lots of beaches round here

A few weekends ago we went to Ocean Beach, in west San Francisco. The day was perfect, thousands of people were out, and you could see for miles. We found a few interesting shells, waded in the very cold water, and discovered that sand makes a pretty good chalkboard replacement. Here is Jason reciting his favorite proof of why the square root of 2 is an irrational number.





The sunset was beautiful, and the layers of far away clouds made the sun appear huge as it began setting, and morph into odd hourglass shapes as it finished setting. As we walked back up the beach to our car we passed a wedding party lining up on the beach.

My first day at the new job

I arrived at work yesterday morning, to find on my desk:

• a vase of fresh flowers
• a shiny new MacBook pro, with a set up and fully functioning development environment
• a 30 inch computer monitor
• business cards with my name on them
  
• a gift certificate for dinner for two at Chez Panisse

And, last but not least, because my new job title is Web Ninja, they had also gotten me a set of nunchucks. This is going to be an awesome job.

February is album writing month

This month my band Tab Completion (which is a computer *and* guitar pun!) decided to do the RPM challenge, and write, record, mix, and press an entire album in the very short month of February. We did it! I'm so proud of us. We wrote ten songs and now we have a CD to show off! I'm currently on vacation (the new job doesn't start until next week), so, having convenient amounts of free time, I ended up doing all of the recording, mixing, mastering, graphic design, and CD production. It was fun but ended up being quite a lot of work, especially the graphic design part. I also learned a lot about recording in the process, and after tuning my ear to adjusting levels now have started wanting to adjust the EQ levels of everything I hear. Hey- turn the treble down on that cat!

Here is our beautiful album:





























So proud. In a month or so the RPM website will have built a streaming jukebox out of all the CDs they received, and anyone will be able to hear the whole album. What kind of music do we play? That's kind of hard to say. After a lengthy discussion we compromised on "garage folk jazz" but I'd say it's basically indie-pop. I'm happy because I get to play a lot of vibraphone and accordion on the album.

Urban Camouflage

Dutch artist Desiree Palmen creates elaborately painted urban camouflage. Pretty awesome.

Another economic solution to that social problem

Well, I've donated about $150 to the ACLU over the last few weeks as part of my economic protest, and while I feel happy about giving myself an excuse to donate money to charities doing great work, I decided to get another job. And not just for these reasons in that other post. When I decided to go work for a small company, I was hoping to find an agile, fast-paced environment, unhindered by big company process and legacy code. The medical software company was not that. If anything, it had more legacy code than Amazon, and didn't strive for innovation because its business was in maintenance mode. I need to have a hard job, where I can constantly push myself to learn more. The time for coasting is not now.

Serendipitously, I found a job at a startup company that is in its early stages and is trying to change the world by building tools to empower consumers to make more conscientious buying decisions by providing them with easily accessible and complete product and company information. This is effectively another economic solution to the larger-scale, more important social problem of unsustainable consumption. So I'm really excited about this opportunity- it's a perfect match for my skills, interests, and ambitions. And ultimately I'm glad I took the medical software job and got disillusioned with it at exactly the same time that this other company got started. The timing couldn't have been better.

My new job title will be Web Ninja. Multicast packet storm pirates better watch out. And I'll be using Ruby on Rails, and getting to work on really interesting, hard data integration and personalization problems.

So I gave my 2 weeks notice yesterday. This morning when I came into work, my boss told me that even though I didn't have vacation built up, she'd prefer to just pay me out for the two weeks and let me go home now since my work was already wrapped up. Pretty sweet. So I'm relaxing on the couch today, catching up on the 57000 blogs I subscribe to. And maybe I'll even play with Ruby a little.

American Society for Velociraptor Attack Prevention

Today my favorite stumbleupon is the American Society for Velociraptor Attack Prevention. It's pretty funny, and also an excellent get rich quick scheme. Piggybacking on the popularity of XKCD and it's references to velociraptors (substitute, velociraptors, goto), the author only had to create (or lift from wikipedia) about 5 paragraphs of relatively funny material, and probably gets enough click traffic through the ads on the site to make a bit of profit. There's even a nice box where you can enter your email address (and probably get it sold to spammers).

Stumbleupon is teh awesome

On the suggestion of a coworker who is my new Aggregator of Internet Arcana (sorry Chris), I finally checked out StumbleUpon, a meta site that lets you list topics you are interested in, then suggests websites to you. You can refine the suggestions incrementally by rating any sites you view. You have to download a browser toolbar for that part. I assume it also aggregates all the feedback it gets from all its users to make its recommendations to me smarter.

My motivation was to discover new internet cartoons. I'm a faithful reader of Natalie Dee, Married to the Sea, and XKCD. And when I run out of those I will begrudgingly read more mainstream cartoons like dilbert. Icanhascheezburger also seems to fit my short attention span web humor need. But these heroic cartoonists have limited energy, and can only put out a comic a day. Even the distributed cat picture taggers can't keep it up over the weekend. I need more cartoons in my life.

So I downloaded StumbleUpon's toolbar and checked a few of the 'interest' boxes: Activism, Books, Irony, Counterculture, Crafts, Investing, Music, etc. Here's what the first few clicks turned up:

• A man in wales built himself a real-life hobbit house into the side of the cliff, and his website describes how he did it. Awesome.
• A site of free public domain audiobooks. Awesome.
• A recipe website indexed by tantalizing pictures.
• An album art index. Awesome.

4/4 awesomes. I'd say Stumbleupon rocks.

One thing that is interesting is the percentage of spam websites that appear in your 'stumbles'- it seems to be about 10%. I know there are lots of spam websites out there trying to shore up their ad click-through revenue and sneak up the google search results pages, but 10% seems high. Also interesting is that it sometimes takes me a click or two to realize the website is spam- the index of the site will look totally valid and believeable but when you click through to pages the site claims to be indexing you see ads. And not surprisingly the spam websites are a whole lot more readable than many of the mom-and-pop personal webpages.

No new fabulous nerd cartoons yet, but I'll keep stumbling.