Tools are not to blame, blame laziness

PowerPoint and Excel aren’t the enemy, though a lot of people to seem to think they are. Frequently, I hear others say “don’t use PowerPoint” or snicker when someone mentions conducting analysis with Excel. This is wrong. There is nothing wrong with Excel or PowerPoint; I am a fan and user of both programs. The problem […]

Data portals are tomorrow’s map room

I’ve often found myself exploring a library’s map room or thumbing through old Census records while taking study breaks. I was often surprised how I could become engrossed with old data. Some of the fascination comes from a historical narrative of history from the perspective of that generations point-of-view, even if it was based on faulty logic […]

Using Sublime Text 2 for R

My R interface has been pretty basic in the last few years. I have usually stuck to the R console. Yes, I’ve tried Emacs with ESS; a staple, but it is so unbearably antiquated that I always gave up on its significant learning curve. GUI packages–especially Rstudio–offer viable alternatives, but I feel the GUI lets […]

Organizing Email Sent Directly to You

I wrote about this four years ago elsewhere. I just remembered it and posting it here for posterity (and for my own memory). Original Date: March 20, 2006 Awhile back Lifehacker ran a post on how to highlight emails sent directly to you in Microsoft Outlook. Later, they showed how to “gray out” email not […]

Using Uploader.py to upload from Picasa to Flickr – Repost

Below is a re-post from the original genericface blog. By far the most popular post, it has been replaced by easier tools, such as picasa2flickr. Original date: March 14th, 2006 Picasa is by far my favorite photo management software. Flickr is the arguably the best online photo sharing site (Zooomr is a rising competitor). However, […]