I was glad I left late for the city. I stayed home in the morning to work on the big site upgrade that I am doing. I reached about hour 25 of what will most likely be a 30 hour project that I will get paid $300 for. I suppose $10/hr. is a big improvement over the $2/hr. I was making last year. I am happy about the job. It is for a long time client who has sent me many referrals, and the updated site will make it much more usable for us both.

I digress. Back to the expo. So many of the things that I consider to be the future (and present) of the web are open source projects with large enthusiastic development communities. The small expo floor was filled with large corporations and smaller startups focused on selling their products to other companies. The people I spoke with were sales reps rather than developers.

GoogleDoubleClickAmazonMicrosoftAOLeBayNokia. For sure these companies are contributing a lot to the current and future web, but I had expected a bunch of geeky web developers excited to learn about new technology, trade mashup ideas, or at least argue about which programming language is best. I think the conference might have been more like that, but the expo was for marketing, not learning. There were some interesting products there for sure, and if I was a big company with lots of money to spend, I may have been more interested in some of them.

Walking around and hearing sales pitches was boring me, and I am almost never bored. It only happens when I am in a place where I have no interest in what is going on around me and no freedom to retreat into my own brain. If I am in a situation like that for too long, I will end up in my own world anyway and start seeming retarded to anyone trying to interact with me because I can barely talk and I hear things too slowly to respond to them. It is also about the point where I start bumping into people because I lose track of what is going on outside of my head. Nice Luckily K was there! Somehow she manages to communicate with me no matter how slow my brain is at any given moment.

Thanks to K, the day was not a complete loss. She met me at Moscone Center and we walked around the expo together. That was nice. We entered some contests, K more than me because she had business cards with her and I didn’t. There was a contest to win a copy of Adobe CS Web Premium. We both entered. It would be great to win that! We got the obligatory pens, a bright orange t-shirt, and a tiny green stapler. After that, we had some dinner at the Metreon and then BARTed home. I was completely exhausted, but ended up working for a little while before finally getting to watch Jeopardy on DVR.

I have been very tired the past few days. Not sure if it is from working so much or meds, but I am still feeling much better than before. I don’t know if I will be able to go to Hannah’s birthday party or not, but I am finally starting to feel like traveling might not be a horrible nightmare, so hopefully I will get there at some point in the near future.

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While I am not a big fan of the actual term Web 2.0, I am very excited about the trend of providing people with easy access to cool technology and letting them run wild with it. The best explanation of Web 2.0 I’ve seen yet is this video that I stumbled across on youtube today and watched 4 times in a row. I think non-geeky types might enjoy watching it too.

The Machine is Us/ing Us

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Dear Mr. Architect:

Please design and build me a house. I am not quite sure of what I need, so you should use your discretion. My house should have somewhere between two and forty-five bedrooms. Just make sure the plans are such that the bedrooms can be easily added or deleted. When you bring the blueprints to me, I will make the final decision of what I want. Also, bring me the cost breakdown for each configuration so that I can arbitrarily pick one.

Keep in mind that the house I ultimately choose must cost less than the one I am currently living in. Make sure, however, that you correct all the deficiencies that exist in my current house (the floor of my kitchen vibrates when I walk across it, and the walls don’t have nearly enough insulation in them).

As you design, also keep in mind that I want to keep yearly maintenance costs as low as possible. This should mean the incorporation of extra-cost features like aluminum, vinyl, or composite siding. (If you choose not to specify aluminum, be prepared to explain your decision in detail.)

Please take care that modern design practices and the latest materials are used in construction of the house, as I want it to be a showplace for the most up-to-date ideas and methods. Be alerted, however, that kitchen should be designed to accommodate, among other things, my 1952 Gibson refrigerator.

To insure that you are building the correct house for our entire family, make certain that you contact each of our children, and also our in-laws. My mother-in-law will have very strong feelings about how the house should be designed, since she visits us at least once a year. Make sure that you weigh all of these options carefully and come to the right decision. I, however, retain the right to overrule any choices that you make.

Please don’t bother me with small details right now. Your job is to develop the overall plans for the house: get the big picture. At this time, for example, it is not appropriate to be choosing the color of the carpet.

However, keep in mind that my wife likes blue.

Also, do not worry at this time about acquiring the resources to build the house itself. Your first priority is to develop detailed plans and specifications. Once I approve these plans, however, I would expect the house to be under roof within 48 hours.

While you are designing this house specifically for me, keep in mind that sooner or later I will have to sell it to someone else. It therefore should have appeal to a wide variety of potential buyers. Please make sure before you finalize the plans that there is a consensus of the population in my area that they like the features this house has. I advise you to run up and look at my neighbor’s house he constructed last year. We like it a great deal. It has many features that we would also like in our new home, particularly the 75-foot swimming pool. With careful engineering, I believe that you can design this into our new house without impacting the final cost.

Please prepare a complete set of blueprints. It is not necessary at this time to do the real design, since they will be used only for construction bids. Be advised, however, that you will be held accountable for any increase of construction costs as a result of later design changes.

You must be thrilled to be working on as an interesting project as this! To be able to use the latest techniques and materials and to be given such freedom in your designs is something that can’t happen very often. Contact me as soon as possible with your complete ideas and plans.

PS: My wife has just told me that she disagrees with many of the instructions I’ve given you in this letter. As architect, it is your responsibility to resolve these differences. I have tried in the past and have been unable to accomplish this. If you can’t handle this responsibility, I will have to find another architect.

PPS: Perhaps what I need is not a house at all, but a travel trailer. Please advise me as soon as possible if this is the case.

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