I keep getting invited to Google Wave even though I’ve had an account for months. It seems others are inviting me with different email addresses than the one I have registered with Wave. I can’t add my other emails though and Wave is disconnected even from my Google profile. 😦 Lame.

I have been asked many times for my thoughts on Google Wave. Here are just a couple:

• IRC moved up stack. Google Wave is essentially no different from what we’ve been doing with IRC and TKL bots for a very very long time. This doesn’t diminish it. To the contrary.
• Google Wave is crappy email. Because there is hardly anyone using it.
• Google Wave is crappy instant messaging. See the last point. Also, it doesn’t notify users of a message other than through the web interface, which I rarely log into.

As Jevon wrote to me, in a Wave, “if [Google Wave] had email notifications it would be more useful”. Oh the irony.

Don’t get me wrong. Google Wave is interesting. Primarily because of the underlying protocol and architecture. I am certain that if Google throws enough money at Wave, and I suspect they will, they will develop it into an important and useful technology.

Ping me with your email address if you want a Google Wave invite. If you’re already on Wave feel free to add me. I am AaronRoe At GoogleWave Dot com

I love that show: “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia”. It makes a nice title for a blog post with some random photos from our recent family visit to Philly. It was indeed unseasonably warm and sunny while we were there. I had work in DC, but the family came along and the weekend before we visited friends who live outside Philadelphia. We took a “big bus” tour of the city. This is a double-decker bus that you can jump on and off at designated stops. It was great fun. We also visited the “Please Touch” museum for children. Philadelphia is a beautiful city. The flora brought back fond memories of of the three months I lived in Central PA when I was 18 years old and in transit across country. 

 

I have a favor to ask. Please donate a couple dollars and a few minutes. If each reader of my blog gives a couple bucks we can fund many of these projects. But let’s start with this one. Let me explain.

Several months ago I attended the Web 2.0 Summit Dinner. Good times. As a door prize, if you will, O’Reilly and Pahlka gave all of us in attendance a $100 gift card to DonorsChoose.org. Here’s the deal:

Here’s how it works: public school teachers from every corner of America post classroom project requests on DonorsChoose.org. Requests range from pencils for a poetry writing unit, to violins for a school recital, to microscope slides for a biology class.

Then, you can browse project requests and give any amount to the one that makes your eye twinkle. Once a project reaches its funding goal, we deliver the materials to the school.

You’ll get photos of your project taking place, a thank-you letter from the teacher, and a cost report showing how each dollar was spent. If you give over $100, you’ll also receive hand-written thank-you letters from the students.

At DonorsChoose.org, you can give as little as $1 and get the same level of choice, transparency, and feedback that is traditionally reserved for someone who gives millions. We call it citizen philanthropy.

via DonorsChoose.org

Thanks O’Reilly and Pahlka for turning me onto this. I’ve add this to my list of charities, which include: Plan USA, Kiva.org and EFF. Given the many years I invested in bridging the digital divide in under-served communities in NC and MN with the creation and support of several non-profits (three still in operation) I’m stoked on DonorsChoose for the slant on education. Through DonorsChoose I have donated to a several projects thus far.

Here is a summary of my first two projects:

The teacher letters are awesome!

My most recent project was discovered by my wife, Tara. You can dramatically impact a school and community. It will only take you a couple minutes and a few dollars. There is no minimum donation. As previously mentioned, if every reader of my blog donates a couple bucks we can fund many projects. Please help with this one.

There is a literacy project at C.C. Spaulding in Durham, NC that needs YOUR help. This is one of the at-risk inner city schools where my wife taught and I volunteered. Moreover, I launched a technology community center here, built the network and IT/IS infrastructure. I know first hand how much this population of student needs YOUR help.

Please donate. Even if only a couple dollars. There is no minimum and this will only take a minute and MindTouch will match every dollar donated. Just contact me via email or Twitter and we’ll match.

Thanks!

Ashby has been participating in the Little Rascalz multi-sport class on Tuesdays at Pioneer Park in Mission Hills. This has been wonderful for her. Thus far she has played La Crosse, Baseball, Soccer, Tennis and Field Hockey. 

The above photo is from her last class. Prior to this class starting her and I were participating in our own Greco-Roman wrestling session on the grass. After we had paused, Ashby stumbled into the top of my head when I was looking down. She busted her lip wide open. Blood was everywhere. The other parents didn’t know we had stopped wrestling and it was caused by her stumbling. They only saw her bloody face and tears and had been witness to our shenanigans for the previous 15 minutes. Needless to say, their looks were telling. I felt like a total ass.

Anyway, I got the blooding down to a trickle and offered her to go home. She wasn’t having it. She immediately got out on the field as soon as the coaches started and got down to some field hockey.

Today, when she saw the above photo she said: “I’m holding my lip like that because it still hurt.” She’s such a bad ass. 🙂 And yes, I do recommend Little Rascalz.They have eleven locations in San Diego county.

I lucked into a ticket to Gogol Bordello last week. The show was fantastic.

As previously blogged I recently attended the ReadWriteWeb Real-Time Web Summit. The day before the event I had noticed the Pogues are playing at the House of Blues in San Diego on October 19.

I am a big Pogues fan and it has been over a year since I’ve been to any concert. When I looked at ticket prices I learned they are selling for $85 a ticket! I don’t think I have ever spent more than $50 on a concert ticket. Tara encouraged me to go to the show, but there is no way I can bring myself to spend that much for a concert. Especially not for a concert at the House of Blues—the Applebee’s of concert venues.

After deciding not to attend the Pogues show I was pondering how long it has been since I went to a show and how I really wanted to see Gogol Bordello live. In the event you are not familiar with this band, think: Gypsy Punk Rock. Sounds awesome, right? It is.

The next day, while at the aforementioned conference, I bumped into Eric Marcoullier. Eric is one of the guys who built and sold MyBlogLog to Yahoo!. I’m not sure how we first met, but Chad Dickerson, formerly the lead of Yahoo! Developer and the current CTO of Etsy.com, is a mutual friend and I believe Chad introduced us a couple years ago or perhaps Chad just said we should meet. I’m not sure.

Eric and I suffer from what I call: cyber familiarity dissonance (CFD). This is when the familiarity with a given person is disproportional online than the familiarity afforded via meat space interactions. Basically, you barely know them, but thanks to social networking and social media tools you feel like you know each other fairly well. It seems my relationships in meat space increasingly suffer from CFD.

While talking, Eric mentioned he was attending Gogol later that night. Having just been thinking the night before about Gogol it seemed a peculiar coincidence. Alas, the event was sold out. 5 minutes after speaking with Eric he returned to inform me he had a ticket. $35. I was in. If I were

The show was fantastic. It was the highest energy concert and best pit I’ve been in for years. I was left of center stage and surging between 3-8 people back. The pit was friendly, but there were plenty of elbows flying, body surfing (which means you have to watch or be kicked in the head) and I experienced a few head-butts. Good times.

Maybe it’s the nature of Gogol or perhaps the changing times, I’m not sure, but there were a surprising number of women in the pit. Is this typical these days?

in closing, if ever you have a chance to attend a Gogol Bordello show you really should jump at the opportunity. 

I was recently on TWiT.tv: FLOSS Weekly with Randal Schwartz, Jono Bacon, and Leo Laporte. Download MP3 file | Shownotes

All three of these people (and Dane) are wonderful people I thoroughly enjoy speaking (and drinking) with. 🙂

Visit the FLOSS Weekly Episode 89 show page to stream the episode in a click. You may also subscribe to the show in your preferred podcast or RSS client, which you should because it’s an awesome show.

I really enjoy podcasting. I’d like to participate regularly in a podcast(s). If any readers have a podcast that you think I would find relevant to my areas of expertise please let me know. Or if you have an idea of a podcast you would like to start, ping me about this too. I wouldn’t mind starting a new podcast if 1. it were on topics I’m interested in and 2. I didn’t have to worry about any of the infrastructure for supporting it.

MindTouchers Steve and Arne have a fantastic podcast on concurrency called: ‘Concurrent Podcast’. Here is their schedule:

Topic	Status
Lock vs. Lock-Free The good, bad and ugly of locks; how to avoid them; and when lock-free data structures might just be the ticket.	published
Why Async matters Why should you care about asynchronous programming patterns in your daily programming?	published
Coroutines in C# How to write asynchronous code in a synchronous style.  Benefits and dangers of using the iterator pattern for async methods.	published
Grand Central Dispatch Apples introduced a new paradigm for concurrent programming in OS X Snow Leopard.  Join us in this podcast to learn what it is, how it works, and how it compares to other implementations.

I encourage you to subscribe and listen to it.

From where I live in Hillcrest / Mission automobile traffic and a very steep downhill run. On the way home, which is uphill, I take 5th Hills it is just under three miles to my office, if I take a direct route. On the way to work, I commonly take a route through neighborhoods that have little Avenue near Balboa Park. 5th is a three lane, one way road. It is less steep coming up the hill and it provides a longer route for me to exercise.

Traffic in downtown San Diego is sparse. This is not San Francisco, Seattle or even Minneapolis. Traffic in San Diego is so sparse in fact it is odd to those of us who are accustomed to cities like San Francisco.

San Diego Gaslamp District at 6:30 PM on a Friday night.

Leaving from work I turn on 5th Avenue from Beech Street. I usually will bike on the sidewalk, which is illegal, for the first several blocks because that first section of 5th Avenue is busy with speeding cars getting on and off Highway 5. Moreover, there is little to no foot traffic in that area.

By the time I reach Kalmia Street, where foot traffic begins to pickup, I take to the road. When I bike on roads with no bike paths I tend to take up an entire traffic lane if there are parked cars. San Diego has very few bike lanes. By taking up a traffic lane I ensure motorists see me. This is legal. In fact, this is the only way to legally bike when there is no bike lane.

Why is it important to stay to the center of the lane taking it up entirely? It’s as simple as it is unobvious to passing motorists. When I stay to the side of the lane I risk cars pulling out from side streets and car doors opening, which then force me to skirt erratically and dangerously into traffic.

When I take up the traffic lane I can pretty much keep up with the traffic – thanks to the traffic lights. However, every day I have, at least, one road raged motorist verbally accosting me, or worse. Motorists will honk and scream obscenities at me, flash me the finger while shouting, threaten verbally to run me over and even go so far as to feint their vehicle dangerously close to me. These feints are often so close that were I to flinch and crash my bike I would be run over by them or the vehicle behind them.

One day while commuting home a motorist in a van squeezed me out of the traffic lane into a parked car while screaming profanities at me and honking. The door of the parked car opened and the only way I could avoid getting run over by the van or hitting the car door was to drop my bike. I looked up as the van drove off and it was the catering van from Cafe Zucchero, a restaurant two blocks from my office. I learned later the driver’s name is Greg. Thanks Greg. I can assure you that had you not forced me to crash I would have gotten to the next light just as fast as you.

Damien, one of my co-workers, was biking to work recently when a Police officer demanded he move out of the traffic lane over his loud speaker. A Police officer. Clearly, this fellow does not know the law. Nor do the belligerent motorists who regularly accost me. When I bike alongside them at the next traffic light after they’ve verbally assaulted me, for biking, I will inform them I am obeying the traffic laws and so too should they. Those brave enough to acknowledge my presence will usually scream at me not to take a lane and threaten me again with being run over.

Recently, I have noticed public service ads around town that state “Lose the Roaditude” and are directed at bicyclists. These instruct bicyclists to obey traffic laws. “Roaditude”? Bicyclists? I suspect these stem from the rise in popularity of Critical Mass here in San Diego. Is it any wonder Critical Mass is growing in popularity?

Where are the “Share the Road” signs? Where are the public service ads informing motorists of their obligations to bicyclists? I want to see an effort to inform motorists of bicyclists rights. There needs to be a concerted effort of City officials and Police to protect bicyclists.

I have been thinking about software convergence lately. This weekend I was visiting Big Bear, CA with my family where a cultural convergence was happening. The annual Big Bear Film Festival, a motorcycle rally and Oktoberfest all happening at the same time. What does three distinct events transpiring in a very small town create? A peculiar cultural convergence of Hollywood hipsters, motorcycle club members and rural rednecks. This peculiar convergence is not a dissimilar result from many software convergences. At least this cultural convergence is fun to watch.

I had a great time with my family. Big Bear always delivers on the promised reprieve. This trip was spontaneously arranged mid-week. Tara and I spend our Thanksgivings in Big Bear and she suggested we drive to Big Bear and find a suitable cabin for our Thanksgiving trip.

For this weekend Tara found an adorable farmhouse for rent. The owner did a fantastic job decorating the place. However, the neighborhood was less than appealing. My Facebook description of the farmhouse:

We rented a cute little farmhouse. It’s nice. Other than the shitty neighborhood replete with dick rednecks partying loudly all around us…Oh and owner said it was “near” the airport. Seriously, the runway is literally in the backyard.

Thankfully the airport in Big Bear is just a little air strip for small personal airplanes. Still, with two little ones, the airplanes coming and going were not welcome. Worse yet were the raucous parties of cursing twenty-something Caucasians that drove jacked up American made trucks that appeared as though they should be participating in a monster truck rally. These twenty-somethings also dressed as though they were lead characters in rap music videos. Yet another peculiar convergence.

We did find a cabin for our Thanksgiving trip to Big Bear. Cozy Hollow Lodges is less than a mile from the village and it has a playground. We drove by and checked it out before we left town.

I was in DC last week where I was attending a work related conference titled Gov 2.0 Summit. Before leaving home I asked Ashby, my daughter, to help mommy because Roesevelt, my son, was sick. Tara called me and told me she had been especially helpful and that Ashby had told her she was helping so much because “daddy asked me to help you because Roe is sick.” So cute. I had to pick her up something.

Before going to the airport to return home I stopped by Georgetown to buy Ashby something fun to reward her. I happened upon a shop lifter casually walking away from a shop keeper after apparently having stolen from his shop. The shop keeper attempted to stop her by insisting she stop as he followed her down the sidewalk while, I’m assuming, he hurriedly tried to reach the police on his mobile phone. She ignored his demands and continued her brisk stroll.

The shop keeper attempted to wrestle the stolen merchandise from the woman. A scuffle ensued that soon involved three women wrestling the unlucky shop keeper to the ground. It seemed they were all in cahoots. I only photographed two of the women wrestling the shopkeeper because the third actually left her one year old child, in the stroller, in the road. Albeit near the curb, but still in the road. Realizing where the kid was, sadly, kept me from photographing the dog pile on the hapless shop keeper as I was busy worrying that a car may hit the kid. 

As for Ashby, she got two hair barrettes and an Obama tshirt. She says the Obama tshirt is a boy’s shirt and she is not fond of it. She is very girly. 🙂

Anyway, Georgetown is a beautiful part of the city.