Update 16: San Jose, Job Search, Site Update, Writings, SSX, and more...
January 21, 2001
From: "David Weekly's Update"
Subject: San Jose, Job Search, Site Update, Writings, SSX, and more...
To: "The david.weekly.org Update List"
j a n u a r y 2 1, 2 0 0 1
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< david.weekly.org > Update #16
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------[ European Adventures -> San Jose ]
Well, I didn't go to Tahoe. I spent the summer in Europe, which was
absolutely incredible and was away from any significant amount of
technology, computers, etc. I spent most of the time designing,
getting translated, and passing out surveys asking what people
thought about genetically modified foods.
We got to go all the way up to Narvik, Norway, which is way north
of the Arctic Circle. We went hiking on a mountainside and got to
watch a sunset turn into a sunrise at midnight (while slapping
off the mosquitoes!) to return the next day to Stockholm on a
22-hour train ride through the fjords. Gorgeous.
Stockholm was beautiful. I had a near-religious experience with
a Northern Thai appetizer, and learned how to cook for Vanessa,
thanks to Epicurious.com (highly recommended!). The kids in the
city have this funny thing for dumping detergent in the fountains:
one morning one of the fountains had about two feet of foam in it!
We went to Oslo to see one of Vanessa's old friends and we got
to see the statue garden there, which is absolutely tremendous.
There are over a hundred statues, designed by a singular
architect, the center of which is a totem pole-like pile of
granite people something like eighty feet high. Whoa. The
sculptures all just seemed so alive. You'd touch them, even, and
they just felt like people in stone.
We had adventures at Tivoli in Copenhagen, went to a rave
party in Turku, Finland (the boat to get there has a dance
club on it!) at which there were old people dancing in a
swimming pool, and we got sick on the high-speed X10 train.
One of the highlights of the trip, though, was our visit
to Florence during our two weeks in Italy before connecting
to Stockholm: biking downhill at night, FAST, with no lights
on the bikes or on the road, slightly drunk on incredible
wine, with the road sharply curving left and right, the
stars in full force, and the city of Florence unfolding
itself beneath us. Wow. I love Florence.
I came back from Europe refreshed and realizing my hunger for
technology. The prime purpose for getting away from
technology and considering working for the CCC at Tahoe was
to allow me to get perspective on my life and feel like I
wasn't being shoved down a path against my will. But Europe
made me realize that technology wasn't imposing itself on me:
I desired it. I had been the one chasing it all the time; my
whole life in fact.
I knew I wanted to code again.
So I came back to the US with a resolution to get back into
tech. I spent two weeks in Boston with my folks, then two more
with Vanessa's folks in California as I worked through getting
housing in the Bay Area (much fun, let me assure you!). I
ended up housed in San Jose with two Cisco engineers, Jason
and Dan. We've totally wired our house up with Ethernet cable
and at one point there were over a dozen computers here. We
got 1.1 megabit SDSL access, but it took a month, so for four
weeks I was sitting at home, working on the Internet over a
dialup connection. Ack. It was rough.
I've been working on my own projects, learning bits and pieces
of things, but it's really been an uphill battle just to get
myself motivated enough to work on a given project. I see it
like this: intellectual meandering works when you do it 10% of
the time, the rest being structured time. You can be very
productive with that 10% and can grow a lot. But when meandering
is what you're doing 100% of the time, you just feel lost, you
go nowhere, and you learn very little. Working by yourself, at
home, you slowly lose your motivation, your wit, your joy, and
your optimism.
That's roughly what happened to me. So on this New Year's Day,
I resolved to stop trying to do solo hacking and to go out and
get a real job. So as of the top of the month, I'm on the hunt.
If you know of any good folks in the San Jose / Santa Clara
area looking for a real experienced Linux Perl/PHP/SQL/C/C++
hacker (who can do MacOS, PalmOS, and even [gulp] Win32 if
needed and knows Java, Fortran, Visual Basic, HTML design,
assembly, and other varied tasks) please do pass the word on.
[resume: http://david.weekly.org/resume.html in HTML]
[resume: http://david.weekly.org/resume.doc in Word]
[resume: http://david.weekly.org/resume.pdf in PDF ]
All I have to say is that I have had some entertaining
moments in the interim; among other things, I worked for
the Korean media covering CES and COMDEX in Las Vegas.
That's right: I'm a Korean technology news reporter.
Ain't life odd like that? =) And I'm sitting on the Board
of Advisors of a fledgling Norwegian Internet audio
company. Sheesh.
------[ Site Revisions ]
I call the current version of the site version 4.6 because it's
the fifth minor tweak I've made to the fourth major overhaul of
the site. The main difference is now the whole site is modular
and uses relative linking, making it easy to have multiple
layouts for the site. My main motivation for doing this was to
enable an AvantGo version of my site to allow for readability on
Palm Pilots. The nice part about these alternate layouts is that
once coded once, they don't need to be touched to mirror new
content. Aren't templates great?
http://david.weekly.org/lite/ [the barebones version of my site]
http://david.weekly.org/red/ [my site, in red!]
You can view it on your cell phone, too! =) Tell me if you'd
like any alternately styled interfaces, too. I may look into
Flash, WAP, PDF, and/or MS Word methods of publishing my site.
(PDF to allow for printing out my site.) Tell me what you'd
find useful.
I removed the pictures section of my website (was mainly
pictures of me and my now ex-girlfriend - I'd rather not stare
at them or having people looking at us happy as a couple), but
in exchange have created a new video section. There are videos
of my CES interviews and even two very funny non-CES videos,
including a music video of Pokemon done to punk rock (it's
already gotten about 50,000 unique visitors!). Enjoy!
http://david.weekly.org/video/
------[ New Writings ]
< http://david.weekly.org/writings/google.php3 >
Google as a Brain Extension
< http://david.weekly.org/writings/comdex.php3 >
Reflections on COMDEX 2000
< http://david.weekly.org/writings/netnotdead.php3 >
Why the Net is NOT Dead
< http://david.weekly.org/writings/fiber.php3 >
Powering the Future Internet (the coming fiber revolution)
< http://david.weekly.org/writings/ces2001-mp3.php3 >
The Proliferation of MP3 Hardware at CES 2001
< http://david.weekly.org/writings/ces2001-xbox.php3 >
The XBox and the Christmas 2001 Game Console Competition
< http://david.weekly.org/writings/ces2001.php3 >
CES 2001 Roundup / Conclusions
< http://david.weekly.org/writings/rent-efficiency.php3 >
The Rental Home Efficiency Problem
< http://david.weekly.org/writings/ui.php3 >
Rethinking Computer Interfaces [written today!]
The above essay is a first draft - contributions to my thoughts
would be highly appreciated! Likewise, I'd love to hear comments
on any of the above writings and what kind of writings you all
would like to see on the site.
------[ SSX Fan ]
If you know about the Playstation2, you've surely heard about SSX,
EA Sports's snowboarding game. It's an obscene amount of fun to
play and is incredibly realistic. I got so sucked into it that I
started a website on it! My website, SSXFan.com, covers the names
of all of the tricks you can do, has shortcuts, MP3s from the game,
the trailer movie, and links to all the best SSX resources around
the Internet. If you are curious about SSX or just want to drop by:
http://www.ssxfan.com/
SSX Fan has already been written up in Business Week as creative
waste of my time to senselessly share information without cost!
("A Wide Web of Advice" by Joan Hamilton, 1/22/2001 issue)
Please feel free to contribute articles and tips to SSX Fan!
------[ Codec Review ]
I've been considering conducting a second, really massive codec
analysis and putting it under my CodecReview.com domain. In the
interim, I've assembled one of the most massive collection of
links to codec reviews on the 'Net, but hopefully something should
eventually pan out to let people "face off" one codec against
another.
------[ This Newsletter ]
So this is the first time I've sent out this newsletter in about
a year - I'd love to hear your feedback on what's been going on
with the site and what you'd like to see. If you want to
unsubscribe, just send me an email. At some point I'll automate
all of this, but right now it's by hand. If you are unsubscribing,
I'd love to know what it was that you had hoped for that I
couldn't give you, or how to make the newletter more interesting
and relevant.
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