Sydney is a beautiful city; I’m having a lot of fun exploring and wandering about here. In the [spirit of tradition](http://uwmike.com/articles/2007/02/27/nyc-cheatsheet/), here are a few early observations and random fun tips, from my first week of living it up down under. Read on…

A passage this morning [at Community](http://communityfellowship.org/) was from the [letter of James](http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=James%204:13-17;&version=31;), about looking to our futures:

> Now listen, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go to this or that city, spend a year there, carry on business and make money.” Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. Instead, you ought to say, “If it is the Lord’s will, we will live and do this or that.” As it is, you boast and brag. All such boasting is evil. Anyone, then, who knows the good he ought to do and doesn’t do it, sins.

I always feel kind of conflicted about these kind of messages. Waterloo charges me a ridiculously high tuition, but I also make a lot of money working on co-op. Even though I’m basically a pretty typical broke 21-year-old student, I have a larger cash flow and less debt than many my age.

But in saving during work terms and spending during school, where’s the line between attentiveness and worry? What constitutes reasonable planning for the future, and what is man’s folly in making his own plans? King David, in [Psalm 33](http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Psalm%2033:10-11;&version=47;) says:

> The LORD brings the counsel of the nations to nothing; he frustrates the plans of the peoples. The counsel of the LORD stands forever, the plans of his heart to all generations.

Read on…

My Dad has [Facebook](http://facebook.com/). All my friends have Facebook. I have Facebook. I can count on one hand the people my age I know, that do not have Facebook. The people I met last term in New York and San Francisco all had Facebook.

Anyone who talks about “social networks” today as if they mean anything other than Facebook is being coy, or is deluded.

Classmates and Friendster haven’t been important in years; in the wake of its buyout, MySpace is rapidly losing relevance outside of musical artists using it for promotion.

Facebook is the model of a modern, successful, social website. It hits a very pleasant sweet spot between elegance, user-friendliness, and attention to [issues of privacy](http://uwaterloo.facebook.com/sitetour/privacy.php). But there is one major problem: If Facebook Inc screws up, the elegance and user-friendliness can all go away (some of the new Apps are definitely pushing it), and your privacy might go away, too. Facebook is a *closed system*; it’s a single point of failure on all three counts. Read on…

The history and bookmarks features of web browsers have traditionally been separate. Which is strange, since they’re conceptually similar. Each is a title and a link. One represents a place *you’ve already been*, and the other represents a place *you intend to visit in the future*.

For me, they’re also similar in that I don’t really use either of them. At all. Between Google searches and location bar type-ahead, I’m always able to retrace my steps to something I remember seeing. To manually maintain a bookmarks list would be like manually maintaining a contact list in my email—why do it by hand, when Gmail can simply remember everyone I’ve ever corresponded with, and then guess who I mean as I start typing their name in the to-field?

Mozilla have recognized that power users ignore the two features, and have also seen their fundamental similarity. Firefox 3 will introduce a unified feature called [Places](http://wiki.mozilla.org/Places), which attempts to bring a more sensible and usable interface to the browser.

I’ve been thinking about this problem for a number of months, however, and I don’t think Places goes far enough. I’d like to propose not only a unification of history with bookmarks, but a complete integration of that unified feature with browser tabs. Read on…

As time goes to infinity, so also does the entropy of any particular system. This fundamental truth will have long term consequences on Earth’s climate, but around midterm time, it was having immediate consequences on the state of my bedroom.

I browsed through the IKEA website, seeking information on shelving systems that I could use to quell the tide of chaos. I knew the basic size and configuration that I wanted, but I had trouble finding what I was looking for. There were a number of [uninspiring wall-mount systems](http://www.ikea.com/ca/en/catalog/products/10103494), and a bunch more [free-standing units](http://www.ikea.com/ca/en/catalog/products/40103628) that were basically what I wanted, but visually boring and overpriced. When I asked about delivery, I was told that a $150 shelf would cost $180 to bring to my door.

Three hundred dollars was out of the question, so I investigated what could be done on my own. Read on…

A year ago, [I wrote](http://uwmike.com/articles/2006/06/06/aging/):

> Could my high-school self have ever predicted that he’d soon develop an irrational love of cooking, social dance, and his Apple computer?
>
>I had no more idea then than I do now of what lies ahead. But remembering the big changes in the recent past serves to keep me open-minded about the future.

Hilarious. Could myself of a year ago have imagined he’d shortly be invited to an internship in glamorous New York, working on one of the most advanced JavaScript codebases in existence, with some of the most interesting and knowledgeable people in the business?

As another year ticks by, it’s another sobering reminder to remain open-minded to the future and at peace with the present. Everything’s in the Lord’s hands anyways.

I’ve written before about the [power of JavaScript as a visualization tool](http://uwmike.com/articles/2007/01/08/javascript-visualization/). Then, I’d been talking about it in conjunction with straight-up HTML and SVG. Now I’ve got a neat new demo to share that takes advantage of Canvas.

You’re going to need Firefox or Safari to view this, but [check it out](http://sandbox.mikepurvis.com/js/clock/).

The genesis of this idea comes from Louis K’. Thomas’ [logarithmic clock](http://www.latenighthacking.com/projects/2005/logClock/), which [showed up on reddit](http://reddit.com/info/1thgm/comments) recently.

I had wanted to experiment with some more interesting visuals than what Thomas had in his original. I’ve always been fascinated with polar functions and spiral geometry, and this seemed like a fantastic opportunity to explore this area. Thinking of a traditional clock face, I mused about the feasibility of bending the log clock into some kind of round display that was less obviously just a mathematical plot.

Hopefully I’ll have more time at some point to write about the process of creating this, but for now, enjoy!

*The Phantom Edit* a re-cutting of *The Phantom Menace* that seamlessly eliminates the worst twenty minutes of the film.

This is old news to hardcore Star Wars fans, but it only just came across my radar the other night, and I thought I’d share. I’ve had some limited experience in cutting together family videos; just enough to have a great deal of respect for the art of editing. Editing is difficult enough when you’re sorting through all the takes, mixing in soundtrack and voice overs from scratch… but to attempt to re-cut a movie from its final theatrical form is almost inconceivable. Read on…

For the past four months, I’ve been traveling about and haven’t had much of the necessary time nor the inclination to write. In lieu of that, I had been aggressively updating my [Facebook photo albums](http://www.facebook.com/p/Mike_Purvis/122603642). Being back at school for the summer will reinstate blogging as among my primary procrastination measures, so expect more content in the coming weeks, including a much-needed update to [WP-Cats](http://uwmike.com/wordpress/wp-cats/).

In the past I’ve always enjoyed the changes from school to work and vice-versa. The variety offered by Waterloo’s co-op program is a wonderful blessing: Working is money and free time and independence. School is community and friendships.

This time does feel different, though, and I’m not the only one feeling it.

I’m trying to be excited to go back to school, but I’m really just *not*. New York is a beautiful city; I’d come to love it there. Meanwhile, my connection to Waterloo this term was little more than a tuition bill and an [increasingly broken and mismanaged](http://dearwaterloo.com/) professional development program. Here, I was in a job where I could leverage my existing skills, learn far more than I have in any academic term, and yet still make a meaningful, appreciated contribution.

I do know that I will one day be back in New York—I love too many things about it to not return. This leaving is temporary; whether back in months or years, for a few days, or for a decade, I cannot say. But I do mean to return. Leaving now is not a permanent farewell, only a temporary parting.