Oliver Roup

Travel

Japan 2017

Japan A few notes I took on a recent trip. Before you go Follow Tokyo Fixer on Instagram. At minimum he will get you excited. If he inspires you, he has the time and you have the budget, apparently he’ll…

Culture

Quote

The simple truth is, not all of us become the men we once hoped we might be. But we are all God’s creatures. If there are those among us who thought ill of Mr. Hollom, or spoke ill of him,…

Uncategorized

The Reverse Turing Test

I’m always fascinated by the subtle ways in which our otherwise insightful predictions about the future are nonetheless totally wrong. The famous Turing Test is paraphrased as “can you tell it’s a robot?” In the ad tech business (and many…

Code

Setting up a new mac

I bought a new iMac recently and figured it would be worthwhile to write down everything I did to get it to where I wanted it. Install bootstraps: Chrome – Preferred browser Iterm2 – Terminal Homebrew – The missing package manager Atom – Text…

Technology

Computational Fluid Dynamics take a leap

People ask me all the time what work is being done that I find exciting. Honestly it’s a little harder than it used to be. The simultaneous emergence of cloud infrastructure providers and mobile hardware created a cambrian explosion of…

Code

Unevenly spaced time series analysis

A number of years ago I bought a Withings connected scale. It’s great. You get on every morning, it logs your weight and uploads it to the internet where it can be analyzed. Recently, I decided to use the Withing…

Business

Tesla, Autopilot and Data Collection

f I were going to build a self-driving car, I’d want to have a large corpus of field data. What situations come up most commonly? How do humans handle them? How might our computer react in a similar situation? Google’s…

Uncategorized

Bitcasa, snake oil, etc

I’ve watched with some amusement the controversy between CrunchFund and TechCrunch and whether Mike Arrington can successfully / fairly cover the startups that he writes about / promotes. On the general question, I have no idea, and I do think…

Uncategorized

Apple + OnLive?

Big software companies like Google, Microsoft, Apple and even Facebook have a ton of cash on their balance sheet. Whenever investors start pressuring them to dividend some of that cash to shareholders, the ready answer is always that they’re hanging…

Code

Keyboard modified clicks

In case you’re ever wondering, here is a full list of the “key modified clicks” that the major browsers look for: (Note that on Windows, “cmd” is “ctrl”) Chrome, Firefox: shift: new active window cmd: new tab cmd-shift: new active tab…

Shared Items

Shared Items – March 2, 2010

Wash. man electrocuted by urinating on power line March 2, 2010 – Possibly the most gruesome way to go that I can imagine.

Shared Items

Shared Items – February 26, 2010

Vancouver Now – Emergency shipment of condoms headed to Olympic athletes – Post Sports February 26, 2010 – Canada is awesome!