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Took the bike out for a spin on what might be the last truly hot and sunny weekend of the year.

Head out in search of the fabled Red Hook ball field food vendors. For 30 years they’ve been congregating on the weekends in Red Hook to feed the hordes who show up to play and watch soccer. And its widely agreed to be the best Mexican and Latin American food in the 5 boroughs.

Last year they had a brush with extinction as the city, in its bid to clean up the neighborhood and make it yuppy/Ikea safe shut down the proceedings citing sanitation issues. Eventually a compromise was struck, and a handful of the vendors are back, now in plumbed trucks. The food is still very very good, but their numbers are reduced. My favorite was the pupusas loroco con queso.

But even before that a flat tire drove me into the The Bike Shop and the Coffee Den across the way, where they serve a decent cup of Gorilla. Need to get those kevlar tires.

From there we walked along the water front, dramatically changed from our last visit two years ago. And found to our glee that Steve’s was still serving their swingles, frozen chocolate dipped key lime pie on a stick.

On the ride back I wandered into Fort Greene park, and wondered if I’d found a portal back to Dolores Park. So startled I forgot to take a photo.

And then, at the end of the 13 mile loop, blocks from home, tripped over a fafi and Koralie piece, paint not quite dry.

We tromped up to our roof with friends and neighbors to watch the fireworks in the rain.

A family ritual, originally uploaded by curlyjazz.

We go for coffee at Gayles every Saturday morning I’m in Santa Cruz.

And what a long, strange 10 years it’s been.

I didn’t make it to the keynote to see our new CTO speak (meetings that morning), but it was very strange, bordering on deeply surreal to watch the video of it.

1. Interesting to see my “Flickr is the 2nd largest API ” meme work its way up the tree. I didn’t make that factoid up per se, and I’d probably stand behind it if pushed, but I did reason from very limited data. (also AWS screws up the story, is utility computing an API?)

2. Still haven’t quite adjusted to the transition of OAuth from being a personal project that the “Paranoids” (official title of Yahoo’s internal security experts) were angry at me for working on (against Yahoo policy for Yahoos to work on security related projects), to a the company wide standard, at least on paper.

Renewed protest.net. First registered 1998-2-24. Last time I renewed it was for 5 years. Time passes.

Got ambushed by the calendar again. At some point “way far away in the future” became “like tomorrow”.

Which is how I find myself caught a bit by surprise by the fact that I’m getting on a plane this weekend with Jazz to go meet some friends in Sayulita, MX having done nothing remotely resembling research or planning.

This will be my first real visit to Mexico, so any tips you have for me on Mexico, or Sayulita would be great!

update: everybody is telling me to take lots of books to Sayulita, and my brain is going blank this week. Suggestions on books to take to the beach?

You might have seen the post on the Flickr blog announcing Places, or maybe the Good Reverend’s write up, but if you haven’t:

Places is a new Flickr feature that mines our corpus of geotagged photos, identifies characteristic features on a per location basis, and then goes back into the data looking for “iconic” beautiful photos. (btw try reloading that /places page, the feature places are random. As to a certain degree are the photos on the individual Places pages themselves)

It also is where a good chunk of my creative energy went for the last few months which is why the blog has been so quiet. And its a hell of a lot of fun, not to mention a privilege and pleasure to deep dive into our database and be reminded just how much fabulous photography there is on Flickr, and maybe just barely fumble around the edges of surfacing the diverse communities shared vision. Eyes of the world indeed.

A Place for GeoRSS feeds

Dan roped me in on Places months ago. We had geoFeeds working for semi-arbitrary places, and we needed a page to hang them off of. That page looked a lot like search result. You never saw it because the Flickr project management process (a blog post of its own) left that particular prototype a bloody, heaving wreck. Don’t worry, the current version is much much much better. (of course you also never saw Dan’s brilliant prototype of the current version, which was too cool to release on an unsuspecting public) And voila, many months later, the feeds are there. (though I’d still like to bring back that SRP view to allow rich searching within a location)

Increased Surface Area

We brought a bunch of different design goals to Places, but one of my obsessions that I think we nailed was the idea of “increasing the surface area” of Flickr. (also known as providing new ways to level up in the Game of Flickr[tm]). Only a few people, and a limited range of styles will ever be featured on the Flickr Explore pages. Which is fine, most people don’t care. But Places provides another way to recognize the contributions of Flickr members, by hilighting their geotagging and their photography skills. I’m looking forward to adding a couple more similar features to Places, recognizing other Flickr Games one can level up in, and other contributions back to the commons you can make.

Mo’ Betta

A bunch of stuff didn’t make our initial launch. Some of that has come in since then. More will be coming. I’m particularly excited about using adding some new data sources to improve the page. (e.g. the Groups right now a bit weak, and we don’t have reliable neighborhoods in cities, both of which are in process of being fixed)

Thats kH8dLOubBZRvX_YZ to You

Turns out there are a lot of San Franciscos in the world, and we personally struggle to keep track of which one is which. So we’ve been experimenting with giving them unique place_ids. If you look really close you’ll start to see these popping up around flickr, in photos.getInfo, photos.search, and as microformats on the Places pages. Its all very experimental, this unique identifiers thing, but we think it might work.

Arm Chair Travel

And because I love you, I’m going to let you in a on a secret. Have a great trip.

tornado, originally uploaded by curlyjazz.