Penny Hero (dot) Net

I want to log notes on a calendar on my iphone. I also want to be able to log several different types of things separately, but have the option to view them together on the same calendar.

For example, say I want a food log, a workout log, and a mood log. I should be able to thumb an icon, quickly type an entry, select the log name from a drop-down menu, and hit submit. Then, when i want to analyze what I’ve logged that month, I should be able to pull up a calendar-like interface that has my different logs visible across the whole week, month, or year.

Long story short: I want this application, it doesn’t exist, and I can’t create it myself. Let’s call this app “Daily Log”. Interested? Read on…

Stuff I’ve tried already:

• iPhone’s regular calendar:
  Creating an all-day event on the calendar and adding notes is a cumbersome process. Plus, between a log entry and a regular calendar event on the calendar
• iPhone’s Notes application
  manually entering the date at the top and just having a list of unsortable entries in the Notes interface is no more useful than carrying a notebook around in my purse.
• GoalKeep ($3.99 on App store)
  Goalkeep has something like the type of Calendar interface that I want. It has a cool “zoom in” feature that lets you see the day you click on in more detail, and each entry is displayed visually on the calendar with different colors. However, goalkeep isn’t a log application at all, so obviously it doesn’t serve my purpose.
• Any kind of blog client
  Blog clients have the whole “automatically date-stamp the entry” thing down, but they post the entry online, and the calendar view is only visible from a web browser assuming that particular blog has a calendar view (Livejournal does.). I want my entries private and viewable locally.

Here’s how Daily Log would work:

The user thumbs an icon, and Daily Log opens a “Write Log” interface including a text entry box, a pre-filled datestamp box (that can be manually edited), and a drop down menu with a few labels, the option to edit existing labels, and to create a new label. The interface also includes a menu either at the top or the bottom that gives access to the “view logs” interface (more about this later too) and “settings/configuration” where you can create labels, or change other settings.

The user types an entry, selects the label for the entry, and hits submit. Daily Log returns to the Write Log interface, ready for the next entry.

If the user clicks on the “View Logs” button, the app displays a calendar with an overview of a period of time (year, month, week), and displays color-coded previews of the log entries on the dates (a different color for each different label). The user can click on the preview to see the full log entry.

The calendar view also has a link to the app’s configuration, where users can select colors for different labels when in the calendar view, and can show/hide different logs.

Backup through itunes or the web:
This application should only come paired with a web-based service if it is for backup purposes only and does not prevent the user from writing logs without internet connectivity. I personally want to use my Daily Log at any time, any place, for personal, medical, or just plain TMI purposes, so I don’t want anyone but me looking at my log entries.

If possible, application data should be backed up when syncing with iTunes and not require internet connectivity at all.

Here’s some example uses for Daily Log:

• Daily food journal (without extra “count your calories etc” database lookup crap)
• Mood log
• Workout log
• Dream Log
• Menstrual / PMS log
• “here’s what I did today” task logging

Here’s what Daily Log would NOT be:

• NOT a to-do list application (omg there are a million of those.)
• NOT a reminder application
• NOT a social networking client
• NOT be dependent on internet connectivity to use

Anyway…this is one of the reasons I wish I could have taken more (read: some) engineering stuff in college. I’ve got ideas for tools, and the ability to describe them and design them… but I can’t make them. :(

Want to help?

So, in the first serious attempt I’ve made to keep myself from playing WoW for a day, I dusted off my guitar and tried to see how much I remember.

My fingers hurt like hell, but it’s a good hurt. :) I stumbled through a few of the Pumpkins songs I know, some Third Eye Blind, and the few original songs I wrote back in High School (still no lyrics for any of those).

Then I remembered I had a folder of songs and tablature somewhere. Dug it out. Unfortunately, it was full of base tabs from when I was in a band (for what, a month? haha). Most of the tabs were for songs I had wanted to play (Like Naveed), but never got brave enough to actually suggest them.

Anyway, in the back of the folder, I’d stuck a 3-ring notebook with half the pages already torn out. What was left was a bunch of poetry, maybe attempts at song lyrics actually–I barely remember writing any of it.

I found this little snippet though, and I think it’s brilliant. I have a sneaky suspicion that I stole it from someone:

Jazz me up,
I’m like a bad mood soda
Feel your fizz carress my sky.
Do I?

It’s sitting all by itself above some really crappy verse in a different colored pen as if I’d thrown it in there really rushed and then didn’t know what to do with it.

Anyway, I like it. I’m not sure if it’s mine. At the edge of my brain, I think I remember trying to come up with music for it. But of course failing miserably. I’ve been told that my “original” music sounds like Christian pop-rock (no offense… but happy bouncy “rock” music is not my cup of jasmine tea.)

More quotes may follow. Wish me luck with taking a break from WoW. The rest of my life is calling. :)

I’d been telling people I worked with in the Writing Center that in a business environment, emails should be short, easy to reply to, and direct.

I thought I knew what that meant… I’m a good writer, confident in my ability to be professional and clear… direct and concise… I asked a client a question 7 days ago about something related to their company… something I needed to know in order to finish something for them, and never got a reply. At all.

I basically wrote:

Can you give us more information about your [type of service] services? For example, which products on your site apply to these offers? How big can orders be? Do you have any electronic or print materials describing these services we can reference?

And then I said “my goal is to do x, y, and z with this information” in about 2 sentences…

I really thought that this was concise enough. It really only asks one question “can you give us more information” and then clarifies what types of information we need. If I saw an email like that in the Writing Center, I would have said “good job with being clear, clarifying, etc” and thought it fit the business environment.

However, like I said, I never got a reply, and today we were about to finish the project for this client and we still had these unresolved questions.

The bosses from Portland came down today and our President shot an email to this client to get the issue resolved because for one thing, time is running out. His email was literally 2 lines long and just asked

“Hey [name], do you do [x] or do you do [y] for your customers with your [type of service] services? Thanks, [Name].”

…

We got a reply in 5 minutes. He saw my email and suggested that it might have APPEARED that I was asking a complicated question simply by having so many words in my query.

So really folks, short is better. It’s better to shoot off a few emails several times a day with specific questions than to put them all into one email and send it out hoping for a long complete reply.

Moral of the story is: ask one question per email. Make it something that the person can answer sitting down in about 30 seconds. DON’T suggest options or alternative ways of seeing the question. “Either/or” emails work well. Essayistic thoughtful ones do not.

DON’T BE AN ENGLISH MAJOR.

In real life, on days when you want to call in dead when you’re not even sick or you want to just disolve into the rain because it just seems so hopelessly endless, there needs to be little unexpected treasure boxes left behind speakers, bushes, or in your shoes the way that there are hidden mythril trinkets or stronger weapons or stashes of gold in even the darkest, most dangerous boss-ridden dungeon in any RPG worth a damn.

*sigh*

Is this my third post in one day?

I realized today that I need a single place to store, save, and refer to lots of little tiny bits of information… things like notes to self, lists of movies, lists of books, things I don’t want to forget, birthdays, etc. It’s irritating as fuck when i write something down and lose the paper, or when I’m curious what my to-do list was like a year ago so that I can compare it to how busy I am during my senior year. So… I have a feeling that I need to get smart with database programming and php like… yesterday.

Idea for a web app:

It would basically be a running list of anything you want, with a ton of meta-data that could be added quickly. The interface would be simple containing (ideally for people like me who want it fast, now, simple, etc) a textbox where you could basically type your item with some kind of syntax that would tell the app that this is the item (maybe put it in [brackets]). Then you could have simple syntax that would quickly tag the item… The trick would be the ability to add all kinds of meta-data and tag each short entry with as many terms or types of information as you’d like.

For example, I could enter:

[revise wr327 paper] cat:assignment due:20060317 cat:writing cat:school.wr327

(’cat’ means ‘category’ btw. I could replace it with ‘tag’ but i want something descriptive so I can have ‘due’ and the potential for ‘name’ or ‘date’ or something at the “level” of category)

and it would store all that info including a date-timestamp or various other types of automated data like ip address, browser, etc. It would be REALLY spiffy if the app would suggest tags based on ones you already have (like gmail’s auto-complete of email addresses… sounds like I need to learn ajax.)

Then, I’d have a nice shiny published interface that would let me sort my list by any of those categories or tags or other data that I’ve created, quickly generate html ordered lists so that I can copy/paste that into my blog to share with others, etc etc.

This wouldn’t be a social-networking tool or group-aggregate-data networking at all. this would be a personal application, ideally web-based and public in order to be easily accessible from any location, and it would be used as a feature-enhanced book of post-it notes or pocket-notebook.

I’m sure that this could be done! I’d like to learn how to create a tool like this. Can anyone here see problems with my idea or forsee things that I may need to learn that I probably haven’t thought about? I’m one of those girls who has crazy big ideas and doesn’t realize that they’re way over my head. From what I understand, I could do this (minus the auto-complete stuff) in php and mysql… and a lot of hard newb-destroying work.

Also, is it weird that I think of my ideas all from a “user” and “this is what I want it to do and result in” standpoint and not from a “hey I know how to program this, maybe I can program something else that’s cool”?

The following are things I don’t want to forget, insights that I need to re-articulate, and possible points of tension/discovery that I might use in my essay on DH Lawrence.

Examination of HOW Lawrence is a modernist

• like Conrad, he’s reacting against old writing styles and cliches and conventions. Content and form changes, but conrad is more impressionistic and symbolic in his attempt to understand the unconscious mind. Lawrence attempts to articulate the unconscious and put into words the inner workings of human emotions and what he believes modern technological de-humanization is stripping from our human experience. (Look at his essays for where he says we are at fault and western world of materialism is bad etc. maybe…)
• critical or complicated relationship between human beings and the change that the modern world brings to them. Technology intrudes on the brangwens, and it is in part good. it brings success, opportunity etc. individuals can search for their Great Meaning in more places.

Lawrence’s ideas in terms of identity and the “social-construction of the soul” (my term)

• different characters find their individual meaning in different ways. Tom=land. Lydia=her secretiveness? Will=art/archetecture. Anna=children. Ursula=literature/school?
• all are still driven to love someone and be with someone else to find meaning. their different identities come into conflict or create tension with the other. (Anna and Will’s object/need-more struggle… Anna “wins” which difuses their relationship. Only after he finds a bodily object identification and feels empowered through that, does it reinvigorate.

Problems with Lawrence’s attempt to articulate what he and Lawrence both seem to realize is not articulatable.

• Conrad uses dense stream of consciousness symbolism and delayed decoding, imitates the thinking of a human being that suggests the effect of discovering and knowing the unconsciousness.
• Lawrence invents a new language to try to articulate what can’t be articulated in our language. I think this is very problematic. In my own reading, after reading his theories, it virtually “killed” the impact of his novel because what had previously been metaphor and subtle became direct and explicit. It just “felt wrong” in that way that can’t be clearly articulated. begs the question… how could lawrence think that he would be capable of doing justice to the unconscious pre-language workings of the human soul.

Other:

• Lawrence’s relationships are an oscillation between being the drive to be independent, and the drive to be with someone else and find meaning through someone else. Lawrence theorizes this in a metaphysical/psudoscientific way in his essays and believes in the magnetic fields etc. but the oscillation and back and forth is key. creates a living changing conduit that contributes to the health of the Relationship as an entity.

Paul armstrong says: power and justice are incompatible (page 5 on my preview)

possible that *shock* the two women characters are the only two heroic/incorruptable characters because they are inherently powerless, and transparent conduits through which male power travels… until the death of the two men in antonia’s life.

antonia as a female politician essay.

The livejournal version of my post about girls and linux is still getting some discussion. I replied to a user’s post, and I wanted to re-post this part of the conversation here too, just for fun. I like that blogger gets more attention from search engines than livejournal, plus I want to save this in a non-lj space.

Basically, davev1968 said, “stereotypes exist because they are, at least in part, true.” This is a really common response to people who are trying to deconstruct stereotyping language or ideologies. So I replied in part:

…however, I do also want to remind everyone that stereotypes and the “reality” they describe have a more complicated relationship than just the idea that they “have some grain of truth” or they are “generally actually true.”

One perpetuates the other and reinforces the other unless you make yourselves conscious of it and work to deconstruct it or work against it. Stereotypes are not “natural” as you describe them. They are constructed by people trying to describe reality, but then they themselves reinforce that reality and make it difficult to break out of those destructive patterns. to say that they are “natural” is to take a back-seat and simply “accept” things that aren’t always true. It used to be that it was “natural” for blacks to be slaves, and women to be submissive to men. While these are more extreme examples, it’s still exactly the same social structure that makes it happen.

Altering these “less extreme” stereotypes like girls-hate-geeks means fostering discussions like this, reminding people that the world is always more complicated and deserves to be described by things other than stereotypes. Once that ball gets rolling, intelligence will really seem more attractive, and it will be more “normal” for women to be as “intelligent” as men.

So, there’s some stuff. I wanted to save this for later for if I ever have to defend the world’s complexity and destroy people’s lazy tendency to over-simplify things again.

heh. ok. get me the fuck away from my computer. I have homework to do.

A lot of people misunderstand synaesthesis and think that one sense actually gets imposed on or mixed up with another sense… that we have distracting hallucinations or that we’re completely unable to even see the number 2 if it’s written on paper of the wrong shade of green for example. (hahaha.)

So, while reading about cognition and how we create and compose patterns on the information we recieve in order to process it, I came up with a way to explain my type of synaesthesis to people who don’t have it:

If you look at a picture of a heart (like this: ♥) printed in say, black ink on white paper, what color is most likely to also pop into mind? Many people (especially in western cultures) already have a color associated with that icon and would say pink or red, right? If you look at a black and white photo of a banana, what color or smell might your mind also recall? Yellow and banana smell, right?

While these types of associations are usually culturally or experiencially constructed, having synaesthesis is very similar to this type of perception. When I see a number or letter, my mind also percieves or knows that the character is also a certain color or texture, similarly to how someone looking at a black and white banana might also still percieve or know that it is yellow. It’s not that something is imposed on it, and it’s also not as if the text visually is a color that it’s not on the page (the ink really is still black on white). It’s just another aspect of the text that I’m aware of.

Anyway, this kind of analogy or description might be useful to those of us who has ever wanted to explain it to someone else, or whose been faced with a philosophy or psychology teacher (or in my case, a math teacher) who totally botches their description of it.

Cross-posted in my blog and .

A lot of people misunderstand synaesthesis and think that one sense actually gets imposed on or mixed up with another sense… that we have distracting hallucinations or that we’re completely unable to even see the number 2 if it’s written on paper of the wrong shade of green, for example. (hahaha.)

So, while reading about cognition and how we create and compose patterns on the information we recieve in order to process it, I came up with a way to explain my type of synaesthesis to people who don’t have it:

If you look at a picture of a heart (like this: ♥) printed in say, black ink on white paper, what color is most likely to also pop into mind? Many people (especially in western cultures) already have a color associated with that icon and would say pink or red, right? If you look at a black and white photo of a banana, what color or smell might your mind also recall? Yellow and banana smell, right?

While these types of associations are usually culturally or experiencially constructed, having synaesthesis is very similar to this type of perception. When I see a number or letter, my mind also percieves or knows that the character is also a certain color or texture, similarly to how someone looking at a black and white banana might also still percieve or know that it is yellow. It’s not that something is imposed on it, and it’s also not as if the text visually is a color that it’s not on the page (the ink really is still black on white). It’s just another aspect of the text that I’m aware of.

Anyway, this kind of analogy or description might be useful to those of us who has ever wanted to explain it to someone else, or whose been faced with a philosophy or psychology teacher (or in my case, a math teacher) who totally botches their description of it.

Cross-posted in my journal and my blog.