Brian Keng

  • Take a chance

    “If you’re not scared you’re not taking a chance and, if you’re not taking a chance…then what the hell are you doing?”
    – HIMYM

    “If you don’t screw up at least half of the things you do, you aren’t trying hard enough.”
    – Arnold Wytenburg

    I’m convinced we do not take enough risks — at least not about the important things.  Doing what you love, being with those whom you love and figuring out how to love.  All good things to take risks on.  Life’s too short to play it safe.  You’ve got less than 30,000 days left, what are you going to do?

  • Engineers and Technology

    “We humans are actually not interested in computing, what we’re interested in is information…”
    – Pranav Mistry Sixth Sense TED presentation.

    Sometimes it takes a genius to tell us something obvious.  Scientists, engineers and all other technical people should listen up.  People don’t care about how technology works, we just want it to work!

    Your mom watching a DVD, your friend talking on an iPhone or your nephew playing with a transformer, they all have one thing in common.  They don’t care that it takes millions of man hours to build, decades of R&D or the smartest people in the world, they just want it to work.  And work well.  And that’s not an easy job because it encompasses design, advanced features, novelty and a bunch of other things but one thing it does not include is understanding, knowing or caring how it’s built.

    Maybe if we engineers can get this into our heads, we can rule the world.  But until then, I’ll settle with playing with these cool devices.

  • Without a data plan

    One of the great things about smart phones is the plethora of things you can do with them, that is until you find out you need a data plan to do anything meaningful.  In that case, it’s like having an XBox 360 and finding out your only game is pong.  Great hardware but limited functionality.  Well I was in this same predicament after I bought my Blackberry Curve.

    For a while now, I’ve been using Thunderbird for email.  I like it.  It’s simple, free and does what I want it to do.  Recently, I’ve switched to using the Lightning plugin and migrated my calendar over to Google Calendar because I needed something a bit more powerful than just Rainlendar.  This worked great for me.  I had a full calendar program with everything I needed (including the little alarm that you can snooze that keeps popping up which reminds you to do something).  And of course, I just assumed that I could somehow sync my calendar on to my Blackberry which just goes to show the naivety of my youth.

    As it turns out you can sync your calendar with your Blackberry using Google Sync IF you have a data plan.  This is not true if you only have wifi.  Because not having a data plan is as close to blasphemy as you get with wireless carriers.  You’re an outcast in a post-apocalyptic wasteland where you’re left to fend for yourself where your only glimpse of hope is finding that one person in the entire interweb that has the same problem as you do AND has solved it.  Unfortunately, I could not find that person, although I did find many who were in the same predicament.

    Another solution was that you could use the built in Blackberry program to sync your calendar but only IF you use Microsoft Outlook or have your calendar in a CSV format.  So either I could either switch to one of the most popular email clients that’s probably just as easy to use, much better supported and already installed on my PC OR figure out a way to get my calendar in a CSV format.  Guess which one I chose?  Yep, get my calendar in CSV format.  Here’s how I did it.

    1. I set a Scheduled Task on my PC to run every 2 hours to download my Google Calendar in iCal format locally to my hard drive.
    2. After it syncs, I wrote a Perl script which runs and parses my local calendar and converts it to CSV format.
    3. Every time I connect my Blackberry to my computer, it automatically syncs +/- 30 days worth of events of my local calendar in CSV format.

    And Voila!  I have the ability to sync my calendar to my mobile device.  Of course there are a few caveats.  For example, it’s a one way sync (due to nature of the syncing program) but I’m okay with that because I rarely set events on my calendar through my phone.  That almost always happens when I’m triage email anyways.  I’m pretty satisfied with my setup though and it’s nice to know that even if I wouldn’t survive in a post-apocalyptic wasteland at least I can sync my calendar with my Blackberry.

  • Data Plans

    Hi, I’m Brian, I have a blackberry and I don’t have a data plan.

    Sacrilege cry the masses! But I have a good reason and it’s simple, I get email. Not a lot of email but just enough.  Enough to know that a data plan would decrease my productivity.  Let me explain.

    On any given day I usually have between 6-12 hours where I can do work.  This includes coding, reading papers, writing papers or miscellaneous work (TA, course work, supervising undergrads etc.).  Now this sounds like a lot but it really isn’t.  And the reason is you can’t get any meaningful work done unless you have at least a two hour block of time (although some would argue 45 mins. but I think that applies more to meetings).  Think about it.  To sit down, get into the right mind set (i.e. context switch), remember where you left off so that you’re ready to do some kind of efficient work on that task takes at least half a hour.  Put in another hour of real work then add 30 mins. for bad estimations (because things always take longer than you expect) and two hours is up already.

    This is of course a lower bound on that block of time you need.  For coding or writing papers, I like to reserve at least 4 hours.  So what’s the problem some may ask, 4 is less than 6 right?  Wrong.  Like most real world problems, there are frictions.  Things like meetings, chatting with peers, noisy environments, meals and you guessed it email.

    I get somewhere between 10 and 40 emails a day.  And if I had a data plan then for every email I get, my phone would make a cute little sound and starts flashing this tiny little red light.  As soon as I hear that sound or catch a glimpse of that flashing diode, I’m distracted and there goes my continuous chunk of time.  All of a sudden a 12 hour block of time gets divided into 10 different pieces and my productivity goes down the drain.  This isn’t a new realization either, it’s well documented that these minor distractions bring down efficiency (reading is great isn’t it?) like a gentle breeze across a house of cards.  I don’t know about you but I like to be productive and that’s why my name is Brian, I have a blackberry and I don’t have a data plan.

    P.S. I realize it’s possible to get a data plan and not have push email capabilities but I feel like it’s a waste of money to get a data plan and then not take advantage of one of the major features.  Plus, I think I’d have a hard time explaining to people my reasoning.  It’s just easier for now to not have a data plan.

  • Updates

    I’ve been woefully neglectful of updating my website (web log?).  I think my original intention for installing WordPress was to practice writing short essays around 500 words about ideas that were both on my mind and others might find interesting.  In retrospect, this was ambitious which is clear from the number of posts I’ve made in the past six months.  That’s going to change.

    Here is a list of things I’ve already done:

    • Updated my About page.
    • Added a Publications page of my published papers.
    • Upgraded WordPress (sorry hackers).
    • Enabled comments.

    I’ve decided that I want to update my web log regularly and my inspiration comes from two places.  The first inspiration comes from Seth Godin‘s blog which he updates on a regular basis.  He has great insights into a variety of topics and he just spits them out I presume as he thinks about them almost on a daily basis.  Producing quantity and quality aren’t mutually exclusive.  The second comes from an essay by Paul Graham about how to write a good essay.  My main takeaways were that they should be about topics you have thought a lot about and things that people will find surprising (because who wants to read about sliced bread?).  It’s great to have smart people to learn from.

    So how am I going to accomplish this?  Well I recently got a Blackberry Curve 8900 and I’ve been filling the MemoPad with a bunch of random things that I happen to be thinking about.  I think this should reduce my writing time as well as ensure the quality doesn’t go down the drain.  Because I wouldn’t want to keep all the surprising and interesting things that I notice and think about to myself.  That would just be selfish…

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