rebooting...

Tomorrow, July 11, is the 5-year anniversary of my blog.

5 years! And over 2,000 posts!

Anyway, I thought that this would be a good time to start--again. I've been slowly (given that Ning takes up 99% of my time -- and a fun 99% it is!) building up a new blog to reboot. For the moment it has a basic template and there won't be much stuff there. I've also decided to keep this blog in place for now. I may add 301s for the feeds soon, but I'm still thinking about the rest.

The new blog is at blog.diegodoval.com. Here is the link to the new Atom feed. Update your bookmarks!

And see you on the other side. :-)

d-day!

Happy birthday me! I was reading last year's birthday entry and I ended up amazed at how little I've blogged since then. I do seem to be picking up the pace though. I have in fact 2-3 entries almost written that apparently refuse to be posted. "Final touches" and all.

Unrelated -- CNN permalinks stop working after a while. How to solve that? (see last year's entry)

And this year is the 5th anniversary of this blog! Surely I can come up with something special for that one. :)

a space odyssey

This is entry 2001.

PS: I couldn't resist. :)

comments back up

Just a quick note, comments are working again (they were broken until yesterday), part of the incremental fixes I'm doing--plus I upgraded to MT 3.35. As usual, the first ones to notice where spammers, but MT's spam comment features work pretty well so I only have to deal with those when deleting them. :)

there and back again

3 years ago I switched to a G5 powermac at the office.

3 Months ago I got fed up with Windows. I mean, really, really fed up. Coincidence?

I'd been trying Vista for a long time (I first installed it a year ago, before the first full betas).

I installed the final version (from MSDN) as soon as it came out last year and I was really astonished at the amount of stuff that was either broken or didn't work right. UAC was still there, as bad as ever. Weird incompatibilities abounded. And using Office 2007 was such a strange experience (what with the different UI for Outlook and the rest of the apps and all) that slowly but surely I got fed up.

Then I read more in depth about the various security layers and DRM mechanisms that Vista has put in place to make sure you can't the see content that you'd paid for unless you have an "approved" device. Because, you see, surely you must be a digital thief if you want to use unencrypted digital paths!

So over December I planned the switch. In Jan I got a Macbook and later when we did a refresh of machines at the office, I got a Mac pro. Then I used Parallels to suck down the windows installs I had into nice little comfortable VMs that now sit on my desktop -- Vista included.

No doubt I may get tired of OS X later for some reason -- everything has its quirks, but for now, and for the last three months, I've been happy as a clam.

I started thinking about this as I wondered how to start writing again, and then it hit me that the switch probably was part of the reset process in my brain. The last several months I've been slowly (VERY slowly, about half an hour a week :-)) making tiny changes to my hosting infrastructure to make it easier to manage and cheaper -- I'll talk about that later.

Lots of other changes planned (in the same small increments!) including a redesign, a domain switch and so forth.

But for now, this is a good start. :-)

happy new year!

What? Me, posting? Does that mean I'll start blogging again? It's a mystery.

In the meantime: have a great 2007 everyone!

d-day!

It's my birthday again. :) This one, according to CNN, is special: maybe the world will end, or maybe nothing will happen. Thanks to CNN for the insightful article.

Last year's birthday I was still in Ireland, a few weeks later I posted about the "controversy" around a certain stealth startup called 24HL, now, of course, Ning, where I work :) -- then left Dublin slightly more than a month afterwards.

Quite a ride. I can't believe I've been back in California for almost a year. Wow.

weeds!

Let me get this straight... my last post was... April 9? Where did these two months go, exactly?

Hm. I've literally have stayed off the blog and the site, completely wrapped up in Ning work (there's a whole lot of cool stuff coming down the pipe... just a little more patience!). But... as time goes by, blog posts start to accumulate in my head (the title for this one has been bouncing around for weeks). In the meantime, a lot of stuff happened: Russ stopped blogging, at least for a while :), E3 and the PS3 stuff, Vista getting delayed, Yahoo! and eBay, Google & Dell, more web 2.0ish activity that can be described in a long series of posts, including the whole O'Reilly web2.0-trademark-brouhaha just a couple of days ago, and a lot more.

Comments accummulated on various posts... backups lagged... etc. Weeds! Go get the lawn mower! Prepare the tools!

Ahem.

Now somehow I fell into it, just writing again. Feels good!

Btw, mentioning Russ is not random, aside from him being a good friend I think I've been going through similar soul-searching as it relates to the blog and what exactly I want to say or express with it. No, I'm not quitting, I feel I've been comfortable enough with taking these "breaks" from it as they come. This is one of the key things of a blog as opposed to something else -- it's gotta be done with passion, and you have to be able to walk away from it, otherwise it's just another fancy trap we have built for ourselves.

One of my not-really-earth-shattering conclusions from my thinking about this is that we need new tools -- the tools dictate a lot of what we say, and how we say it. We need tools that stream with us, from tiny snippets of text, thoughts, links, comments, to entries, multi-part entries, and then articles. Right now, it's not that easy to move seamlessly from one to another. And that hampers expression.

Anyway, these are just disconnected thoughts right now. We'll see if I get into a new kind of groove for blogging. Anyway, for now at least, I'M BACK! The 4-year anniversary of my blog is in just over a month. Quite an occasion to start things up again. :)

da flu (or something)

Heh. Just as I was getting back into my blogging mood, I came down with some kind of flu or flu-like virus and there went everything. I spent the last week mostly in bed, and mostly sleeping. Tired as hell and all sorts of weird symptoms (dizziness, aches of various sorts), but now I seem to be getting better. At least I can stay at the computer for more than two hours without getting exhausted :)

Anyway. Let's see if I can get back in the fray.

happy st. patrick's day!

It's still the 17th here in the West Coast, and I'm reminded of things that happened to me while in Ireland. You know, stuff like this. One thing that's cool about St. Paddy's in Dublin is the sheer size of the festivities. In recent years, about one million people congregated in the center of the city for a really cool fireworks show. Of that million, I seem to remember that about half were tourists from various spots of the world, the rest of Ireland, etc. For a city of half a million plus people, that's definitely quite an influx over a few days. :) Anyway, here I am, raising my virtual pint of Guinness. Hope everyone had a good day!

into the desert

It's been a hectic few weeks, with a new release of Ning (which I'll talk about in a minute) and a 2-week visit by my brother and his wife. Last week we took a four-day road trip down the coast to LA (through Route 1, which is astonishingly beautiful), then to Las Vegas, and finally back home through Death Valley National park. I've wanted to go to the desert for a while now, and now that I've been there I know I'll be going back soon. On the Nevada-California border we stopped for a bit and there was no wind, which created perfect silence. Awesome. Highly recommended if you're ever looking for a cool trip through the area.

happy birthday russ!

Happy Birthday!. One suggestion: give the mid-life crisis thing a few years more, that way you have a healthy set of neuroses to choose from at that point. :-)

today's randomness

First off we lead with critically important news, something with potential to affect everything from the Middle East peace process to how we manufacture high-end microprocessors: Researchers breed fluorescent green pigs. Awesome.

Then an article that's actually interesting about the early days of Sun also over at News.com. I got registered with the Computer Museum here but I keep forgetting to check their schedule. Something to keep in mind.

The Acme Coffee Challenge was not completed as expected, Mike has more details here. It was a good showing though. 75 cups. Definitely something interesting to experience but not something that I'd personally like to repeat anytime soon. :)

acme coffee challenge!

We've begun! 100 cups of coffee in 48 hours. Can it be done? No one really cares, but hey, we're following a honorable tradition of people that play the Banjo with Cobras or Jump into a box full of scorpions. Okay, maybe nothing so radical. Here's Mike's post on the topic.

The truth is that we are working on some new stuff at the office and, well, the coffee will come in handy. :)

PS: we started at 5:30 PM, Sunday Jan 8th.

acme coffee challenge... or something like that

I agree with Mike: when trying to imitate a cartoon it makes perfect sense to use the Internet, and more specifically Wikipedia, as a source of rock-solid facts to prove that nothing can possibly go wrong.

Next up: I demonstrate the feasibility of this approach with my newly acquired Acme(TM) Rocketsled. Wish me luck!

PS: I was in fact in awe of Mike's goal for a while, for sheer bravery if not originality. I thought: I may consume copious amounts of coffee, but 100 cups in a day! Ah, pure genius. "I will stay alert to Mike turning into a blur and report accordingly if it happens" I said to myself. Then I realized he planned to drink 100 cups over 48 hours. Treachery! I sweat coffee at that rate. I eat entire coffee plants for breakfast! Bah!

PS2: Yes. I am kidding. I don't eat coffee plants for breakfast.

PS3: Although... the general tone of this post is making me reconsider how much coffee, in fact I am ingesting. Needless to say, it's all Mike's fault.

happy new year!

Hey, better late than never no? :)

I got back a couple of days ago from a 5-day visit to Victoria, BC (Canada). This was more than a visit, in fact it was an actual vacation (gasp!) involving almost no use of computers and barely checking any email (twice in a week!). Quite amazing actually.

I made the decision a few days ago to start blogging again. 2005 was a year were blogging proceeded in fits and starts, and the year just flew by, what with all the moves across continents and such.

So here we are. Have a great 2006 everyone!

the dog days of summer

While normally this would mean (cue dictionary) "a period of stagnation or inactivity," in this case it means that I can't seem to get off the ground blogging with any regularity again. Lots of work (enjoying it like crazy, btw), and about 6 posts (yes, six) that remain half-written or almost-done but never quite get there, and loom larger in my mind than they should. Which convinces me, as if I needed any convincing, that you post when you write, or you never post. Unless you're focused on getting something written, posts don't just happen over weeks--at least not for me.

At least I seem to be getting much better at my "blogging about not blogging" posts. Heh.

three and a half weeks

Nearly settled now after my arrival in mid-July, I'm starting to regain my balance. Now I've got a house, a desk, the ability to make coffee, and the rest of the things that make it possible to, well, write. Work continues apace of course, but for some reason this kind of moving around consistently throws my writing off-balance. Moving as in moving from one life to the next, those moves that feel perennial even though nothing is.

I finally got a car yesterday, and even though now there are a couple of things missing (landline, cable) it's starting to feel more stable now. Doing it all in less than a month ain't bad either. Full speed ahead!

hello, bay area!

Wow, the last few days have been quite something.

No, it didn't take me a week to get from Dublin to Palo Alto (that only took 20 hours) but it did take me a week to regain my footing somewhat. I'm still looking for a place to live, and there are tons of logistic details to finish, but things are definitely moving along.

Once things stabilize I definitely want to get back on the blogging bandwagon. Get some sleep too. :)

goodbye, dublin

I'm in Dublin Airport now, waiting for the plane to start boarding. The last 3 weeks may have been a bit crazy, but the last 5 days were downright insane. Packing, moving, cleaning... I lived in the same apartment in Dublin for more than 3 1/2 years and there was stuff in every corner and crevice. I haven't been able to do much work, or anything else for that matter, just getting everything ready (and, as it happens, during three of the hottest days of the year. Nice weather if you're sitting and relaxed... but if you're lugging around 40-pound boxes, well, not so much).

I returned the apartment yesterday, and have been staying at a friend's since Monday, doing things in the city. And what a great city Dublin is. Definitely one of my favorite cities in the world. I've had a great time here, I've met some really cool people and had a good time, even if I was working in one thing or another for most of it :). Many of us in tech are privileged to work on what we love, and a lot of times work doesn't really seem like "work" at least not according to whatever weird measure I have inside my head.

So: Goodbye, Dublin, and thanks! And (more importantly) thanks to all the people that were there along the way. I'm sure I'll be back sooner or later.

At a minimum, for a fresh pint of Guinness. :)

preparing...

...to move back to California soon. I got back my passport today, visa and all, and I'm packing and wrapping (and sending) and getting other things ready. Last week was extra busy, which accounts for the sudden lack of posting (again... I know). This week will be no different. Moving is a bit exhausting, emotionally as well as physically, and at the same time it's exciting, so there's a certain schizo-undercurrent to the whole thing... plus you end up feeling that you're rummaging through your life and all sorts of things come back.

The last few weeks have been slightly crazy. So much stuff going on. But it's fun! And it's only the beginning. :)

24 hour laundry: the view from inside

Well, well, well. :)

There's been a lot of discussion recently about a certain new startup called 24 Hour Laundry. It pretty much got started with this CNET article, then as highlights we've got Om, Mark. Even (perhaps predictably) Slashdot.

24HL, as it happens, is where I work. Remember this?

Yep. It's true. Aaaaaall this time and I didn't say anything. Outrageous! How could I?

Well, that's kinda the point.

You see, we didn't want to make any noise. CNET decided that they wanted to "scoop" a story that didn't exist (and is still not all that exciting at this point). We didn't have anything to do with that article.

Then, in the process of not asking for any press and minding our own business, we get branded a certain way, and told we are doing something wrong by focusing on our product.

What is confusing to me is that some of the comments out there begin with "Well, I don't know what they're doing but [insert your thought about why it's wrong here]".

It is one thing to speculate (which we all do a lot of, don't we) and draw tentative conclusions based on that, but it's another to take those assumptions and then categorically "paint a picture". I know: to a certain degree, these are the rules of the game. But there is a difference between saying "If X is doing W, then here are the problems I see" and saying "X appears to be doing W. They're crazy!" This was partially Russ's point with his great post yesterday. (Update 6/23: Jeff Clavier also makes good points on the topic).

For example, Mark Fletcher said:

[...] But creating a new web service is not rocket science and does not take a lot of time or money. My rule of thumb is that it should take no more than 3 months to go from conception to launch of a new web service. And that's being generous. I'm speaking from experience here. I developed the first version of ONEList over a period of 3 months, and that was while working a full-time job. I developed the first version of Bloglines in 3 months.

In other words: "whatever it is you're doing, you should be able to do it in three months."

Ah, those pesky generalizations--but this is actually an interesting point to bring up. Last year, it took me about 3 months to write the first version of clevercactus share, which didn't just include a website/webservice, but also an identity server, a relay server (to circumvent firewalls) as well as a peer to peer client app that ran on Windows, Mac and Linux.

One person, three months. Webservice, servers, clients, deployment systems, UI/design, architecture, code, even support.

Which proves... absolutely nothing.

You have to fit the strategy to the company and not the other way around. In our case, we're doing something a little different (not better, just different) than the next web service, so we're just trying to keep our heads down until we have something that makes sense.

Of course we want to release as quickly as we can. Of course we know that when we launch there will be dozens of features we wanted to add but didn't have time for. Of course we keep in mind that we can't release a "perfect" product.

We absolutely want to involve users in the product's eventual evolution. We just want to make sure that we have a few things figured out before we start sending out press releases to announce our video-blogging social scooter company.

We appreciate the patience, and the interest (even if in some cases it's a bit misguided!). We are working as hard as we can, as fast as we can, to come up with a good product.

Sounds reasonable? :-)

PS: this may be a good time to add "This is my personal website and blog. The views expressed here are mine alone and do not necessarily reflect those of my employer."

D-day

It's my birthday!

Having a late night coding session right now--been working a lot recently, but things are going great. We've got an internal milestone coming up today at work, and after that I'll try to relax for a bit, and spend some time finishing the corrections for my novel which have been waiting for the right moment to present itself. It should be a good change of pace, at least for a few hours. Plus a good Pint of Guinness. Definitely.

Plus, I'll do some more blogging. I've been slacking on that front. :)

"surprisingly real"

"Nicole Kidman talks about her surprisingly real life." is what the magazine says on the cover. There are tons of magazines in the rack at the shop across the street from my apartment, and through this week my eyes keep drifting towards that sentence.

It seems to me that this simple sentence encapsulates so well the trappings of our celebrity-centered culture. Because the implication is, obviously, that Kidman's life should not be "real" (otherwise how could it be "surprisingly real"?). Therefore what must be real is our lives, that of those that don't appear in magazines. And yet the focus is on what is apparently not real. That's were we project ourselves, or where the media would have us project ourselves. Reality TV, after all, perfectly sums up the notion that we want to see "real" people but not quite--since immediately we assign them celebrity status, turning them into "not-real".

A welcome change would be for everyone to appreciate their own lives, and accept that actors, politicians, and so on are also people, like everyone else. Better known, with more money, sure. To get away from our focus on surface.

Which also reminds me of:

"Remember when they were interviewing the pilots, when they came back from the bombing raids in Iraq, in Baghdad? I remember, one guy, in the debriefing, they were asking him about his experience, you know, in a real war-zone. I mean, he'd only seen his targets through night-sights, and scanners, and on video screens. And they asked him, what did it feel like. And his only comment was: 'it's very realistic.'

Well... that's kinda where ZooTV is coming from."

Bono, on an interview in Zoo Radio during the 1992 ZooTV tour.

ps: btw, ZooTV? Best. Rock. Tour. Ever. :)

the friendly skies

"Due to our policy of overselling flights, this flight has been oversold"

An airplane PA announcement in The Simpsons.

The woman next to me has been getting a tiny little bit more hysterical every second that passes. The UA employee is trying to calm her, babbling the usual airline non-denial denial ("it's not our fault"). The woman is all dressed in gray, her hair knit into a ponytail so tight it looks as if it's painted on her head.

Then she starts sobbing. "But I was in line," she says, looks down to the floor.

I suddenly remember the scene in Airplane when a line forms in the aisle of the plane, with people waiting for their turn to calm one of the passengers. The nun! I chuckle.

Meanwhile, the UA employee commiserates, but only the right amount.

The woman looks up, and says, "I really wanted that upgrade."

That's right. The woman is crying because she's not gonna get "her" upgrade to Business. She'll have to fly "Economy Plus". Eventually she gathers herself and valiantly makes across the room, to the gate, into the plane.

Me? I'm not flying at all.

I've been "rejected."

The three phases of rejection

I experienced this in United, but by no means it is restricted to them. When a Crappy Airline (TM) rejects passengers because to an oversold flight, they go through the three steps of passenger rejection, as outlined by Freud in his short treatise Commercial Flight, the Super Ego, and the influence of tiny complimentary Shampoo bottles:

1. Denial with Observation. This is apparent in the typical pre-departure announcement "We are looking at an oversold flight tonight."
2. Acceptance. A corageous employees, hidden behind the counter, announces "We have an oversold flight tonight."
3. Juggling. "We will need to find new flights for these fifteen people."

At one point I almost went up to the counter to ask them whether this mess was ever their fault. All of their statements implied they looked at these things as act-of-God kind of situations more than the result of the company's own stupidity, or crappy software, or whatever reason there may be for them to oversell more than 20 seats in a 300-seat airplane.

But I digress. The plane is now majestically backing from the gate. I'm most definitely not in it.

It's 7:30 PM.

I had been packing and arranging stuff since Friday night, and Saturday both Martin and Russ helped a lot (Thanks guys!) with packing/moving stuff. I had miscalculated a bit the amount of stuff I had to pack/clean up and without them it would have been much more difficult.

Back to the airport, and the plane backing up. At this point I've been at SFO for three hours, arriving two and a half hours before the scheduled departure of 7 pm (and three hours before the actual departure) but that doesn't seem to matter. That I bought the ticket over three months ago doesn't seem to matter, either. They had already been looking for "volunteers" to fly the next day, in Business class. But, like in the movies, once they fell short of volunteers they just drafted a bunch of us.

So we get some vouchers for a Crown Plaza SFO and for dinner and breakfast. The value of the meal voucher? $15. For a hotel restaurant! Clearly these people haven't eaten at any hotels recently. $15 may be enough to pay for the mini packet of ketchup.

Problem is, the paperwork takes time. Suddenly it's 8 pm. Then it's 9pm. We have to go from one counter to another. I seem have packed a black hole in my bag, since it appears to be getting heavier by the minute. I look around but spacetime does not appear to be collapsing into it. Hm.

They also give me a UA coupon/cheque which I promptly cash. I eventually get to the hotel at around 10:30 pm.

At this point, my anger at being treated like space-age cattle has subsided a bit. Business class, some cash... it's not that bad! I follow this line of thought for a few moments until I remember that when I was asked to "volunteer" for exactly the same thing, I didn't. Hm. What was I thinking!? Maybe that losing a day was not a good option given my schedule next week. Maybe that I shouldn't have been left with no information whatsoever waiting at the gate for hours, with all the UA people stonewalling. Maybe I was thinking that, Business class or not, the new flight next day required a change of planes in JFK, which exponentially increased the probability for something else to go wrong, which brought me to the most important point: my visa was a little more than a day from expiring. Any extra delay and it could be a problem. Not good.

On the way to the hotel I keep humming Show me the way to go home/I'm tired and I want to go to bed/I had a little drink about an hour ago/and it's gone right to my head. But this being just the beginning of the trip, and having had nothing to drink, is clearly out of place. I stop humming. :)

the next day

I wake up at five, having finally been able to go to sleep about four hours earlier. My new flight leaves at 9. By now I'm a bit paranoid about this stuff, but I have time. I eventually get to the airport around 7. I have some breakfast. I go to the gate. Around 8 am, they change gates.

Then they start announcing that the flight has been oversold, and they are looking for volunteers.

Oh-oh. I walk up to the counter, and double check that I'm in. Yes. Good. So me and my fellow stranded travellers have used up a number of tickets on this flight, resulting in other people getting "rejected". I begin to wonder if the problem with my flight yesterday actually started, say, in the late 1990s and they've just been pushing people forward since then. Why get more planes when you can just keep delaying passengers ad infinitum?

The flight to JFK is pretty good, actually. They give me a portable DVD player to watch movies, and both the movies and the DVD player explain in large, friendly letters, that they only work with each other. Meaning: if you steal me, I won't be useful.

We get to JFK barely 15 minutes before the connecting flight to Heathrow starts boarding. That goes well, and as I settle down in my seat, the pilot waxes lyrically about getting to London an hour early. We proceed to sit on the tarmac for the next hour and a half, and eventually take off, at which point the pilot tells us that, well, we will actually be getting to Heathrow half an hour late. The Business class seats on this 777 are still lavish compared to economy but are relatively small. I notice there's another type of seat, another class, between where I'm sitting and First. What the...? I suppose there's always a way of getting more money out of your customers.

The movies on this flight are all terrible, and the outlet that my seat has (which I was counting on) requires a special plug, which I don't have, and which the flight attendant doesn't have either. I can't sleep. I start doing some stuff, predictably with the power options to the wrong setting, and my battery's gone in a little more than an hour. And no Internet either.

the last leg

London's Heathrow Airport was designed by a group of super-smart chipmunks with the purpose of driving passengers mad, or so I've heard. I mean, an airport where the Terminals not only have some hallways that hundreds of meters long, but are themselves separated by a few kilometers... (and no, I'm not exaggerating).

Particularly for international flights that connect to another UK/Ireland destination, every time you land at Heathrow you should be ready to spend the next hour or so walking (or running) from Terminal 3 to Terminal 1, with (if you're lucky) a bus ride in between (no luck? got lost? more walking!), plus another security check because all the back and forth forces you to leave the secure part of the terminal. I finally get to the gate, completely exhausted, a few minutes before they start to board.

From there, it's another short delay: another full plane. so everyone's forced to check in their carry-ons. By now I'm oblivious. An hour later I'm in Dublin. My bags get there with me (phew!). I was supposed to arrive here almost 24 hours ago. I Take a taxi, I get a bit overcharged but I don't worry too much.

Then, eventually, home. Happy at that, even if I know that the next few hours will be spent with chores: dusting, getting food, cleaning....re-connecting, and getting some work done. I have no idea if I'll synchronize properly with GMT, but the crazy schedule of the last two days certainly bodes well for that.

In retrospect it wasn't as bad a situation as it could be. I ended up getting home with all my stuff and my schedule is now a wreck (plus I'm more tired). But the real problem is that the airline, in this case United, sucks so badly at giving information to its customers. Had they said at checkin that this was an issue (right after I got to the airport on Saturday) I may have changed plans then. Instead they stonewall and make up excuses and keep you waiting, leaving you in the dark. They still don't get it. Information is good. Telling your customers what's going on is good. A bad situation is made worse by lack of information; people get more stressed and confrontational when they don't know what's going on. When will they learn? Yeah, I'm not holding my breath.

And now back to our regularly scheduled programming...

ps: loong post! Wow. I kinda cheated by "writing it" in my head while I was traveling yesterday. And there's more. But it'll have to wait. :-)

back to dublin

In a few hours I leave California, back to Dublin after my three month stay here. What a rocking three months. A lot of work, but a lot of fun too.

I have a few posts that I started in the last couple of weeks but didn't get to finish (if there's something I learn from that it's 'post right away' because if you wait you never get back to them). I don't have much hope to get them finished on the plane since the tiny seats don't allow for much space for the monitor to be open, but we'll see. I definitely want to get them posted when I'm back in Dublin.

Also, I've been working bit by bit (almost literally :)) on a small project that Erik proposed back in mid-April. I completely underestimated how busy I'd be and so I haven't had time to release it yet. But it's pretty much done, so I want to get that out there as well (and be able to avoid telling Erik that I'm 'almost done'! Luckily he's patient. :)) Hopefully that will change next week!

This week we did make some time for a couple of outings: H2G2 and Star Wars Episode 3. I hadn't been to the movies in months, so it was pretty good in and of itself. More on the movies themselves later.

Whew. Ok. Back to packing. Catch you on the flip side!

the 25th hour (the hour, not the movie)

And we return to that age-old ritual of computer geekdom in which a day turns into night turns into day... and we keep working.

I'd been getting into the groove gradually in recent weeks and months, but only tonight I broke the 'trip to Australia' mark. Now that I think of it May seems like a common month for me for this kind of thing.

Yeah, yeah, I know. After last year's burnout, in theory this isn't something that I should be relishing. In theory. But as Homer says, "In theory, communism works." Plus, you know, after a burnout or writing block or something of the sort you kinda wonder if you have actually burned out some circuit somewhere...

But what of the sense of enjoyment at getting stuff done at warp speed, being so much into something cool, and getting it done, that you don't really care for sleep. (The phrase "I'll sleep next month" is a favorite).

All the while the Scorsese fan in the back of my mind keeps bringing up Paul Newman's Fast Eddie in the last scene of The Color of Money, grinning as he breaks, and says: "I'm BACK."

:)

three weeks?!?

Unbelievable. I blink and three weeks go by. You get emails and IMs wondering what's going on, and say (and think) you'll get back to blogging in no time. Then there's never enough time somehow... all's well though--time flies when you're having fun!

PS: Thanks to Don for the final wake-up email. :)

so what's going on?

No posting for days! Days! What is going on here?

What's going on is that I'm leaving the world of technology. No more software, no more startups. I'm done with it all.

I have been reading some stuff by Lord Kelvin and have come to the conclusion that there is nothing interesting going on right now, and that nothing interesting will ever happen again. (For those scratching their heads, Lord Kelvin was the one who stated that "There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now, All that remains is more and more precise measurement.").

The signs are all there. Google is adding more and more disk space to Gmail, indexing more pages, and creating new software that, just by virtue of being used by Google affiliates, covers more than 100% of the market. At this rate of growth, all our personal hard drives and processors will be consumed by Google software by 2007. Not only I will not have any privacy or property of any kind, I will still be unable to find anything, just like today, but I will be able to do it while looking at funky Google logos, which is a plus I guess.

Then there's Microsoft, who has enough cash reserves to purchase a small country, but is actually rumored to attempt the purchase of Washington State soon and then leave the continent (no, not leave the Union, leave the continent: split the state from the continental shelf and turn it into a solar-powered island).

I could go on. From Electric cars that run slower than the V12s of yore, or faster computers for lower price, this curve is clearly unsustainable. We would quickly end up with cars that consume nothing by standing still, and free computers that can run infinite loops in only a few seconds. We will be reduced to spend our days wondering when the next iPod will be released, or something of the sort.

So I have purchased a cottage in the Alps and I plan to spend the rest of my days skiing and foraging for food in various high-end tourist resorts. I plan to periodically re-emerge from isolation to remember the hectic pace of modern life, read news, what have you.

And to get some M&Ms. I like M&Ms. (Not such a fan of the yellow ones for some reason.)

inertia breaks

It begins: "this would be interesting to blog about." Some notes are made. Thoughts organized. In-brain sessions held, middle of the night, smoke-filled-backroom-atmospheric-like. Then nothing happens: you're too busy. Busy, busy, busy, busy. "Tomorrow," tou think. Tomorrow turns into Tomorrow again. Ideas accumulate. Things you wanted to comment on further start to become stale. Events pass you by. There's another earthquake! Grokster v. MGM is in play, and everyone talks about it, even if a decision is not expected until June or thereabouts. Services launch. Get invited to some of them, use them. Even more things to talk about. Even less time.

Comments are posted, page rebuilds, and MovableType's all-seeing all-knowing configuration with its "show posts for last seven days" (which you keep forgetting to find some way around) suddenly yields an empty page. Blank.

But a blank page is full of possibility too. Like a desert.

And hey, Spring is here!

Inertia breaks.

Sort of. :)

quote of the day

If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.

Harry S. Truman

a st. patrick's day story

Happy St. Patrick's Day everyone!

Since this is the first time in three years that I'm not in Ireland for St. Patrick's, I thought I'd do a little blog-remembrance while having a Guinness.

While in Dublin it is common to come across groups of drunk people late at night in the weekends (and sometimes during the day!) it becomes even more common during this holiday. Many of those are not necessarily Irish, mind you, since there's a huge influx of tourists during this week every year (between half a million and one million if I remember correctly).

Now, in St. Patrick's day, 2003, I was heads-down working on what would shortly become clevercactus pro. It was a night of deep fog, and I was working quite late (as usual). Around 3 am, I hear sounds coming from the door. Sounds that indicated that someone was trying to open the lock. Coming out of flow state, slightly confused, I walk to the door and look through the peephole. A man is standing there, looking with confusion at a set of keys in his hand, with which he had evidently tried to open my door.

"Hello?" I venture, non-committal.
The man's head jerks up. Now I can see his eyes, glazed.
"Open the door" he says, in what semantically registers as an order but with a tone that makes it sound more like a plea.
"What?" I say.
"Come on, let me in." Definitely pleading now.
I chuckle under my breath. "I'm sorry, but you don't live here."
"Come on, let me in," he repeats, this time less sure of his request.
"Go away," I say, then laugh. I can't believe this guy.
He stands there for quite a while, undecisive, until he suddenly turns away and I see him go to the door of the apartment in front of mine. Problem is, he doesn't live there. I observe him. Again he tries to open the door with his keys, and I go back to work. I hear him make more noise further away, presumably trying to open the final door in the group, again with no luck.

Now, all the doors in the complex look alike, so I understand some level of confusion. But you really have to be wasted to not remember what apartment number you live in.

I assume he eventually went through all the apartments and found his, after all, there was only one more floor to go.

Unless he was in the wrong building of course. :)

back into the flow

I've been really busy the last few days, and blogging has suffered. Oh well. I expect this will continue to happen for the foreseeable future. :)

I am really enjoying the weather here. Truly fantastic. One thing I miss, though, is Webvan, which was really great. I have to try out Safeway and see how it goes--otherwise shopping is kind of a pain since I don't have a car yet. But, you know, biking back and forth to the office actually makes up for it. Particularly in this weather.

Did I mention I'm enjoying the weather? :)

the valley!

W00t! Here I am! :)

I was going to post before leaving Dublin but as it turned out I didn't have time. Too many things to prepare.

I'm totally psyched, even after not sleeping much for the last few days, and for the most part in "automatic mode" until I can manage to settle a bit. I arrived at SFO last night around 5, after leaving Dublin in fairly intense cold and hopping at Heathrow in the middle of an on-and-off snowstorm. Things ready for the most part, in a nice apartment, although no phone or Internet access yet (which is why I'm writing this offline, at 6 am in between software installs, organizing stuff around the apartment, and having some coffee :)).

More later as I start having persistent connectivity along with time to write!

packing

So, you're going to be away for about 3 months, around 5,000 miles from the apartment where most of your stuff is stored. What to pack? The answer: not much. A few books. Some clothes. All of my data (portable hard drives come in handy for that). This is the first time in many, many years when I'm traveling without a notebook --- my data will be a couple of portable drives, and I plan on getting machines (note the plural! --that was unconscious :)) in Palo Alto when I get there.

I'm leaving in 8 hours or so. I don't expect to sleep much. There'll be time for that next month. Or next year. :)

PS: Thanks to Russ, Matthew, Erik, and everyone else who's left comments on my commencement news. :)

and now...

It's a couple of days of backups, small-scale internal bickering about what to pack and what not to pack, and so on. To simplify, I'll be traveling only with a couple of portable hard drives, and that means making sure that I really have everything I need with me. Just a few books as well. Oh, and ripping a few CDs that I haven't got around to yet, just so the collection in the iPod is really complete.

It's a beautiful day out today, Dublin seems to have decided to give me a preview of Palo Alto. A bit colder, and more cloudy, perhaps. But similar. :)

I'll be there Tuesday. Yes!

beginnings

Yesterday was Commencement.

It's not every day that you get to participate in a ceremony that dates back hundreds of years (around 400 in this case, at least certainly for parts of it). The entire ceremony is in Latin, except for a few words here and there, and with a well-defined structure. Now, I am generally skeptical of rituals, since in many cases the ritual itself has both outlived the need for it and any knowledge of why it was being done, leaving only an empty shell of repetition. What's interesting is that, in this case, skepticism or not, I was eventually pulled into it. The slow but determined pace, everything in Latin (in which, to someone who doesn't know Latin, even the menu for a restaurant sounds portentous), the process by which the degrees are conferred, where a sort of conversation is pretty much "enacted" between the Proctor and the University's Senate, where the Proctor "presents" some people for conferring and requests that the Senate recognize them and award them the degree (which they do of course, although I suppose that theoretically someone could throw a tantrum and deny it!). More subtle things are also interesting, PhD candidates enter last guided by a guy with a scepter or something (I still don't know what that was for), in essence being guided into the ceremony by someone external. But when it's done you leave following the Provost and the Senate, pretty much declaring that you're now "part of the team" to a certain degree.

The colors of the gown (or the "technical" term I prefer, "cape" :)) were, um, slightly unexpected. Having no idea about these kinds of things, I was completely surprised when they it handed to me. The red and yellow colors of the PhD gown are for Trinity College Dublin, and each College has its own colors (and this applies to other Universities in Ireland and in the UK, like Oxford and Cambridge on which TCD was modeled). There are more "rules" related to the gown's colors (e.g., a Professor's gown is based on the colors for the Ph.D. I think) but I'll have to find a good historical guide for all that eventually, it sounds like there should be some interesting stories behind some of these things. The weight of the "cape" is something to behold and after a while you can't help but feeling different just by wearing it. Which I guess is the point!

One more thing, a small matter of language. I think it's great that this ceremony is called "commencement," which aside from its meaning as the ceremony itself or the day for it, also means a beginning, a start. In a sense, the ceremony celebrates the new stage that's about to follow. The formal Spanish term for Commencement is "colación" which, in Spanish, pretty much sounds like a mix between "collating" (a good translation for one of the meanings of the word) and flushing something down a toilet (yeah, not a nice image, I know). In fact, "colación" comes from "colar" which aside from meaning "the conferring of a degree" also means "to pass through a tight space, to pass liquid through a filter" and even "sneak through." Anyway, aside from the imagery, all terms in Spanish refer to the fact that you're finishing something rather than starting a new phase, more of a looking back than the looking forward implied by "commencement". I wonder if similar things happen in other languages.

So afterwards (cue Monty Python) "there was much rejoicing", then Dinner at the Commons Hall with my parents (a tradition that's 200 years old too) and then, of course, off to the Pub with Philip, who was also graduating, and others from NTRG, in a ... tradition... that is... probably as old as humankind itself. :) At some point during the night I learned the slang "fair fucks to ya" which means something like "way to go" but much more, um, endearing (how could I graduate without knowing that?! Shocking!). Then I said goodbye and walked back home, through cold wind and clear night. It was a good day.

To beginnings...

a week of many

Things? Events? Happenings?

Friday is Commencement, wherein I will wear a suit, gown and funky hat, and receive the degree, apparently with stuff written in Latin. Hopefully they will also provide translation, or maybe I will find subtitles somewhere for download. Btw, I prefer the term "cape" instead of "gown". Or "cloak". Or something. My parents are arriving today for a few days, with the intention (aside from just visiting of course) of attending the event.

Then next Tuesday it's leaving on a jet plane, for a couple of months or so in Palo Alto. Where the weather has been unusually is bad (rain all week). Not as cold as here though. I'll work on fixing the rain problem when I get there. :)

today is saturday?!?

So I'm on the phone with a friend this morning and I'm asking if he's ditching work today (since he's telling me how he's going to the beach with wife & family and all) and he laughs quietly. "No, I'm not working today." A few confused moments later and it turns out that this is reasonable, you know, because it's Saturday!

Damn. So I tell him how yesterday night I had ordered some stuff through the internet from Tesco (big items that I can't carry easily, paper towels, that sort of thing) and how I was pissed at them because they had only set a Saturday delivery date for me. I spent the entire day yesterday absolutely convinced that it was Thursday. And this entire morning convinced that it was Friday. Plus today I was even more confused since I went to sleep at 2 am and woke up at 5 , then unable to sleep just got to work and chat with Russ, who was recovering his system from an attack yesterday morning (and hopefully he'll be back up soon).

Then after some well-deserved heckling my friend says, "well, you should know the date because of your blog. You post there after all." But then, in one of those moments when the words are out of your mouth before you know what you're saying, I reply: "my blog knows the what day it is. *I* don't."

We depend on software do we not. And there's the extent to which it is true.

Plus: if anyone can tell me what happened to last week, I'd be grateful. January, too.

and the next big thing is...

Errrr... can't say yet. Stealth-mode and all that. :)

Okay, I'll leave this topic for now. Other things to blog about. I've been incredibly busy the last few days, but that's how it goes. More in a bit.

in a letter I received today...

"Trinity College Dublin / University of Dublin

Dear Mr. Doval,

I am pleased to inform you that the University Sub-Committee of Council and Board at their meetings of 18 January 2005 have accepted the recommendation of the examiners that you be awarded the degree of Ph.D."

Yes!

</trip>

Got back to Dublin yesterday night, after a fairly exhausting 20-hour trip (lots of waiting around for planes. For example, I got to Heathrow at noon but arrived in Dublin at 6 pm!). It didn't take long to start missing CA weather... now I'm battling the usual post-travel cold+jetlag that follows traveling east across more than 4 or 5 timezones (and wondering what jetlag will feel like once we start with interplanetary travel).

A few things to comment on today, mostly what I didn't get to write during the trip (the "radio silence" of airplanes isn't a big problem--until you have to travel several days a week that is).

So: more throughout the day. :)

a quick update

I'm now in LA (Pasadena actually) in between meetings, and I have a few minutes so I decided to post something because clearly I'm not going to have time until next week to really sit down and collect my thoughts on all that's going on. So this is going to be one of those "weather reports" kinds of posts.

I was in the Bay Area until yesterday leaving pretty much with the rain (was that crazy weather or what? Thunderstorms in SF last Saturday! mudslides in LA! Today though it's clear skies and 60 F so it's all a-ok :)), flew down to LA and I'm here until tomorrow, when I fly up to ... Seattle. Yeah, Seattle! And the weather forecast says that it'll be sunny then (I said I was going to talk about the weather didn't I...) which is not what you'd expect from Seattle. :)

Then from Seattle on Saturday back to the Bay Area and back in Dublin next week. Yes, the schedule became more packed than was originally intended, and it all happened in the couple of days before last thursday (when I left). Very intense. Now I'm running up and down the West Coast and it's just crazy the amount of activity I'm seeing, even in the limited time I have and only talking to what are relatively small groups of people. The boom might not be back, but things are definitely happening.

I took a couple of pictures that I'd like to upload at some point but now I'm out of time. Maybe later I'll be able to log in from the hotel, but I'm not holding my breath: signal strength was pretty bad last night, and I couldn't get online, and when I do get online I need to do things more urgent than this. I ocassionally use the phone to check things, but it's both slow and expensive, so that's kept to only the minimum necessary.

More later, hopefully before next week. Tons of things I've wanted to blog about, including Apple stuff and other things. Stay tuned. :)

in the bay area this thursday!

I'm going to be traveling to the SF Bay Area this Thursday for a few days (I'll be there until early next week). I'm going to, um, interview with a certain company :), but that aside, I'm traveling with a bit of slack to actually spend some time with people. I'm really looking forward to it. And no, not only because I expect the weather to be much better than Dublin. :)

PS: who else will be there around that time? Let me know, I'll try to make time at least for a coffee and a chat.

meeting martin

So yesterday evening while I was waiting for tech support to reply and in the midst of work I took a break and went up to the Gravity Bar, in the Guinness Storehouse (part of the tour thingy), and met fellow mobitopian Martin and his girlfriend for a drink. (Interestingly enough, I was supposed to pay for entering, a tiny fact I remembered after I got there, but I must have walked in with such determination that they let go by even as they stopped other people to ask for "tickets"). Anyway, we had a good chat and it went by pretty fast. We were there for about an hour, and it seemed like a few minutes! Excellent. :)

mini-outage

Yesterday I had a strange outage on the site, connection started to get really slow until it was impossible to connect. Ping was reporting 85 percent packet loss. And so on. I tried a few things, stopping and starting services, to no avail (nothing seemed to be wrong *in* the machine). In the end I just contacted tech support at my hosting company and in a couple of hours they figured it out (all the signs pointed to some problem just "before" my machine). Then I spent some time last night restarting the stuff I had stopped and checking nothing bad had happened. Now it's all back to normal. "Or as normal as it gets..." :)

2K5!

Happy new year everyone! :)

Day's been tempestuous so far... cold, gale or near-gale force winds, and lots of rain... but sometimes it clears up for a while and the sky turns into deep shades of blue, like in the picture.

Today I'll be working for a good while, but then I'll take some time to read, catch up with some weblogs, make backups (yes, make backups!), write, and hopefully go out for a walk, assuming it's not too cold. The world feels quiet. Kinda nice.

end-of-year thoughts

What a year.

So many things happened.

On my personal sphere, I defended and submitted my PhD, released one product (share) and re-released another (pro), and then only a month ago we ran out of money...

We also had the US presidential election, which energized pretty much everybody, and lots of contentious issues, the ongoing struggle in Iraq, the "war on terror," with another terrible attack, this time on European soil, Madrid on 3/11, by crazed nihilistic psycopaths that somehow think that killing produces anything aside from death and suffering. Only a few months ago the Beslan Massacre and related terrorist attacks gave a terrible excuse to Russian president Vladimir Putin to tighten his grip on power in the country.

Then, this week brought us a tragedy of a different kind, the Earthquake/Tsunami in Asia, which will probably end up costing a quarter million lives and untold social and economic damage. This was just one region, 11 countries, and, in a global scale, comparatively "few" people affected, and even so the international aid system is under severe strain. You better hope that global warming doesn't materialize, or we're in for a lot more than this.