Four months at wolframalpha.comDecember 28, 2009
Has it really been four months already? What a wonderful experience it has been this fall working on Wolfram Alpha. I have been given opportunities to work on very interesting and challenging projects, and a few weeks ago the first two of those projects went live on the site.
It has also been a very worthwhile experience working from home. There is definitely the opportunity to get more done as there is no commute time, etc. It is also pretty nice being able, as a consultant, to buy your own hardware. Gone are the days of working on a 4 year old computer. I splurged a bit and got a Quad Core i7 from Dell with 8GB RAM, dual widescreen monitors, and Windows 7. Is it ever nice having 3840 horizontal pixels of resolution, and now having had a quad core, I'd never go back. Multi-core CPUs are a beautiful thing for power users that do a lot of multi-tasking.
The downside to working at home, for me, has been missing out on interacting directly with the great people at Wolfram Research in Champaign. While I was down there in October, I had the chance to meet quite a few people, and it would be fun to work in the office there with them. (That being said, we definitely won't be moving to the US any time soon!)
Starting in January, I'll be playing hockey once a week with my former colleagues at Navtech. I'm really looking forward to that!
A nice history of RIMDecember 28, 2009
http://www.engadget.com/2009/12/28/ten-years-of-blackberry/Defining intelligenceDecember 16, 2009
Thought of the day:
Intelligence is the ability to form high level concepts from low level observations, and then to be able to relate those high level concepts to new low level observations to solve problems.older >>
