The chaos last night became pretty intense and this is what we woke up to this morning:
Seriously, that dip in the curb is our driveway. I did a double take when leaving the house to go to work this morning.
Here's one more from the walk at the weekend. 19th & Valencia on a wet Sunday morning, peaceful and un-rioty:
I like taking these polaroid-style photos. The no-cropping no-rotating constraint makes you think harder. Here I messed up the horizontal (I nailed the wrong lines: the yellow ones) but I like it enough to post anyway.
Tonight the SF Giants beat the Texas Rangers to win the World Series. San Francisco's gone crazy. Our neighbors have a sound system out on the street as well as an open fire, several armchairs and a television. Everyone who passes honks their horn, including the police and fire trucks.
@thebeean is going all kinds of nuts.
Hallowe'en over here is a big deal, much more so than in the UK.
On the other hand, on yesterday's walk I saw this sign in the window of the thrift store at Mission & Clarion and enjoyed the quiet understatedness of it:
The changing season in San Francisco this year is being measured for me by @thebeean. Fall has definitely arrived. These days it's dark when she gets up and we watch it get light together. She goes to bed a couple of hours after sunset. My Saturday walk with her this morning was on wet streets under a gray drizzle and I put the rain cover on the stroller for the first time.
She's thirteen weeks old today.
The Mission felt distinctly autumnal as we walked our circuit, and I took some photos along the way. Here's one from the window of a pawn shop around 19th & Mission. The sign says Unredeemed Viola.
Great name for a band, I thought.
We're taking Lux to meet the English side of the family next month so we had to get her a passport. Filling in the forms was actually easy enough (and Wendy wrote "Occupation: BABY", which I found charming) but the photo was a challenge.
It's harder than it sounds. No smiling, no funny faces, no hands or limbs of anyone else, eyes open, facing forward, a white background. And this photo is in a passport valid for five years! We laid Lux down on the white bed, stretched the sheet out, and I took her photo. I thought the result looked fine:
but the Post Office said the background was too dark.
We came home, put some white cardboard down, and took another picture. This time it passed muster, but the photo's not worth posting here. We're yet to apply for the UK passport; perhaps the original photo will work for the Brits.
The Bean is seven weeks old today.
My good friend Jesse pointed me at the fantastic chart below showing what's in store with her sleep over the coming months.
Each horizontal scanline represents a day (the week numbers are down the left hand side) and the chart as a whole shows wakefulness and sleep for a single newborn subject over the course of the first six months of life. Sleep is depicted by a line; wake by gaps in the line. The dots are feedings. You can see a day/night pattern of wake/sleep forming, beginning around week 16 or so.
We've a while to go yet.
Before publishing my updated résumé, of course I ran it past the Inner Circle for review. My best friends always have useful things to say.
One of the first comments I got was about my line "Now the lead of four Partner PMs defining Twitter's product partner strategy, divining and prioritizing product needs in key verticals":
I think you meant to type "defining" rather than "divining"which made me wonder. I'd intended divine in the sense of "discover by guesswork or intuition; have supernatural or magical insight into". I suppose it was deliberately a bit fanciful but I didn't think it unclear or religiously suggestive until my reviewer gave me pause.
The next day I got a bunch of feedback from another friend, including
I like your use of divining a lotand on balance I decided to go with the line as written. Shortly after that I wrote my Anniversaries post.
The next morning I woke to an IM from yet another friend wondering if I'd mistyped "defining". And also a blog post by my mom wondering what a "key vertical" is.
Sigh.
Here's a photo from the weekend:
Today marks my six-month anniversary working at Twitter. I'm loving it so far, and I'm delighted that the things I hoped to find there I've pretty much found there.
It's also been 12 months since I last updated my résumé, something I try to do every year no matter how difficult I find it. So without further ado, Isaac's Summer 2010 résumé can be found at http://isaa.ch/cv. Sure, give me feedback. Why not?
Bonus photo of Lux, five weeks old:
About 18 months ago, before Lux was yet a twinkle in anyone's eye, Wendy and I were having lunch in Kelly's Mission Rock cafe. A couple arrived and sat down at the next table, rolling their stroller up alongside the table and then magically rotating the seat part so it faced inwards.
Our jaws dropped. It seemed like such an ingenious design and we'd never seen anything like it: the seat was attached to a circular mounting upon which it could turn 360º—forward-facing, backward-facing... or right now, in the cafe, sideways-facing. How clever. We couldn't resist asking the couple what kind of stroller it was even though we had no immediate plans which would require one.
Fast-forwarding a year and more, though, we do find ourselves suddenly in the position of needing a stroller. Of course there was no question that we'd get that same kind, with the uniquely cunning design and the seat which can face any direction. We were delighted when it arrived and demonstrated a bunch of other similarly thoughtful features too.
And then a couple of weeks ago, eating at Barndiva in Healdsburg, we rolled our stroller up to a table in the back garden and rotated the seat so it faced inwards. The young couple at the next table whispered and pointed, and asked us about it. They told us they had no immediate plans for kids but gosh what a superbly designed piece of kit they thought it was. We were more than happy to tell them all about it.
After all, the stroller is indeed fantastic and, fittingly, is made by Orbit. What goes around, comes around.
We called our firstborn child Lux (aka @thebeean). It's Latin for light.
We didn't anticipate confusion or uncertainty about her sex based on the name¹, but encountered some nonetheless. It prompted me to do some research about other folks called Lux. Turns out in fact that there aren't all that many.
Lux Interior (an assumed name which came "from an old car commercial"), frontman of The Cramps, is just about the only famous one—and is a bloke. On the other hand, Lux Lisbon is a girl but is a fictional character in The Virgin Suicides. I didn't find any other well-known people called Lux but I did find one or two others considering the name.
Beyond names, Lux has a formal meaning in physics: as the SI unit of luminous emittance it's equal to one lumen per square metre. And Lux is also a soap; originally (1909) a laundry soap but subsequently (1925) a bathroom soap. A colleague of mine at work clipped for me this page from an old Time magazine:
How awesome is that?!
Notwithstanding the rarity, Wendy and I both think the name suits our baby very well. We are certainly delighted to have her luxing up our lives.
The title of this post, by the way, is the second half of Genesis 1:3: dixitque Deus fiat lux ("and God said let there be light"). Et facta est lux ("and there was light")... and the rest, as they say, is history.
¹ UPDATE: although Anssi Porttikivi points out that lux is grammatically feminine in Latin.
I learned the other day that the word "infant" derives from Latin and means "not speaking" or "unable to speak". I liked that.
More babyfacts:
And now some babyphotos:
An old friend of mine (I've known Lee for over thirty years) wrote me about the arrival of The Bean but also commented on Learning or Earning, Redux. He summarized it ever-so-neatly thus:
When people start only learning skills related to surviving in their company its bound to lead to a lack of innovation
And yes, this is precisely it. You might think of progress and invention in a company as a chemical reaction, with corporate inertia represented as activation energy. There's a point beyond which exciting reactions that might take place in a smaller organization are no longer possible in the larger one. The cost of survival itself in the organization becomes an inhibitor.
In baby news, here's a recent photo of Lux at the tender age of eight days, struggling herself with energy:
I met the bean. She's amazing. Lux Hepworth, 8lb 4oz & 20½", born 1.38am 1.37am in San Francisco.
More to come.
This slide deck from a Google UX Researcher is long but can be flipped through easily enough: http://www.slideshare.net/padday/the-real-life-social-network-v2. I think it's worthwhile. It's got lots to say, and thoughts to provoke, about networks of people in general (social or otherwise).
Just one of many amazing stats from the deck: just four callees account for 80% of the average phone user's calls. It's interesting that attention is paid to the phone call network; back in 2002 a colleague and I at Qwest were looking into precisely how calling records might be mined for social inference, ultimately to deliver more intelligent telephony products. Still today I think this is an enormous unexplored area for carriers.
The presentation is pretty silent on one important element of people networks, though: it covers the idea of disjoint subnetworks but not how interaction behaviors derive from the substance of the connections (social, professional, familial, theme-based, and so on). Ade's post (Ade's another Googler) at http://blog.oshineye.com/2010/06/spectrum-of-networks.html proposes a spectrum but he conflates the concepts of network behavior (eg. conversation) with network substance (eg. social). Conversation is one of the activities which may emerge on, or be enabled by, one network or another; but I don't think that conversation defines a network to an extent that calling it a "conversational network" makes sense.
The topic in general is deep and not fully understood. Something we know is that autosharing a YouTube video on Twitter results on average in five times as many incremental views as autosharing that same video on Facebook. Why? One hypothesis is that a user's followers on Twitter are typically following that user because of a shared taste for content, whereas a social connection on Facebook conveys comparatively less "mutual interest" information. This is a property of interest-based graphs versus social graphs, and it's highly relevant when studying how information propagates through a network of people.
You can imagine that "how information is shared through people networks" is something which is very interesting to developers and publishers of content, whose existences depend on their reach and resonance. I'm lucky enough to be working (for Twitter) with a number of publishers with a desire to understand networks of people and how they help in the distribution of information. I expect many interesting discoveries on the way.
I've been talking to a bunch of people about exciting jobs recently, so I thought I'd round up some of my recent thinking in one place.
Here are my recent posts about work-type stuff:
Enjoy!
And for further enjoyment here's a photo from downtown San Francisco the other day:
We're nominally due to meet The Bean on Saturday July 31st. However, it's drastically more likely that we'll first meet The Bean on some other day than on that one. Some selected statistics:
All in all, we're probably more likely to meet The Bean on Wendy's pick of dates (August 3rd) than on mine (July 26th). I figure, though, if you don't bet against the odds when your instincts tell you then you'll never win big.
The Bean's Room, unlike the #hippiehomebirth schedule, is progressing in a highly organized and predictable fashion. Two weeks ago we did stroller drill:
and last week we put up the crib: and then today we installed the sheets and the changing table:I changed the pictures on the walls, too. It used to be a couple of my moody Bernal favorites:
and
Now it's two more colorful Bernal favorites of mine:
and
The Bean will be called either Lux or Harrison, depending on which name best suits.
I cannot wait to meet it.
I forgot to include a photo with the last post. Here's one taken in the afternoon from the Twitter office:
There's lots to be said for working on an oil tanker. You get to see more of the world than most people, for a start. For maritime work the pay's really good and there's the opportunity for nice annual bonuses. The stability (both figuratively and literally) is a big plus no doubt, and the work's predictable too: you wake up each morning and for the most part know what you're going to be doing that day.
In fact when you think about it, the predictability of work on an oil tanker is there at a macro level as well. You probably have a pretty good sense for what you'll be doing in six months' time, for instance. After that it'll probably depend on whether you get that promotion to senior oil-tankerer. Beyond that, who knows? Possibly if the VP of oil-tankering kicks off that reorg then a Director spot will open up. It's good to always have a sense of what's next, and you pretty much know that your tanker's going to be around for a good while to come.
And moreover, oil tankers are uniquely huge and impressive pieces of machinery; the pinnacle of modern seafaring art at scale. You could spend many happy years working on an oil tanker—getting to know every nook and cranny, learning every detail of its immense operation. Developing a deep expertise in something can be very fulfilling, and working on an oil tanker can provide just that opportunity.
From what I hear, there's plenty of general flexibility in the work. The vacation allowance is great, the benefits generous, and you know what? Recent oily events notwithstanding, it's actually pretty difficult to mess up big-time and lose it all. After all, an oil tanker is such an unimaginably expensive concern that there's an array of battle-tested procedures, best practices and safety technology to practically eliminate the chances of human error causing catastrophe.
What's not to love?
On an ocean-faring yacht, by comparison, the salary isn't as good and the perks aren't quite so lavish. You also feel the choppy waters, and on occasion sea-sickness can strike quite severely. Storms which would barely be noticeable on a tanker are life-threatening on a smaller vessel. Passion and guts are required in no small measure, and the danger is real: more than a few yachts have been lost at sea entirely.
The work's nowhere near as predictable, either. It really requires a fluid state of mind where you wake up each morning prepared to keep the vessel afloat, come what may. On a good day you'll get to pay attention to the trim of the sails or how best the whole crew can work together. On a bad one it'll be all you can do to keep the ship above water and, you hope, heading in the right direction.
You've got to be pretty careful working on a yacht, too. The guardrails aren't always where you'd hope they might be and it's all too easy to switch that bilge pump into reverse by accident. Stay alert! Procedural lore is yet to be established, and in its absence there's a lot of trust placed in individuals to figure out the right thing to do (and establish said lore along the way). If you doubt your ability to improvise well, don't join the yachting crew.
And don't even start about the "career path" on a yacht. Senior yachtsperson? Director of yachting? Is there a Yacht General Manager about to appoint a chief of staff? Not so much. Fancy titles, job levels and promotion cycles are something which will come once the next storm has passed and this thing has stopped taking on water.
But you, yes you, can help with that—and it's exciting. There's an exhilaration and a vitality which you just can't get elsewhere. Every day is different, and the sense of adventure is absolutely unbeatable. It's raw and exhausting, but hearty and uniquely gratifying too. The decisions you make each day will affect the course of the journey taken by the crew as a whole, and that brings its own sense of reward. What's more, on a yacht there's a chance of discovering new lands to which an oil tanker could never get close.
No doubt there are an infinity of unknowns when exploring on a yacht. Where will you be in six months? Will your supplies last? Should you be concerned about those clouds? Is the boat really supposed to lean like that? If these thoughts make you long for terra firma then perhaps the life's not for you.
On the other hand if you can roll with it, set sail, and choose your own adventure then you're in for a great ride. Certainly you'll get drenched on the way, but the wind and the sun will dry you off and you'll feel great.
A friend of mine has a job offer from a small technology startup. They just got funding and he's considering joining the ten or so other folks working there. His worry: what if their main product doesn't work out? What if it's a market failure? What then? Is he stuck looking for work again?
With the right team the answer is: no. The ideas will evolve quickly, and the team will land on something which is really going to work. It needn't look at all like the product they're building today, and that's OK. In fact a slavish adherence to the original plan, in the face of market ambivalence, is an extremely common failure mode for startups.
There are a number of great examples of adaptability from technology startup history. Here are two.
Exhibit A: Twitter. Here's how TechCrunch reported the debut of "Twttr" back in summer 2006.
...the fact that this is coming from Odeo makes me wonder—what is this company doing to make their core offering compelling? How do their shareholders feel about side projects like Twttr when their primary product line is, besides the excellent design, a total snoozer?The point being that Twttr at the time was indeed a side project of Odeo—a company which was doing something completely different. Three months later Obvious Corporation (founded by Ev and Biz and Jack, now familiar as the inventors of Twitter) acquired Odeo, as well as the Twttr product, and six months after that Twitter was spun off as its own company. (Disclaimer: I work for Twitter)
Exhibit B: I'll let Cory Doctorow tell the story, as he told it on This Week in Tech last week.
Here’s what I mean by innovative, fast, smart development.And funnily enough you can see the vestige today in Flickr URLs like http://www.flickr.com/guidelines.gne. Originally the .gne stood for "game neverending", the Flash game which was the Flickr precursor.
When I was dating the woman who is now my wife, Alice, I was on the board of a company called Ludicorp and they made a little flash game that was really fun. Alice lived in London, I lived in San Francisco and we had this long-distance relationship, and one day the Founder of Ludicorp came over to my place in San Francisco and said how’s it going with Alice? And I said you know, it’s going great and we share these photos of our days as we go through the day, but it’s a pain to do it, and he said, Oh! we’ve got photo sharing coming in the game, we’ll accelerate that feature.
And people really liked it. So they were revving the game a lot, like every 30 minutes, and eventually that feature grew to eclipse the game and they retitled the service Flickr.
This is an old concept: the 'A' team with a 'B' idea versus a 'B' team with an 'A' idea. Investors tend to prefer the former. Why? Because there's a good chance they'll improve upon the 'B' idea to make it great—whereas the 'B' team will most likely simply fail to execute on their 'A' idea.
I'm excited for my friend. I happen to think that the startup in question has a great team and will find success even if it's not based on their current product.
Unrelated: a photo from this weekend:
Astonishing. I found this on Lamebook and felt compelled to post it here.
Shared on Facebook by "Steven", with whom I suspect it would be very interesting to spend some time:
BEEN TRYIN 2 WRITE MY THOUGHTS MORE SO CHCK THIS.
WAT IS LIFE? IS IT JUST THE OPPOSITE OF DETH OR IS IT SUMTHING MORE. WE KNO IT IS ON ALL THINGS LIKE FROGS AND STICKS AND SHIT BUT WHERE DOES THE LIFE GO WHEN THOSE THINGS DIE. I KNO FOR CERTIN THAT WHEN I DIE I AM RIDING WITH FUCKIN JESUS BUT EVEN THAT HAS GOT ME ASKIN QUESTIONS. LIKE WAT R WE GONNA DO FOR ETERNITY. IS ME AN JESUS JUST GOIN 2 PRETTY MUCH CONSTANTLY FIGHT DEMONS? DO THEY NEVER DIE? WTF R WE SUPPOSED 2 DO IF WE KILL ALL THE DEMONS AND DEVILS AND SHIT AFTER A THOUSAND YEARS. THERES STILL GONNA BE MILLIONS OF YEARS LEFT. MY PAPS USED 2 TELL ME THAT WED BE ROLLIN IN MEDOWS WITH FLOWERS AND SHIT BUT I DO THAT HERE AND IT GETS BORING AFTER LIKE 10 MINETS AND MAYBE IF I TRIED REALLY REALLY FUCKIN HARD I COULD ROLL ROUND IN A GRASSY FIELD FOR LIKE MAYBE 30 OR 40 MINETS BUT HOW THE FUCK AM I GONNA DO THAT SHIT FOR MILLIONS OF FUCKIN YEARS. SO I GUESS I HAVE 2 END THIS DA SAME WAY AS I STARTED WAT IS LIFE.
The mind boggles.
According to Wikipedia, Maker Faire is an event created by Make Magazine to "celebrate arts, crafts, engineering, science projects and the Do-It-Yourself (DIY) mindset". According to me, it's a festival of creativity. Every year I've been there I've been blown away by the ingenuity, the friendliness, the innovation, the enthusiasm, and—especially the last couple of years with it attracting a more mainstream crowd—the excitement of hundreds of wide-eyed kids. It's enormously energizing.
There are homemade human-powered vehicles, cars modified to get 100mpg+, science experiments, flames and kinetics, lasers, Tesla coils, soldering workshops and surface-mounting classes. There's a life-sized mousetrap setup, neon light glass-blowing, wooden computers, high-speed photography, metalworking, and much more. It's a unique and phenomenal gathering of geeks, artists, and imaginative souls.
Witness "Deus Ex Machina, a large-scale swing with a computer controlled interactive water plane that makes shapes and text. Using water released from solenoid valves, a plane is created in front of the swing rider. A sensor tells the machine the rider's position as shapes and messages descend in the rider's path". Amazingly clever (see the video) and huge fun for kids:
There was also The Ant, an enormous interactive installation spewing fire out of its arched back. Eight pads at ground level, amenable to pounding by adrenalized children, controlled fiery emissions from eight separate flame-throwers mounted high above:
Check out the crazy piano, too. I'm not even quite sure what this is or how it related to the central Maypole but it was pretty cool:
Steampunk is quite a "thing" at Maker Faire and it prompted me to do some research on what it is and where it's from. Short story, my interpretation: an alternate future projected forward from the pre-electronic mid-1800s. Intricate and clever gadgets abound, but powered by springs or steam. If nothing else it reminds you of the pointlessness of projecting a century forward from where you are. Nigh impossible to predict the upcoming technological revolutions.
Like many a faire, there's ice cream:
Wendy enjoyed this aspect too.
Andrea's a dear dear friend and we went to Oakland for her birthday. OAK-LAND!
She has a roof garden above her apartment and we hung out in the sunshine. At 4pm you could see the San Francisco skyline across the Bay. By 6pm the city was covered in fog but the deck was warm and sunny and glorious.
Birthday cupcakes:
Me:
Andrea:
My team at work went to an afternoon baseball game this week. Courtesy of a generous donor, we had a box for the midday game between the San Francisco Giants and the San Diego Padres at AT&T Park.
As an Englishman who didn't grow up with the sport, and recent drug scandals notwithstanding, I have a strong feeling for the romance of the game. Fifty years older than American football (yes, that's what Wikipedia calls it), and the subject of such wonderfully schmaltzy movies as Field Of Dreams, baseball seems somehow quintessentially American like no other sport.
An informal survey reveals answers to the question "who's the most famous player of all time?" for various sports:
Nonetheless, my own history with baseball doesn't go quite so deep. I went to a Yankees game in New York in 1998, maybe a dozen Rockies games while living in Denver 2003–2005, but until this week I'd never been to see the Giants play in San Francisco. Thursday's work outing was a chance to see the AT&T Park at its best: a glorious sunny day and a close game.
The field itself is great, too. Lovely view of the San Francisco Bay stretching out to Oakland:
and the view of the action was fantastic, with the Bay Bridge visible top-right:
The Giants lost 0–1, but what a lovely way to spend a weekday afternoon.
Following on from my last post about Bernal being a photographic inspiration, here's a picture from our walk yesterday:
I mean seriously, how could you not love these wilds being on your doorstep?
