On Tuesday I went to see the This American Live – Live broadcast at the Daly City Century Theater. It’s the first time I’ve been to one of those theater broadcasts that I think the NYC Ballet (or Opera?) popularized. First of all, I was amazed at the high def video quality. The images of Ira Glass, the audience and producers were sharp and the sound was crisp. Watching Ira Glass also was a treat. The show that they broadcast was on the theme of Returning to the Scene of the Crime, and featured stories loosely based on that topic. Watching radio production happen live gives an interesting perspective of how difficult it actually is and the amount of work that is involved. They’re doing an encore showing May 7th (but not live of course) that I’d highly recommend to any This American Life, radio or podcast fan.
My First Computer
A few months ago back home, my dad was trying to resurrect our old Sperry that he’d brought home when I as a kid. We still had it in the basement but sadly it wouldn’t boot up any more. Here are some pictures I took.
Most of the machine was built by Mitsubishi, so there a ton of Mitsubishi parts in. You can clearly see Intel 8087 math coprocessor with its gold top. The power supply, in the top right, is the only part of this machinery whose connectors are still the same in a modern PC. All other connectors and interfaces have been replaced or modernized. The two long cards on the left are memory cards, and then there’s a hard drive controller card, a floppy controller card and I think a modem in there too.
Here’s a view of the Intel 8088 and the 8087 up close.
Another look at the expansion cards. From far to near, I think it’s video (with a DB9 connector!), memory, memory, serial, modem, hard drive controller, and then floppy controller.
View from the back and the ports:
One Year at Adobe
Last week marked one year for me at Adobe. It’s been a good year where I’ve learned a ton about a new segment of the tech industry and the ways that different organizations work. I’ve also been fortunate enough to work a lot with our partners and customers, spending a lot of time with them understanding the various niches in the ecosystems they play in as well as the goals and desires across the globe. I’ve been lucky enough to do a fair amount of travel in the first year: 13 trips from far flung places like Kansas City and Newark to Seoul and Milan! In that year, groups that I’ve worked with (I can hardly take credit to any of this stuff) launched the Verizon Dashboard, showed a product concept for multi-screen widgets, and a bunch of other things. It has been a great year and here’s to the next!
Mobile World Congress 2009
Mobile World Congress starts today, it’s my first time here. This place is pretty impressive. The Fira, the conference center in Barcelona, is built to match the architecture style of the city and blends right in to the fabric of the area. It’s impressively large and as you walk in you’re accosted by all the biggest names in the industry, mobile and general technology both. It feels a lot like the first Comdex I went to in the 90s. It also feels like Burning Man for tech geeks. In the entrance pavilion (which is outdoors) are huge 20 foot TV screens showing interviews, etc and race cars and booth babes. And that’s just outside.
Our hospitality suite — which is basically an office building that was shipped and built here — is amazing. There’s a full kitchen, stocked with food and drinks for the employees. And that’s completely hidden from the meeting rooms that our awesome admin and show staff run with full coffee and food service. As one of the companies I met with in the morning said, “this temporary office is better than our regular offices on the peninsula!” Needless to say, it’s quite cool.
Adobe’s booth is in Hall 1, and I’ll be manning it for various hours of the day from today until Thursday. I’ll also be doing two presentations at the theater at our booth, “Delivering the Most Complete Web Experiences Across Devices” and “Deliver Seamless Experiences With Flash”. Come check them out if you’re here.
Seeing Rome in 12 Waking Hours
I arrived in Rome yesterday at 6pm from Milan taking the new-ish fast train (still 3.5 hrs). My flight out to Barcelona is tomorrow at 9:20am, so I had about 10ish hours of awake time to see Rome for the first time. Thus began my sprint across Rome.
Friday night, I left the hotel and walked down the Spanish Steps towards the Trevi Fountain. Very nice and pretty walk in the evening and there were a good number of people around. It was cold but I can imagine in the summer how crazy it must get here. From Trevi I walked to the Parthenon where I had dinner at the piazza. I got lost a bunch of times on the way back but managed to stop in for gelatto a couple of times on the route which made it enjoyable (altho freezing).
Today (Saturday), I started early and left via Metro for the Colosseum. I got there at 8:30 and to my disappointment they didn’t take credit card for entrance. Seemingly keeping with the time of antiquity there was not a single ATM around for what must have been two miles. Finding an ATM put me back at the Colosseum at 9:15, still early enough to beat the crowd. From there I went off to the Roman Forum, which was something out of this world. Standing at the birthplace of the republican form of government is pretty special. The day had blue skies, not a ton of crowds, and an overall ease to it.
From the Forum, I took the subway across the river to the Vatican and made my way to St Peter’s Square and Basilica. The scale of the building and plaza is unbelievable. It’s so imposing and feels built to make you humble in the greatness of the church. I took the audio guide while I was there and listening to the veneration of everything holy was odd — it was interesting to get preached to while having a history lesson.
By this time it was about 3:30 so I had enough time to go see the Vatican Museum and the Sistine Chapel. The museum was quite impressive on its own. The collection of Egyptian and Etruscan work is incredible. They had a set of Sumerian scrolls and writings that were unfathomably impressible. The Sistine Chapel, and the apartments that lead up to it were equally impressive. My favorite Renaissance piece outside of the Chapel was Raphael’s The School of Athens as well as the Belgian tapestries. Inside the Chapel pick any of Michelangelo’s works, they’re all beautiful. Creation of Adam is particularly striking.
I made my way back via Metro (not without sampling a local Italian digestive at a bar) and parked at the hotel for an hour or so letting my feet rest. I went back out and took a taxi to Piazza Navano, had dinner overlooking one of the fountains. Walking back tonight I had a better sense of direction than last night via the same route, stopping again for gelatto en route.
Tomorrow it’s off to Barcelona for Mobile World Congress. Hopefully a bit warmer than there than here, but either way I’m excited to go.
FriendFeed
Echoing Omar’s post, I started using FriendFeed to aggregate my activity across various sites on the intertubes. I’m at hyperionab on their services. It’s quite cool. I have this blog, delicious, Facebook, Google Reader, last.fm, LinkedIn, Netflix, twitter, and Yelp plugged in to it. It’s really useful that I can flag something as shared on Google Reader and it shows up in my FriendFeed feed. They’ve done a great job of creating that Facebook style news feed that works to aggregate many services, not all of which are social networks.
Blackberry OS 4.5
Last week I upgraded my Blackberry Curve from OS 4.3 to 4.5. The upgrade process ran only in Windows took about an hour. I ran it in Fusion, but was generally painless and worked without issue. I’m sure there a ton of new features and bug fixes but here’s my hit list of what I like.
- HTML email! Tables work, replies don’t break formatting. Colors, bold, underline, and all that goodness renders on the phone.
- You can see Exchange availability in the calendar. When you type in somebody’s name, it shows you the free/busy for that person.
- Multiple and colored calendars. If you have more than one service that supports a calendar, the Blackberry will overlay them with colored views now. It works a lot like Windows Live Calendar does.
- The address book now uses two lines per contact. The first line is the name and the second is the company. Not a huge fan since now I can see half the contacts at one shot. I wish they had an option to disable that.
- The new default font, BBAlpha Sans, is really pretty. It’s easy on the eyes, has really nice font hinting. The problem is that it slows the phone down. I have a feeling rendering that font on the Curve is a bit much and adding a touch of sluggishness to the device. Switching the font to any of the old ones picks the speed back to the 4.3 OS.
- In call audio enhancement is supported, so you can add bass or treble boost in the middle of a call if somebody is hard to hear. It’s moderately useful.
- The media player app is pretty much the same, except there are now voice notes. It’s a bit hokey and I’m not a huge fan of it. More on that in a later post.
Overall, it’s a really good upgrade. Makes the phone feel like it’s a new device and the HTML support is awesome.
Linksys WRT100 and the Macbook Pro
My parents have a new Linksys WRT100 RangePlus router at home that replaced an old D-Link. The old router had no problem on my MacBook Pro. This new one would always connect but using any service on the web or even IM would be spotty. Oddly, traceroute and the like showed find transmit times but I think it wasn’t able to push more than one kbps or something paltry like that. It was so painfully slow that I coudn’t even access the router’s configuration page via wireless
After fiddling around hardwired, I disabled the “mixed mode” which is basically B/G/N support and set it to B/G support since my laptop in any case is the only device in the network that supports N. Bingo — back and functional. So, word to the wise: Linksys WRT100 does not love the factory settings on the WRT 100.
Social Application Sharing on the iPhone
While I don’t own an iPhone, I’ve been watching this phenomenon occur over and over again. People, iPhone owners and non-owners alike, often pick up other people’s iPhone and take a look at what applications are installed on them. I’ve been trying to keep an eye on when I do this and when people do it to each other. It happens across the board even from one iPhone user to another. It’s the social app sharing phenomenon.
The market dynamics of the app store (e.g. what is the top selling app and so on) changes so fast that people rely on other people to see what is hot and happening. And they do that by picking up their phones and unlocking them. The real-world social sharing is probably just as powerful of a discovery mechanism as the App Store.
This doesn’t happen with many other phones. Very rarely do people want to see my trusty Blackberry Curve and it never happens some candy bar phone. So, you iPhone users, watch this happen around you if you didn’t notice it before. It’s most bizarre.
NEA Arts Indemnity Program
I ran across then when browsing a web site for an exhibit here in SF: “This exhibition is supported by an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities.”
So I looked it up and apparently the National Endowment for the Arts has an indemnity program that was created to allow US museums to pass the liability (e.g. insure) for the collection they have on loan to the US government. If there is a loss, the institution must pay a deductable and the rest of the loss is covered by the government. What a clever idea. It’s a seemingly cheap way for the US government to encourage museum sharing and reduce the cost of the museum insuring the art work.