Reid Burke

  • A Look Inside Yahoo!

    Yahoo! Building D

    The second day I was in California, my friend Dav Glass gave me a tour of the Yahoo! campus in Sunnyvale. The appearance and general vibe I received while I was there took some getting used to: everyone seemed excited to be there. They had good reason to be: they have their own beach volleyball court, live music, restaurant, game room, and I’m just scratching the surface here. Here’s a video of a “virtual tour” of Yahoo! if you’re interested:

    The next day, I met up with Matt Hackett and visited “Summer Jam ’07” for web developers, which was really cool: they had live music from Yahoo! (and Lockheed) web devs!

    Jamming

    There are many more photos from the event on Flickr. I met some really cool people there who were actually interested in web development! (Imagine that.) Plus, the music was very good.

    Matt and Reid

    I’m really glad I had the opportunity to experience Yahoo! and a big thanks to Matt and Dav for showing me around!

  • California Day 0: Great Food, Weather, Hotel…

    Yesterday my mom and I started our vacation in California. The trip here was very long, taking several hours flying from St. Louis to Orange County and finally to San Jose. But after staying here for only 1 night, all of that was definitely worth it.

    Valencia Street View

    First of all, the weather difference is night and day. Coming from Southern Illinois where high humidity is the norm, the climate here is great. We are staying at Hotel Valencia Santana Row, an upscale hotel which is jaw-dropping beautiful. We had dinner a block away at The Counter where you are given a clipboard and pencil to literally build your own burger (which tastes amazing). This morning I ate breakfast at Citrus which was just as good as everything else here.

    The Counter: B.Y.O.B.

    So far, the only negative has been finding a place to park, but what can you expect in California?

    Today, I’ll be taking a tour of Yahoo! with some of my friends who work there and then hopefully go see some of the other area attractions.

  • Phantom Vibration Syndrome

    Ever get the feeling that your cell phone is vibrating, but it really wasn’t? Hello, Phantom Vibration Syndrome.

  • My Problem With Facebook Platform

    Facebook Overflowing Requests
    I’m getting tons of these junk requests every day. I wish Facebook would provide a mechanism to “ignore future invitations” so I wouldn’t have 5 new iLike invitations whenever I login. (Besides, I already use Last.fm.) Otherwise, my requests page is becoming just as bad as my MySpace.

    Other than annoyances such as this, Facebook’s Platform is a great concept. I hope that Facebook further refines their Platform to accommodate for situations like this.

  • Quickly Accessing Related Items in iTunes

    You know those little arrow links that appear next to track names and artists in iTunes? Typically, clicking them takes you to the iTunes Store page for that item. What I didn’t know is that Option-clicking them will take you to related items in your music library, a feature I’ve always wanted.

    The best part: you can invert the behavior so that the arrow takes you to your library’s items by default. Simply type “defaults write com.apple.iTunes invertStoreLinks -bool YES” (without quotes) into a Terminal and restart iTunes. Enjoy!

    Thanks to John F. Whitehead for publishing this hack.