Ho John Lee’s Weblog

It’s difficult to get a sense of scale with natural phenomenon, including weather disasters, since they’re so much larger than what we normally deal with in every day life. There is some amazing before-and-after satellite imagery of the recent cyclone in Myanmar (Burma), in which the flooding in the river delta areas is clearly visible. For comparison, I’ve made a Google Maps view of the Bay Area in a similar (not identical) scale. The NASA imagery has a 25km reference scale, the Google Maps image I’ve scaled here was originally at 20km reference scale.

 

 

A rainbow a day…

Back in Maui for spring break. Everything looks the same as last year, which is just the way we like it…

 

Happy New Year 2007 from Palo Alto, California.

Today is the first day of school in Palo Alto. It feels like we just started summer vacation, but it’s fun seeing everyone after the break. I’m always surprised by how much the kids grow in just a few weeks.

The West Coaster is a small roller coaster going around and above Pacific Park, a small amusement park at the Santa Monica Pier. The ride isn’t too scary, provides great views of the beach, and goes around twice each time you board. The mid-week lines are short, so we went around and around until we lost count.

Spent most of the past weekend on the beach in Malibu. Emily and I tried a little surfing, ocean kayaking, and also got a good look at some dolphins while we were paddling around.

I brought the Thinkpad, but left the charger at home, the idea being to limit my computer use while on vacation. We decided to stay a couple extra days, so I was effectively offline after running on batteries for 5 hours or so. Next time I’ll bring the charger anyway.

If you’ve been having trouble getting at this site while I’ve been away, Dreamhost posted a narrative of their recent adventures in data hosting, some of which have been power-related, and some not.

These guys have been shooting scenes for their movie at the house down the street for the past couple of days. I can see the lights from my home office on the second floor, and this evening we walked over to take a look.

Dan Engelhardt started making movies on his iMac as a seventh-grader in Menlo Park. Brad Leong put on a student film festival — which included his own work — when he was a junior at Palo Alto High.

This summer, these two precocious 20-year-olds are home from college to make their first full-length feature film, a coming-of-age movie they hope will be the next “American Graffiti.'’ It’s set in — where else? — Palo Alto.

A few days earlier they were around the corner over at a house on Bryant. Those scenes apparently involved hanging lots of toilet paper on the trees in the yard. They’ve gotten grants from Panavision, Kodak, and Apple, so they’re better equipped than the average videoblogging operation.

Busy day today. Went to the Palo Alto Chili Cookoff, the Redwood City Fair, and wrapped up by watching fireworks at Shoreline this evening.

In addition to a prize for Best Overall Chili, there is also an award for Best Decorated Booth, so there are usually some interesting ones.

Emily really liked the Starship 2000 ride which spins around and sticks everyone onto the walls, so we went on it twice.

Returned this afternoon from Gnomedex. There was a lot of external interest in John Edwards’ session, which made the front page of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer on Saturday.

For myself, I enjoyed getting away for a few days to think about blogs, social media, and also enjoying Seattle. It was interesting to meet various bloggers in person. Mostly good, although from time to time I wished for the super remote from “Click”, to turn down the volume or fast forward.

There wasn’t a World Cup video feed on the first day of the conference, so Jeff Clavier and Halley Suitt offered to sponsor a big screen television at the conference center, which was running on the second day for the England-Portugal and France-Brazil matches. Conveniently, the dramatic penalty shootout ending the England-Portugal match started just after a session break, allowing many fans of the English side to be disappointed in real time. Jeff was pleased with France’s win, however. No conference feed in the World Cup TV room, but the IRC backchannel was busy.

Another fun softball season ended this Saturday.

Here is a visualization of my del.icio.us tags, by Kunal Anand, who’s been collecting del.icio.us tags and turning them into interesting pictures. Here’s the short explanation he sent along:

1. Each dot represents a tag (aka a node)
2. Each line represents an intersection between tags
3. The center of the visualization (denoted by a colored gradient), represents the heavy set of intersections

It appears that I have a fairly consistent set of regularly used tags, and a fairly even distribution of less used tags that intersect with the most common ones.

For comparison, see visualizations of tags from Brad Feld, Tom Coates, Pete Freitag

Back in Palo Alto again. Appararently it rained nearly every day that we were away, but it’s been pleasantly sunny and around 80 degrees this afternoon. The Bay Area is a lot nicer now that the weather is working properly again.

Vacation, broadband and an ocean view. What more could you want?

Now I can post very little due to vacationing, as opposed to posting very little due to work.