Third in a series of stellar views (exhibit A and B). This is the view due west from the Hills Bros Coffee building, with the green glass Infinity tower in the foreground on the right.

And for the curious, here’s my desk in its present spartan state.

Like Andre says, all this can be yours and more, if you know, join us.

This is a view I’m guessing very few people ever experience. I call it “The Reverse Hills Bros.” This is not exactly the new view from my desk—I’ll post that in a day or two.

I’d previously written in uncommon collaboration about an Irish artist living in Germany named Enda O’Donoghue who used a photo I’d taken as the basis for a pretty cool painting.

He just sent me an email letting me know the painting is on display in a Leipzig exhibition called Gedanken zur Revolution (Thoughts on Revolution). Rad!

Update: Enda just sent me a better shot of the painting hanging in the gallery.

It must be pretty bad when your dad asks if everything is ok, because you haven’t been posting as frequently to your blog. No big secret, just been busy. Mostly I’ve been trying to focus on a project at night which sort of eats up the time I would otherwise be blogging—and it puts my head in a decidedly non-bloggy space. I made some good progress tonight, so I thought I’d take a break.

Nothing top secret there either. Just a lil’ photo gallery web app to replace the venerable Gallery. Something I’ve been meaning to work on forEVER. Just finally had a flash of inspiration on the particular quirky angle I wanted to take, and the feeling of technical prowess that I could actually approach a project like that from scratch. God, is it ever hard starting from scratch. I have a newfound appreciation for web frameworks (like Rails and Django) even though I’m not using one (or trying to write my own).

It’s probably also true that I sort of burned myself out trying to move all my data to my newer but heavier laptop. Oh well, now I’m just eagerly awaiting my new X200 to arrive, to replace both of my laptops.

Surprisingly big life change coming up on Monday: I’ll be working in San Francisco! Monday is Federated Media’s first official day in our new location, which kind of feels like a combination between moving to a new city and starting a new job. It’s definitely a significant upgrade in both respects. And I’ll also be leaving Sausalito behind, the place I’ve worked for the last two years and two months. In particular, my commute will change from a 8 mile, somewhat harrowing journey over the Golden Gate Bridge on my Vespa every day to a less than 2 mile walk/bike/scoot through the city. I’m totally stoked.

Did you notice Google Maps finally added “Walking directions”? From our apartment they estimate that it will take 36 minutes by foot. I’m actually looking forward to building a little physical activity into my daily routine. And some new lunch options.

I don’t know what exactly compelled me to purchase an ultralight ThinkPad X23 in the spring semester of my senior year (as opposed to a heavier model), but I knew it was the right decision the first time I was able to casually stretch out in the lobby of our dorm and soak up the wireless. It’s not that my dorm mates couldn’t do the same, it’s just that their laptops were so dang heavy, some in excess of six pounds, that they rarely bothered removing them from their desks.

At that time portability was an issue because I was constantly trucking myself between classes and work, and I always wanted to have my laptop with me. By the time I was done with school, I decided portability wasn’t so much an issue, and thus upgraded to a T42, gaining screen real estate and processing muscle in exchange for two more pounds of plastic and metal. Since then I’ve written extensively about the circuitous path my laptops have taken that has led to me typing this on my six year old X23 laptop.

There’s a different kind of portability than lightweight to carry. There’s the ability to cozy up with it, or balance it on my lap, or move it from the couch to the bed to the kitchen table with ease. This personal space portability is important to me because the type of things I do with my laptop are essentially relaxation activities. Reading and responding to emails, reading blogs and writing posts, working on photos. I read a lot. My laptop is my sketch pad, my drafting table, my workshop, and for all those reasons, I want it to be comfortable. And light.

Over the last 6 years, IBM, and now Lenovo, have made gradual improvements to the X-series: newer processors, USB 2.0!, slightly lighter, etc. None of newer models seemed substantial enough to merit replacing my trusty X23. For 6 years, I was waiting for one new feature in particular: a higher resolution screen than 1024×768. Last year I even sent Lenovo an email:

I would *love* to buy a new computer from you, particularly a shiny new X-series, but I’m waiting for one feature that you haven’t offered yet. A higher resolution widescreen LCD. WXGA 1280×800.

I know I can get that and more on a T-series (I know because I have one), but there’s something about the X-series dimensions and weight that I just keep coming back to.

I never heard back (*ahem* David Churbuck), but it sounds like they heard me. This afternoon I randomly wandered across the Lenovo website to see if their never-ending sale had actually ended. To my amazement I found an all-new X-series model: the X200! And wouldn’t you know it, it has a 12.1″ widescreen display with a resolution of 1280×800. It’s like the laptop of my DREAMS!

There’s only one problem. I normally have large and important packages shipped to me at work because they can’t be left at my apartment. The problem is that at the end of next week, FM is moving offices from Sausalito to San Francisco. So rather than risk things getting lost somewhere in transit, I’m going to hold my breath until Monday (the current end date of their never-ending sale), and place my order then.

Programming languages by themselves aren’t very interesting to me. I’ve never been a language geek in that sense. One thing however that is interesting to me, and has been for some time, is the web. Something changed for me in the fall of 1998, towards the end of the first semester of my freshman year. That was when my dorm’s newly-wired Ethernet was switched on. Suddenly the internet wasn’t something I had to go stand in a line at the library in order to get access to. Suddenly my computer wasn’t just a glorified word processor.

Where programming languages are means for me to get closer to the web, I’ve learned programming languages.

This is probably why PHP, as ungainly and homely as it is, has been such a natural fit over the last several years. It is programming language intended squarely for the web. Its primary goal is making web pages more dynamic, more programmable. Only later were command line features bolted on, quite the opposite of its more elegant scripting-language counterparts (Perl, Python, and Ruby), which tend to deal with the web after the fact.

I didn’t quite realize it at the time, but at work I’ve been meaning to do some datamining. Or at least that’s what I’m going to call it here. My requirements are simple. I want my database schema to be flexible and expandable, and I want my queries to be ad hoc and fast. They don’t have to be Google Search fast, but fast enough that most queries take less than a minute to run. And I want to do this for cheap. None of that Oracle, DBA, enterprise, 6 month build cycle nonsense. I want flexible, fast, and cheap, and I don’t want to have to choose two. I mean if Google Search can return infinitely unique result sets in less than two tenths of a second, why can’t I?

And why does MySQL get so goddamned slow when it gets over a few million records?

If Google can do it why can’t I? This is the paradigm shift. Maybe I can use Google to mine my data. Not Google the company or Google the search engine, but Google the infrastructure. This is what makes search plays like Cuil seem so laughable. It’s not the algorithm silly, it’s the infrastructure. If I were ever to work for Google, I’d prefer it to be in operations, as opposed to engineering. That’s where all the fun is. I digress.

The whole point of this post is to inform you, dear reader, that tonight I went through the Google App Engine Hello, World! tutorial. And I’ll probably start using/learning Python. The blogosphere’s initial reaction to Google App Engine was lukewarm. Basically Amazon S3/EC2-lite. Or something like that. But as of yesterday, or sometime last week, I’m seeing things differently. Like maybe Google App Engine is simply a way to use Google’s world-class, paradigm-shifting, grid-computing infrastructure without actually having to get a job there. That’s pretty cool. We’ll see how it goes.

a Wordle “word cloud” of this post

Ah, a relaxing Sunday. Body’s a little sore, as Stephanie and I spent Saturday hiking into Desolation Wilderness, southwest of Lake Tahoe. We’d earmarked Saturday to help out her dad and Sabine with a garage sale, but turns out they didn’t need us, so we got home from work on Friday without anything at all planned for the weekend.

Stephanie was thinking Yosemite, the same idea occurred to me too, but fearing it’d be crowded and/or hot and/or hard to find a place to stay on a moment’s notice, we started thinking about some out-of-the-way places like King’s Canyon or Sequoia. Lake Tahoe also came to mind, but without the centralized resources of the National Park Service, we didn’t really know where to go or what to do (first). Searching around for Lake Tahoe hikes eventually that led us to Desolation Wilderness, something I’d briefly read about before.

With a loose destination in mind, we got ourselves a hotel room for the Friday night, rented a Zipcar for 7:30pm (it was just about 7) and started pulling together our hiking gear. Not more than an hour after we’d gotten home from work, we were out the door and on our way towards South Lake Tahoe.

p.s. Have I mentioned how much I love Google Maps’ Terrain view?

We spent the night in Pollock Pines, got a map and free day use permit from the Forest Service Ranger Station (though it turns out we could have self-registered at the trailhead), and continued east on US-50 towards the Pyramid Creek Trailhead. From what I’d read, the best first thing to see was Horsetail Falls, which seemed to offer some opportunities for doing a little hiking off the beaten path.

The trail on the map was marked as 1.4 miles long, the first half of which was maintained, the second half (to the base of the falls) was apparently unmaintained, with a total elevation gain of about 760 feet. After that there were no “official” marked trails, either on the map or on the land, other than the Falls itself and Pyramid Creek above the falls connecting a series of lakes. After a brief lunch overlooking a series of emerald pools at the base of the falls, we continued up along the falls, following a loose set of rock cairns and the occasional “unofficial” painted arrows.

After a long hard hike, somewhere between bouldering and hiking, we made it to Avalanche Lake at the top of the falls. We continued further to Pitt Lake, but with no clear route in sight, and a few dead ends, we decided it’d be best to head back rather than go any further. Which meant we had to figure out how to get back down the rocky mountainside we’d just ascended. Suffice it to say, we were sore, and it was hard. Once we made it to the pools where we’d stopped for lunch, we took a lovely break to stick our bare feet in the icy water. We eventually made it back to the car, thoroughly exhausted, and began the drive back to San Francisco.

At the start of the hike, with Horsetail Falls way in the distance

There’s no turning back now!

Horsetail Falls up close

A taste of the “trail” alongside Horsetail Falls

View from the top of the falls

Update: over on White Noise Lounge, I just posted a recording of a Gurgling mountain stream from Desolation Wilderness.

In the same vein as Deleting saved form entries on Firefox, I’ve noticed a bad habit I’ve developed recently of typing my password when no password is needed.

Most recently, and most tragically, I was mindlessly leaving a comment on a friend’s blog, a typical WordPress install that requires a name, email, and url. Except my fingertips apparently thought I was logging into Gmail and typed my name, email, and password—and then immediately hit submit! Ugh. Suddenly there’s my strong password sitting out in the open, live on the web for all to see (as if it was my blog’s URL), e.g. http://myp4ssw0rd!/

Now chances are anyone who stumbled upon that would have seen a jumbled array of characters and thought I sneezed instead of entering my URL. But I didn’t want to risk one clever or curious person who might have tried to use it to login to my Gmail account, or my blog, or about 5 other places I used that password—all of which I’ve now changed.

I also find myself mindlessly entering my password at the command line in Ubuntu. I’ve gotten so used to sudoing commands, that sometimes I forget I’ve already sudoed, and I’ll enter my password at the command line right after running a sudo command. Oops. There’s probably a lot of mineable passwords in the .bash_historys of the world. I wonder what my sysadmin friends do/recommend when that happens…