Today I attended the “MSN Rabble”, where the Senior Vice President of MSN, David Cole, described his vision on what the division should work on. I did some thinking on what I thought the future of the internet might be, here it is:

• Personal Content — blogs, self publishing and consuming other people’s and organization’s publication in a manner that relevant to you
• Integrated Communication Universe — IMs, e-mail, voicemail all accessiable via one UI and integrated
• Roaming — identical experience on the wire and off the wire. If you’ve used Outlook 2003, Cache Exchange mode gives a good look at where this area needs to go
• Vector Graphics — think about Flash on steroids, but without all the nusiances revolving around it, operating seamless with bookmarks, email and data
• Presence Awareness — when technology can locate you (in a safe/secure manner), this will open a world of possibilities that will make your physical context relevant. Imagine being able to roam your data to a park bench, find your friends at a mall or get personalized ads.
• Unstructured data — make the databases/back end systems transparent to the user, treat data as data

Nothing really amazing or revolutionary here. It’s mainly the synthesis of the news, internet, work all put into one list.

I spent last weekend in San Diego. Man, I miss that place. It’s pretty badass. More so due to the fact I know what to do there, what places to go and the local scene. I was down on a recruting trip for Microsoft and got to meet a lot of interesting people, some really smart (able to answer “design a thread-safe free and malloc operation” on Library Walk) and others not so smart (to why are you a CS major, “cause the money is good”). Thursday and Friday I worked in the Microsoft field office in SD in one of their “virtual offices” that was a cube (with a window view) with a phone, power and Ethernet. Thursday night, Justin, Dan, Austin, Joe and I went to Bar Dynamite in Downtown/Little Italy. That place rocked. It played the phattest hip-hop I’ve ever heard in a bar. It was a haven for those who don’t enjoy commercial hip-hop. Friday, Ami and I had dinner at Café Japengo, a swank Asian fusion place near the Hyatt Regency in La Jolla. They have an excellent baby greens salad. Sunday had lunch my parents in Laguna Hills and came back to SD and watched on of the most depressing/amazing films I’ve seen in a while: Grave of the Fireflies (Hotaru no haka). It’s the story of a young boy (Seita) and his sister (Setsuko) who loose their home during a raid in Japan during World War II. It’s an anime film make in the late 1980s that’s very moving and depressing. I encourage you to watch it. Here’s a good fan site that has the entire script. Sunday I went to Chalk La Strada in Little Italy where local artists make chalk murals on the streets of Little Italy. Another awesome San Diego event. I’ll have pictures up later.

I’m embarrassed to be a Californian and an American these days. An actor/bodybuilder is our governor, a ex-baseball team owner is our President and a oil firm CEO is our vice president. My takeaway from this whole recall fiasco is it shows exactly how much you can change with a million dollars and how effectively to pray on the middle class’ worship of money. I hate the middle class and middle America. They’re generally educated but act without a mind of their own and make decisions with that level of intelligence (freedom fries, anyone?). Individual thought has been replaced with promotion campaigns, marketing slogans, and super sized politics. Remember, the political machines know what you want better than you do. How has the political system become so effective at making otherwise intelligent people think like a prole? For more fun rantings, read Ninad’s blog for good political commentary.

Well, it’s for real. I’ve been at this job for 2 months. Hard to believe, isn’t it? This weekend was pretty uneventful. Jason and I went to Cardiff Lounge in Saratoga Friday night, which was quite cool. Lots of hot girls and good music. Saturday I didn’t do much, worked on some VA/LPI stuff and hung out with the roommates while they dyed their hair and got a new deck installed in my car to let me plug my iPod into my stereo (Alpine CDA-9805). Quite nice since it brought the bump back to my car ever since my Sony deck was stolen. Sunday was lots of football and reading. Last week I finished War Talk by Arundhati Roy, which was quite a brilliant collection of her political essays. I’ll post some quotes from it here later in the week. On a very fun note, I’m going down to San Diego on Microsoft’s dime to recruit (come here little children!) for internships and full time positions from Tuesday night to Sunday.