Recently in the "Friends" category...
I picked up this shirt back in college from a Skin Games gig. Kev may well remember that evening…
What astounds me is two-fold:
- That the shirt has lastest this long.
- That the shirt is older than a bunch of people that work here.
Anyhow. Great band. Great memories.
On Monday I will be forty… Damn. I remember my twentieth birthday party quite vividly - can twenty years really have passed since then?
Anyhow, enough with the old.
Last night, my lovely wife threw a surprise birthday party for me at the Wilde Rover in downtown Kirkland. What a wonderful time!
Lots of friends, lots of beer. And at least one person who couldn’t remember how they got home afterwards…
Thanks honey.
I can’t believe I’m sat at home instant messaging with my neighbours - I’m helping someone get setup with Google Apps.
This must be what it’s like to be a geek at college these days. Except with bigger dorm rooms.
My pal Andy just took a ride on the Vomit Comet!
There really is no indication at first that anything is happening - you can hear the engines increase a little as the plane starts to climb but since there are no windows you have to real clue that anything is happening. Slowly you start to feel the increase in gravity as pressure across your whole body and if you try to lift your arms they really feel heavy. Its not uncomfortable but very odd but then quite quickly there is no pressure and you see people pushing off and WOW you feel very light. Martian and lunar gravity is strange enough but the first zero g is even weirder - you are suddenly not touching the floor and the slightest movement makes you go feet up or collide with your team mates. You can see why they say no jumping - you find yourself on the roof without even trying.
After 30-40 seconds someone yells ‘feet down’ and you have to make sure your feet are closest to the floor. Gravity comes back quite quickly and you will hit the floor hard. This is why its padded. They have us do some fun things like chase M&Ms and play with water. Of course when gravity comes back you are showered with the spare M&M and lose water but that’s all part of the fun.
Nice one!
On Wednesday night, Nabila and I attended the opening night for Teatro ZinZanni at their new, permanent home in Seattle. This was my third ZinZanni, and man was it great!
The show was awesome, the food (by Tom Douglas), spectacular. A real treat.
Teatro ZinZanni is a big night out unlike any other, a three-hour whirlwind of international cirque, comedy and cabaret artists all served up with a five-course feast designed by celebrated Northwest chef Tom Douglas.
An ever-evolving and constantly changing production, Teatro ZinZanni combines improv comedy, vaudeville revue, music, dance, cirque and sensuality into a dizzying and colorful new form that is never quite the same from evening to evening. The fast-paced action of the show unfolds above, around and even alongside the audience as they dine on a gourmet meal. Teatro ZinZanni is guaranteed to dazzle.
It’s such a great experience - a three hour show where your waiters are the performers; superb acts in the middle of the dining area; great ambiance; incredible music; a wonderful venue that transports you back to a world of cabaret with a distinct European flavour.
What more could you ask for?
If you’re in the area, you have to go.
Just buy a ticket.
Or three.
Now.
I’ve finally finished with the photos from Steve and Rachel’s wedding. You can find them on Flickr.
During the wedding, Julian was also wandering around with a camera and captured this one of me! Nice shot, little dude.
Today we had the honour of attending the wedding of our long time friends, Steve and Rachel. What a wonderful time! Much merriment was had by all and I sincerely wish them the best that life can give in their future lives together.
Also, a few months ago they asked me if I would take the photos of their wedding. Talk about nerve-wracking! ‘Twas a good job I picked up that extra 4GB CF card as I ended up shooting over 500 frames…
It’s going to take me a while to delete all the rubbish and make the rest look halfway decent, but I know that some friends will be wanting to see some right now, so here’s a few rushed shots…
More on Flickr in a couple of days…
Update: The photos are now up on Flickr.
Our second intern of the summer, Julia, headed back to college this week. She rocked quite hard - we’ll miss her…
Gayle has all the details…
Oh, and Ming, yes you were our first intern, but Gayle forced us to promote Julia… Or something like that…
For my money, one of the best writers (ok, bloggers…) on the internets right now is my former colleague at Microsoft, Hal Bryan.
His posts are the highlight of my day. Well, week. Ok, month.
Take this snippet from his most recent post for example.
Have I no shame?
Actually, I do, but I’m about to squander the last of it away like Jack giving away his cow, without even some magic beans, much less their subsequent beanstalk, to show for it.
I collect DVD’s, and have a weakness for certain types of movies and television shows. Sometimes, my standards can actually be fairly high, tending toward well-written dramas, comedies-of-manners - “Careful there, Vicar”, “Very droll, Bernard”, that sort of thing.
This isn’t one of them. Not even close.
No, in this case, I’m admitting to enjoying something terrible. Why? Well, because it has a rather surprising amount of good flying in it. Before Michael Bay gave us Pearl Harbor, before Tony Bill gave us Flyboys, flying scenes in movies and television shows were usually real, and, thus, good. If scenes weren’t shot for that particular title, then you might see stock footage. If it was faked, it was usually faked so horribly with models that it was worth watching anyway.
Hal, you need to write more.
Tonight I feel like I live in a community more than ever before.
Up until last week I lived on 8th Street South in Kirkland, right next to the Little League baseball fields - the street is part of a Kirkland known as the Everest Neighbourhood.
Recently, longtime neighbours of ours, the Aubrey’s, decided that it was time to downsize after living here since 1972 and raising their kids in their house on 8th. They applied to subdivide their land, but permission came with the stipulation that 5th Avenue South that connects 6th to 7th should be extended through to 8th - obliterating a footpath and lovely area of the neighbourhood in the process.
Not to mention the fact that commuter traffic generated by such a cut-through would destroy the quiet and kid-friendly street one block west.
You can read more about this at the Kirkland Courier’s site and this map will show you what I’m talking about.
An appeal was lodged and tonight a quasi-legal hearing was held at Kirkland City Council. It was quasi-legal in the sense that the council members were effectively judges and jurors on the issue and were not allowed to hear any arguments about the case beforehand. Arguments would be presented for and against and entered into the record and most frustratingly, audience members had to be quiet and respectful - no clapping and no standing up and shouting “WTF!”.
You can understand that I was sitting on my hands and biting my tongue throughout the whole proceedings.
There were many empassioned arguments including one by a neighbour who had done some severe homework, turning the city’s own planning policy against itself.
So many friends from the neighbourhood showed up. Many with kids. Everyone supporting the appeal. Did I mention that 7th Street has almost forty kids under ten years of age living on it? It’s an old school neighbourhood with young parents; kids playing on the street side of their houses with other kids; neighbours chatting and doing favours for each other.
Community.
A community that would have been destroyed by a short-sighted, follow the rules, planning policy.
The end result? A unanimous vote by the council1 in favour of our neighbourhood.
Surrounded by neighbours, I have never felt so much a part of a community.
Rock on.
1 Incidentally, there is a certain council member who urgently requires that a bureaucratic stick be surgically removed from their arse.
A friend of mine and former shipmate, Nick Edgar, has put together a demo using the WorkerPool support in Google Gears to generate a Mandelbrot set whilst keeping the browser responsive.
Pretty sweet!
I just recently reconnected with a friend, Brian Jolley, from the halcyon days of school back in England. Anyhow, he just sent me a picture of us from around 1974…
See if you can spot me…
One of Julian’s school friends had a birthday party today - and not at the usual sort of places either!
The party was at the Woodinville Fire Station - what an incredibly brilliant idea!
The day started out in the fire station’s classroom when Lieutenant Davis showed a kid friendly instructional video and then one of the Fire Fighters donned all of his gear, including the breathing apparatus. To be quite honest, this was the first time I had seen a Fire Fighter fully kitted up, so I asked how much it all weighed. About one hundred pounds apparently, but much heavier when it all gets wet…
However, Lieutenant Davis had an alteria motive for doing this. Apparently a big problem with rescuing kids from a burning building is that a Fire Fighter can appear quite scary with all their gear and their voices sounding Darth Vader’s, plus the fact that the kids are already freaked out by the fire. Sometimes they run and hide from the very Fire Fighter that is attempting to rescue them…
So he got on hands and knees and crawled around in front of the kids, letting them hear his weird voice and having them touch his hand.
That one thing was probably the most valuable part of the day.
Anyhow, after that everyone got to go outside, play with fire hoses and sit in fire trucks. We also got a great tour around the station, including the dorm rooms and gym (which included a large plasma and an Xbox 360).
A great day, topped off with them extending the ladder truck’s one hundred foot ladder whereupon one of the Fire Fighters climbed all the way to the top!
Superb!
This year will be the 20th anniversary of the release of Fish! from Magnetic Scrolls.
Fish! was the first game and first real live commercial software project that I worked on and the first product that I really argued for the inclusion of an exclamation point in it’s name :-) Somehow the exclamation point disappeared from the packaging for the US release…
Released towards the end of 1988 was Fish!, a more light-hearted, surreal adventure game, where the player assumed the role of a dimension-jumping goldfish. Written by John Molloy, Pete Kemp, Phil South and edited by Rob Steggles, Fish! would prove to be the last of Magnetic Scrolls’ traditional commercial releases.
I loved Fish! It was weird, different and totally odd. I also loved working for Magnetic Scrolls which was Unix-centric - everything was developed on a MicroVax and cross-compiled and the guys were way overboard on the intelligence level which led to very interesting pub discussions.
Stories around working there mostly involve great coding, fun problems and south London pubs. In fact I remember that when the UK went to all day licensing hours (i.e. the pubs were open all day), we decided to “extend” our lunch hour. We all came back to the office fairly “happy” to the chagrin of our boss, Anita Sinclair, who’d been schmoozing a potential investor who’d been hoping to meet the team :-)
Alumni from the company are pretty well known in the computer graphics space - two of the guys, Doug Rabson and Servan Keondjian (both now at Qube), went on to form RenderMorphics, which I joined in 1995 shortly before it’s acquisition by Microsoft and Richard Huddy went on to work for ATI and NVidia.
Ahhh, reminiscing… I am, indeed, an old fart.
Update: Oh, and yes, I know the quote and US reviews say 1998, but it went out in 1997 to the world at large…
In a particularly well reasoned essay, David reinvents the control of the DNS infrastructure.
How did I stumble upon this? Well, David and I went to school together at Downlands County Secondary School (when did it change it’s name to “Community School”?) in Hassocks (where I grew up) and Haywards Heath Sixth Form College (what’s with the “Central Sussex College” thing?) in the south of England - both of us pretty much geeks! In fact we sold games that we’d written for the ZX Spectrum games and shipped them out on little plastic bags amongst other geeky activities.
We lost touch after we both went to our respective Universities, but happily he stumbled upon my blog a couple of years ago and we reconnected. Every now and again he sends me another great idea. Most of these ideas are utterly fascinating, if very off the wall. And sometimes they just make a lot of sense, even if potentially impossible to implement due to infrastructure inertia.
David’s ‘The Independent Network - An Alternative to the Internet’ is one such missive. If you have any interest in the current domain name morass, it’s a must-read.
And apparently I’m not the only one who’s been getting David’s semi-regular essays.
In his latest column, PBS’ Bob Cringely talks about David’s idea and, quite frankly, agrees with him.
Hopefully David’s website won’t explode under the traffic sent his way…
David hadn’t seen the article before I sent some congratulations his way, to which he jokingly responded (and I hope he doesn’t mind me quoting him): “If I’d known it was going to go public I’d have spent more than 30 mins writing it! :-)”
I think it took him longer than that…
Welcome Matthew!
The Five Things meme has finally reached me - it must be really hitting the long tail of it’s lifetime now!
So, you get to thank to Justin Uberti for tagging me as I unleash some trivia about my life…
Anyhow, the rules are that I tell you five things about me that you might not know and then tag five others to do the same.
With that out of the way, here we go…
- My first coding experience was on a friend’s KIM-1. Then a ZX-81 followed by a Spectrum, followed by etc…
- At Sixth Form (High School to you Americans) I was instrumental in putting on a production of “HitchHikers Guide To The Galaxy”. I co-wrote the script in whilst supposidly in physics class with a friend of mine and then let him direct the adaptation while I did sound. We sold out all three nights and made a bunch of money for the school - we had people coming to see it from all over the country.
- I wrote computer games at school and sold them. I wrote books of games with “code listings”. I was published in Crash.
- In the early 90’s I wrote an application for the official scorer’s at TCCB cricket matches that replaced the traditional, centuries old, scorebooks. It was a TCL/TK app running on X-windows on BSDI Unix on 386 laptops that connected back to base so we could provide live updates to Teletext. That was over a SLIP connection. There was no PS2 mouse driver at the time so I wrote it. Think about it - 70 year old cricket geezers using X-windows on Unix in the early 90’s. They loved it. Oh, and I also got to sit in the scorer’s box at Lords during the 1993 Ashes series…
- I love sailing. Especially sailing in far off distant lands. Unfortunately I’ve not got to do that much recently…
And with that I get to tag five other people. Lets go with:
Hadley suggested that I enter a photograph that I took of her daughter into Shutterfly’s Seasonal Reflections contest.
So with full permission, I of course obliged :-)
Please follow this link to vote for the photograph…
Robert Scoble popped over to our office in Kirkland today for a video interview and a tour of the Google facilities. I followed around chatting with Buzz Bruggeman who came along for the ride, while Robert wandered, walked backwards and did the fun Scoble interview thing. He even interviewed the Chef!
It sure was nice catching up with him and it sounds like he’s enjoying California and PodTech immensely.
His HD video camera was quite a feast for the eyes - Robert, what type is it?
He also gets the honour of causing the phone on my desk to ring for the first time, when he called from reception. I’ve had it over a week now and it never rings - ‘tis all email… Dunno why I have the thing…
Oh and for historical interest, here’s a fun video that Robert did at Channel 9. The interviewee? Me.
This evening I went out for a beer with Breen, a former flightsim developer and current Google developer. It was cool to catch up, and cool to find out that he still has the aviation bug - he now has his PPL, instrument rating and is working on his helicopter ticket!
Afterwards, Breen dropped me back at my hotel, but came in because a friend of his who was in town for a conference was also staying at the hotel and they were going to catch up.
When the elevator doors opened on my floor, there she was with three friends of hers, waiting for the the hotel staff to unlock the “Hi-Fi” room - kind of like a living room for guests to hang out in.
One of her friends looked strangely familiar.
“Steve, this is Matt Mullenweg”.
“Ahh, Mr WordPress!”, I replied, shaking his hand.
Anyhow, we all shared a bottle of wine and quite amusing conversation before I retired to my room.
Coincident meetings through unexpected connections are fun.
Though, as is becoming an all too regular occurrence, I was the oldest person in the room by at least five years…
