Cafe Bucky

Consolidation.

We are going to head back to California in August. I do love NYC. It is expensive though, and that’s something made much more apparent when you’re spread amongst two places and two coasts. In a Walnut-shell, we’re in a tiny place in the UWS (5 of us, counting two cats), and if we wanted something decent-sized, we’d have to rent/sell our house in California (which would be a pretty big project), and use that money to rent in NYC. It works on paper, but I don’t live in origami. It’s not the right chapter, right now, to take on that project.

I won’t detail the next two months here. Suffice to say it’ll involve studying, driving, packing, taking lots of photos, and more driving! I’ve never driven across the country, so I’m really looking forward to that. If anyone has a good lead on how to rent a mini-van for a one way trip NYC -> SF, let me know. I’m well aware of how to do that for $1000 … $500 would be better though :-)

I’ve been mostly in NYC since October 2003, and California has been my escape - the place where I could spread out a bit. The experience has made me appreciate many things about my native state, and my West Coast DNA. I have some experience with the people who live on the Island Off The Coast Of Europe. There really is a New York State of Mind - It’s not just a song. I’ll miss it.

If you’re an F1 fan, you know where to find the info about the sad state of politics in the sport.

I used to follow Formula 1 Racing quite closely, and have attended Nurburging ‘99, Australia ‘00, and Monaco ‘00. I can’t imagine any of the fans making the trek to Indy ‘05 feeling anything but utter disappointment at the complete debacle of today’s “race” (only 6 cars starting out of 14). Of course, this doesn’t excuse the handful of idiots that started throwing debris on the track.

For Michelin to come to Indy for the 6th time in as many years, and not be able to produce a safe tire is incomprehensible. For the FIA to not allow a chicane in Turn 13, when it seemed to be the only sensible compromise, proves them to be an incarnation of bureacratic inflexibility. It was absolutely amazing to see 14 cars return to the garage at the end of the formation lap. Sad, but understandable from their point of view (your tire supplier tells you the tires are not safe, what do you do?)

This incident will only speed the split between the teams and the FIA. It’s glaringly obvious that the FIA does not have the interests of the fans in mind. I look forward to the creation of a series that is not run Eccelstone and Mosley.

I looked at my camera this afternoon and realized it was talking to me.

“Take me to the track”

What?!

“Take me to the track! I want to take pictures again. I want to get dusty. I want to get into the paddock and see insanely fast cars”

What?!

“Oh man … c’mon. Let’s hit some races at Sears Point and Laguna Seca. It’s been frikken years man! I’m a camera, and you’ve got this zoom blur thing going. Let’s go man!”

(… looking at beer bottle suspiciously)

Ok, cool. That’s what we’ll do. It has been a while, I miss it, and I will be in California for most of the summer. Yeah. Yeah! Let’s get some groovy shots!

“What’s on, then? Where are we going?”

Well, let’s see …

• (Laguna Seca) - Red Bull U.S. Grand Prix (MotoGP / AMA) - July 8-10
• (Sears Point) - Grand Prix of Sonoma (ALMS) - July 15-17
• (Laguna Seca) - Monterey Historic Automobile Races - August 19-21
• (Sears Point) - Indy Grand Prix (IRL) - Aug 26-28
• (Laguna Seca) - Montery Sports Car Championships (ALMS) - Oct 14-16

“Oh boy! 5 races?! Gimme plenty of batteries and CF cards! And can we bring Susan’s Nikon D1x too?”

Hold your f-stops man. We’ll see. At least a couple of races, ok?

“snap snap!”

This is a followup to my post about FAME, AJAX, & LAMP. As I wind up what I am currently doing, and look forward to the O’Reilly OSCON 2005 (first week of August), I see July as an opportunity to do a lot of intensive study.

Of course, it’d be great to do some part-time gig in July, and I’m certainly capable as is. Don’t get me wrong here :-) I just don’t want to get into a situation where I have to bail on the conference.

What I am thinking is that I want the conference to cap off a period of reorienting full-time to the technologies I want to be a part of.

So here’s where I wish I had a ton of readers, because I’d really love to get some feedback … If you could take a month and just spend time learning tools and methodologies, where would you start? How would you organize it? How would you pace yourself?

The answers are, of course, completely variable from one developer to the next. My general idea is:

• Patterns, Unit Testing - I want to improve
• Eclipse / FAME environment - The OSFlash method of Flash development
• AJAX + WordPress Plugins
• PHP5 + Apache 2 migration

I’m not saying I’m going to master anything in a month. The goal is to bring some skills up to the next level. We all (should) know that most of the development world is constantly moving target.

I do have a project that I can resume that fits nicely into those areas, so I can apply new knowledge to something that’s real. Would be interesting to hear from others that have taken the time to do a “tech reset”. What would did you learn, and how would you have done things differently?

Quick thought - do you see some of the patterns? Many desktops are getting replaced with laptops, and the trend is going to accelerate. My hunch is that we’ll have wireless docking stations within 4 years (for video, external speakers, firewire/usb drives, etc.) … Here are just a few of the indicators of a shift in the making:

• An Intel Mac PowerBook will be much more powerful next year than what we would have gotten from IBM …
• notebooks outsell desktops - More notebooks than desktops were sold in the United States in May (2005), according to a report released Friday
• Seagate to ship 160GB notebook drive (next year, but how long till we see 500gb notebook drives? I say 3-4 years…)
• “notebooks that can run for eight hours without the use of additional external batteries” (within four years)
• Ubiquitous WiFi? Even my town of Petaluma is getting into the act

There are many other variables in the mix as well - the snippets above are just the tip of the iceberg. The CNet article on notebooks outselling desktops marks a milestone of sorts. I wouldn’t say “the desk is wherever you are” yet, but the trends, they are pointin’ …

I’ve had a couple of days to ponder the Apple/Intel marriage. I’ve read numerous articles about it. It’s going to work out to be a really good thing. What seems to have been the problem is that IBM just didn’t have their heart into making great chips for Apple in a timely manner. Imagine how embarassing it would be for Steve Jobs to do next January’s keynote and say “we still don’t have a G5 PowerBook, but we have a speed bumped G4 that will run for two hours on a charge”.

So the mid-term future is bright, but how will Apple spin the next 12 months? What G5 product are they going to introduce that won’t be seen as a sitting duck? Could they possibly introduce a machine with a swappable CPU/Logic Board? (G5 now, Intel later?) Nah, somehow a convertible strategy feels like a real reach, even when considering the radical moves we’ve seen from Apple.

My short-term strategy is this: minimize the Apple hardware commitment. My daughter is about to turn 12, and her G3 PowerBook is showing its age (hinge just broke, CD drive doesn’t work, too slow to run a couple of apps we have in mind). I had considered getting her a G5 iMac, but now a better strategy seems to be: get a Mac mini + Airport, bump up the RAM, and get an LCD monitor (I love my Sony SDM-HS75P, so perhaps another one of those). We can think about an Intel Mac next year, and transition the Mac mini to be the entertainment / house server, or throw Ubuntu Linux on it.

There’s a lot more to say on this, and it would be much faster to just podcast it :-) My sense is that the Mac community is going through a highly emotionally charged time (what!? Intel?!), and that a sense of acceptance will quickly emerge - something along the lines of “IBM is cool for certain things, but they really dropped the ball on Apple, and it’s a good thing that Apple had a contingency plan in place”.

I want to confirm people’s fears about walking around in NYC. It *is* a dangerous place, full of careening taxis, enormous potholes, steep subway stairs, metal strips poking from curbs, and it requires all manner of pedestrian avoidance techniques.

And I just got plinked in the head with an ice cube in front of Zabars! It fell from an air condtioner above the sidewalk. Isn’t that terrible!? Must have been “meant to be”, like “Intelligent Design” or something, as they say in Kansas. Gosh, got to be on guard every single second around here :-)