Gmail tasks' missing features

I've been a big fan of Bob the Monkey or the Cow, depending how you look at it. All my to-do items are tracked withing remember the milk, nicely organized in lists, shared among people, and tagged with something meaningful. The user interface has been the same for a while and can be improved upon.

A recent blog post about Gmail tasks triggered reexamining this feature. While promising, it falls short because it lacks the following features I am used to (correct me if I overlooked how it works with Gmail tasks):

1. ability to specify a due time and an estimate how long a task will take.
2. ability to specify recurring tasks: e.g. pay PG&E every 12th of the month
3. ability to share tasks with others
4. ability to add a location and map to a task
5. ability to add a priority to a task
6. ability to add tags to a task
7. ability to add contacts to a task
8. smart lists : e.g. show all work related (tag=work) items due this week
9. google.com/tasks should provide a great user interface to sort, rearrange and do bulk operations on tasks

Academy of Sciences

At last, we made it to the new Calafornia Academy of Sciences museum in San Francisco. We criss-crossed the entire museum in about five hours, including two shows. You do need to pick up passes in advance if you want to attend either show or presentation. (plan your visit)

The first show was a 3D movie about bugs. And no, there was no Hollywood happy ending. The movie takes you through the young lives of caterpillar turning butterfly and a praying mantis. At the end, one becomes the dinner of the other.

The second presentation was 30 minutes visit into space within the planetarium.

Further, the four story rainforest exhibition is impressive, as well as the big aquaria. The kids loved the funny looking frogs, the geckos, the huge catfish and piranhas. The picture above taken on top of the living roof of the museum building.

Summer visit to Gold Country

Last December, during the cold winter break, we escaped the Bay Area for three days to the California Gold Country. The two highlights of the trip were the Columbia Historic Park and the Railtown 1897 in Jamestown.

The first one is a traditional eighteen hundreds mining town, including a stage coach. During the fourth of July weekend there are a lot of old fashioned games and traditions. We missed the parade but did enjoy greased pole contest and five way tug-o-war. Many also fashion traditional clothing.

We did pan again for gold, but were not as lucky as last time and came home only with fool's gold or pyrite.

The second highlight of our winter trip was Railtown 1897. This historic state park houses various steam engines. While during our winter visit no trains were running, we were able to freely roam the grounds and explore are the areas.

This time steam engine 2 did run between Jamestown and the rock quary. This was a Shay locomotive (geared engine). The geek in me did waste a couple of hours last night browsing wikipedia and steam engine websites on the details about the locomotive. I also came across a transcript of the cannon ball express ride (pdf).

The last stop of the trip is adult only: a sampling of the many wineries in Calaveras county (map). Over the last two days we samples wines from Ironstone, Solomon, Twisted Oak, Frog's Tooth, Broll and Bodega del Sur. The wineries of the Sierra Foothills use different grapes and produces wines uncommon to the Napa or Sonoma valleys: grenache, verdelho, roussanne, mourvedre and tempranillo. I favored the taste of the wines of Broll most.

Oh darn Twitter (2)

When I wrote Oh darn twitter, I really wanted to create this video to summarize it but CollegeHumor was a tad faster. I'll just drop the reel on the cutting floor and just post their Web Site Story.

See more funny videos and funny pictures at CollegeHumor.

When visiting Belgium

I often get asked what to do or what to visit when spending a few days in Belgium. Very often Belgium is not the main destination of the vacation. It is a stop on route from Paris to Amsterdam, or the airport of Brussels is the entry point to Europe. So I'll make it brief:

Cities to visit (in order of my liking): Antwerp (Antwerpen), Bruges (Brugge), Ghent (Gent), Leuven and Brussels (Brussel). If you like to visit a modern vibrant city, start with Antwerp. It combines great history (architecture, paintings, museums, culture) with lots of pubs, restaurants and shops. If you like true medieval history, visit Bruges, also known as the Venice of the North. Ghent was the capital of Europe during the empire of Charles V. It is also a happening university town. However the center of student life occurs in Leuven. And yes, you should also visit Brussels. I typically compare a visit to Brussels to a visit to Washington D.C. If you can only pick one city in the US to visit, would it be Washington? Or San Francisco or New York?

What to drink? A visit to Belgium would not be complete without a visit to a couple of traditional pubs (cafes) and sample some of the 8700 different Belgian beers.

What to eat? Did you know French fries originated in Belgium? You won't be able to avoid them. In every town square, on many corners, you'll find a 'frituur' or small place to get a pointy bag with Belgian fries. Try it with mayonaise rather than ketchup, or try a couple of the various sauces on top of it.

Of course try a real Belgian waffle, the famous chocolates, speculoos, a bucket of mussels with fries, shrimp in tomato, eal in a green herb sauce, real Belgian endives or white asparagus.

Belgium is a cycling country. Many cycling champions came from Belgium. You'll find lots of people on a bicycle during the weekend making trip along the various trails. Checkout the fietsknooppunten blog for a sampling of trails and what to see along the trails. Or request the blog author for some recommended trails.

Leave a comment if you have specific questions about towns, seasons or customs.

On Keyboards

When I read the headline today about how Lenovo starting moving around the Delete key on the keyboard, it thought it is about time for some keyboard layout experimentation. I am sure lots of people will be upset about this. I am not. The key input device to a computer has not evolved in many years.

I first ran into this when visiting Argentina : because of the Spanish keyboard layout, it is very difficult to type important internet symbols.

Mobile devices already started experimenting. Take a look at the slide out keyboard of the HTC G1 phone: notice how next to the space bar is the '@' key. No need to shift-2.

An internet / geek's keyboard should have the following keys within easy reach: @ / \ { } ( ) ) , introduce a zoom and search button and make switching between tabs (Ctrl-Tab) and windows easy (Alt-tab).

Picture courtesey of android-phone.org

oh darn Twitter

Twitter killed my blog. Not really. Temporarily. However primarily a lack of time and a convenient way to just blurt out 140 characters of opinion have kept me from writing on my blog. I did write a couple of posts on the company blog. Home remodelling, summar planning and a deluge of work kept me from posting to this blog. The light might be dimmer, it ain't out.

Going Native Garden Tour

On a hot spring day (92F/ 33C) we toured a couple of native gardens in the San Jose area. Every year, since 2003, the Go-Native-Garden-Tour has been organized in spring. This year there were about 45 participating gardens. We visited about 5 gardens.

The common thread is that all gardens use California native plants and are designed for water conservation. This is especially important this year since water levels have been extremely low. Nearby reservoirs were near empty at the beginning of the winter. I have never seen them that low.

My front lawn has suffered over the past years. In part because I have 3 big trees in front which suck up all the water. Secondly, one summer vacation without proper watering and I have a large open patch in the lawn.

I decided not to redo or reseed, but to slowly replace it with a native garden. For one maintenance is low. Secondly a native garden uses almost no water. Some of the gardeners mention they water a couple of minutes every 4 to 6 weeks. That's just amazing.

We took plenty of pictures of the plans and their nametags. Almost all gardens had every plant labeled with both their Latin name as their common name.

So, what's next? Step one will be to dig up the front lawn and install a drip grid water system. Step two: figure out a simple design with a couple of rocks. Step three: lots of mulch. Step four will be looking for plants. Perhaps something for the fall.

The backyard is a whole other story. For years the main role has been claimed by Mr Clover and his viral cousins taken over the entire yard.

Crafting your resume

I've been reading and qualifying resumes for an application engineer in my group. I received hundreds of resumes. I have read every single one of them. Being on the reading side of resumes does provide some interesting perspective. Here are a couple of tips. They are really basic, but nevertheless worth repeating.

• A objective spells it out very clearly why you are applying for the job. Tailor it to the specific job. It is the first thing the hiring manager will read on your resume. Often one of the first questions on a phone interview is "what are you looking for in this job?". The objective should answer that question. Do customize it for the job you are applying for.
• List when you are a US Citizen or US Person. Especially when the job requirement states that US citizens are desired (e.g. in the defense or intelligence industry).
• Send your resume in PDF to avoid the layout being screwed up when the hiring manager opens up a Microsoft Word resume.
• Don't call it resume.pdf. I often saved the resumes in a folder to check later in the day. When you call your firstnameLastnameResume.pdf, I did not have to rename the file plus your name sticks out in the file. Keep your brand up.
• Spellcheck. Seriously! This sounds obvious but I encountered lots of spelling errors on resumes.
• Spend a little time on the layout and readability of your resume. When the hiring manager is reading hundreds of resumes, avoid that he or she needs to take a second pass to understand your profile and capabilities.
• Stick with traditional resume formats, unless you are applying for an artist or graphic designer. 2 pages.
• When a new grad, listing your courses and specific project work is a plus and a great hook during the phone interview. "In my fly-robot project, I was able to demonstrate ..."
• When you apply for a computer engineering job, do not list Microsoft Outlook. If you have to highlight that you know how to send and read an email, you are in trouble. Similarly, it is assumed you know how to use a word processor and a spreadsheet. If you created a novel macro for Microsoft Excel, do list it. But detail that is was more than just using Outlook. That's useful.
• If the submission process allows you to add a cover when submitting your resume, do so. A cover letter allows you to sell yourself. You can use full sentences, rather than the short form often used on a resume.
• If you do get a phone interview, do follow up with an email afterwards. Ask for the email address. This is a nice touch and shows you really are interested in the job.

Ronde Van Vlaanderen

It is over: Stijn Devolder wins the Tour of Flanders (Ronde Van Vlaanderen). This is the most beautiful of the one-day bicycle races.

I woke up this Sunday at 6:30AM. Why would you want to wake up that early on a Sunday my wife asked. What would you do if Argentina was playing the world cup final against England at 6:30AM?

The Sporza live video feed did not work. Thus I could not listen to the legendary commentary of Michel Wuyts. Plan B: pick up a video feed on justin.tv and listen to Carl Bertele and co on Sporza radio. In a side window I was following the #rvv tweets. (Next week, I'll try out http://www.tvtweets.be/)

It was a beautiful race. Great weather, fast pace and every second counted. This picture captures a lot. Devolder, in a group of four, attacks on the Muur van Geraardsbergen. Just take a look at the supporters. That's the face (and scream) I made in the kitchen this Sunday morning. Next Sunday : Paris - Roubaix (get details at Steephill.tv)