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I have a pet theory that you can tell a lot about a city by paying attention to its signage. So I like to keep my eyes open when I’m in a new place and take pictures of things that strike me as especially interesting. When I was down in Los Angeles, here are a few of the signs that I saw:

Yes, you really can get plastic surgery on Rodeo Drive:

Here’s a 90210 sign:

What’s unusual about that? Well, I also saw an different 90210 ad with the letters sideways, but it looked like the actors had been photoshopped into the second ad with the same poses. Ah, here we are:

That’s just distracting. They could have at least changed the poses around a little bit. Let’s see, I also visited a book store in Los Angeles. When you buy a copy of Beowulf, you get a script book from the movie:

Fitness appears to be a big activity in L.A. and they offer some exercise workouts that you might not find in other cities:

You have your pick of:
- Indoor cycling
- Pole dance workout
- Yoga
- Abs and sculpt

I also saw a “Stunts Unlimited” sign; that’s a business you’d probably only see in L.A. I headed to the beach and enjoyed walking along the boardwalk when I saw this swimsuit sign:

It says “Come in and having the best price bikini for men and women.” But possibly the sign that took my fancy the most was this one:

It says “Organize a teeth whitening party and get your teeth whiten FOR FREE.” I’ve heard of things like botox parties, but that was the first time I’d heard of a teeth whitening party.

Please don’t take these pictures as mean-spirited; L.A. was a ton of fun and an amazing city to explore for a week. I just took pictures of things that grabbed my eye as I saw them. A few of the other fun things I noticed:

- near the Beverly Center, I saw fruit vendors with vibrant multi-colored umbrellas.

- a huge boat parked on the street with a “for sale” sign in the window.

- L.A. has a ton of Land Rovers compared to Northern California.

- someone wearing a hipster shirt that read “MySpace makes work fun.”

- the funniest street name I saw was Cattaraugus Avenue.

That’s about it. If you want more than that, you’d have to read my twitter-logue of the trip.

I’m up to my ears in email from last week, but I had a great time down in Los Angeles and at SIGGRAPH:

I’ll try to write up a little bit about the trip, but for now I’m gearing up for SES San Jose. Places to find me:

- I’ll be on a keynote panel on Tuesday. By the way, I don’t know who put my title as “Software Engineer Guru,” but it wasn’t me.
- I’ll be at the Google Dance on Tuesday night.
- I’ll be roaming the halls and attending sessions, especially on Tuesday and Wednesday.

If you see me, please walk up and say hello! I’d love to hear your thoughts about things that Google should be doing.

By the way, the LED cube in this image is this project.

SES London was really fun last year, but in 2008 I’m mostly staying closer to home. If you’re attending SES London this week, please say hello to Adam Lasnik and Luisella Mazza. It also looks like Maile Ohye, Shuman Ghosemajumder, and several other Googlers will be speaking as well.

Here’s the places I plan on speaking in the first half of 2008:

February 26-28, 2008: Next week I will be doing a couple sessions for SMX West, including a Linking Q&A panel. What sounds even more fun is the trivia-quiz “Search Bowl” that I’m doing with fellow Googler Paul Haahr. It sounds like a fun, casual event to answer search trivia questions. Other search engines will field teams, plus an SEO team will play as well.

April 18-21, 2008: I’m speaking at the Domain Roundtable conference in San Francisco. I couldn’t pass up a chance to attend a conference about domain names when it’s so close to home.

April 22-25, 2008: I’ll speak or be on a panel in the Web 2.0 Expo, also in San Francisco. Maybe I’ll just stay in San Francisco that week and work from Google’s San Francisco’s office.

June 3-4, 2008: This is more tentative, but I’m hoping to make it to SMX Advanced in Seattle. Considering that until last year I’d never visited Seattle, I’ve enjoyed every time that I’ve gotten a chance to visit the city.

You’ll note that most of these conferences are nearby. The wonderful thing about ramping up new conference speakers in webspam is that if I want to ramp down on travel, newer speakers can more than handle the task. I’m really proud of the speakers that we send from Google.

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.

Next 3 trains leaving, nifty $1.40 vs. $1.81 driving, accurate walking directions. Very nice. Congrats to Gregor and the whole team

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.

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?

I've been on the move lately. Last week, I was in Los Angeles visiting the Google office. While I was there I dropped by and talked to Jason Calacanis about Blogger, Google, Twitter and more. Last night, I attended the Google speakers dinner for the TED conference at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. As in years past, I was blown away by the attendee list. This year I met Cameron Diaz, Meg Ryan, Forest Whitaker, and Tracy Chapman. I also had a chance to meet or reconnect with a host of awesome tech and environmental superstars like Pierre Omidyar, Kate Stohr, and Andrew Beebe. Aside from restraining my friend Hunter from making any embarrassing 'I'm bringing sushi back' comments to Cameron Diaz, the night went very well.

Tomorrow I'm off to the PMA show in Las Vegas, back for a day then onward to South by Southwest. Stay tuned to the Blogger Buzz blog for Blogger SXSW Austin party details. Right now, I'm about to talk to 50 French businessmen about innovation at Google! Maybe I am the new Chris Sacca? I just hope the old Sacca doesn't mind. ;)

In case people are interested, this is how my travel and vacations appear to be shaping up for the first half of 2007:

- I’m taking next week off. I didn’t really get to take much time off between Christmas and New Year’s, and my seven-year anniversary is this month (!), so I’m planning to get out of town with my wife, read a few books, and not check email. At all.
- mid-February: I think I’ll make it to SES London and then stop by Google’s Dublin office. It’s been a while since I’ve been to a search conference outside the U.S., and I’d love the chance to visit Google folks in Dublin. For that matter, I’d love to visit other Google offices from Hyderabad to Zurich, but it’s important to start somewhere.
- March: nothing but work planned. There’s a couple search conferences in Australia, but I think other Googlers will do a fine job speaking down under.
- April: I may hit SES New York, depending on how busy things are, but it should be a good month to get work done.
- May: I’m hoping to take a few weeks off in May.
- June: mostly work. But I may duck up to the Search Marketing Expo (SMX) for a couple days because I’ve never gotten to visit the Kirkland team on their home turf.

Right now the second half of 2006 2007 is looking like a solid expanse of work, perhaps with a trip to PubCon in November.

(This week I’ll try to recount my experiences at Pubcon last week. Let’s start with getting there.)

I head to SFO to fly out to Vegas. My flight is on US Airways and I’ve only got carry-on luggage, so I walk to a self-serve kiosk. The kiosk won’t let me check in because I swiped a different credit card than the credit card that bought the ticket. So I move to the person-line, wait for a few minutes, and then the lady behind the counter motions me to a different kiosk. From a distance, the two kiosks look the same, but evidently this one is looser one (a slutty kiosk?) because it will accept any credit card.

As I’m checking in, I look over and there’s a piece of paper talking about an “Ammended Rule change” or something. I’m a big fan of John Walker’s Strike Out idea: I usually stop reading a document after the first misspelling. The first word on the page is misspelled–it should be “amended”–so I figure it’s not important and keep checking in. I request a receipt as I’m checking in (it makes filing an expense report easier) but the kiosk refuses to give me one. Oh well, I’ll get one on the way back from Vegas.

It turns out I should have paid attention to the misspelled document. I haven’t flown since some idiots decided to use liquids to blow up a plane, and I’ve forgotten that liquids are a no-no now. As I’m stripping off my shoes, pulling out my laptop, and pulling bits of metal out of my jeans (keys, cell phone, VPN card), a TSA agent asks if I packed any liquids. “I don’t think so,” I reply. Now I’m running through my suitcase inventory in my head as I’m walking through the metal detector. Could they mean toothpaste? Nah, I decide. Toothpaste is thixotropic, not a liquid.

A few seconds later, I find out that toothpaste is considered a potential terrorist tool, not a benign thixotropic gel. A TSA agent stares suspiciously at me and critiques the fact that I packed a 7 oz. tube of toothpaste. “This is too big,” she says. How am I supposed to reply? “Sorry, liquid terrorism completely slipped my mind until just this moment”? Maybe “it’s not completely full, so it’s probably only 3 oz. in total”? As she’s frowning at the offending toothpaste, 1 suicidal neuron starts to pipe up. You know, when you stand at the edge of a cliff or a tall building and there’s that one neuron that wants to jump? In this case, the crazy neuron wants to say “You know, there’s this HUGE security hole because you need to check both identification and boarding pass at the boarding gate…” but I zap that neuron and continue to smile sheepishly at the TSA agent.

I am saved by my sloppy packing. Whenever I pack hygiene items, I stuff them in baggies, so my suitcase has a couple quart baggies and a gallon baggie. That’s just how I roll. The TSA agent tries the toothpaste with different baggie combinations until she’s sure that it will fit in the smallest baggie, and that the baggie will zip closed without folding or spindling the toothpaste tube. Satisfied, she drops the toothpaste into my suitcase. I thank her, but I’m nonplussed: the toothpaste used to be in a baggie, but now it’s sitting naked in my suitcase. Would it be a party foul to put it back in a plastic bag so it doesn’t get a chance to mess up my clothes? Unsure of the baggie etiquette, I leave it where it is for now and exit the security area. I place a mental sticky note on the inside of my skull to scold the bad toothpaste and throw it away before flying back.

The rest of the flight is rather uneventful. The flight is only an hour or so, but the speakers keep playing promotions for US Airways vacation packages for about 15 minutes after we’ve taken off and are in the air. Of course, the one item I forgot in packing is some headphones, so I try to ignore the commercial. It really reminds me of the commercials that you’re captive to in movie theaters, which makes me think about how I’ve stopped going to movie theaters as often.

By the way, was my flight back from Vegas delayed for over an hour with no real explanation why? Why yes, yes it was. On the bright side, I got to sample the free Wifi in the Las Vegas airport. Good on you for that, McCarran airport. It could have been worse. The gate next to mine had their flight cancelled, and it was the last one of the night. Dozens of frustrated travelers lined up to rebook their flight with two airline agents. I contented myself by thinking “Okay, I’ll just avoid US Airways/America West flights in the future.” A few hours later I learned that US Air and Delta (an airline that I enjoy and fly often) are proposing to merge. Sigh.

Okay, Burning Man is going on this week. A few years ago I went to Burning Man, and I thought I’d share some advice to keep you out of trouble and make it more fun if you decide to go.

1. Don’t take your own car. Burning Man is a temporary camp on a desert playa. That means dust. When I took my 1994 Ford Escort a few years ago, I never did get the dust completely cleaned from the car, right up until the day the car died. Save yourself the stress: rent a car or a van.

2. Don’t agree to drive someone who buys gallons of yellow body paint. I’m looking at you, N. I never did get those traces of yellow body paint completely cleaned out of my car either. This advice also applies for red body paint, blue body paint, and green body paint. Really, any type of body paint.

3. Take a digital camera and a normal camera. Taking pictures of naked people? Use the digital camera. Taking pictures of art installations or the scenery? The normal camera is fine.

4. If it’s your first time, don’t go on a Monday. I know that you want to get the “full Burning Man experience.” But the fact is that you’ll be out in the desert for days, and that can get old if you don’t know many people. Go on Wednesday or Thursday and you’ll still have plenty of time to see the art cars and watch the Man burn.

5. Keep your eyes open and try new things. For example, when I was there, I kept seeing trucks driving around every few hours, but didn’t pay much attention to them. On the last day, I realized that the trucks were spraying water as they went. Smart people keep their eyes open and spot opportunities, whether it be free water showers or a chance to talk to someone new.