PARC / WikiDashboard

I had a wonderful time at PARC this summer. I worked with Bongwon Suh and Ed Chi in the Augmented Social Cognition group very closely and I feel we got some quality work done. I’d never been in a corporate environment myself before this summer, and while I realize that PARC is not the average corporate environment at all, I definitely have a newfound appreciation for the depth of knowledge and pace of development happening inside. PARC is a great place to work and I would highly recommend their summer intern program.

Daily Porsche Count

One of my developed habits while being in the Bay Area this summer consisted of counting the number of Porsches I saw each day. The Daily Porsche Count, at first, was just a joke as I realized I’d seen three or four in about fifteen minutes my second or third day out there. I was living in Palo Alto and also spotted a Maserati, multiple Lotuses (Loti?), a couple Lamborghinis (one red, one yellow), and of course, the latest entrant, the Tesla. (The Tesla showroom actually went up while I was there, and they are incredible (both the showroom and the cars). )

Over the summer, I realized I had started counting the Porsches every day – and the average was definitely around 4 or 5. But sometimes I’d reach that quota before breakfast. It was a rare day I saw zero. The biggest Porsche Count was 21, the day I rode my bike across the Golden Gate Bridge and over into Tiburon.

The other interesting observation was that on the way home, via L.A. and Tucson, the Daily Porsche Count dropped (as expected). What was unexpected was that the Daily Corvette Count increased proportionately as we headed to L.A.

Additionally, the only Porsche I saw on the drive back to NC was painted on a barn in Kentucky advertising a no-longer-in-business pit stop down the road.

Follow-Up: I saw four yesterday in and around Chapel Hill. Maybe I’m a little more tuned to their existence now…

Wedding

I mentioned it above, but hadn’t mentioned it before – I’m getting married.

This takes over your life for a short while. There are lists upon lists. Spreadsheets and registries. Deadlines, supplies, and shipping. Gifts, Flowers, Suits, Photos, Dress, Vows. What a process.

Good thing we’ve been working together for a while. We have a fairly fine sense of our strengths and weaknesses, tone and timbre.

1 barn. 233 confirmed family and friends. Many cakes. A few surprises.

What fun.

Tahoe Hackfest

A couple weeks ago I attended the Allmydata.org Hackfest (5th in a series, as I understand it). Zooko and Brian Warner hosted a few people at the allmydata.org offices and fed them pizza and code. Adam Langley spoke about his recent posting of Obfuscated TCP. Oskar Sandberg talked about his current work proving some of Freenet’s original routing code was mathematically efficient. David Molnar shared his current PhD work at Berkeley (metafuzz and catchconv), which are used to find bugs in programs.

I don’t pretend to understand all of what happened in front of me at the hackfest, but I know that I’m definitely putting the next Hackfest on my calendar and going if possible. The pizza was good and I really like having conversations with people who know their math.

DiSo / Drupal

Within a week or so of the Hackfest, I found myself headed back up into the city for dinner at the DiSo / Drupal meetup. The conversations were not as directed as I’d hoped, but I met some interesting people. Chris Messina, Will Norris and Kieran Lal held court at one end of the table, and I talked with Andrius Kulikauskas, Neil Drumm and Dan Kurtz down on the other end. I think DiSo is poised to become as big as microformats are today – and eventually become the standard for how we’ll interact as individuals (I’d say “online” here, but I think it’s more than that). I cannot wait to have my people in my pocket – XMPP and OAuth enabled – making recommendations and filtering out the noise. Please get here soon.

WikiDashboard

Unrelated to the city of San Francisco, I’ve been at PARC for two months now, and I’ve finished my first milestone. The WikiDashboard code I’ve been working on shipped today. This is a big deal for me since just a few short months ago I saw it on the internet for the first time and thought it was a really cool project. Now, I’ve contributed my own code – and even got paid! A neat trick.