February News Dump

Random Notes:

• I just heard that my friend Dan will most likely be moving out to the Bay Area to perform his residency at Stanford! Hooray! This is super awesome, not only because this is a great area and I'm sure he'll be happy here, but also for my own selfish reasons I'm trying to get all my friends to move out here.
• On the topic of the Valley, I read a really good article in the New York Times about the unique place Silicon Valley holds in the world economy. Unfortunately, I've procrastinated in putting up the link, and now it's behind the Times Select wall. It isn't SO good that you should spend money on it. The idea, though, is that there is a curious contradiction at play in the world today: while the world is getting flatter, and technology is doing amazing things to erase the importance of physical distance, there is no real substitute for having a geographic region where creative people congregate and bump into one another. Silicon Valley still attracts a shockingly large percentage of startup funding and company headquarters, and will probably continue to do so for the near future; the article talks about all the times in the past where the valley has seemed to be in trouble (the collapse of the memory chip industry in the 1980s, the dot-com bust in 2000, etc.), only to come back stronger than ever each time (the rise of the microprocessor giants, the current wave of biotech and green energy startups). Anyways. It made me feel good about being here.
• Hey, let's make it a three-fer: as has been well documented on this blog, I ride a decent amount of transit for someone who owns a car. Earlier this week I took part in a focus group organized by the VTA - that's Valley Transit Authority, the folks who run all the public transit in Santa Clara County. It was pretty cool... we spent some time talking about our impressions of transit in the South Bay, evaluated a new website they're working on, got free food, and walked away with $75 in cash. They never said not to talk about the website with others, so I'm interpreting that as permission to blab about in on my blog - you can visit it at http://qa.vta.org. Also, if you live in the South Bay and are interested in making a little extra cash, you can register with San Jose Focus and maybe they'll give you a call.
• I'll try not to be annoyingly partisan or anything, but Obama's my man. I dropped a fairly modest contribution when he was in his exploratory stage, and now I'm on the mailing list for the $250 a plate fundraisers. I don't know whether to be honored or bothered.
• I love living in Northern California. Wearing shorts in February because it's 76 degrees out? Yeah, I could get used to this. Actually, I have.
• The second annual Amgen Tour of California is under way. Last year I wanted to go, ended up not, and then spent the next year regretting it. This year I made it out to the Prologue in San Francisco and the start of Stage One in Sausalito. It was a lot of fun; I don't follow bicycle racing all that closely, but know enough to track what's going on, plus it's great to be in these beautiful locations surrounded by enthusiastic people. If you'd like to track the excitement vicariously, the official tour web site has some amazing live coverage on race day. They switched from Google last year to Yahoo this year, I'm not sure why. Anyways, the technology is quite astonishing. Also, my trip up to Sausalito was the first time I've been in the North Bay since moving out here, and I must say, I was impressed. That's beautiful country up there.
• As for books, I'm most of the way through Obama's The Audacity of Hope. I'm biased, but I think it's quite good, especially for a campaign book. It won't be as timeless as Dreams from my Father, given the references to topics of the moment such as Terry Schiavo; actually, it already seems a bit less relevant given the change in control of Congress four months ago. Still, the strength of the book is that it is topical strictly for illustrative purposes; Obama is mainly interested in talking about the principles of our government and its role. I don't think enough people talk about his background as a professor of constitutional law, and while he isn't "professorial" in this book, he has a firm grounding in and respect for the traditions of our country.
• I came scarily close to filling up my work computer's hard drive earlier this week. It's only 50 gigs, and I hadn't had to delete any of my source repository trees before, so I had a lot of low-hanging fruit. Anyways, along the way I found a phenomenal tool that Windows users might want to grab if they are thinking of doing a similar cleanup. WinDirStat will analyze your drive and divide it into trees, so you can see just how much space each folder takes up. You can sort your folders in order of size, and drill down into subfolders to find where the big offenders are. I'm really glad I found this because it's sort of a practical example of the 80/20 rule... the biggest improvements can be found in relatively few places, so it's important to find a tool that will help you find those places. For example, early on I'd naively assumed that the Program Files and my music collection would be big targets. However, one of my build directories was twice as big as the entirety of Program Files; I could have spent an hour picking out programs to uninstall, and not come close to the amount of space I reclaimed just by deleting old temporary files.