ndrw.me

Pretty much the most badass technology to come out of Silicon Valley in a long time. It’s a completely new camera technology that lets you “shoot first, focus later.”

As described by one of Lytro’s investors:

People often refer to taking a picture as capturing the moment, but conventional photography does not really capture the moment. It captures one angle, one set of light, and one focus of the moment. If you are a professional photographer, you might capture the best parts of the moment. If you are someone like me, you most certainly will not. With Ren’s light field camera, you actually capture the moment or at least all of the light that visually represents the moment. Once you have captured the moment, you can go back at any time and get the picture that you want.

The idea for this company actually came from a Stanford CS student’s PhD dissertation. He went on to build his research into a viable consumer company, Lytro, which has attracted $50m in funding so far. You can see many more demo photos here.

An actual camera is scheduled to come out to market later this year. Personally, I’m more excited about the potential that such an innovative technology brings.

Decided not to.

If I was living in a city and car-free, I could see myself using carsharing as a renter quite a bit. But right now, and from a car owner’s point of view, it’s just not at all a good idea.

I love the concept of communal property for the sake of efficiency, and even as a car-lover, I do see car ownership as a giant societal issue needing some disruption. I’m a hugely practical person, and if a tool (the car) costs me a giant chunk of my monthly income but is sitting around 90% of the time… well, then that’s a crappy tool and I’m an idiot for using it.

Ideally, from an efficien-holic point of view, Henry Ford wouldn’t have made the automobile affordable to all, the car wouldn’t have become a status symbol, the auto giants wouldn’t have lobbied Congress to kill public transportation infrastructure, and the Interstates wouldn’t have been built. Yes, that’s a invidious thing for me to say as a car guy, but if none of that occurred in the past century, I wouldn’t be a car guy today.

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Online to-do list managers are a dime a dozen these days. That’s good and bad: You get lots of choices, but many interesting contenders get lost among the latter pages of your Google search.

I don’t like displaying colleges on my apparel, but Stanford’s something different. It’s not a school I can get into just by trying my hardest. It’s not even my top school at the moment. It’s not just a school. Stanford, ladies and gentlemen, is a lifestyle.

Stanford is a dream. It signifies ambition, a pure and sincere ambition to do something great. Year after year, it upholds the collective longing of hundreds of thousands of high school Juniors and Seniors. No other school has attracted me so. Not Harvard, MIT, Oxford. I’m not sure exactly how; Stanford exudes an inexplicably intriguing scent to us young honeybees buzzing with anticipation for college. Perhaps their genius students and professors have devised a magical method of propagating that top-notch reputation into a worldwide obsession.

Anyhow, a few months down the road, I will be joining the thousands of students around the world hitting Submit to Stanford’s Common App. Perhaps I’ll do it just to be part of the club that attempted “the Stanford” and failed. Perhaps, in a far less likely development, the admissions experts over in Palo Alto will click to the next Stanford application. Perhaps, they will detect a glimmer of potential. And perhaps, the applicant will be me. Perhaps, the letter I frame on my wall years later will not be one of rejection, shown to guests as novelty and as evidence of my life-long admiration to Stanford. Perhaps, that letter will be treasured as a token of the euphoria I felt on a spring morning back when I was still a lanky, big-dreaming high school kid. Perhaps, I will be Cardinal red and white.

BSODs don’t usually scare me, but this is kinda scary because of the circumstances. All I had open were Office 2010 and IE9. Then IE suddenly crashed and Windows Security Center popped up and told me my firewall was off. Instinctively I turned it back on but the window that showed up was ‘Vista Internet Security 2011’. It looks and sounds like Microsoft Security Essentials but it’s not, and it automatically started “scanning”. That’s a sign of trouble. Then, out of nowhere, BSOD.

Now I’ve restarted my computer with WiFi turned off for safety. I need to figure out how this malware landed on my computer when I haven’t downloaded anything.

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