BoomFlag

I found the greatest tie in the world. A guy named Bill Porter made it by hand. It’s a white tie with LED’s inside of it, and a microcontroller that plays Tetris. As you wear the tie, Tetris blocks fall down the length of it and stack up at the bottom.

He put instructions online, and I’m sorely tempted to give this project a shot. It would be so awesome.

It took me a moment to get this joke.

An electron is driving down the highway, and a policeman pulls him over. The policeman says, “Sir, do you realize you were traveling 80 miles an hour?” The electron sighs. “Great, now I’m lost.”

Outside of the office, there are four trees along the road. They’re prime parking spots. On these hot summer days, it makes a huge difference to have some shade in the afternoon, rather than baking the inside of the car for hours. So every morning, I always hope to score a tree as I pull into work…

I’m glad I’m not using the MobileLife Album service on T-Mobile.

They apparently shut it down on June 30… and sent an email to their customers on July 18. Thanks for the warning, guys!

Linux kernel 3.11 was released today. The release name?

Linux for Workgroups

Hah, that’s awesome.

Why do most microwaves have a Popcorn button that, when pressed multiple times, will pop multiple bags of popcorn? Does anyone do that? I can’t imagine how two (or more!) bags of popcorn would even fit in a microwave…

I’m on a conference call with an eBay sales team, and Nick and I have been counting all of the sweet “salesey” words they’re using. Our favorites:

“value proposition”
“onboarding” (six times!)
“eck cetera”
“best practices”
“strategic partnering”

Ahh, every day I’m thankful I’m not a sales guy.

Dear everyone who is sending resumes to me to apply for our development position here at Zing:

Please don’t put an objective on your resume. They’re just vapid and silly.

Thanks,
Jeff

Last night the sky was really dark just before sunset, and lightning danced in the eastern sky. We’d been sitting around the family room reading books, so we went outside to watch the approaching storm. Suddenly it started hailing. It was fierce and fast.

Kyra picked up one of the hailstones. It was actually just about golf-ball-sized!

After a few minutes, the hail stopped and it poured rain for another ten minutes or so, then abated and became a quiet, calm evening. Strange stuff.

My fourth and final day in the United Kingdom was a mix of meetings and sitting in Heathrow waiting for my (delayed, again!) flight. It was a ten-hour flight back to Denver, and since I can’t really sleep on airplanes, I spent my time reading a book, learning to play Go, and looking out the window.

It’s amazing how big the Atlantic Ocean is. I mean, it’s just blue from one horizon to the other. It was kind of dull for a few hours, and then suddenly I saw chunks of ice floating in the water. Before long we crossed over land. Assuming a great-circle route from London to Denver, I assumed we were passing over the southern tip of Greenland (later I checked, and indeed we were). It was so cool. The land was nothing but snow and rock, with ice floes easing into the ocean and huge rivers of glacial ice moving through the valleys. It was sheer white with a little black rock interspersed here and there. No sign of civilization, or life at all. The snow was perfectly smooth and unending. There were points where the clouds were literally sitting atop the snow– I assume it’s because of the cold or something.

Later we crossed Newfoundland and Hudson Bay, again seeing a lot of floating ice and vast expanses of snow. Over Minnesota I saw why that state is called the Land of Ten Thousand Lakes. There seemed to be more water than land. There were quite a few small villages, some roads connecting everything, and lakes peppered across the landscape.

I left around 6pm and landed at 8pm, so we were more or less keeping pace with the sun. Since I’d been up since 7am London time, and didn’t get home until 9pm Denver time, it was basically 21 hours of daytime. Strangely, I didn’t feel all that tired… jet lag wasn’t really a problem at all on the trip.

All in all, it was a fabulous experience. I’d love to go back sometime, as long as I could avoid so many meetings!