Fiat Lux

Two kitties, one knapsack.

I've been tagged by Sarah. So while I wait for a bunch of podcasts to download, I might as well work on my list:

Start with 7 random facts/habits about yourself.

1. My iPod Nano is red because I love the color, although the fact that some money also went to a good cause does not displease me.

2. A 7" GUND brown teddy bear lives on my desk, next to the pen cup and a basket of paper clips. I bought that bear they year I spent my summer vacation working in a summer stock theater on Long Beach Island, NJ.

3. I grew up in a 'dog family'. They don't understand how I ended up with so many cats.

4. My very first Internet e-mail address ended in @aol.com. I'm so ashamed.

5. I have a weird allergy. I'm allergic to nuts -- but NOT to peanuts.

6. I've been following the Casey Serin saga for months.

7. I hate vacuuming. Despise it. I don't mind anything else when it comes to keeping my house clean, but that is a chore I go out of my way to avoid doing. I've been thinking that maybe I'd like it more if I went out and bought a really high-end, extra-powerful vacuum instead of the old, small, and slightly underpowered vacuum I currently have, but I'm hesitant to drop a bunch of money on something I dislike so much.

Then choose another 7 people to get tagged and list their names. People who are tagged have to write their 7 things on their blog. Don't forget to leave them a comment to tell them they have been tagged and to read your blog.

OK then. I tag Dragoncaller, Sour Duck, Below The Crowd, Seamus, Bisky, Rudi, and (if he's still paying attention to the Internet) Steve.

I suddenly realized I haven't blogged in a few days. Sorry about that. Everything's fine, I've just been a bit overloaded.

On Memorial Day, I finally got around to joining a local health club, and now I'm trying to figure out how to work regular exercise into my day to day routine. The club membership came with three free "starter" sessions with a personal trainer, which were more than a little intimidating, but at least now I have a nice workout plan all mapped out for me. Problem is, it takes me almost 90 minutes to get through the whole thing, plus changing clothes & shower time -- that's a 2-hour block of time for each session. Trying to fit that into my current schedule, especially on work days, has been a little disruptive.

I'm hoping that once I get more settled into a routine and comfortable with how to use all the damn machines, then I'll be able to get it closer to an hour than 90 minutes, but for now it's a real pain. Even if I leave work by 5:30, I'm not home and ready for dinner until well after 8PM. Since you're not supposed to eat for at least 3 hours before going to sleep, the only way I can eat dinner at all is because I'm a night owl who stays up for the Daily Show & the Colbert Report. On the flip side, trying to get a 90-minute workout done in the mornings would mean hitting the gym before 7AM; and I am not at all good about getting out of bed that early.

I've never been much for health clubs before, so hopefully I'll find a way to make this work for me. Ideally I'd like to get to the club 4 out of 7 days a week, which I think is a goal that's both reasonable, and likely to actually produce some results over time. But if I can't get the workout down to about 60 minutes, I suspect I'll have to do the bulk of my exercise on the weekends, which means less results over time.

I have no illusions that I'll be able to turn myself into a muscled-out fitness goddess; I find working out far too boring for that. Getting into better general shape and turning a few pounds of fat into muscle would be nice, though.

Haven't done one of these in a while:

I Want To Come Over - Melissa Etheridge
Tenth Avenue Freeze Out - Bruce Springsteen
Indestructible - Matisyahu
Desperado - Eagles
Everybody Wants To Rule The World - Tears For Fears
Mercy Street - Peter Gabriel
A Bit of Earth - The Secret Garden (Original Broadway Cast)
I Feel Fine - The Beatles
Church Of The Poison Mind - Culture Club
Complicated (The Matrix Mix) - Avril Lavigne

As a reminder, The Rules: Open iTunes or your iPod. Load up your entire library. Put it in "random" mode. Write down the first ten tracks that come up--and no fair putting in ones you think will make you look cool, or omitting ones that make you look like a total dork.

Off to WWDC I go this morning. I've never been to a Jobs keynote before; this should be fun!

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!

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:

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.

It's been very warm and sunny recently; here Bear and Tommy are catching some afternoon rays.

Learning something new.

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.

If this keeps up I might need to add a "Beads" category.

An article in the Wall Street Journal today reports that some companies, not content with creating virtual "presences", are now even starting to do job interviews in Second Life.

The more I read about Second Life, the more I wonder what's wrong. On the one hand, Second Life gets great coverage in the press and seems to have good word of mouth. For example, whenever someone asks about Second Life over at LinkedIn Answers, the responses tend to be very positive. On the other hand, I don't know a single person in my real life who actually spends any time using Second Life. And my social circle, by and large, is in the consumer category that would be expected to at least try it out - comfortable online, "content creators," and actively involved in other online communities and activities. Yet -- I find Second Life utterly unappealing. And nobody I know talks about it. WoW, of course. LoTRO and CoH, yes. Even games like Star Wars Galaxies and Eve Online get some attention. But not Second Life.

My overall impression of Second Life, in fact, is that the vast majority of people who use it regularly are looking to get kinky in one form or another, or are there because they're trying to make a buck off it one way or another. Now, I could be completely wrong. If I am, I'd love to hear it. But right now, it seems like there's this significant dichotomy between what I'm reading and what I'm experiencing. Maybe it's just me. But maybe Second Life really is a lot more hype than actual trend.

You tell me.

This may sound a bit odd, being posted on a MovableType blog, but I've signed up to go to WordCamp 2007.

Two reasons:

1) The blog I manage at work runs on WordPress and I want to know more about how to make it do its thing.
2) The current speaker roster includes Matt Cutts, Om Malik, Dave Weiner, and a bunch of other interesting people. That's more than worth the price of admission ($25!!!) right there.

It would be better if the event took place on weekdays instead of a weekend, but other than that, what's not to like?

No, Bear, you can't have them.

I've been mulling around a post on Facebook for a day or so. I signed up for Facebook sometime this past winter, but didn't really do much of anything with my account there until April, when I realized that my 20-something cousins were using it heavily and that if I wanted to stay in better touch with them, that was a way to do so.

Since then, I've started checking Facebook more frequently and gotten more aggressive about adding friends. Along with LinkedIn and Flickr, I'm checking it more or less daily now. Sadly, though, my social circle doesn't seem to be the Facebook target market, because after exporting my entire Thunderbird address book (more than 250 e-mail addresses in all) I found fewer than 20 of those people actually on Facebook. That was disappointing; especially as many of those addresses were classmates from USF. I don't really expect that my old college friends or my relatives would be on Facebook, but I am a little surprised that so few grad school friends were there.

Aside from not finding a whole lot of my friends there, I like Facebook. It's easy to use and entertaining, and it lets me share things about myself that I can't or don't want to share on LinkedIn. Nick O'Neill has some thoughts on this issue, and suggests that Facebook might "bury" LinkedIn, if they so choose. It's possible, although if Facebook goes public and gets a big enough warchest, they might just as well buy LinkedIn instead.

This is a really good example of the never-ending dynamic flow between disintermediation and reintermediation, actually. How do you hit the right balance between the costs and the benefits of spreading your information across multiple social networks, versus having everything in one place?

Anyway, if you're on Facebook and want to friend me, please feel free to do so.

UPDATE 7:30PM: After posting this, I ran across Danah Boyd's excellent article on the class division developing between Facebook and MySpace. It's well worth reading.

As I write this, there's roughly 73 hours left until the iPhone hits the streets. I still haven't decided if I want to buy one or not, and if I do, I need to get serious about my line-camping plans.

I'm still on the fence, though.

A wave of reviews has hit the web this afternoon, and by and large they are highly positive. The virtual keyboard, considered by many to be a potential issue, sounds like it is a lot easier to use than expected. The biggest snafu seems to be the speed of the AT&T EDGE network itself, and sadly, it sounds like that's not something that a software patch will be able to fix.

I want one, oh yes. But I don't need one, and I do have a lot of other uses for the $600 or so an iPhone will cost me. Plus, for that much money, do I really want to live with slow data speed, when that's one of the key features I'd be using the thing for?

Right now, I'd have to say no. If I am going to drop that kind of cash on a convergence device, I don't want to spend the next 2 years cursing out my too-slow net access every time I use my iPhone.

And yet -- I reserve the right to change my mind.

I'm off to work. I'm taking a camera and plan to swing by an Apple store at lunchtime to check out the party. I may or may not post photos, depending on if I get any good ones.

UPDATE 3:25PM: I did get a couple of photos, including one of Steve Wozniak himself camping a line like the rest of us mere mortals. @Flickr.