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Going to Sayulita, got tips?
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?
Los Angeles
Jasmine and I headed to Los Angeles for the new year. And we had an amazing time. This is hard for me. As a native of Northern California I was raised to despise Los Angeles. (and really I’m more a Central/Southern California, but culturally we identified as NorCal.) Studies on environmentalism and conservation just reinforced the point.
Part of the deal for us going to LA was that I’d do a chunk of the driving as Jasmine’s wrist is sprained. This was problematic as I don’t drive, and didn’t have a license. So on Dec. 24th we spent some time driving, and on Dec. 26th I proved that CA will give a driver’s license to just about anyone. And Dec. 28th we drove the 350 miles to LA. And so ends a 15 year boycott of car culture.
The weather was great, we saw amazing art, we ate great food, we caught a good show, and saw good friends. We took a bunch of photos, I’ve got a small sampling of them, and Jasmine has a more complete set.
The Smart House, Venice, CA
Shepard Fairey might be over saturated, but he is also at the top of his game. The execution on his new work, Imperfect Union, is flawless, and gorgeous. Also sold out. Literally. Every piece was sold. We tried to beg/borrow/steal anything with War by the Numbers on it. Without success.
The Murakami show was overwhelming. On paper doesn’t it look that large, but the live experience is different. Interesting to see his work all together, you realize how weak the painting is, and how amazing his sculpture is. The security presence was so intense, I almost felt like I was in a performance piece, the © in the show’s name being acted out as authoritarian dystopic future. Which is to say, we were only able to sneak a handful of photos. Or a plot to make you buy the catalog. (which we did)
We met up with Jasmine’s people from NYC at the Varla NYE party. The Dickies were the headliners, but the Airliner is a great funky dive bar, with 3 stages, which they kept busy that night, including our favorite act of the night, Vegas based “Objex”, the only one we got photos of.
More then any other year I can remember “Happy New Year!” congratulations seemed to roll in every hour on the hour all day long. This diversified geography thing is starting to look unscalable.
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What to take on your Thanksgiving travels
I won’t be doing many (any?) posts over Thanksgiving — my grandfather’s birthday is this weekend, and I’m spending the time visiting with family. On the bright side, I wrapped up my logistical project today, and I’m looking forward to blogging a little more after Thanksgiving. I also taped three videos when I visited the webmaster console team in Kirkland a few weeks ago, so we might be able to get those up too.
If you’re looking for fun things over the holiday weekend, here are some things I’ve enjoyed recently:
DVD:
- Ratatouille is excellent. It’s family-friendly, but it’s also very clever.
- I played soccer in high school, so I’m a sucker for fun soccer movies (Shaolin Soccer and Bend it Like Beckham come to mind). I really liked Gracie. It’s fascinating to read how the movie is grounded in real life. Gracie is one of the few movies where I’ve watched the movie again with commentary later (provided by Elisabeth Shue and Andrew Shue).
Books:
- Non-fiction, I really enjoyed Rule the Web. I’ll talk about this book more when I do my Christmas gift suggestions, but the short summary is that anyone that touches a computer can find some fun things in this book.
- Also for non-fiction, Founders at Work is interesting. If you have an entrepreneurial bent or have ever thought of doing a start-up, I think you’d like this book.
- Fiction? I genuinely haven’t been reading much straight fiction for the last month or two. If you like comic books graphic novels, I’ve enjoyed Powers recently. The Powers series examines what would happen if lots of regular people had superpowers. I also checked out Shooting War. It’s frigging bleak, but you might like it if you liked Transmetropolitan.
Podcasts:
- The Daily SearchCast has gotten a little sporadic as Danny has been on vacation and doing search conferences. It’s still one of the most enjoyable ways to get your fix of search news though, and it’s much safer to listen to the SearchCast in the car instead of trying to surf web sites on an iPhone as you drive. 
I’ve got a batch of these to listen to while I’m traveling this weekend. But Daron and Danny: you tweaked the MP3 filenames to include some keywords, but you dropped the date. Bring the date back so it’s easy to listen to them in order!
Web. Some stuff that’s in my browser or otherwise interesting:
- Eric Enge interviews Eric Engleman, from Bloglines. It’s a fun interview, and I’m glad that Bloglines keeps the Google Reader engineers on their toes.
- Sure, you saw Scoble blow off Android. But though I love Robert, he’s not a hard-core developer. He’s a smart guy who talks to techies and developers and neat people. So I’d trust Scoble’s opinion on how compelling the Android videos and demos were, but you really want a developer who digs into the system to give an in-depth write-up. A better view on Android was this article by Reto Meier. I love that Android supports all sorts of inputs, from GPS to compass to accelerometer to cameras.
- This Linux device driver project needs more unsupported devices so that they can write drivers for them. My three requested devices would be 1) full support for *all* of the keys on the Microsoft Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000, 2) the Omron HJ-720ITC pedometer, and 3) the Fretlight guitar.
- Gmail has always been pretty open (e.g. letting you download your email for free via POP or easy exporting of your contacts). It’s nice that Gmail added IMAP support, but I’m just as excited that Google has introduced a Greasemonkey API for Gmail to make hacking on Gmail even easier. I was a little surprised that this didn’t get much coverage in search blogs, other than Google OS covering the API.
That’s it for now — enjoy your Thanksgiving, and I’ll see you in a few days.
Which hotel are people staying in for PubCon?
I’m booking my trip to Vegas for PubCon, which starts in a couple weeks. Does anyone know what hotels will have lots of webmasters hanging out late? Which hotel are you staying in?
Back from Kentucky
I just flew back from Kentucky, and boy are my arms tired. My brother is getting married in early September — woohoo!! — so on Friday my wife and I flew to Kentucky for a wedding shower. We flew back today. It was really nice to see lots of family and friends and wear my Ale-8 T-shirt with pride.
The only real downside (other than all that flying time) is that I’m several days behind on email now. Not the situation that I’d like when going into a multi-day search conference tomorrow, but such is life. If you see me at the conference, please say hello! Also be on the lookout for several other Googlers who will be presenting or hanging out at the webmaster tools booth.
Last but not least, here’s a really useful piece of advice. If you’re attending the Google Dance on Tuesday night at Google’s headquarters, don’t just spend your time chilling with Googlers, dancing, and drinking. There will also be a “Meet the Google Engineers” room in building 43 where you can ask lots of different questions. There will be folks from search quality, search infrastructure, Google Reader, AdSense, Feedburner, invalid clicks, mobile search, and many more teams. Save some time to drop by that room and meet some Google engineers. I plan to be there too.
Old Receipts
Upon cleaning out a filing cabinet prior to moving
Receipt for that “cute place we stayed with the view of Duomo”, Albergo, S. GIOVANNI, di Umberto Zanobetti, via Cerretani, 2 - 50123 FIRENZE, 18/07/01, numero 451
Receipt for medical care rendered for one Yasmina Trabelsi, Centro Medico Pardo, E.I.R.Ltda. Av. De La Cultura 710, CUSCO. 26 de 07 del 2005. 1,104.09 PEN.
Receipt for consulta medic en Hotel, Fernando Minauro Zecenarro, Medico Cirujano, Av. Huayruropata, CUSCO. 22 de 07 del 2005.
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Travel plans for late 2007
Earlier this year I posted my rough plans for the first half of 2007. This is what the schedule is looking like for the second half:
June 4-5: SMX Seattle. Already did this (duh!), but part of the reason for this post is so that down the road I can remember what I did.
June 22-24: Foo Camp, also a week or so ago.
July 21-22: I’ll be speaking at WordCamp 2007 in San Francisco.
August 20-23: SES San Jose
September: there’s a wedding in early September I plan to attend.
December 4-7: I’ll be at Pubcon Vegas 2007. I plan to send other speakers from my team to SES Chicago so that we can cover both conferences.
I wanted to hit Defcon or SIGGRAPH this year (late July/early August), but I probably won’t get around to it. I’d like to attend TED at some point, and I’d definitely enjoy crashing the World Economic Forum in Davos someday. Does anyone have suggestions for other fun non-search conferences or events?
Back from Foo Camp…
I’m back from Foo Camp 2007 but omigod, I’m so sleepy that I’m seeing double. I stayed up until ~4 a.m. Friday night and 5:30 a.m. last night, and breakfast started at 8 a.m. Some of the late night time was chatting with people and some of it was the Werewolf game. No way around it — getting up for work tomorrow morning is going to suuuuck.
I think Foo Camp is off-the-record, so I’ll make only one observation that anyone could make from public photos. Jay Adelson of Digg looks like he was separated at birth from author Neil Gaiman:
Adelson’s hair is longer than his picture, so the resemblance is even more noticeable. They also both strike me as bemused at the world. Jay and Neil, you guys should meet each other.
Okay, I’m off to bed. Thanks to Tim and the O’Reilly folks for a fun (un)conference.
Update: The Foo Camp on/off-the-record policy is nuanced. Talking about the general experience as a participant (”I got my laptop laser-etched!” or “They stock the restrooms with Make magazine here!”) shouldn’t be a problem. The preference is that sessions not be recorded/live-blogged (so that people can be spontaneous), and that anything said in confidence should be kept that way as if it were under NDA. People should to be careful to check with other participants to make sure that any commentary preserves the expectations of whether the conversation was public or private. When in doubt, assuming something is off-the-record is the safe policy. If you want to get a flavor for Foo Camp though, Kara Swisher did a short video about it.
Leaving on a jet plane
T-minus 5 until jumping on BART to SFO to CGD. I’ll be around and online this week from XTech (assuming Edd has the wifi figured out). The following week I’ll be totally offline enjoying a week in/around Paris with Jasmine. Having spent so much time doing “exotic” travel I’m intrigued to see what hanging-out-in-major-Western-city-as-form-of-travel will be like.
p.s. If I haven’t gotten your Paris suggestions feel free to leave them in the comments!
See y’all in a couple of weeks.
Where to go on vacation?
I mentioned that I was planning to take several weeks off in May. Well, it’s May now and I’m starting on vacation really soon, but I haven’t planned any travel. Okay, that’s not quite true; I’m heading back to Kentucky to see family early in the vacation. But I haven’t planned any other travel yet. Anyone want to offer recommendations on good/fun places that I could visit in May?
Heading back to the valley
I was out of town Monday through today for a family reunion in New Jersey. It’ll still take me a day or two to catch up on email; I’m sitting in the Philadelphia airport right now. But I couldn’t pass up the chance to see family and get an authentic New Jersey hoagie. 
