30 April 2008
RSA Keynotes Online
Watch the keynote presentations from the RSA Conference. Free! I have enjoyed Hawkins, Gladwell, and the crypto panel. Too cool.
Anthropomorphism in the Apple
When I was about 10 years old, I flew to New York City one Friday night to meet my dad, and to spend the weekend with him there. It was a very special time with him.
My dad had been in New York for some meetings. He met me at LaGuardia, and hailed a big Checker cab to take us to Manhattan. It was in the middle of winter, late at night, and there was a storm. On the freeway we weren't going very fast but we hit a patch of ice and the car started spinning. "Get down!" my dad shouted, and I did. The spinning stopped and the car miraculously hadn't hit anything, so we got off the freeway and drove on. After an eternity we arrived at the St. Regis Hotel at 55th and 5th.
The next day was bitterly cold but sunny. My dad asked me if I wanted to visit the Empire State Building or the World Trade Center. I could not decide, and I told him if I chose either one I would hurt the feelings of the other building. So my dad indulged me and took me to the top of both buildings. We rode the subway. We took the ferry to the Statue of Liberty and climbed the steps all the way up to the crown. We saw Times Square and I was not impressed - it was 1977, and I was 10. We went to Chinatown where he bought me a stupid little hand-held roulette game that I desperately wanted. We went to FAO Schwarz - now that was impressive. We ate dinner in the restaurant at the St. Regis with the famous mural.
On Sunday I wanted to see where Lindbergh took off on his famous flight. So we went to LaGuardia and my dad rented a car. We drove to a shopping mall in Queens where my dad told me the airport used to be - I don't know if that's true but I have no reason to doubt it. [Updated 4/30: It is Roosevelt Field Mall in East Garden City, NY] Then we drove to Kennedy airport just so I could see that too. Finally we returned to LaGuardia for our flight back to Chicago.
Happy Birthday Dad
My dad had been in New York for some meetings. He met me at LaGuardia, and hailed a big Checker cab to take us to Manhattan. It was in the middle of winter, late at night, and there was a storm. On the freeway we weren't going very fast but we hit a patch of ice and the car started spinning. "Get down!" my dad shouted, and I did. The spinning stopped and the car miraculously hadn't hit anything, so we got off the freeway and drove on. After an eternity we arrived at the St. Regis Hotel at 55th and 5th.
The next day was bitterly cold but sunny. My dad asked me if I wanted to visit the Empire State Building or the World Trade Center. I could not decide, and I told him if I chose either one I would hurt the feelings of the other building. So my dad indulged me and took me to the top of both buildings. We rode the subway. We took the ferry to the Statue of Liberty and climbed the steps all the way up to the crown. We saw Times Square and I was not impressed - it was 1977, and I was 10. We went to Chinatown where he bought me a stupid little hand-held roulette game that I desperately wanted. We went to FAO Schwarz - now that was impressive. We ate dinner in the restaurant at the St. Regis with the famous mural.
On Sunday I wanted to see where Lindbergh took off on his famous flight. So we went to LaGuardia and my dad rented a car. We drove to a shopping mall in Queens where my dad told me the airport used to be - I don't know if that's true but I have no reason to doubt it. [Updated 4/30: It is Roosevelt Field Mall in East Garden City, NY] Then we drove to Kennedy airport just so I could see that too. Finally we returned to LaGuardia for our flight back to Chicago.
Happy Birthday Dad
27 April 2008
Catching Up
- Work is still hell. Getting a too-big project out the door has been very painful indeed, for my co-workers and me, for our families, and for our IT department as a whole. Online journals have suffered too.
- I've wanted to go to NFJS for a couple years and I finally went to one last weekend. I was long overdue for a good geeky conference. It was an excellent kick-in-the-butt. Some lessons learned: OSGi will be hot (I still don't understand what it is); Java the Platform has surpassed Java the Language in importance; there are good reasons why Java performance can and will surpass C-family performance; and burn-up charts are cool because they clearly show changes in overall work. It was a great opportunity to reconnect with the developer community at large, and see what other people are doing.
- Oliver Sacks' Musicophilia is a great book. It's taken me forever to make time to read it. Sacks writes about his patients' (and his own) experiences with music and neurological conditions, and offers great insights to how the brain works with music.
- My good friend David got me (among other things) a copy of Carla Bruni No Promises for my birthday. This was a truly inspired gift. The music is pretty good too.
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