After picking up Rons car, we went over to the Burning Man Decompression.  I’ve always hear friends talk about this desert event and was interested in seeing what BM was all about, albient in the city and a much smaller version:)  Yeap, lots of interesting costumes and pryo :p

Here are some preview pictures (click continue reading for the rest):
(more…)

(more…)

After taking the Bart from the airport and walking a few blocks, I arrived at Bayside Village.  As far as corporate appartments go, I must admit I was pretty dissapointed with the inside of my apartment.  I guess I’ve gotten used to things like corian countertops, walk in closets, hardwood floors, etc. from my house in DC, or my last corporate apartment in KC.  All that aside, the location is really all that matters, and that is superb.  On the short walk to work I pass the Giants stadium, a borders, whole foods, great resturants, a museum, caltrain station, zipcar lot…  Here are a few quick pictures upon my arrival:

They’ve launched a Satellite into space today to capture imagery data, better then their current provider.

I was listening to a podcast about Google in Asia and wasn’t sure how well they might compare with local search companies like Bidu going forward.  Well, rather then indexing the data of others for search, they are gaining an important data source themselves that will certainly provide another strong competitive advantage.

The last one came last week in the form of a web browser, Chrome.  Many were quick to point out its inability to drive revenue and that it wasn’t necessary in a world of IE’s, Firefox’s, Safari’s, etc., however it further adds capabilities/opportunities to an emerging company who could use it to springboard into other business areas like office, desktop, even OS.

Upgrade the shower rod to the curved type:

Install new cabinet in bathroom (notice the modification ; ):

Deck Before:

Deck After:

Perennials:

Ocean City:

Thailand:

First let me start by saying that these instructions are how I setup a mac from scratch and you might not necessarily follow the same steps, though I think you should. If you are interested in repartitioning your drive, read on, if not, skip to step 1. (more…)

Long story short, I continue Ruby with my work on AIM Photos at AOL, however my personal stuff I’m moving to PHP with an equivalent rails framework. Two likely candidates are trax and symfony.

During my evaluations I read a great quote by another developer switching back to PHP, he said, “PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES ARE LIKE GIRLFRIENDS: THE NEW ONE IS BETTER BECAUSE *YOU* ARE BETTER.” How true are both of those statements. The basic point is that you learn so much from the past relationship that you come better prepared for the next one.

If Java was more supported by shared hosts, I’d jump back on the Struts boat, though for my personal work, PHP should do fine. Now I need to switch from Netbeans back to Eclipse, and dreamhost back to 1and1, oh joy Similar to a new GF, who brings her own baggage and family, you need to accept and try for a successful integration.

First off, it was huge, supposedly the largest book fair in the world. I have a few more coming up so I’ll be the judge, though I doubt this one will be topped.

The company got a decent size booth in the back. At first I thought it was a terrible location though changed my mind when I realized first that rather then other booths directly in front of us, we had a cafe/meeting place area, second, by the time people got to our area they actually listened to what we were saying rather then just grabing a few freebies and moving on to the next row of booths (since there really were no others:).

One morning I arrived before the general public was allowed in and snapped a few pictures, some of the booths were truly impressive.