Work Related

• ConnectedTV team. This is my day job and rightfully consumes the most of my waking hours of probably anything else. I love my job and what I do, so the time spent here goes by without noticing sometimes.
• Photography. This is the second most time consuming thing I do. “Snapping” photos doesn’t take much time one would think, but when you combine sorting, post processing, setup/teardown etc. it easily consumes much more time. I’ve done like 50-60 exec headshots, 40-50 non-exec headshots, countless corp events, and a ton more in the past year alone so this definitely does consume a lot of my time. I’ve been slowly scaling back on this, but might decide to scale back more aggressively still.
• Evangelism. This is something I do in many forms, ranging from leading up an internal employee evangelism team to attending conference and other tech events. I’ve been to four major conferences this year alone (Mac World, SWSX, Web 2.0, IDF) with more coming. 
• Point of contact. I am the point of contact on a lot of different things at Yahoo!, ranging from DHS/FEMA in disaster related things, to handling our Apple EPP relationship for North America, to the League of Women’s Voters since I maintain hosting for vote411.org. 
• Working groups / committees. These vary from time to time, but I am usually involved in a couple at any given moment either inside Yahoo! or outside but Yahoo! related somehow. These range from stuff like the Green Coding Initiative, to our YEF Grants committee, to outside stuff like being on DHS’s NetGuard working group. 
• Side projects / hacks. I’m always looking for new ways to optimize some process or fill a niche need of mine or others so I am constantly building up small side projects that I am working on or want to do someday.

Personal

• Reading. Probably the single biggest consumer of my time outside work. I love reading and am constantly chewing through books. I think I have like ten I am flipping back and forth between on my Kindle now with over 100 more waiting to be started either on the Kindle or in printed book form.
• Photography. Not just something I do for work, but also something I do for fun. It’s challenging and allows me to try and develop an artistic side.
• Yoga. Except for the past two weeks (been injured from my last hike) I’ve been doing Yoga three times a week for the last two months. This is something I hope to resume very soon once my chest feels up to it.
• Traveling. I LOVE to travel to new places. In the past year the new places I’ve been to are Cayman Islands, England, and Bonaire. I’m scheduled to go to India sometime in November for the first time and will be spending two weeks in Malaysia, Singapore, Kuala Lumpor, and Sipadan Water Village in March of next year. I’ve also done a lot of domestic traveling over the past year and will likely do more before the year is out.
• Outdoor activities. Predominantly this involves scuba diving and hiking lately, but I also enjoy stuff like sky diving, water skiing, etc too, just not found the time recently.
• Programming for fun. I always have some project or another I am working on for fun. This could range from working on my personal website, to building some twitter client, or coding for some platform I am passionate about (like OSX/iPhone).

As you can see from the above list, there isn’t a lot of activities (in the personal category at least) strictly related to just socializing or meeting new people. Maybe that’s why I am almost 30 and still single. Hmm, something else to think about.

I’m sure the above list isn’t all inclusive by any means either, it’s just what came to mind when I thought about it. So, now that you know where my time is spent, what consumes your time? Feel free to share in the comments or postback from your own blog.

My Yahoo! wrapped 2006 Honda Accord

I’m going to repost the Q&A from the Flickr set here as well:

Q: Did you really pay for this to be done?
A: No, Yahoo!’s buzz marketing team paid for this.

Q: Does Yahoo! pay you for this?
A: No. I have no monetary compensation for having my car wrapped.

Q: Why are you doing it then?
A: There are a number of reasons, but the simplest of them is that I truly love Yahoo! this much. You might not agree with my passion and ways to express it, but that doesn’t stop me from wanting to spread the word about how awesome Yahoo! is.

Q: Where can I see it?
A: I have my car on campus most days. If you are on campus, ping me and I would be happy to show it to you. Otherwise, check my blog and you can find out about my scheduled public appearances with it (aka conferences, Yahoo! events, etc).

Q: Can this be done to my car?
A: Definitely! Ping me and I will tell you where to find out more information (assuming you are an employee of course).

If anyone has any other questions, please feel free to leave them in a comment or IM/email me. I’d be happy to answer any questions anyone has.

The first scheduled appearance off campus of the car is at the car show which is part of Camp Yahoo! 2007. I’ve heard rumors it might be positioned center stage, but we will wait and see if that becomes a reality or not. Unfortunately that is not open to the general public and I am not sure when the first time it will be out in public yet (other than my normal daily driving). Please keep an eye on my blog as I will post future public appearances of the car here, assuming you are interested in seeing it in person.

Finally, if you see me out and about in public, please be sure and come up and say hello. It just might get you something for free by doing so. =) (no promises, but it should be something cool).

Let me know what you think!!

2 Burning Rope Problem

You are given two ropes which when lit take one hour to burn. Neither rope burns at the same rate and neither burn at a consistent rate. Your task is to light the burning ropes and use them to determine exactly when 45 minutes has passed.

Magician/Assistant 52 card trick

A magician has a standard deck of 52 cards (aka four suits of 13 cards each). The magician removes five cards from the deck and discards the rest. He then chooses one as his card, pockets it, and then leaves four cards on the table in a straight line without overlapping and all turned in the same fashion. The magician leaves the room and then the assistant comes in and is immediately able to say the exact card the magician had. How do they do it? There are no secret tricks, just basic mathematics.

I think I might have a solution now to the first one (not going to say it and ruin your challenge), but the second one still has me a bit stumped. Yes, one could cheat and look it up on the Internet, but what is the fun in that? Ponder these and see if you can come up with the answer!

The specs are as follows:
AMD Athlon 64
DFI Lanparty UT nf4 SLI-DR Motherboard
2 gb Corsair DDR-400 Memory w/ Vantec copper heatspreaders
(2) XfX nVidia Geforce 6600 GT 128mb DDR3 PCI-e Video Cards
80gb Seagate SATA drive
Teac CD-W540E CD-R/RW Burner (IDE)
Plextor Dual Layer DVD-R/RW Burner (SATA)
Antec P160 Anodized Aluminum Case
500w Aspire Dual Fan Aluminum Power Supply

Although I have spent all of about maybe a couple hours playing games on it (I’m not much of a gamer), I can say it is very impressive even at the highest settings possible. I went ahead and ran 3dMark05 on it and it scored 7,018. It’s 3dMark03 score was 15,536.

It’s definitely nice to have him back in the office.