Month: June 2007

Where I Spent My Saturday

Learning something new.

TemperChi Glass Art Studio

Now that grad school is past and life has settled down into something approximating normal, I’ve been waning to add some new things to the mix. This weekend, it’s a class in making lampwork beads.

I don’t think I’ll kick my career to the curb and become a full-time glassmaker like Sarah did — my beads are seriously ugly — but this definitely is a lot of fun.

Unexpected Happiness: We Saw ‘The Police’ Live!

So around lunchtime yesterday, Scott IMed me with some Big News: a co-worker of his was looking to unload two tickets to The Police concert at Oakland Coliseum. Did we want to go?

HELL YES!

The Police broke up before I started going to concerts, so I always assumed I’d never have the chance to see them live. Then, when they announced their “30th Anniversary tour” I figured there’d be no way I’d manage to snag tickets. Instead, the tickets came to us. Nice how that worked out.

I didn’t have time to do much planning, and cameras weren’t allowed anyway, so this is the best I could do for a photo:

Oakland Coliseum

I’d never been to a stadium concert before, and the sheer size of the venue was definitely a drawback. But other than that — and the absolutely horribly bad opening act — we had a fantastic time. Wikipedia has a full set list, if you’re interested in that sort of thing.

Despite Stewart Copeland’s grousing, the band sounded very tight and polished to me. There were one or two moments when I thought I caught a bobble as the band transitioned into the next song, but other than that, they played extremely well for just short of two hours, including encores. Sting had to work fairly hard to get the audience energy up (I think this is where the stadium size was an issue) but the last 40 minutes or so was a big rock-out.

In short, if you get a chance to catch the tour, do so. It’s worth it.

WWDC Day One

Wow, I’m tired.

So, as a preface, here’s what I know about software development: just enough to know how much I don’t know. In other words, once the conversation moves past features and functionality and starts getting into in-depth discussions of threading and memory management, I’m quickly going to be in over my head.

That said, I had fun at WWDC today. Even having to stand on line for 90+ minutes to get into the keynote room wasn’t that bad. The keynote was fun, and Leopard looks like it’s got some nice new functionality for end-users, and the fact that it will be fully 64-bit has got the developer I was sitting with jazzed.

I don’t quite know what to make of the “Safari on Windows” announcement. On the one hand, given that Apple is going to pursue a strategy of getting 3rd-party apps onto the iPhone via Safari, it makes sense that they would push out the browser to Windows as well. It reminds me of the old Java “write once run anywhere” idea. It’s great, if you can pull it off.

On the other hand, I also can’t shake the thought that what they really should have done was to buy Mozilla instead.

Edit: forgot to add — I’ll probably skip days 2 and 3 of WWDC and be back in SF on Thursday. I have to get some real work done too!