Tic-Tac-Toe in many dimensions

Avril started to think about playing TiC-Tac-Toe in 3 or even more dimensions. We have even prototyped a simple iOS to play it in 3-D and 4-D: Hyper Tic Tac Toe.

Polish microcar Smyk

During my visit to the Muzeum Inżynierii Miejskiej in Cracow, I saw this interesting prototype of the car developed in 1957. A youtube video shows how its door is in the front. Quite interesting!

Watching TED talks on a long flight

For my long flight from San Francisco to Cape Town, I downloaded a few TED talks on my iPad. I picked them very quickly right before my flight, so I wasn't sure how good they were. I enjoyed almost every one of them. Here's a list, so that I remember what I watched:

• Martin Jacques: Understanding the rise of China, youtube
• Rufus Griscom and Alisa Volkman: Let's talk parenting taboos, youtube
• Nigel Marsh: How to make work-life balance work, youtube
• Christopher McDougall: Are we born to run?, youtube
• Van Jones: The economic injustice of plastic, youtube
• Anders Ynnerman: Visualizing the medical data explosion, youtube
• Bruce Feiler: The council of dads, youtube
• Elizabeth Lesser: Take "the Other" to lunch, youtube
• Cynthia Breazeal: The rise of personal robots, youtube
• Dale Dougherty: We are makers, youtube
• Johanna Blakley: Social media and the end of gender, youtube

Help buy rainforest land in Ecuador

This is a great opportunity to help indigenous people preserve their land and make a statement about supporting causes like this one. I donated to 300 Acres and I'm very happy about my small way to help.

in reference to: http://www.300acres.com/ (view on Google Sidewiki)

Consider biking

Few people do it but visiting the Yosemite Valley by bike is very pleasant. You can bring your own bike (this is what I do) if you have a bike carrier for your car. But you can also rent bikes in the park.

More information on the bike trails (including a trail map) and rental information is available here: http://www.yosemitepark.com/Activities_Biking_BikeRulesandTrailMap.aspx

I also found a nice video overview of biking in Yosemite: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JHauqjTHw4Y

in reference to: Yosemite National Park - Plan Your Visit (U.S. National Park Service) (view on Google Sidewiki)

This is a great rule

The original Reasonable Person Principle from CMU is a great way to think about communities of people, especially for online communities when you do not see someone in person: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~csd-grad/reasonableperson.html

in reference to:

"In spite of all our best efforts, disconnects and misunderstandings
will still occur. The Reasonable Person Principle is an approach
for working through them. When a disconnect occurs, it often seems
that the other person is behaving unreasonably (“I can't believe X
could have done Y!”). The Reasonable Person Principle says that
you should always assume that other people are behaving reasonably,
even if it doesn't appear that way. Rather than attacking them,
ask questions to find out why they did what they did. Almost always,
you'll discover that there is a reasonable explanation. This way,
you can defuse the situation quickly and move forward constructively."
- Startup Company Culture (view on Google Sidewiki)

Feeds and permalinks

Sidewiki supports feeds for a given web page. Admittedly they are not easy to discover (we're working on improving that) but the are described in our API documentation. Look for "Retrieving Sidewiki entries written for a particular web page" in http://code.google.com/apis/sidewiki/docs/2.0/developers_guide_protocol.html

Sidewiki also supports permalinks for each post. When you're reading this entry, click on the "Share" menu in the bottom right. The first menu item is "Link" which is a permalink to the post. Here's an example: http://www.google.com/sidewiki/entry/bryan.working/id/ebSnkQ-d7jclMKruX1Pqs0W06bs

You can also use the "Share" menu to share via email, Twitter or Facebook.

in reference to:

"If there was a way to get RSS feeds for SideWiki entries on a per-page basis that would have been amazing. There are multiple organizations, sites and pages that I would like to subscribe to and get constant feeds of what people are saying about the pages. Currently I cannot seem to find an easy way of doing that with SideWiki. There is something about having hyperlinks to your Twitter posts which makes twitter special. Features where I can at-least get permanent links or URLs of SideWiki comments; would have made SideWiki golden."
- ThousandtyOne! - .NET, Life and Logical Thoughts By Rajiv Popat - Google SideWiki - Amazing Story Telling. Interesting Product. (view on Google Sidewiki)