Ke Colin Zheng

Harlan, Stacy, Jon and I went for a chocolate factory tour in Fremont today. My first time experience of a chocolate factory. It’s a bit different from the “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” movie, but fun and tasty.

Among all the Theo chocolate bars and confections I sampled, my favorite is the bread dark chocolate bar, and the blended-cocoa ghana-panama-ecuador dark chocolate bar 75%. And also, the earl gray confection is very refreshing to me.

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I created an online survey page to conduct a user study for my research lately. It was a lot fun exploring all the tools and options out there for creating surveys.

The survey that I was trying to create was simple in the sense that  the questions were shallow and straight-forward. However, there are some interesting technical nuggets: 1. I want to dynamically assemble surveys, that is for every user, I’d like to randomly select a few sample questions from all questions to create the questionnaire; 2.  I’d like to present videos in the survey, and again, I need random ordering for displaying videos.

I tried a few online survey design tools.

• SurveyMonkey
• Zoomerang
• UW Catalyst WebQ
• PulseWare

While all of them provide basic flow control and a full list of question types, PulseWare is the only solution provider that supports video. Not only you can include videos in the survey by uploading to PulseWare survey server, also you can embed videos linked from 3rd party locations. Among all these tools, WebQ is the most flexible one as it gives you pretty much all freedom to write questions in HTML(except embedding video). Zoomerang and SurveyMonkey have the best-looking interface. While they are very intuitive to use, they seem to charge every single feature for money. And the feature set is not as complete as PulseWare.

Sadly, none of the survey tools I tried support random sampling and dynamic assembling. Maybe that is not very useful for most of the business needs. I settled with PulseWare for its media support(video in particular). I’m in general happy about it, but as I complained earlier, it could be better!

For someone who spent over 2o years in school, having his name printed on books is a definite joy! Especially, if that comes as a surprise, and it’s free.

Well, now my name appears on a book called “Artificial Imagination“, although it was misprinted as “Ke Zhang”. 🙂 Well, 86% accuracy is decent enough for me to claim my ownership. To be honest, I didn’t know anything about this book until the author contacted me in email asking for permission to use photos I posted online. As you may guess now, I was happily enlisted as the photographer of this book.

And that’s how I fulfilled my dream of publishing a book with my name on it. 🙂 Well, at least for my first book.