This is a week late, but I still wanted to post it:

Last Monday, M and I went to the taping of the Colbert Report. Once we found the studio, we walked past the picketing writers, and got in line. After about an hour, they walked through the line and handed out tickets. They purposefully overbook so there’s a full crowd, so only the first 100 or so got in. We were #s 86 & 87. A few people at the back of the line were turned away, but told they could come another day and be put at the front of the line. Eventually they let us in; through the metal detector and the guy checking bags; and into a small room with a few chairs, a water cooler, a TV & DVD player, and a couple bathrooms. We stood around for a while longer, apparently waiting for them to finish the rehearsal and be ready for us. Eventually, Mark, the Audience Coordinator (who looks eerily like Steven), came in, explained what was going on, gave us a chance to ask him questions about the show or the host, did some trivia for t-shirts, and told us how and when we should applaud and laugh. He put a ‘Best Of’ DVD on a few minutes before we were actually let in to the studio area and seated.

We were lucky enough to get seats, but a few of the last people were seated on the steps or had to stand off to the side. The set was pretty much how I imagined it, though maybe a bit smaller. The stage manager (or something or other) walked us through when to cheer and applaud (for example, they showed the opening when it would normally appear, and we were supposed to start our ovation when the eagle showed his talons). Next, this stand-up comedian came in, and did his thing for a while. He was ok - not wonderful, but entertaining enough. When Steven was finally ready, he came out, and the audience had a chance to ask him questions before he “got into character” - he even sang for us when asked to.

Then the show started. We cheered when instructed to, and laughed out loud when appropriate. We were the show’s soundtrack - the mics were on us and every noise we made was recorded for the show. The show was filmed almost in real-time. They took breaks at the commercials - I assume just long enough to watch the previous segment to figure out the timing and see if anything had to be re-recorded (one line in the show had to be redone).

Once the show was over, we were thanked and anticlimactically released.

Writing this from the big, glass 5th avenue Apple store.  That is all. 

I’m in New York!

Just a few key things to report on now - I’m about to start my 2nd full day here.

About an hour into the flight from Edmonton, the seat-back in-flight entertainment system stopped working.  They tried rebooting it, but it’s a POS so they never got it back up.  (I had other stuff to do and I’ve watched just about everything on there that I care about, so I was actually OK with it.) As reparation for that, though, they ended up handing out free flight vouchers to everyone! Sweet!

The next flight was half an hour late to leave because we had to get de-iced.  (Which, by itself, is a pretty cool process…)

Once I finally got in, my sis (M) met up with me, and we took a bus from the airport, through Harlem, to her dorm on the edge of Manhattan.  We went out to a nice Italian place in her neighbourhood for dinner, walked a bit, and hung out with some of her floor neighbours until like 3AM.

Yesterday (Sunday), we walked and shopped.  It was fun, but nothing much to write about, really.

It’s Monday morning. M is at class right now, and I’m just getting ready to go out to explore.  When she’s done in an hour or so, we’re going to meet up, go for lunch, and shop/sightsee some more.

We were able to get tickets to tonight’s taping of The Colbert Report (yay!!). So we’ll go there at about 4:00 for the 5:15 taping.

I’m off to Toronto tomorrow, I have no idea how much internet access I’ll have there, but I’ll do my best to keep y’all updated.

It feels like I just got back from that last trip, and already I’m leaving again tomorrow.

Here’s the plan this time around:
Sat, Jan 26 - Tue, Jan 29: New York (Visiting my sister in Manhattan, exploring, shopping, etc.)
Tue, Jan 29 - Sun, Feb 3: Toronto (Visiting family and friends, exploring, etc.)
Sun, Feb 3 - Tue, Feb 5: Miami (Beach!!!)

This is going to be a very different trip than the last one, but it still should be fun.

(I leave tomorrow morning, and I still haven’t packed… I should probably think about doing that when I get home from work… maybe…)

This trip is over, I’m home now (actually at work, currently - but you get the idea). The plane back from SF was delayed a couple hours (first because of weather, then because they had to change a light bulb on it), so I had to take a later connection home from the Vancouver airport. I got home a bit later than I had planned, but it worked out in the end.

It was a good trip - got to meet a lot of really cool people and see a lot of cool things. I’ll be going through my pictures tonight, I’ll post a link to a gallery as soon as it’s ready.

In addition to those I mentioned before, I got to meet lots of ‘new media’ celebrities at Macworld, including Veronica Belmont, Patrick Norton, Leo Laporte, Cali Lewis, and Roger Chang - and got pictures with all of them.

The news sites Ars Technica and Phoronix have posted their summaries of the KDE event. And, as I mentioned, the KDE Dot site has good writeups of the first three days. There are a bunch of “official” photos here.

Also the KDE keynote is up, as well as videos of some of the other presentations. (Most of you will find these really boring, but there might be a couple of you out there that might like them. Maybe? Yeah, ok probabaly not.) Aaron did a great job in the keynote explaining the philosophy of KDE and 4.0, and explaining the concepts behind the new version.

This is kind of a lame post, but I still wanted to write something to wrap it all up. I’m back at work for the week (ugh!) and then I’m off to NYC/Toronto/Miami. I’ll post that schedule as it gets closer.

I just came back from seeing more of the city.  I walked up to Fisherman’s Wharf, down along the waterfront, and saw the Golden Gate Bridge, all lit up.  I’m really glad I got a chance to do that, but I’m dissapointed that I didn’t bring a camera with me for that.  Oh well.

Even though I’ve seen more of SF, it still leaves me wanting more.  I definitely want to come back here.

I’ve developed a bit of a cold, but that was kind of inevitable, considering that I’ve spent this entire trip in enclosed spaces with lots of other people:  on airplanes, buses, in hostel rooms, packed convention centers, and conference rooms.  Oh well, it’s not nearly as bad as it could be.

Ok, that’s all for tonight.  I’m off to bed then on my way home.

Just arrived at my SF hostel from my last day at Google. The third and last day was pretty quiet compared to the other two - there were only about 40 people or so, and it was pretty relaxed.

I was going to take another fun chain of buses to get back to SF, but I ended up taking a taxi with 2 other guys. One of them was a student and the winner of a contest, so he was flown there for free; the other was the main developer for Kubuntu Linux (the only paid developer, actually). The Kubuntu guy had to get to the SF airport much sooner than it would have if he had taken transit with us, so he called a cab and we joined him.  We would have chipped in, but he said he was going to expense it, which means that Mark Shuttleworth (millionaire, entrepreneur, and space tourist) paid for my ride back.  Yay!

Aside from that, the coolest thing from today was hearing the guy from the VLC project talk.  He showed us the new (unreleased) version which he completely redesigned.  He’s done some very cool things with it.

I’m going to go out and grab a bite to eat.  I may write more before the end of the day, I may not.  The airport shuttle is coming to pick me up at 8 in the morning, then I’m on the way home.

Day 2: Got up, got ready, got on the bus, got to Google. Another breakfast, then everyone sat down for the speeches & presentations. These speeches were webcast live to other launch parties happening all over the world. When they have them up on YouTube later, I’ll post the link.

Pretty much the entire day was filled with presentations (not counting the breaks where they fed us). It’s very cool what they’ve done with KDE 4.0 - some pretty impressive stuff. I don’t think I’ll go on about it here (mostly because it’s explained elsewhere so much), but they’ve done some great work.

Speaking of ‘them’. I want to talk about the people. Today there were about 150 people there (they were expecting as many as 200). They were 17 year-olds, and men probably in their 60s and older (though most were in their 20s and 30s). There were students and industry professionals. The 5-or-so women that were there were almost all wives/girlfriends, but there were a couple females there by themselves. There were people that just use the software (like me), alongside those that create it. There were developers from individual applications (like KOffice, AmaroK, VLC, LinuxMCE), to people representing full on distributions (like Slackware, and Kubuntu). There were podcasters (like Marland, Dave, and Chess), and full on reporters (most notably from Ars Technica and Phoronix, among others). People drove in from the Bay Area and flew in from all over the Americas, Europe, and Asia.

There’re more blogs, summaries, and pics at the semi-official KDE sites planetkde.org, and dot.kde.org.

EDIT (1/19): A good writeup of the day, along with a bunch of pics are here.

Back at the hotel after the second day at the KDE event at the Googleplex. Sooo much to write about!

I woke up at 4:30 on thursday and worked my way over here from SF. The trip was a bit stressful, but it worked out in the end. After missing the first two subway trains because I couldn’t find the station, I got the right one. I had to take 4 different buses/trains, each only about 30 minutes each (so I couldn’t really even get comfortable and relax on any one of them). I eventually got to the hotel just before 8. I left my bags at the desk and joined others who I found were here for the same reason.

The bus was supposed to leave at 8:30. And it did. There were about 40 of us congregating around the front of the hotel, waiting for the cue to get on the bus and leave. When 8:30 rolled around, the bus left. I think there were about 4 people on it. It eventually came back, and we all got on and left for Google.

Ok…Google… This event may as well have been held at the CIA. They were crazy about security. We flat out weren’t allowed to take pictures inside any Google building - at all. (Not even in the closed-off, nondescript room that all of our stuff was held in.) And we were only allowed to take pictures outside if we were being escorted by an employee. We had to have our badges on at all times and there were security personnel at the entrances. A small group of us were taken on a brief tour of some of the facilities, but we were explicitly asked not to blog about what we saw. That said, it was still cool to be there, and it was nice of them to host us how they did.

As one of the Googlers (rudely) said when someone asked her about the corporate culture and employee perks, this event is about KDE, not Google. Ok, whatever… this page has a good writeup of what the first day of the event was like, including some photos. (we couldn’t take any, but there was a Googler taking some official ones). Really, the first day was pretty chill. There was breakfast there when we got there (basic, but nice - fruit, pastries, coffee, juice). Most of the day was spent informally chatting with eachother, and in small, impromptu mini-sessions.

At the end of the day, we were bused back to the hotel and there was a cocktail mixer with free booze and appetizers. The hotel is really, really nice - such a huge change after being in the hostel. I have my own large room, with a kingsize bed, nice bathroom, cable TV, desk, coffee maker, free internet, cordless phone, bathrobe, etc. Mostly little things, but I appreciate them so much more when compared to having just a top bunk and a footlocker to myself.

1. I have no fucking clue where I’m going.
2. Buses and trains are not the same thing. Don’t confuse the two.
3. The most unlikely people can be very helpful. (and vise-versa)
4. Don’t wear nice pants on big city public transit.