. Of all of the songs I’ve heard, there are far too many by artists whose other music I have never heard.

I don’t know if I can really portray how I feel about all of this stuff out there. I know that on her radio show Dr. Laura always says she doesn’t know how people can ever get bored with so many books in the world. I think that people get bored when they lack social stimulation, and books don’t really solve that. But I’m pretty happy with my social situation, so I feel I can heed her advice and dive in.

There’s this certain depth at which I used to immerse myself into books that just cannot be duplicated on the Internet and in flashy video games, movies, and television shows. I think what has happened is that I’ve rediscovered it.

My roommates and I started a website today in honor of the key that we found.

wefoundthiskey.com

Swimming in the Earth is back! Sorry about the downtime. I found old copies of my articles in Google’s cache of my Feedburner RSS feed. If you don’t know what that means, don’t worry. The posts are magically back, sans comments.

I ushered for a play at Brandeis the other night. It was a comedy entitled The Suicide, being put on for Russian Week. Thanks to Polina for suggesting it. I really enjoyed making sure that everything went smoothly for the audience. It reminded me of the days when I was a roadie for my friends’ band.

From the Brandeis theater schedule:

An unemployed man contemplates suicide but is besieged by spokespeople of discontented groups, from butchers to intellectuals, who want to turn his suicide into a gesture on their behalf. This brilliant Soviet-era satire is a classic of the Russian theater.

Anyway we caught the final showing and it was pretty crazy. About halfway through so many things were going on at once and it was hard to figure out what the point of it all was. Experimental theater at its finest, I guess. Since it was the last performance, I think they added some crazy stuff like having a random lady walk out of this guy’s closet and lifting up the backdrop to reveal the backstage area.

I talked with one of the other ushers, a graduate student who sat this play out for lack of enough parts to play. She explained the Suzuki Method to me (although I feel like I might have gotten the name wrong after reading that Wikipedia entry). She’s going to be in Euripides’s Bacchae later this semester. I might go usher that as well to enrich the 1/4 of myself that is Greek. It’d be a good way to get out of Olin a little more.

I’ve just joined the up-and-coming group blog alwaysBETA.

My first post, The Beta is Strong With This One, looks deep (a little too deep) into the history of beta testing, with a touch of prophesy.

Announcing my new blog, Swimming in the Earth.

Grant Page X is through now. Thanks to everyone who read. I will be continuing to post my thoughts on my new blog, and as a new contributer to AlwaysBeta.

I will keep this blog up for posterity.

Grant’s Take is officially closed.

The idea I had for this blog was too restricting in my opinion. I will continue reporting on logical fallacies that I find in the media on my new blog, Swimming in the Earth, intermixed with whatever else I want to write about.

Thanks for reading. Sorry it never really got its wings.

Grant

Hello everyone.

Welcome to Swimming in the Earth, my new blog. I will be posting anything and everything here. My other websites are linked at Grant Page Central.

I bet you’re wondering how I chose the name Swimming in the Earth.

A couple weeks ago, I was in class here at Olin College. The class was SCOPE, our team-based yearlong engineering capstone project, and we had a guest speaker talking about ethics.

To make a point about what words people associate with good ethics, the speaker asked, “When you die, what epitath would you want written on your gravestone?”

Without skipping a beat, I thought to myself, “He swam in the earth.”

I was really taken aback by this random thought. I knew exactly what it meant to me, but as an image I’m not sure it fully conveys its point. Indeed, it invites the joke that my dead body would be “swimming” in the earth of the grave.

But I’ve gone off-topic.

Swimming in the earth is my way of explaining the concept of living life to its fullest. This planet has a lot to offer me in the short time I have here. If I don’t break some rules and get my feet wet I’ll have missed out on a lot of experiences.

Thus, I should go swimming in the earth. Right through the dirt. Through the sky. Through the water too, but that’s too easy. I should run around and sit still. Get comfortable and catch myself off guard.

And I’ll be writing all about it here. Technology, humor, politics, language, music, society. Anything is fair game. Please leave this blog better than you found it; comments graciously welcomed.

Verizon is threatening to start charging Google for the traffic it generates over its internet backbone.

“The network builders are spending a fortune constructing and maintaining the networks that Google intends to ride on with nothing but cheap servers” [Verizon senior vice president and deputy general counsel John] Thorne told a conference marking the 10th anniversary of the Telecommunications Act of 1996. “It is enjoying a free lunch that should, by any rational account, be the lunch of the facilities providers.”

Strange broken lunch metaphors aside, it seems Verizon wants Google to start paying for the traffic that goes on their lines between users and Google’s services. Never mind that the bandwidth already gets paid for by the end users.

The threat? Verizon will add a bottleneck to the connection, slowing down Google while letting other sites through at full speed. One might also notice that Verizon and Yahoo! launched a co-branded DSL service last August. Coincidence?

Anyway, let’s go through a little thought experiment, shall we?

1. Google refuses to pay Verizon for its bandwidth.
2. Verizon starts capping bandwidth for Google traffic.
3. Verizon customers notice that Google is slower, and that Google is snappy on their friend’s cable modem.
4. Cable modem commericals tout great performance on “the sites most used on the Internet, such as Google.”
5. Over time, Verizon loses customers because the most well-known and most-used site doesn’t perform well.
6. Verizon eats their words and lifts the cap.

In the end, Google doesn’t pay anything extra, most users don’t care that anything happened but are subtly repelled by Verizon, and Verizon wastes money on implementing and maintaining a lot of routers that now have to filter everything and hold onto packets for longer.

I for one am not worried about anything coming of this.

My former roommate’s company, Salubrion, had its featured product mentioned on Boing Boing today! Unfortunately the name was misspelled as “Selubrion”, and the page it linked to also misspells the name and has a faulty link as well.

Well, actually it looks like the link to Gaiam’s site works now.

Anyway, I went ahead and bought www.selubrion.com and had it redirect to http://www.salubrion.com in hopes of helping him out.

Via Michelle Malkin comes this St. Louis Post-Dispatch article:

For more than a year, former Marine Staff Sgt. Jimmy Massey has been telling anybody who will listen about the atrocities that he and other Marines committed in Iraq.

Each of his claims is either demonstrably false or exaggerated - according to his fellow Marines, Massey’s own admissions, and the five journalists who were embedded with Massey’s unit, including a reporter and photographer from the Post-Dispatch and reporters from The Associated Press and The Wall Street Journal.

This London Times article has the headline “Iraq battle stress worse than WWII”.

However, a quick reading of the article shows that at most the article claims that “troops in Iraq are suffering levels of battle stress not experienced since the second world war…” which doesn’t really justify the use of “worse”.

A better headline might have read “Iraq battle stress similar to WWII” or “Iraq battle stress at WWII levels”, even though even then there is no actual metric by which to compare the stress.

On a sidenote, I agree with the sentiments of this article, and have a newfound understanding as to why the United States consistently refuses to allow its citizens and soldiers to be answerable to the International Court of Justice. It’s one thing for your own country to try you under its laws after you serve it in war. It’s yet another to have to face an international body to which you have virtually no say.

Over at mediamatters.org there is a video clip of Brit Hume reporting on Fox News and an accompanying post accusing him of being callous implying that he was callous [it is not explicitly stated, Ed.] in response to the 7/7 London bombings. I found this in a post from the Center for Media and Democracy.

The quote from Brit Hume is

“my first thought when I heard — just on a personal basis — when I heard there had been this attack and I saw the futures this morning, which were really in the tank, I thought, ‘Hmmm, time to buy.'"