Kevin’s Blog

The other day I decided to create a web service (for fun).

The objective: To provide bloggers with an easy to use, online version of Photoshop.

Spec: The users should be able to watermark, blur, resize, or place a border around an image. The image and image processing commands should be submitted through a simple web form.

Implementation: I started with a framework I knew fairly well: Ruby on Rails. However, I ended up realizing it was total overkill for what I wanted to accomplish.

This realization led me to a simple lightweight framework called Ramaze. Ramaze made implementation almost trivial — the entire service was under 100 lines of code.

In a hilarious bout of irony, I managed to delete my entire blog installation when trying to do a backup. Fortunately, restoring from my fumbled backup was significantly less humorous.

I was at my friend Andy’s house the other day, and he kept calling me a genius whenever I noticed some solution to a problem we were facing. This kind of situation came up quite a few times while we were cabling his new 4-core, NVidia-powered, full-res-Crysis-playing, fiber-net-backed, desktop monstrosity.

After being called a genius approximately fifty times, I realized that I should complement people more. To practice, I attempted to reciprocate the compliment at opportune moments. Following my natural instincts for this turned out to be disastrous, since my sense of humor is perhaps my strongest sense of all.

I tried eliminating the humor bias by considering the full set of commendable actions, and choosing to complement each action, as it occurred, with approximately .50 probability. After a few trials, it was painfully obvious that I was just inserting the compliment randomly.

Thinking back to conversations with all the people from Google who I’ve had the honor to problem-solve with, I’m beginning to believe there is some sort of training regimen for the effective use of the phrase “You’re a Genius!”

Todo: Figure out an effective “You’re a Genius!” algorithm.