trip report and stuff.
Nov. 1st, 2008 11:00 amI'm in a cafe in Berkeley, and it's raining. I haven't lived here since ... 2004? but it still feels like home. All the shops on Shattuck Avenue are familiar. In an hour, when they open, I'm going to go over to the Other Change of Hobbit and buy books, and then I will scurry to the airport to catch the plane back to San Diego.
The company decided that all of us remote employees should come to the head office (in Mountain View) for a week and have meetings, mainly to decide what we're going to do for the Firefox release after the one we're finishing up now. If anyone is really, really curious, they can see my somewhat poorly organized and not quite up to date personal list of things to work on.
On Thursday evening I went to see Michael and Julia, who still live in San Francisco. We carved pumpkins with the upstairsniks' two-year-old daughter, which was great fun, and then we talked about all sorts of stuff until far too late at night. I wish I got to see them more often.
I was really tired on Friday, but that was okay, because we all took a big chunk of the afternoon off and went to the Computer History Museum where, until May 2009, they are doing live demonstrations of the second Difference Engine ever to be constructed. (Sadly, it is not part of the museum's permanent collection.) It's hard to describe, but very impressive in action. I kinda think someone ought to print a book of navigation tables directly from the Engine, thus fully realizing Babbage's vision. No, it wouldn't be anything that couldn't be done faster, cheaper, and more accurately with the laptop I'm using right now, but that's not the point. In the evening I hung out with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
madmanatw and his friends Alexander and Rachel (who have LJs but I don't remember the handles) and we played Race for the Galaxy.
Today is the first day of National Novel Writing Month. I am not writing a novel, but I never did finish the journal article I was writing back in January on my master's research. So I've decided to use the framework of NaNoWriMo to make myself finish it. Presently I have about 3300 words of introductory text that are good as is, plus about that much again in appendices that maybe don't get included in the final form (detailed discussion of method and so on). The data analysis is incomplete, because that's where I got stuck. So these are my ground rules for myself: each day 250 words of prose, or enough data analysis to complete one graph. I am not allowed to obsess over the graph formatting.
Man, that rain is coming down.
The company decided that all of us remote employees should come to the head office (in Mountain View) for a week and have meetings, mainly to decide what we're going to do for the Firefox release after the one we're finishing up now. If anyone is really, really curious, they can see my somewhat poorly organized and not quite up to date personal list of things to work on.
On Thursday evening I went to see Michael and Julia, who still live in San Francisco. We carved pumpkins with the upstairsniks' two-year-old daughter, which was great fun, and then we talked about all sorts of stuff until far too late at night. I wish I got to see them more often.
I was really tired on Friday, but that was okay, because we all took a big chunk of the afternoon off and went to the Computer History Museum where, until May 2009, they are doing live demonstrations of the second Difference Engine ever to be constructed. (Sadly, it is not part of the museum's permanent collection.) It's hard to describe, but very impressive in action. I kinda think someone ought to print a book of navigation tables directly from the Engine, thus fully realizing Babbage's vision. No, it wouldn't be anything that couldn't be done faster, cheaper, and more accurately with the laptop I'm using right now, but that's not the point. In the evening I hung out with
madmanatw and his friends Alexander and Rachel (who have LJs but I don't remember the handles) and we played Race for the Galaxy.Today is the first day of National Novel Writing Month. I am not writing a novel, but I never did finish the journal article I was writing back in January on my master's research. So I've decided to use the framework of NaNoWriMo to make myself finish it. Presently I have about 3300 words of introductory text that are good as is, plus about that much again in appendices that maybe don't get included in the final form (detailed discussion of method and so on). The data analysis is incomplete, because that's where I got stuck. So these are my ground rules for myself: each day 250 words of prose, or enough data analysis to complete one graph. I am not allowed to obsess over the graph formatting.
Man, that rain is coming down.
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