ダニエルの冒険

I guess I have a lot of stuff to talk about, but seeing as most of it has gone past the 24 hour mark I’m not going to remember it in enough detail to write a lot (which is probably a relief for you).

First of all, Maker Faire! Jason from work (different Jason to the friend from work who brought me to the vineyard a few weeks back) picked me up and we followed the directions he got from Google Maps for a while, until we ran into what we named a “Google Jam”. It seemed that everyone from San Francisco used Google Maps to get directions from SF to the Faire and that road was backed up the whole way onto the Freeway. Every other road was either empty or had light to normal traffic. Whether or not this was really the cause, it really did look like it.

We got some subs at Quizno’s (I love that steak and peppercorn sub). Jason made the point that a nice thing about Quizno’s is that they don’t make and pretence about being healthy. You know what you’re getting and they know what they’re giving you. It’s not like McDonald’s and their wimpy little salads. If you’re going to do something you should do it all the way!

The Faire itself was great. There was so much stuff there that I’m sure we missed a whole lot of it and we got to speak to some very interesting makers. I met Petri Purho while showing his Crayon Physics game off and asked some questions about how he’s implementing his 2D collision detection and was surprised when he wasn’t familiar with GJK. Made me feel like I’m learning a nice bit about physics simulation at Havok though The game looked great and the graphics were adorable. There’s a great clone for the iPhone/iPod Touch out there.

I got the chance to chat to the girl working in our Japanese office on Yahoo for a bit today. It was really great to get to talk in Japanese. Hope I can check out the office next time I’m in Tokyo!

I went down to the post office today. It was my first time so it was a bit strange for me but I got it figured out. Differences to what I’m used to? Well compared to what I’m used to in Ireland it was infinitely better but that’s not surprising. In my experience, our post offices have a long way to go. Here (and in Japan) there’s a whole load of envelopes and boxes and everything all for sale. Here they have automated machines that print labels and take your parcels and in Japan they have lots of stationery and packing tape and whatever you need available free-of-charge. I’ve had some pretty aloof service from the post office workers in Ireland but the guy here was the rudest yet. I just did what I usually do when I need someone really rude to help me out and imagine they’re actually being nice to me. This usually doesn’t even get a smile back but trying to match my temperament to theirs doesn’t seem like it would get us anywhere.

I wore my Red Hat top today and as I was queuing at the post office a guy approached me and asked if I worked for Red Hat. It turns out that he was the producer, Christian Einfeldt, from the documentary Digital Tipping Point. We had an interesting chat about open source software for a while in the line.

You can’t not do interesting things in this town. Even going to the post office ends up with a story to tell.

In closing, here’s a song I’ve been listening to a lot. It’s a Dire Straits cover by the Killers from the end of their Sawdust covers/remixes album. Song starts after a minute but I left in that minute of talking because it’s interesting stuff.

Here’s the original by Dire Straits. The live version is a bit better than their studio one. Brandon from the Killers gets in a lot more emotion studio-version-for-studio-version but when live Dire Straits can compete, though I still reckon that the Killers one sounds like the original and this like the cover. The sax is kinda lame but otherwise it’s a good performance of a great song.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 7th, 2008 at 4:19 am and is filed under San Francisco. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.