The boardwalk in Santa Cruz was pretty much closed for the season when we were there, which offered us the peculiar opportunity to walk around with everything closed. Jen told me The Lost Boys was filmed there—I could almost imagine one of the Coreys doing coke running around the empty attractions hunting vampires.
Wow, I forgot how much I dislike everything about the Flash interface. This blows.
I’m about to throw my stupid PC laptop out the window. When I was in San Francisco, I started having problems getting it to shut down (it would say, “Saving Your Personal Settings” or something like that for about ten minutes, kick the fan on, and do nothing) and then it began having problems starting up.
Now, I can’t get into the stupid thing at all. When it’s working, it’s great, but why can’t IBM design a laptop to reliably go to sleep without hosing itself? Or is it a software issue? I mean, come on.
Update: Looks like it might have something to do with ZoneAlarm, which suddenly started sucking CPU cycles and refusing to load. After uninstalling it completely, I have Windows Firewall activated. Which is a lot like using an umbrella to prepare for an F5 tornado. Fucking PCs.
We’re back in Baltimore after a wonderful trip to California. The weather is cold and rainy, not at all like the cool, sunny weather we enjoyed all last week, so I’m posting a picture of the redwoods with some sunshine breaking through the crown to remind myself how much I needed some fresh perspective.
A handy guide to wireless access in US Airports. Having just gotten bitten at the SFO airport (and, surprisingly, Vegas was free), this makes travel easier.
I’d love to post a selection of photos I’ve taken in the Bay Area this past weekend, but I seem to be having a problem with Flickr’s upload process-the photos never make it online.
Suffice it to say, we drank gallons of wine and got lost in Sonoma, hiked through Muir Woods and crossed the Golden Gate, attempted to have a martini at the Top of the Mark (but settled for a Blue Hawaii in the Tonga Room), and ate some killer sushi in Bernal Heights. Matt & Soph are as fun as ever, and after an evening of catching up, I felt like eight years on different coasts never existed.
The last couple of days have been very busy. I’m set up in an office building in San Mateo where the workmen are still installing network cable, painting drywall and cleaning up dust. The desk I’m at only came out of the IKEA boxes a week or two ago. In a lot of ways I feel like it’s 1999 again, except for the fact that I’m not an employee, and that I have to leave for home in a couple of days.
It’s been a good week so far, though. I hit the ground running Monday morning, and put in an eleven-hour day before Eastern Standard Time caught up with me. The people working here are wickedly smart—smart enough that I feel like I’m too dumb to belong in a conference room with them—but they’ve been friendly and welcoming to the country mouse who blew in from Maryland and suddenly told them their cobbled-together business cards looked like shit and that there’s been a design approved and ready since last December, had they seen it?
Today is my final day on site, and then I become virtual again, a voice on a phone and a blinking 6AM email message. I’m going to miss the excitement of feeling like a hired gun on a mission, but I won’t miss the lousy hotel bed. I really shouldn’t complain, though, because it’s an exceptionally cheap room with a kitchenette, which came in handy for reheating my Thai leftover dinner last night, and it’s less than a mile from the office. This part of California is strange, because in order to get from my hotel to the office, I cross two highway overpasses, one canal, and under two more overpasses. The grid structure here is very mixed as well, which means there’s no empty space—malls adjoin suburbs, which are overshadowed by high-rise offices, which butt up to freeways, which dump out into feeder roads everywhere. I now understand why some of the first and most successful internet ventures incubated from the Bay Area were mapping applications, because I wouldn’t be able to find my own ass with a flashlight out here without Mapquest.
Happily, my lovely wife is on a plane headed West to join me this afternoon, and we’re going to spend the next three days enjoying the warm, sunny California air. My old friends from college have invited us out for cocktails this evening, and we’re heading to Napa tomorrow to get shitfaced, and from there, the weekend is an open book. Which, I’ve recently learned, is the way I like it.
ze frank at TED. An excellent, funny, inspiring presentation. (via)
A Vanity Fair article about Paul Frank, who is fighting his former company for a fair share of the work that bears his name. A former partner: “…he got paid exactly the same as we did, and we’re the ones who did all the work. He didn’t do anything, and he still quit. What am I missing here?” This illustrates exactly how corporate America values and shits on creative talent.