Learn One Thing: Squash

I recently joined the gym at Yale so I could get back into working out during the winter.  In order to get to the fitness center, I have to walk a sign designating the area behind the sign as the Brady Squash Center, but I couldn’t see inside.  Until I looked it up, I had no idea what Squash was, other than some sort of indoor sport that people at Yale play.  Wikipedia defines Squash as “a racquet sport played by two players (or four players for doubles) in a four-walled court with a small, hollow rubber ball.”  Sounds like Racquet ball to me, which is a sport I’ve played before, but the more I read I found that there are some key differences between the sports:

• Racquet Size (max of 22 inches in Racquet ball, 27 inches in Squash)
• Ball Size (2.25 inches in Racquet ball, ~1.5 inches in Squash
• Ball Elasticity (Squash ball is less elastic than the Racquet ball)
• Court Dimensions (Squash is a smaller (32×21 ft vs 40×20 ft in Racquet ball)

Read more about the Differences Between Squash and Racquetball on www.differencebetween.net.

Learn One Thing: iPhone 3GS oleophobic screen

I recently bought an iPhone 3GS and if you’re not familiar with it, it basically relies on the whole screen as an input device (typing, touching to select programs, dialing numbers).  There are no buttons.  This means that it’s easy to leave fingerprints on the touch-screen, especially if you’re fingers are greasy from sweat, etc…  Despite this fact, I noticed that as I let the phone sit for a period of time, all of the finger prints/smudges disappeared or evaporated.  I had a feeling there was some technology involved here, as it looked like a typical glass screen, but didn’t hold finger prints like one.  Today I decided to learn how this is possible, and found that the iPhone screen is coated with a special oleophobic polymer, a plastic that human skin oil doesn’t adhere to very well.

Gizmodo, a gadget blog, enlisted Bill Nye the Science Guy to explain how it works:

The Applers were able to do this by bonding this oleophobic polymer to glass. The polymer is an organic (from organisms) compound, carbon-based. The glass is nominally inorganic, silicon-based… solid rock. The trick is getting the one to stick to the other. Although it is nominally proprietary, this is probably done with a third molecule that sticks to silicon on one side and to carbon-based polymers on the other side. Chemical engineers get it to stay stuck by inducing compounds to diffuse or “inter-penetrate” into the polymer. The intermediate chemical is a “silane,” a molecule that has silicon and alkanes (chains of carbon atoms).

Pretty neat huh?  I can’t imagine how dirty and smudged the iPhone 3GS screen would be without this technology.  I wonder if the new Droid phone (a new iPhone competitor) or any other touch screen phones have this same technology?  If they don’t they’re at a serious disadvantage to the iPhone 3GS!

Learn One Thing: Google Dashboard

Today I, along with the rest of the world, learned that Google has created a Dashboard page that you can log into and see all of the Google products that you use and some meta data about the data you have saved with Google.

This is really handy for seeing all the different Google products you use (if you’re a heavy Google user like me) and keep a handle on the data you store in the cloud with Google.

I noticed a few products that I used once or twice to try out and haven’t used since.  This tool allows me to see this fact and go into the application and remove any data that I don’t want shared any more.

For example, it shows how many public Picasa web picture albums I have.  If I don’t want them to be public any more, or never did in the first place, but they ended up that way because I wasn’t aware the albums were being made public by default, I can click through to Picassa and adjust the settings.

Go to google.com/dashboard now to see all the applications you’re using and the data you trust google with, all in one place.

Learn One Thing: First Selectman

I was reading an article on the New Haven Register (local newspaper) today about the election results from yesterday’s Election Day and it appeared to me that they had some sort of unique position that you could run for here in New England called the First Selectman.  I had never heard of this office before but based on the article it seemed to be a city level position.

I turned to my trusty Wikipedia and found out that in Connecticut, the First Selectman “is the chief executive and administrative officer of most towns with the Selectmen-Town Meeting form of government.”  Most towns have a Board of Selectmen of which the First Selectman is the leader, which is the executive arm of government in many New England towns.

Basically what this boils down to is the First Selectman is like the Mayor and the Board of Selectmen is like a city council or other executive organization for a city/town.

Learn one thing: Twitter Lists

If you haven’t heard of or used Twitter before, Wikipedia defines it as “a free social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read messages known as tweets.”

I have been using Twitter for a while now, mainly to follow a few bloggers that I’ve come across that I’ve found interesting enough to follow their posts on Twitter as well. I don’t “tweet” much myself, but I do gain lots of useful information from the experts that I do follow.

If you begin to follow a lot of people, the stream of tweets can become overwhelming, and I believe that is why Twitter rolled out Twitter Lists.  I learned today that you can basically build lists of people you are interested in, but maybe don’t want to follow and have their tweets show up in your main daily feed.  You can check out these lists on your own schedule, when you feel like seeing what that list is saying.

For example you may have your main feed of people you follow like close friends/family for which you want to see updates often and as they happen.  Then you can build a list of people who you are interested in, but may not want to have show up in your main feed.  For me this is handy for keeping up to date on what people who tweet about my line of work, SQL Server Database Administration, are saying.  For them I have a list, so I can look at it every day or two and see what important topics they are talking about, but most likely I don’t need to know about instantly in my main feed.

The cool thing about Twitter lists is that you can share them with other people (I actually got my SQL list from SQL expert blogger Brent Ozar, who created it of all the SQL related people he follows).  Listorious is a website dedicated to sharing these lists.  If there is a topic of interest to you, you can probably find a list for it on Listorious and quickly add it to your collection of Twitter Lists.

If you want to follow me on Twitter or see my lists, you can find me here: www.twitter.com/aarontc