unwiredben

I'm writing this from the San Jose airport, waiting for my flight back to New York on a late Friday evening. Earlier today, I turned in my employee badge at Palm. I've got another week working for them remotely, then I'm unemployed. This is only temporary.

Later this month, I start my new job as a software engineer at Mozilla working on their Fennec mobile web browser. I'm not entirely sure what I'll be doing there right now, but I expect it will have a lot to do with making the core web browser component (what they call Gecko) run faster and use less memory on mobile devices.

My leaving isn't an indictment of Palm. I'm really quite impressed with the new Pre phone and webOS, and I think the new products will be quite successful. I think we've found a really great way to help people manage their information and their life in a simple, elegant, and powerful way. When Palm releases the device and the SDK later this year, I expect to be among the first to start making applications for the system. I might even camp out at one of the Manhattan Sprint stores.

However, professionally, I've realized that it's time for me to move on. I've admired Mozilla and their Firefox browser for years, and when they contacted me about joining the team, I paid attention. I found their mission to be quite worthy, their people to be smart and friendly, and the technical challenged to be interesting. I'm also excited to be working on a vibrant open source project and to work in an environment built on worldwide collaboration. Plus, I can blog about my work again!

To all my friends at Palm: you've got my respect and my love, and I really wish you all the success in the world.

To my new colleagues at Mozilla: I'm very excited and can't wait to get started doing great things.

While organizing a drawer this morning, I decided to take a picture of most of my collection. If you click through to Flickr, you can read notes on each device.

While cleaning out stuff at home in preparation for the move to NYC, I found this t-shirt that I'd made in college. The iron-on part has discolored over the years. This is probably the geekiest shirt I ever made and ever wore.

The blue text refers to a VT100 terminal control code. Back before mice and graphics, people talked to big computers using terminals, usually a CRT and a keyboard that connected to the computer and acted as a remote interface. They sent characters back and forth, and usually, the characters sent to the terminal would be directly displayed to the user. However, the VT100 (and its compatible successors) could interpret some sequences of characters as special commands. A common one is Ctrl-H which would ring a bell on the terminal. The one in blue is the code to move the cursor back to the top left of the screen, or the "home" position.

Add that to the riff on the "if you lived here, you'd be home by now" signs that show up on apartment complexes, and you've got one of the geekiest things that you could possibly wear. Also in the running is the C programmer's reference shirt I once had which had all the text printed upside down so you could look down and read it while you were coding, and the KMFMS shirt that parodies the art style of the industrial music group KMFDM while also taking on Bill Gates.

I'm not much of a sports fan. The last time I went to a professional sporting event was probably when I was in college and attended an Atlanta Braves game with my dad and sister. I remember reading a copy of "The Psychology of Computer Programming" in the stands for one of my CS classes, but I have no no idea who the Braves were playing or what the final score was. Earlier then that, I'd occasionally go with my dad to Atlanta to watch Georgia Tech football; the thing I remember most isn't the game, but the electronic scoreboard with the primitive animations to rile up the crowd or get them to go to various local restaurants.

So, with that background, it was odd to find myself and Annelies at a baseball stadium last night watching the Round Rock Express play the Albuquerque Isotopes. I got free tickets from my financial advisor, and I knew that Annelies liked baseball, so we went. It was actually nice; they had rented a suite where there were free refreshments, and our seats were near first base. The heat wasn't too bad with an occasional breeze. There were even moments of tension as we watched foul balls soar over our heads to land in the stands nearby.

In the end, the Express won 7 to 4, with most of the action occurring in the middle innings. I got to enjoy a state-of-the-art scoreboard with video feeds and lots of animations. We even got free water bottles as part of a promotion for the Click to Empower project. I probably won't go back before the end of the summer, but I don't think I'll mind an occasional outing to see the Brooklyn Cyclones once we get moved into our new residence in September.

Most of my 34th birthday shenanigans are done now, and it's been a lot of fun, mostly thanks to my dear fiancee Annelies.

We started with a bang on Saturday with a segway tour of downtown Austin, taking our friend Kirk along with us. The tour company we chose is SegCity; they had us out for over two hours running around the city hall and capital area. The segways are a lot of fun to glide around in; you indicate your forward/backward motion based on how you shift your weight on your feet, and you turn using a handle twist on the left side. It was easy to do 360 degree turns, and getting around the ramp-filled downtown sidewalks was rarely a problem. The top speed on the units we had was 8MPH, so you were never going dangerously fast.

After that, we attempted to get people to mini-golf at Peter Pan's, but it was just too hot. Annelies showed off her ironing skill by making a "Happy Birthday Unwired Ben" t-shirt since she wasn't able to get my name on the sign outside. So, we went early to Hula Hut and had delicious Polynesian/Tex-Mex food under air conditioning. Then a few of us went to the Dart Bowl for a game where we all proved that we're not the world's best bowlers. I didn't break 100 (so sad).

My last big birthday activity was last night when Annelies took me to Wink Restaurant, downtown on Lamar. They improvised a delicious vegetarian tasting menu using lots of local produce, including some great potato gnocchi and a pleasingly contrasty cheese plate.

There are a few pictures of Sunday's fun on the Flickr set linked to the photo.

I just logged into my account on Amazon's Askville, their Q&A site where you answer peoples' questions and get "gold" that you can use for coffee mugs and the like. I found that I'd gotten a bunch of compliments online... it ends up that I'm the "Askviller of the Day". In the last week, I had six answers of mine make the "best answer" list, and I it looks like that put me on top of whatever ranking system they use. To be honest, I'd never even noticed the little recognition box on the bottom of the home page; I usually find interesting questions through the topic-based RSS feeds. Still, it's an honor... maybe I'll stay interested enough to earn enough gold to get the Askville coffee mug; I'm halfway there right now.

In a previous entry, I mentioned New York City as playing a major role in the upcoming year. Here's an elaboration.

My wonderful girlfriend of almost two years, Annelies, is about to head to Africa for her last semester of law school. She's going over to Tanzania to work with the UN's International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, leaving in late January and returning in May. She'll be stationed in Arusha, the large city near Mt. Kilimanjaro. I'm planning on traveling out to Africa at the end of her internship and spend a little time there with her before she returned to the US.

While she's gone, I'll have lots of work to finish for Palm, plus in March, I'll have the 2008 SXSW festival. I'm doing the Palm OS schedule again, although I hope that we got enough infrastructure changes into the program last year so that we don't have to add more hacks to deal with the ever increasing number of events.

The next two months will be spent with Annelies preparing for the New York State bar, which is at the end of July. She'll be able to study for it here in Austin, but she'll have to fly up to Rochester to actually take the two-day exam. She won't know the results for a while after that.

I've also got my sister's wedding to attend at the end of July. I get to be a groomsman, and I really like her fiance.

After that, we'll start our rental search in NYC. We want to find a nice place in Brooklyn near the main subway line that goes to her law firm in Manhattan where she has a job waiting for her in their litigation department. Since I already work remotely for Palm, I expect that I'll continue to work for them once I move; the big change will be that my flights to California will take a few more hours each way and I'll have to deal with lousy JFK instead of the more hospitable AUS. At least I can do a red-eye back to New York.

We're planning on not having a car up there. Going car-less worked well for us this summer during our trial run; we rented a car once to go to an out-of-town wedding, and almost every place delivers there, although we might have to rent out a truck for a day to do some IKEA and Costco runs.

The move will happen sometime in August or early September. I'm excited about my new adventures up in the big city, but I'm also sad that I'll be leaving Austin as my home. However, Austin won't leave my heart; I'm already planning on coming back every March for SXSW as long as I'm able. I've still got a while here, including some time where I'll be on my own, so I'm going to take advantage of as much of the city as I can before I leave.

FedEx brought a package from California today, a black men's shirt that has "Foleo" above the pocket. I'll be wearing this on Thursday when I go to the Palm event at the store at Rockefeller Center.

This is actually the first shirt I've gotten for this particular project. It was secret for so long! I've actually gotten a few shirts out of Palm though; there was a polo shirt for beta testing the Palm Backup software, a grey t-shirt with a wire frame model of the Treo 680, the "Spring Launch '05" t-shirt that came out with the LifeDrive and features icons of a flower, a rocket ship, and 05 all in a row. My favorite shirt was from last summer when Palm had it's 10-year anniversary of the PalmPilot; it's another black t-shirt, but it has a reproduction of the napkin sketch that Jeff Hawkins made of the original Pilot 1000, the product that started the whole mess.

I got a couple of shirts out of PalmSource, but most were generic logo tees. My favorite was a bright purple shirt that we gave out for a developer sync-up for a project that was codenamed Dialtone. The shirt doesn't mention the codename, but below the PalmSource logo there's the caption "350Hz + 440Hz" which references the two frequencies that go together to make a dial tone signal in the US phone system.

When I was at Metrowerks, I accumulated a lot of shirts. I still have a couple of the "CodeWarrior for Be" and "CodeWarrior for OS-9" shirts that were new when I started. I've got one of the alien "They use CodeWarrior" shirts that's well-worn, and there's a lot of now-useless CodeWarrior-logo golf-shirts hanging in my closet at home.

I don't remember getting any interesting shirts at Motorola; I've got a Veriprise t-shirt around, but nothing that mentions any of our products, although there's a VChat sticker on my badge from the 2000 PalmSource show. I hear there's a big corporate party the week that I head to California, so maybe I'll come back with yet-another-shirt to add to my growing collection.

Workers are redoing the roof on my condo today.  They've been working since about 7:30 in the morning with a constant series of thumps and footsteps coming from overhead.  It sounds like being in the middle of a fireworks show or a really loud thunderstorm.  I've got a ladder right outside my office and I keep seeing trash get thrown off the roof onto the driveway below.  It looks like rain later tonight, so I hope they finish before then.

This is all because of an incident with really high winds and hail that hit this place in late 2005.  We got an insurance settlement late last year, and the money is enough to get the roofs redone across the whole complex.  My phase is the first to be done, to be followed by the other three over the next few weeks.

I just learned that the last REAL governor of Texas, Ann Richards, died today after a brief fight with throat cancer.  I'm really sad to hear of her passing.  I got to meet the former governor twice.  The last time was at a SXSW screening a couple of years ago, where she was attending as a friend of the filmmaker.  I got to shake her hand and tell her about the first time we met.

It was 1995.  I was still at Georgia Tech finishing my senior year, and I was flying through Texas on an interview trip.  I'd just spend a couple of days in Dallas with Texas Instruments, and I was waiting in DFW to board a plane to visit Austin for the first time.  I looked around the boarding lounge and I recognized Ms. Richards sitting, waiting for the same flight.  I walked over to her and said hello and introduced myself.  I told her that I enjoyed the commercial for Doritos that she did with Mario Cuomo.  She asked me what I was doing in Texas, and I told her that I was interviewing with TI in Dallas and Motorola in Austin, and she told me that I had to go to Austin, it's the prettiest and best part of the state.  Obviously, I took her advice.

I'm sad to see her go.  The last thing I saw her do was appear in the Alamo Drafthouse's promo earlier this year where the penalty for talking in the movie was having Ann Richards "take your ass out".  I loved that she had a great sense of humor about her, and I hope for her sake, we're able to make Texas a bit more blue this election season.

My publisher let me know through a bulk email that my collectible and almost completely obsolete book "Palm OS Web Application Developer's Guide" is on special for $9 through August 31st.  It comes with an ancient CodeWarrior for Palm OS V8 demo CD as well hundreds of pages of screen shots and code listings from the old Palm VII, VIIx, and i705 devices.  Almost every detail in the book is no longer valid, as those devices haven't been made for several years and the software I talk about doesn't work on current devices.  There may be some useful info for designing for small screens and creating Palm OS application plugins, but that's about it.  Get them while they're stacked up in some warehouse taking space!

Yesterday was my 32nd birthday, and I had a small cookout at tangoglenn's place in the late afternoon to celebrate.  There was much grilling of veggie burgers, bell peppers, squash, zuccinni, and sweet potato, along with a cucumber-and-tomato salad I made from kazanya's recipe, and some Central Market apple pie with ice cream on top.  Much good conversation, and I really appreciate all those who came.

However, I'm writing this to make a record of the "mad libs"-style birthday card that lizardprincess gave to me.  My friends aren't particularly ribald, so this is family friendly:

Friends, this is a surprise party for Ben (person).  We are here to celebrate her/his dog (noun).  I must say that she/he doesn't look a day over 6. (number)  Naturally, we have some smelly (adjective) presents for her/him.  And we had the bakery send up a huge loud (adjective) cheese (noun) with 12 (number) candles on it.  We all want to wish her/him a very green (adjective) birthday and many happy trees (plural noun).

Thanks, everyone.  Now, to get finshed packing and head to the airport for my flight to Cali!

Today is Easter, the major holiday of the Christian religion. Well, it's Easter for Western Christianity, as the Eastern branch celebrates it next week this year.

I grew up with a number of religious traditions. As I like to tell people, I had a confusing childhood. My mom moved to Atlanta, Georgia from St. Paul, Minnesota where she was in a large Catholic family. My dad, whose family was Southern Baptist, met her when he was a student at Georgia Tech and she was working in one of the offices. So, until I was around 7, I would go with my mom to early Mass in the morning, then attend Catholic Sunday School, then get picked up by my grandmother who would take me to Baptist Sunday School and their 11AM services. When I started Cub Scouts, Mom and Dad decided to join Varnell United Methodist, the church that sponsored my pack, and that's where I spent the rest of my childhood.

In college, I had the honor of spending a lot of time with the Wesley Foundation at Georgia Tech, the campus ministry for United Methodism. Much of this time was spent learning from Dr. Bill Landiss, who ran the group for 34 years. Bill was not only a campus minister, but he lectured at Emory University's Candler School of Theology and was an active scholar. He exposed me and the other WFers to a wide range of theological thinking, looking not only at the original biblical text through a scholarly light, but exploring what modern writers have written about the God experience. I found authors like John Shelby Spong, Matthew Fox, Paul Tillich, and John A. T. Robinson, people who struggled with the conflicts between traditional Christianity and the insights into the world brought on by science, psychology, and history.

I have a lot of problems with the practice of Christianity in modern America. I see mega-churches spending millions on giant facilities, family centers, and direct mail advertising pushing the idea of "prosperity" to recruit members. I see communities of faith turned into wings of our political parties, eroding the American ideal that we have a secular government where people of any faith should receive equal treatment and respect. I see empires that broadcast messages of fear and greed through TV and radio. I see the fostering of intolerance justified by appeals to the literal authority of one book, ignoring the authority of reason and compassion. I see powerful interests that have fought to keep women from full participation, and that have tried to hide their own evil acts.

However, I also see a lot of positives. I see churches that make a huge impact in their communities, providing food and shelter to people in need. I see places where people connect to each other, doing simple things like singing together, sharing meals, and doing service. I see people having fun, supporting their sick, and sharing joy. I see people genuinely touched by the faith experience, and that motivating them to be better people. I see struggles for racial equality and struggles against war. I see an institution that helped me grow, that brought me into contact with philosophy, history, and the love of many people. I see a body that preserves the teachings of a man who told people to love each other, to be kind, and to think beyond the material world, one who was killed because his message threatened the power structure of Jerusalem, but who made an impact on the world large enough to span two millennia and be a major force in the world today.

For that, I am thankful this Easter Sunday. The church isn't the source of all of my answers, but it was the start of my quest, and that makes it a valuable part of my life.

I'm starting to feel the pain from a fall I took earlier this evening. I was on one of my usual evening walks when I passed by a part of the sidewalk that's adjacent to some barbed wire fence. A part of the fence grabbed my pants, tripping me up and causing me to fall onto the sidewalk. I fell forward, with my hands, chest, and knees making contact with the concrete. I had the wind knocked out of me for a moment, but I then was able to sit up a little, get the barbs unhooked from my pants, and make my way back home.

So, what's the damage? The pants got ripped pretty badly on one leg, and I don't think they're worth fixing. The barbs poked my leg, but I don't see any real cuts. My palms were a bit scraped up and I'm starting to feel some aches in my wrists and knees. I might have a bruise on my chest in the morning, although I don't think it's too bad.

Here's to occasional clumsiness!

Today marks another year for the jolly vernard... From time to time, he goes by "V", and I remember meeting him for the first time in January 1992. He was the TA for the self-selecting advanced section of Gus Baird's CS 1411 class. I remember doing a Curses-based menu manager as one of my projects, but when we were picking things to work on, he also suggested that we all go and look at this new thing, Linux, that had just started the previous year. So, I did that by printing out the entire contents of the Linux mailing list and reading it. (Printing large amounts of paper was a cheap was to use OIT computing resources back then.)

Quick V story: at one time, back when UUCP addressing still worked, he may have had the shortest email address on the net: v!gatech.

Over my four years at Georgia Tech, V and I became good friends, and we've kept that going over the years with me here in Austin. He's always been eager to throw a party when I visit, help plan my latest project, or just hang out. So, with all that history in mind, I raise my glass to Vernard and wish him well.

VoicePost 206K 1:01

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For more information, see http://www.specialeventrobot.com/blastoff.htm and http://wildbill.purezc.com/photos/?c=Weird+Stuff&p=Colgate+Robot, or go to your local library.

Here's a list of every band that I've seen live, as best I can remember, and not in any particular order.

( Over 60 performers listed inside... )

Earlier on LJ, I mentioned the storytelling event called Frey Cafe that has taken place at the last few SXSWs, and pointed you to Frey Cafe #5, which happened earlier tonight. I met up with lizardprincess at the Convention Center about 6:10, and we walked over to P.F. Chang's where we had a delicious meal of veggie lettuce wraps and Ma Po tofu. We kept cracking up about our waitress who kept adjusting things at our table, including pointlessly replacing the napkins under our drinks and stealing an appetizer plate while it was in use.

We get over to the Red Eyed Fly about 7:30, and no one is there, but things got started around 8:15, delayed a little because of the Webbie Awards ceremony. Now, we'd never been in the back room of this place before, so we didn't know that it was open to the outdoors and susceptible to a strong breeze. This resulted in lizardprincess borrowing my jacket to keep herself warm and some significant use of her as a huddle heater, not that I minded :)

A total of about 20 storytellers made their way on the stage over the next three and a half hours, and most of the stories were well worth hearing. I really liked the story of how Cinnamon got her name from her parents; how a guy witnessed a car crash and tried to help the drunk driver; how a skateboarder got to be an extra in the film "Gleaming the Cube", taking the role from a young Spike Jonez; and how playing a little Mexican boy who missed the pinata got a guy excused from going to church as a kid.

Inspired by the first couple of stories, I put my name on the open mike list, becoming Frey Cafe speaker #14 for the evening. This was my first public performance in a non-professional role since I did open-mike poetry at Flipnotics back in 1995, but I handled myself well. I wish I'd made more eye contact with the audience and went for a few more laughs, but it was pretty well received. Some of the other speakers had taken phonecam pictures of the audience from on stage, so I decided to top them by having lizardprincess capture my performance using my Treo 650.

Ben at Frey Cafe 5 (4MB, 5:39): This cuts off the first minute where I introduce myself, I talk a little about my hometown of Dalton, Georgia, and I talk about how I would go to both Catholic mass and Southern Baptist services when I was growing up until my parents both converted to Methodism as a compromise. Then I talk abut Governor's Honors, Valdosta, Core Wars, Georgia Tech, Tower Dorm, the Bareass 500, Hanson Dorm, my Campus Crusade for Christ roommate, the Wesley Foundation, Dr. Bill Landiss, getting a room at the WF, inviting friends over for RPGs, and getting reprimanded because someone left a beer bottle under one of the couches in the sanctuary.

It was a good effort, but I think it needs a lot of polish before I do it again. Trim some stuff, punch up some details, and a better flow. Still, I didn't have any problems addressing the crowd and I made them laugh a few times. I'm definitely going to be back next year; the storytelling bug has bitten me hard.