April 2nd, 2009
Tags: blog, holiday, japan
Posted in General | 4 Comments »
August 30th, 2008
Earlier this year I had to choose a topic for my honours/thesis. Of the few ideas I had floating around many of them would have been implausible (or maybe even impossible) to do as part of honours, so I settled on one of my more do-able ideas – Email Addiction.
The main reason I chose email addiction was because I felt to a certain degree I was “addicted” to email. The first thing I did when upon getting online was check my email – regardless if I was expecting an email or not. My email was set to refresh every minute and display a message box if any new emails came in so I would be notified when a new email arrived. Anyone else in the same boat as me?
Interestingly enough, there is heaps discussion related to email addiction online – Googling “email addiction” gives you a whole heap of results, all mainly on how to cure/deal with email addiction. However, running the same search in Google Scholar gives you close to nothing; the majority of research focuses on Internet addiction and not email addiction.
So, after many months of reading a lot of literature, changing my topic to “Email Addiction in the Workplace” so it is more focussed, writing up Thesis A, creating a survey and conducting a pilot study I’ve finally reached the next milestone – conducting my actual survey! You may be wondering why I’m telling you this, well it’s because it is an online survey and I would greatly appreciate it if you could help me out and fill out the survey – it should take you no more than 10 minutes. Thanks in advance 
Unfortunately, there is no incentive to fill out the survey other than the warm fuzzy feeling that you’ve helped me in my thesis For those who are interested, I plan on posting up a summary of my results/findings after finishing my thesis which should be around late October/early November.
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Tags: addiction, email, productivity, university
Posted in General | 1 Comment »
August 28th, 2008
Few months ago I had a good look into Google Charts API and it was great! If you are not aware, Google Charts API basically allows you to create pretty graphs simply by using an URL with correct parameters specified. It is fairly flexible, with many things you can change and customise – which is where it becomes bit complicated. It is quite easy to generate a chart, but it wasn’t as easy to generate the exact chart I needed. So below are 6 examples charts with explanations and tips that will hopefully help you understand Google Charts better.
A few notes before I start
- The data/labels for all the graphs here have no meaning at all – just examples that I have come up with.
- I’ll explain each parameter probably only once (since they are generally the same across all graphs). If something is different or special I’ll explain it again.
- If you have any other tips/hints please share
» Continue reading 'How to use Google Charts...'
Tags: api, google, guide, reference
Posted in Tutorial | 10 Comments »
August 5th, 2008
When Google Maps was released in early 2005 it was quite cool to be able to see a birds-eye view of various places (even if you could only zoom in so far). Since then, there has been many improvements – more view types, clearer pictures, closer zoom etc.
In mid 2007, a new view type: Street View was made available. I must say, it is quite cool – Street View allows you to actually see the street as if you were there at the place. This view was only available to a selection of cities in the USA and Australia (the ‘birth’ place of Google Maps) was left out…until today!
Yes, as of today (5th August 2008) there is Street View in Google Maps for pretty much all of Australia! At first I was quite excited, as I’ve had a look at Street View in USA before (1 Infinite Loop ) and thought “Wouldn’t it be cool if this was in Australia?”. Now that it is in Australia I must say it is cool, but definitely also scary! In my opinion, being able to see your own house on Google Maps and with the correct (or a very close) address feels scary!
» Continue reading 'Google Maps – Street View…in...'
Tags: australia, google
Posted in Cool stuff | 3 Comments »
June 23rd, 2008
Quite some time ago (about late 2007) I saw this documentary called “21 Up Japan” which is similar to the “Up Series“. The idea of the documentary is the follow a group of children from when they were 7 years old, and then every 7 years they go back to them and see how they are going. The interviewers had a set of semi-structured questions which they asked, and it was very interesting to see how everyone’s answers changed from when they were 7, 14, and 21.
After seeing this documentary I decided I wanted to do something similar – make my own time capsule However it wasn’t until a few months later in early 2008 when I found an old exercise book which had some short stories that I had written in 1995 that really got me started. Reading those stories made me realise how much can change in a few years (and how much we can forget!). My time capsule is bit different to 21 Up Japan - it does have a set of questions which I plan on answering once every year or so, but the majority of entries are more diary-like entries of times when I feel like something important has happened.
» Continue reading 'creating a time capsule'
Tags: photography, time, time capsule
Posted in Cool stuff, General | No Comments »
