I hugged so many people, I cried so many times. I danced, and napped, and gave gifts, and accepted gifts and the whole time everyone was so welcoming. When you arrive, people at the gate give you a hug and say “Welcome home.” How cool is that? It felt like home.

People tell me that after a while it starts to feel like it was all a dream and I am afraid of that happening. I want to carry back some of the person I was there, the emotional part, I already physically dress and act pretty much the same. I was kind and happy and carefree.

The whole thing feels like a massive group brainwashing that somehow manages to trick everybody into being loving to each other. What a wonderful world that could be. Perhaps the shared hardship of the desert helps bring that out in people, gives them something to rise above.

Endless words could be written about the art, the community, the setting and the experiences. I’ll be going back.

Thank you so much to everybody who helped me prepare and made my world such a bright and wonderful one for the past week.

I played chess quite a lot as a kid, I felt pretty good at it as I won all the games I played against random family members and kids in school. As I got older though I realized that others were actually much, much better at it than I so my interest fell off. A similar plot arc happened with Scrabble, actually, but more on that later.

Some of my coworkers have been playing short games of online timed chess to take a break from work for some time, but it wasn’t until one invited me to a game on lichess.org that my interest began to re-kindle.

While the more common online variant of chess will be short timed games (blitz which is between 3 and 15 minutes a side, or speed chess which is 3 minutes and under), it is also quite acceptable to play the long, slow, correspondence type of chess. Both approaches take a lot of the time commitment out of playing the game and allows me, somebody rather out of practice, to either experience many different games quickly or to consider my moves more carefully at an asynchronous pace.

Words With Friends has done the same to me for Scrabble, being able to juggle multiple games at a time means usually having a move waiting in one of them, and playing more games means learning the patterns more quickly.

Of course, because we all started playing together we also purchased a couple chess clocks and boards for the office so we can play Bughouse chess, a fast-paced team variant of chess played with two boards. Not recommended for learning chess as the strategies are rather different, but definitely an exciting game between coworkers or friends that produces a surprising amount of adrenaline.

He’s getting old. If we’re lucky we will all get old, but watching the man who was one of the largest influences on my life, the man who taught me through who he was what it really means to be a man — the ups, the downs, the sacrifices and the victories — get old is hard.

In his handling of it he is still teaching me, though it isn’t a lesson I feel very prepared to learn. Don’t leave me yet Boompa.

My girlfriend of a couple years and I broke up a couple weeks ago (generally mutually and on good terms so far). We lived together, so I went on a trip for work for a little less than two weeks to give her time to figure out what she wanted and she decided to move out during that time (she told me, so it wasn’t a surprise). There is an emptiness in the air and in me that is hard to keep away.

As a youth I, like many, would get depressed or melancholy in these situations and write a lot, at the time on LiveJournal. That is somewhat what I am doing now, and I expect it will still be a little bit before my coping mechanisms take effect, but at some point along the way in life I found that working with my hands and getting exercise really help me to think more clearly. It’s probably because it forces me away from tech or into healthier introspective activities.

One thing it usually results in is a very clean house so I guess I can look forward to that.

My fingers crack and bleed just thinking about it.

I know there is probably some module for some heinous system like SAP that has a copy of every form ever made and will pre-fill in those details, and there are also probably a couple HR companies that do some of that to a certain extent, but I have yet to see anything designed for actual users that solves this problem.

On the publisher side the interface I imagine lets you upload PDFs/images of forms, and using an interface similar to Flickr’s image notes draw boxes and tag them with which kind of content goes in there (“first name”, “checkbox”, “date of birth”). Let everybody in the world upload their forms and tag them, perhaps add some full-text search and tagging to assist in finding public forms that others have made.

On the consumer side, let users enter in the data for popular fields and autofill those (you could probably even generate html forms and have the browser autofill for you), and let them click on checkboxes and enter text in general purpose text fields. You probably want a general service for letting users draw a signature and store it for re-use for the companies that will allow you that — or just make it look suitable hand-drawn and scanned to fool them.

Forms will still be annoying but 90% less so. Who’s with me?

In all reality not a lot has changed, we do exactly what we were doing before (solving the open source cloud) but now we have more computers and a wealth of new teammates with lots of experience.

Rackspace itself is a nice company to work at. They have a very family-like atmosphere, surely attributable to their fine Texan upbringings, and they’ve put an immense amount of resources at our collective fingertips without trying to control us in any way. They also gave us cowboy hats, so we’re pretty much best friends now.

My office is a house that is on the other side of the block from my house — they actually touch at the back corners — and it has a tea making robot and a Tesla.

My team is smart, small and features two people I worked with at Flock back in my early days of startupery.

My project is interesting and important and is getting lots of good attention from the right people. NASA is our client so we get cool badges and I’m pretty sure I’m on the shortlist for the space ark (see you later, meatsacks).

I get to work on something I like, that other people like, with people I like, in a language I love. Oh, and I get paid. Hoo-rah.

But, let’s start at the beginning.

Act 1

I am born on what is likely a hot, bright day (though the sun hasn’t come up at 2:30am) on July 31st, 1984 in San Jose, California, into what is not a privileged family but certainly an overall happy one and with enough members to support each other. Fast-forward a little under 18 years.

I am, not quite freshly as I hadn’t attended for about a year, out of high school but I graduate nonetheless and end up with a job as a web developer that plays well to my computery history and gives me a good platform for learning this whole web thing. In addition to that I am working occasional jobs in catering and in directing cars to their likely parking spots at the local big concert venue. I am also living in a house with another young programmer and going to school full-time at a local community college. Monthly amount of money left over for food after paying rent, utilities, phone bill and gas was in the range of $200: we ate a lot of pasta.

A year or so later I discover that the company I work for is spamming people, I am bored with all the programming classes available at my school and I somewhat randomly end up at a conference where I get offered a great job in Vancouver, Canada. I take the job but am dead broke for the first couple weeks. Coworkers are wonderful and support me during those couple weeks and one says to me, “Don’t worry mate, this is the last time you are ever going to be broke.”

-Punchline enters stage left-

Little did this friend know how horrible I am with money.

Act 2

I have made a good amount of money in my life and I have spent nearly every penny of it. Not counting a couple things like the deposit on my house and money that is in a 401(k) I have just a bit over 3,400 pennies left. That doesn’t concern me too much in the long run, I like to tell people I’m investing in myself, or indirectly in the internet because I’m fairly sure that as long as it is popular I’ll have a job, but it does provide a plethora of day to day concerns for the usually short (but unnervingly often) periods of time where I have over-planned my budget.

Things also change significantly when you have somebody else whom you are for many practical purposes responsible for. Knowing that I can happily live on rice alone (I’ve upgraded from pasta) does not mean I want to force that upon somebody else, and poor planning can put me in a position where I have very little alternative. Caring for somebody else’s well-being is a wholly different beast from caring only for your own.

Act 3

Whether I actually change my habits based on these most recent monetary outages is yet to be seen, I obviously haven’t ever done much about it before (except attempt to get larger amounts of money at a time) but I do somewhat feel like maybe I am getting too old for this. Scraping by is all fine and good for a 25-year-old but at 26? I should learn some sense.

Full-time employment (more on that later) will shortly solve the current situation but while I sit at home for the last couple evenings of this two month deficit I can’t help but think of all the things I could do to run into this issue less often.

…

I should probably double my rate.

It fits perfectly into my daily flow as the device for all the stuff that isn’t being “at work” or gaming. I usually work from home so the distinction between work and not-work tends to be whether I am sitting at my desk, so many of the other tasks or activities tend to take place on random surfaces and largely while lounging on a couch.

In the past I’ve owned a Macbook Air that fit the same niche for not work or play, but the “cbook” has a couple benefits that are simply based on having a rounded rubberized surface: there are no hard metal edges to dig into my hands or stomach (if lounging on a couch).

It is certainly lower powered than my other laptop, the top of the line 15inch Macbook, I don’t intend to use it for coding in any way as I have quite a dedicated coding environment on my other systems, but it browses the web with ease letting me watch videos, update bugs, review changes, and ssh into my server for IRC and the like (though I’d love a more powerful terminal).

There are a ton of bugs and they are well-discussed but if I know anything about the extremely excellent Chrome team it is that they are amazingly productive, and since all the things I have had issues with are already tracked in the issue tracker and assigned for fixing I am confident that the changes will be rapid and thorough.

Chrome team: Great work guys, and thanks for giving me a chance to try it out.

p.s. The free 100mb wireless account is a really nice bonus, too.

Iain M Banks was in there heavily, however I held off on the Culture novels for a bit because the two novels that were next aren’t available on Kindle, but they aren’t really dependent on each other in any way except for Look to Windward being loosely related to Consider Phlebas and I had already read Consider Phlebas and Look to Windward was available… so now I am going through the rest now. I also read the remaining non culture novels that I hadn’t read, and Transition was pretty awesome. ANYWAY.

Read the Ken Macleod books in the Star Faction series (already had Star Faction itself years earlier), and they were amazing, I love that guy’s poli-philoso-scifi, fucking awesome. Also read his Engines of Light series, they were okay, interesting stuff but not nearly as interesting to me as the Star Faction set.

Went though the Hugo and Nebula award winners (just novel and novella) for this year and last, of which I’d recommend “The City and The City.” Boneshaker was pleasant for steampunk, I’d maybe read some more from that author but not right away. From many many awards ago I also recommend Shade’s Children, amazing.

Went through a bunch of random other scifi, some Neal Asher, if you’ve read any of his books you know what to expect but “The Line of Polity” was better than most (check out “Cowl” for a great time travel concept, though), sort of on the level of a reasonably interesting television show but nothing that moves you; worthwhile padding material.

Some more Alistair Reynolds, I’ve already read most of his stuff but I read “The Prefect” and “House of Suns,” of which I would recommend House of Suns for anybdoy who is a fan of Greg Egan, it has a ridiculously epic story. Saturn’s Children from Charles Stross was the only scifi from him I had left (everything else he wrote is great also) and was a pleasant little raunchy romp and I recommend it to anybody.

In newer stuff I recommend “Julian Comstock: … “, a great one off. I also have found the “WWW” series entertaining so far, light reading and short but got me through plenty of uncomfortably warm nights in Paris. The new William Gibson just to keep up (I’ve read the rest).

On the older end I read the whole Red, Blue and Green Mars series, totally awesome. There are a variety of things one can fault in the novels however they really gave me chills thanks to their very immersive nature. Also the second half of the Dune double trilogy, the first novel of which at least is mind blowingly amazing (reading the first three is required).

Outside of Scifi, “Fermat’s Last Theorem” was great and it was interesting reading “Botchan” while living in Japan.