iPad Impressions

The press embargoes have lifted and the first reviews of the Apple iPad are up. Walt Mossberg usually doesn’t write very critical reviews, but this time he seems to have hit all of the right points in his Wall Street Journal / AllThingsD review: My verdict is that, while it has compromises and drawbacks, the … Read more

VaultPress: WordPress cloud backup/monitoring/security updates

Automattic, corporate sponsor of the amazing WordPress web publishing platform, today announced the new VaultPress service and initiated a private beta. VaultPress is, in short, a cloud service that provides automatic cloud-based backups, uptime monitoring, and security updates for any WordPress instance. They’re planning to charge about $10/month for the service, but will finalize the … Read more

What’s happened to Ubuntu?

Cloud storage SaaS. Music stores using unlicensed codecs in the OS. What happened to the days when the focus was on making a modern Debian desktop targeted at everyone, including nontechnical folks? I don’t feel like the Ubuntu OS has gotten any worse, but I fear that all of these new initiatives will eventually distract Ubuntu’s … Read more

San Francisco

Yesterday I got back to Colorado from my spring break to San Francisco. I spent the week visiting with Alan, whom I had only seen once since high school graduation. His apartment is downtown just blocks from the Embarcadero, so we had easy access to all kinds of stuff. I got to hang out with a lot of Alan’s salesforce.com and Carnegie Mellon alum friends- lots of rock band, cupcakes, and hot tubs were had throughout the week.

I posted a stream of the more interesting places I visited on my Foursquare account. I particularly liked walking around in the Mission (in the sun 😀 ) and checking out some of San Francisco’s, ahem… more eccentric cafés (that link is mildly NSFW).

Towards the end of the week, I got to do some more catching up. I spent a day in Silicon Valley with family: Denis and Shana and my cousins Anora and Quinn. The kids have probably grown a foot and a half since I last saw them, so it was really fun to get to play with them. Shana works in HR at Google and took Denis and I around the Googleplex, which lived up to its reputation as a geek’s utopia. I also had a chance to meet up with Jessica, another friend from high school; we all went to Tommy’s Yucatan Restaurant, which is famous for their top-shelf tequila and is where my stepdad proposed to my mom.

So I had really great time overall. San Francisco is my favorite city in the United States and I’d love to find a software job out there. It isn’t making the prospects of living in Boulder, Denver or Fort Collins any less attractive, though; I had a great time there and I’m sure I’ll be having a great time there again regardless of where life takes me.

Below are the photos I took while I was there. (Denis took a couple of them while Quinn’s wrestling skills had me incapacitated.) I should also mention that Alan is way more of a shutterbug than I, and also spends a lot more time taking pictures of actual people instead of my transfixion on architecture and the like. He has a couple of great galleries from my time there: [One] [Two]