Elliot Lee » 2006 » January » 31

Chinese New Year

Elliot Lee — Tue, 31 Jan 2006 10:19:45 +0000

I went to a Chinese New Year event in McCarthy Quad tonight. Something with APASS, the Asian Pacific American Student Services, and/or the Chinese American Student Association. I got a free t-shirt, free food, and fun solving those little metal shapes that connect and disconnect. It was a cool event. I liked the fortune cookies dipped in chocolate, as well as the almond jello. I also did some of the first Chinese calligraphy I can remember. I just copied from their example. Jon Lo said the first character might not be right, but I still think it’s pretty cool. Its translation is roughtly: “The studies continues,” some kind of encouragement for doing good work and studying.

Automated Depersonalization of Writing

Elliot Lee — Tue, 31 Jan 2006 10:15:29 +0000

Here’s something I came up with last Friday. Perhaps it’s an original idea that I should pursue in the future. For lack of a better name, I call it the automated depersonlization of writing. It was inspired by a neat Ajax app called Writely, a web word processor. Now, a lot of what you’ll publish with a service like that is likely to be private, and for a small intended audience. But there’s sure to be a lot of information in there that would also be helpful for others. So, what my system would do is scan your text for proper nouns, specifics, and personal details, and automatically change them to predefined anonymous descriptors. For example, I’d write a story about someone. Their name could be changed by the computer system to Bob. This means that life lessons can still teach others, while not revealing anything personal about the actual people. That’s the rough idea: it could be later refined.

Too Many Requests for Gmail

Elliot Lee — Tue, 31 Jan 2006 10:04:02 +0000

I still have people asking me for Gmail and orkut invites to this day. It really takes a lot of time to keep sending them out. Still, there are rewards: I’ve met a good number of people this way, and it has increased membership at the Google Forum. If you’re looking for an invite, there are many sources. Posting a comment on my blog isn’t really a good way. Actually, I should go and delete all those requests… I’ve already deleted many of them. But it just takes too much time to sort through.