Some quotation marks

I'm trying out a new Blogger template, one of the standard ones from Google.  I wanted to customize it with my own blockquote style.

Here are a couple images for quotes:

Also reduced size:

Public communication, web 2.0, and all that

I'm not the most wired person out there, but I think I'm definitely above average. The web presents enormous opportunities to communicate with the general public and connect with people who have specific interests. This is very different from personal, one-on-one conversation, which I discussed in an earlier post. The idea of an interactive, user-defined internet is frequently called "Web 2.0."

I'll discuss some of my personal experiences with Web 2.0. (See Tim O'Reilly's article for an in-depth discussion of what Web 2.0 means.)

• Blogging
  Well, this here is a blog! Blogging is a great way for me to practice writing and expressing myself. If you're a really popular blogger like Tim Ferriss, you can have very lively conversations with your internet audience. No one really talks to me about my blog. Not that I really expect anyone to, given that I write about random topics of personal interest and make no effort to connect with a target audience. But if you want to communicate with people via blogging, you can definitely make that happen. Even if it's on a small scale like sharing infant photos with the family.
  I really like using Blogger because of the tags, anonymity, and free storage space.
  
• Facebook
  I like Facebook a lot. I will frequently double-post on Facebook and Blogger. I post on Facebook to let my friends know about a link I like. It's much less intrusive to do so via Facebook than via email. I also get faster feedback. When people log onto Facebook, they know consciously that they are having fun and blowing time. They are in the mood to respond. Facebook is viral in the sense that when people see one or two comments to a posted link, they themselves feel compelled to join in the discussion. In contrast, email is this awful catch-all for communication. My email is probably sandwiched in between a reminder about a meeting and a message from the boss. I also post on Blogger so that I can have a personal record for myself.
  The main difference between Facebook and other Web2.0 tools is the sophisticated privacy tools on Facebook. So depending on the user, Facebook is not as "open" as other platforms.
  
• Flickr
  Photography is only a minor hobby of mine, so I don't spend too much time on Flickr or not as much time as some people do. I use Flickr pretty much the same way I use Blogger, to keep personal records that happen to be public. The main reason I chose Flickr is the excellent interface for tagging and viewing photos.
  Sometimes I'll get some nice, unexpected comments on my (amateur) photographs. That's the magic of tagging and geotagging on Flickr. It's so easy for people to find photographs of a specific location or specific tag. Two of my photos have been chosen for the Schmap online travel guides. I think it's because I did such a detailed job of tagging my photos. There are probably better photos out there, but mine were easy to find. I'm glad to pitch in my bit to make Web 2.0 the great resource it is. Flickr allows me to explore other people's interests and photographic creativity. Many photos, including mine, are licensed under Creative Commons so they can be re-used for non-profit purposes. I'm not too familiar with the social aspects of Flickr, but it appears there's quite a community there. You can join all sorts of groups. I was asked to submit photo to a Sharpie pen group!
  
• Forums
  I'm a member of the ModSquadHockey forum and I used to hang out a lot in musical forums like Finishing the Chat and BroadwayWorld. Reading forums is a fantastic way to quickly acquire knowledge for a new hobby. I figured out how to pick my own hockey equipment and learned what theatregoers look for when they attend a play or musical. I'm still a member of the hockey forum because I really liked the atmosphere on the board (vigilant administrators are a must) and I periodically answer questions. I try to give back.
  
• Wiki
  Wikis can be interactive but not on the level of blogs, Facebook, Flickr, and forums. The interaction is with the members of the wiki who write and modify the contents of the wiki. My only experience so far is submitting reference cards to the Starting Strength Wiki. I did get a nice note from the Starting Strength Wiki administrator, praising my contribution. I'm interested in doing more with wikis but I haven't gotten around to it yet.

George Orwell on clear writing

George Orwell wrote this nice essay about obfuscated writing and how to avoid it. He was responding to the political writing culture of his time (1946).

I used to worry about my writing on this blog, but nowadays I write crappy first drafts. After using Wordle to look for common words in my blog, I have become more vigilant about excising superfluous words, such as "just." I like how blog writing has made me throw words on a page without worry, but I would like to practice good writing now and then. As Orwell says, bad writing comes from laziness. Eventually bad writing leads to poor thinking, even for bright people. I'd like to avoid that result.

My wordle

Apparently, it's a fad right now to use Wordle to generate word clouds from text. The more frequent the word, the larger it appears in the word cloud. I input the last 500 posts of my blog (roughly July 2005 - July 2008) minus the footers ("Posted by ..."). Here's the result, with common English words like "the" omitted:



I see that I'm guilty of abusing extraneous words such as "like", "really", and "just" in my prose, but hopefully not in my daily speech! "Time" and "work" are very prominent, which makes sense. I'm glad that my major activities "physics" and "hockey" are also fairly large in font. There's a sense of expectation in the words "will", "want," and "try." Sadly, I don't see "do" or "done" in the cloud. The word cloud is uniformly positive with words like "good", "great", and "nice." The size of the word "people" shows that I'm not a closeted nerd.

Hello audience!

I checked my Feedburner account and apparently I have 10 subscribers to my blog's RSS feed. As far as I know, the only people who read my blog regularly are my sister, my officemate, and a productivity guy I met online. So who are all the rest of you?

I started this blog so I could record my thoughts and feel less lonely. I think of the World Wide Web as an imaginary audience I'm writing for, so I have to maintain a certain level of coherence and quality (just like the writers who imagine writing for a brother or sister). I've given out my blog URL to a lot of friends, so maybe some of my friends are stopping here? Or people who are interested in the stuff I wrote on the Fisher Files and GTD?

Now I feel a little embarrassed. People actually care about the drivel I write even though I'm clearly talking to myself? I guess that's kind of nice. If you feel like it, drop me a line or some feedback. Tell me who you are. My contact information can be found here.

Line spacing issues in blog

I've noticed line spacing problems in some of my posts. In these cases, there was no whitespace between the last line of the post and the footer of my poster (e.g. "Posted by qmechanic...")

I posted my problem in the Blogger Help group and got a very helpful answer. To make a long story short, it has to do with the way Blogger templates work and the issue can be fixed by inserting a strategic paragraph opening tag.

I went through my entire blog and fixed all the posts with this problem. I also fixed a few other line spacing errors, unrelated to the Blogger template.

Title of this blog

To my loyal readers,

I am trying to come up with a new title for my blog. Here are some ideas:

• One path of a quantum mechanical engineer
  
• Qmechanic's picture
  
• Life, quantum mechanics, and all that
  
• Learning to love the uncertainty

and the original title: "Some thoughts from a quantum mechanical engineer."

Please let me know what you think and/or give me your favorite idea.

- qmechanic

Additional note added 5 February 2005:
Amoebe thought my ideas were lame, so I have came up with the accurate but unexciting title above.

Hello world!

The first thing you might be wondering about is the origin of this blog's title. Well, I'm a physicist, but unlike many physicists, my work actually has some practical applications. Specifically, I study superconducting devices that are capable of quantum computation. So that makes me a "quantum mechanical engineer." (Plus, I have a degree in engineering in addition to my physics degree.) I got the idea from Seth Lloyd, a professor at MIT who works on the theory of quantum computation. People often ask him why he's in the mechanical engineering department, and his reply is that he's actually a quantum mechanical engineer.

Perhaps one of these days, when I have more time, I'll try to say a few words about quantum computation. For now though, you can try Michael Nielsen's blog. Michael is a well-known quantum information theorist.

I'm not exactly sure what I will be writing in this blog. I suppose it will be a way for me to keep a scrapbook of random thoughts.