Pinterest is a nicely packaged solution to a common problem I’ve had in the past with bookmarking. After I bookmark a page in my browser or on Evernote, I very rarely actually re-visit these pages. Maybe they’re really not as interesting as I initially thought, or the concept of “out of sight, out of mind” applies. Pinterest takes the simple, traditional idea of a pin board (when have I ever actually used one in real life? Maybe once, or twice, in the 90′s) and translates it to fit our digital lifestyles on the intarwebz.

Historically, Tumblr has been the platform of choice for visual-centric niches – namely, anything related to design or fashion. Pinterest’s method of collating “pinned” images in sets and collections makes it so much easier to browse through chunks of them without needing to scroll forever or press “next 5″ x 100. The ability to create different board is fantastic for those of us who are OCD about organization :) And overall, it’s a great place to discover new ideas and find inspiration, although the popular ones do get repeated quite often.

One of my favorite aspects of individual pin pages is that they reference 1. who you repinned from (if applicable) and 2. the original source of the image. No more clicking through seemingly endless trails of reblogs a la Tumblr, only to arrive at the original post and find that there’s no source listed /fail

Naturally, there’s still plenty of room for improvement – for example, it’s difficult to find new people to follow. While they provide suggestions when you sign up based on the list of interests you provide, it’s not very easy to find new people after that. A separate recommendations section based on pins that you’ve liked/repinned or people you already follow would be helpful in this instance.

It’ll be interesting to see how brands utilize this service – it’d be silly for them to not take advantage of targeting such a concentrated group of users with overlapping interests in design, decoration, crafts, cooking, traveling… and the list could go on and on.

TL;DR: Pinterest has won me over – I’m a fan!

Throughout the month of May, I finished editing and posting up all of my Antarctica photos on my flickr account, with very basic titles & tags. I managed to fulfill my earlier goal of hitting the 300MB/month upload cap and subsequently upgraded to a pro account. I’m now in the process of re-uploading some of the photos, since I was a silly noob and originally saved the first batch to Adobe RGB mode rather than sRGB, which resulted in dull colors, doh!

Which leads to Goal Numero Uno: Finish Since Antarctica. Currently, a few informational pages have been published, like what I packed & wore, general expedition information, and a map of our route. Next up are the logs of what we did/saw each day, accompanied by photos – some days will be split into multiple parts, so they don’t become too image heavy.

On a related note, working with the Antarctica site has to lots of WordPress theme tweaking, since I scrapped the old layout and redid it from scratch, or more accurately, from starkers. While I’m vaguely familiar with php, I’d like to become more proficient in the language for ease of adjusting functions and possibly creating custom ones. I know there are a lot of limitations, but it’s definitely the language I work alongside most frequently (at least, for now).

From what I’ve heard, learning php is easier and more intuitive with a background in a object oriented language, which leads to Goal Numero Dos: Learn an object-oriented programming language. I’ll start with Berkeley’s CS10 course, and go from there. I haven’t yet decided on a specific language, but I’m leaning towards C#. Why C#? I’m not nearly hardcore enough to dive into a language like C++, and I want to stick to a C language that shares common syntax with others. If anyone has a suggestion or tips, I would love to hear them!

My initial response to this question is yes, I can live without the internet. Live as in eat, drink and any other necessities for keeping oneself generally alive. But can I really live without it?

It’s interesting how we’ve become so dependent on the internet and connectivity in general. I had a similar discussion with my cousins at a Chinese New Year dinner, one of whom has held out on upgrading her old school flip phone to a smartphone. Back when the iPhone first came out, I resisted buying one for the longest time. I usually carried my laptop with me on campus, where there was plenty of wifi, so why would I need an iPhone at school? I also had an iPod touch, which I carried everywhere – that doubly cancelled out the benefits of an iPhone in my daily life.

People would then ask, “But what about when you’re not near public wifi? Like if you need a map or directions while walking in the city?” It’s true, having Google Maps at your fingertips is incredibly helpful when you’re lost in the city. However, I need directions the most when I’m driving – holding an iPhone while trying to follow a map wouldn’t be so useful (or safe for the world) in that instance. Maybe I’m old fashioned – I always look up maps and directions at home, before I set out (and sometimes even print them out. Gasp, I know).

But hold up, printing out these maps does still require internet and general technology. Using printed books of maps seems so foreign now, but it really wasn’t so long ago that we’d have to look up directions to San Francisco using the old fashioned method. Just a few years back, the most efficient method of getting directions involved asking a wise, sage person for their personal route. If you were venturing to an address in the wild unknown (read: somewhere in LA, where streets extend through multiple cities) with zero knowledge of block numbers, well, good luck with that. I still have an entire glove compartment full of California maps, should I have the horrible luck of my GPS and phone dying on me. Fingers crossed this doesn’t happen, ever.

Oops, I’m really starting to go on a tangent here. To wrap this up, staying in places like Costa Rica and Antarctica for a week (or more) each with no internet, no connectivity, nada, was easy. In fact, that disconnectivity (I think this is actually a math term, but you know what I mean) let us really enjoy everything as it was and as it is. Especially for Antarctica – it was great feeling like we were isolated from the rest of the world, in both the physical and technological sense. A family friend joked that we had no idea what was going on outside of the southern continent – for all we knew, the rest of the world could have been in complete chaos, and the unexpected extension of the trip was saving us from impending doom.

However, this isn’t so much the case for living in San Francisco, the real world (for most of us). So many businesses and jobs use social media and internet technology to boost engagement and provide convenience for customers. Even the bakery down the street from our office uses Square, which requires internet as part of its functionality. Chasing down food trucks like a crazy person? You’ll need to find updates on the internet. Friends connect through email, facebook event invites (so many invites are now online vis-a-vis evite and eventbrite), and tweets. Why call only one person, if you can interact with 20 at the same time via internet?

TLDR; Yes, I can live without internet – in certain circumstances, going off the grid would be preferable. However, it would be very very hard to be disconnected in my daily life, in a world that’s already fully immersed.

First Lawyer: .. But the judge will see your occupation as irrelevant to the crime.
Client: It’s just… people hate what I do.
First Lawyer: Spam.
Client: Search engine optimization.
Second Lawyer: Don’t worry ..

Wait, what? He’s worried that the jury will rule him guilty of murder because he’s an SEO? Honestly, he had that whole jury bias bit covered, due to his penchant for dressing up as a Nazi and re-enacting WWII scenes. But I digress.

Since when did search engine optimization become the new telemarketing – a job category that immediately generates distaste and distrust? Over the past month, the topics of search and SEO have been getting a lot of facetime with articles about the morality of SEO and Google’s pitfalls. More and more people from outside the industry are commenting on the crap that often shows up in the results of common search queries.

A recent post at SEOmoz talks about “how organized crime is taking control of Google’s search results”. The points in the article are valid – a search for a product like “nike dunks” will give you a page full of counterfeit shoe venders. The same often happens when you search for full length tv shows online – a bunch of watch-insert-show-name-here.info sites pop up in the results, ready to attack your poor computer with annoying pop-up ads as soon as you click that link. Or a slightly more benign situation, where you search for how-to instructions and get bombarded with Demand Media ehow.com results. Which Blekko has apparently taken care of. Yes, these spammy results are indeed from the (minimal) efforts of search engine optimization in not-so-great hands.

However, does it mean all SEOs are immoral? As many have pointed out in this Quora thread, SEO is like any other tool. It depends on the user and website in question. Many in the industry work to optimize relevant websites for targeted search terms, ones that can bring in high quality traffic. They aren’t trying to hook visitors in for any malicious intent. In some cases, people are spending a ton of effort optimizing relevant websites in order to rank above the unhelpful spam that dominates in certain industries.

While it’s clear that some use underhanded tactics to push crap to the top of search engine results pages, labeling SEO immoral as a whole is shortsighted. And no, I’m not just defending SEO because it’s what I do for a living right now, hah.

Please name any other tech company that is actually working to ensure that the working conditions in the factories where these components are made are at least tolerable and the workers are not exploited? Please list what Nokia or Palm or HTC are doing to ensure the parts that go into their phones are not fabricated by exploited workers or child labourers?

Really? Just like anyone else, I too want to believe that companies are adopting these so-called “corporate social responsibility” measures for the good of the world. But when it really comes down to it, why does a corporation spend the extra time and money to go through these steps? It’s all about the bottom line, baby. The media is ready to pounce on any company with Ecuadorian factories that hire five-year olds or managers who lock-in employees overnight. Customers become defiant, refuse to buy products from these evil evil corporate monsters, and then what? Profitability drops, investors become worried and disgruntled, and executives run around scrambling to come up with a half-decent damage control plan.

Although this specific example only looks at Apple (and yes, I do use a Macbook Pro), they’re not alone in this practice. Most companies, no matter how much they try to deny it, practice CSR to make customers happy. If customers are happy, then they’ll continue to support the company and buy more products and pay for more services, which means mo’ money. It is so easy for a consumer to simply exit if he or she doesn’t like the current options, so it is in the best interest of a company to use CSR as a component of its competitive strategy. After all, if everyone else is doing it, there’s really no other option. And if no one else in the industry does it, well hey, the first mover has a lot more to gain than to lose.

Here’s what Fake Steve has to say about this issue, since no piece of Apple news is complete without him.

Admittedly, Apple has done an excellent job in generating a crap ton of hype for the tablet, but it’s burning out. Fortunately for them, the product is finally (and that’s a “finally” with the i and y drawn out) being revealed this Wednesday, so we won’t have to endure any more “Apple Tablet Has Been Spotted!11one1″ posts. I mean, it’s great that people are speculating, but by this point do we really need confirmation on the product via web analytics? On the other hand, there will instead be an influx of “AMAZINGEST PRODUCT EVAR” and “Ew, this sux so much lyk lolwut” review posts.

I don’t doubt that the tablet will be anything short of revolutionary in the tech world, as Apple seems to have a knack for taking on the First Mover role and succeeding. I’m sure that when it’s officially released in stores, I’ll be right there elbowing my way past thirty-something tech execs and thirteen year olds to get my hands on a demo. And then I’ll walk away after ten minutes of fiddling, with my curiosity satiated. If anything, what I’m really looking forward to is Lenovo’s Ideapad U1, which has the best of both worlds.

Anyways, it’s time to sit back and await The Big Event. I have to say, it’ll be pretty funny if they don’t end up announcing the tablet. However, I sincerely hope this doesn’t happen, as it would subject us all to another X months of rumors and speculation.