Andrew Trusty

The last of my summer projects just recently went live. It’s built on the idea that one man’s trash is another man’s treasure. trash nothing! as I’ve called it is a site that allows you to find free stuff that other people in your community are giving away for free and makes it easy for you to give away the things you don’t need anymore.

It’s built on top of the already thriving Freecycling, ReUseIt, and FreeSharing groups that have thousands of members. But trash nothing! provides more than just access to your existing recycling groups, it makes interacting with the groups quicker and easier. You can view all your groups in one place with automatic message categorization that allows you to see at a glance which items are still available and which ones aren’t. There is even a simple message composer with free picture galleries for the items you give away.

I’m aiming for a broader market as compared to Comic Gopher and Click 4 Obama. If you like free stuff or recycling then trash nothing! is right for you. Currently it only supports a few Atlanta and Toronto area recycling groups but more should be added soon.

Actually, I hear he is pretty bad at bowling but not too bad at basketball and poker. These are just a few of the thousands of interesting facts I have stumbled across while working on my latest endeavor. I don’t usually follow politics very closely until after the conventions are over and there are less candidates to study but this election has caught my interest more than most. It is a heated race between the first viable woman candidate, the first viable non-caucasian candidate, and one of the oldest candidates. So I’ve decided to throw my talents into the race behind the candidate I’m leaning towards (you get one guess who that is).

So I’ve gone and built a free online political education game for Obama, completely un-official and un-endorsed (so far). The name of the game is Click 4 Obama. The tagline is “You play, Obama wins!” and the premise behind it is pretty simple. As people answer quiz questions about US history, politics, and government, the site generates ad revenue which is used to buy ads for Obama. There is a bit more detail to it that you can read about in my official introduction of Click 4 Obama and more details are on the Frequently Asked Questions page.

I could talk about Click 4 Obama all day long but you should really just go check it out and give it a spin. I think I’ve actually managed to make politics fun and educational; my high school teachers would be so proud.

A lot of people delay fulfilling the Technical Communication requirement at Georgia Tech. I was one of those people. I have since realized that many of the skills I learned would have been tremendously useful earlier in my college career as I was searching for internships and interning. I now feel much more confident writing proposals, reports, resumes, and organizing information in general. Much of this was due to the professor, Jennifer Wunder, who always kept the class attentive with intriguing anecdotes from her husband’s and father’s businesses.

For the final project in Technical Communication Practices, my group opted to do a seasonally appropriate guide on wrapping presents. I took on the web design component of the project and rendered our final manual into a beautiful collection of HTML pages. A link to the guide is below; note that the Google Ads are a new addition in which I am experimenting with actually making money from the internet.

An Illustrated Step-By-Step Guide to Wrapping Presents

Over my summer in Barcelona I took the Computational Photography class taught by Irfan Essa. It was an interesting class where we learned how we can use computers and digital processes to create photographs that would be impossible to create with a camera alone. It was not just a class on Photoshop as we learned many techniques including high dynamic range imaging, panoramas, fourier filters, image dissection and analysis.

As we were given free reign to choose what we wanted to do for our final project I chose to create digitally averaged portraits inspired by the Face of Tomorrow project. For my subjects I used the other students and professors from the study abroad group. I took portraits of 16 women, 24 men and the 3 professors and morphed their faces together successively until I had a final digitally averaged portrait for each group. The male and female digital averages are below; the process was quite time consuming but I think the results were well worth it.

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While co-oping at Georgia-Pacific last summer I found myself quite bored after work. During my first two semesters at Georgia Tech I think I became accustomed to the grueling pace of classes and having it stop so suddenly with the arrival of summer left me feeling bored. My brain was itching to do interesting and new things but it was my first semester as a co-op so they didn’t give me very challenging work. So I did what every good programmer does when bored; I picked up an O’Reilly book to learn a new programming language. I chose PHP because I had heard a lot of buzz about it and I had seen some really cool online applications built on PHP. Since I had the whole summer to learn PHP I decided I might as well come up with a reasonably large project to cut my teeth on and really help me grasp this new language. I brainstormed some ideas with a friend of mine and we agreed that a web-based version of the Risk board game would be awesome. We always enjoyed playing it but had problems finding other people to play with us and finding the large blocks of time necessary to finish a game in one sitting. So why not use the internet to enable anyone to play Risk anytime they wanted?

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