Matt Hobbs

Geek Tourism

Thanks to Mobile Monday New York I got to go hang out at Google’s NYC office last night. Good fun, and great to see inside one of the biggest ‘dot coms’ ever. Three floors inside 1440 Broadway with a huge atrium which, though cute, has crappy acoustics if you’re doing a presentation at the bottom. Last time I was at that building we were visiting Diddy’s (previously Puff Daddy) Bad Boy Records company to talk about Vote or Day – fond memories.

The whole thing made me very nostalgic for the old Quidnunc days (RIP), as the place seemed very similar in vibe and the people wandering around, plus the ‘Knowledge Share’ vibe of the presentation. That said the Google playschool colour scheme is a little bit jarring when it’s on top of every notice posted around – made me yearn for some mango orange…

Ps, the Google submarine should be awesome when it comes out in Q2 2006 {;).

Wrong about japan – peter carey. Post 9/11, Peter Carey decided to bond with his son on a trip to Japan to investigate Japanese culture, and specifically the hero worship around comics. Here we have father/son inter-relations, cultural observations and great writing all in one. My only gripe is that the book is way too short – especially when compared with almost every other Carey book.

The Computer is the new Valve

Interesting geek insight today: I was chatting to Cisco about how grid application servers look to be pretty darn interesting these days. For those of you who don’t know the grid application server model is where instead of getting a couple of large, over-powered computers to run your website, you get 10s if not 100s or even 1000s of cheapo, lower powered commodity computers and run then as a bit cluster. Each computer runs its own copy of code and sharing between the machines is kept to a minimum. This is he model used by Google, Amazon and eBay to keep scaling costs down. In fact when I was listening to Peter Yared talk about GASLAMP, his company’s grid enable application stack, he mentioned that at eBay they don’t even get support for computers any more – if one breaks, they just throw it away as it’s cheaper!

This line of conversation led to the stunning realisation that these days there are guys at Google whose only job is to walk around pulling dead computers out of racks and putting in new ones. Compare this to the old days, when some guy’s job at the original Eniac computer was to walk around pulling dead valves out of the system and replacing them. So now computers, made of 10s of silicon chips (for now), each holding millions of ‘transistors’, each of which is equivalent to a old school valve – have become the new valve themselves. Imagine 50 years time…

This is the mass of scooters that was chasing Critical Mass participants round New York last night. The Critical Mass crowd cycled past me chanting “more bikes, less war” then suddenly there were shouts of “Scooters! Go back!” and these guys shot up in the mass of bikes on Bleeker Street. There was a minor road block of police cordening them off and I saw one girl get arrested. As someone said when walking past “This is Bloomberg’s New York”. Makes you wonder why the Critical Mass guys don’t have front runners with phones to navigate safely away from this unwarrented harassment of peaceful protest. America the free. Guess not.

A post

Again people have been commenting that I haven’t posted much recently. And they’re right.

Basically it boils down to being stoopidly busy on the various projects we have at work that all seem to have deadlines around now. The whole of September has gone by and I have no real idea of where it went – so here’s a quick list of highlights:

• Seeing the twin towers of light from my roof, as opposed to standing right underneath them as at last year’s resFest.
• This year’s resFest: highlights of which were Mike Mills’ short film asking ‘what would you do if you had 30 days left to live?’. That guy is a genius and I’m looking forward to seeing Thumbsucker.
• Another fun trip up to Montreal getting away from the crazyness of New York.
• Autumn finally arriving after some brutally hot August days – time to get the a/c out of the window again.

Dinner: Brasserie.

Today

Today is a strange day, like it has been every day for the last four years. A day for remembering those who died unexpectedly and undeservedly, like many who die at another person’s hand. A day for reminding ourselves of the way governments globally capitalised on people’s fear in the name of ‘safety’, as opposed to the real agenda of domination and greed. A day for working towards a better society together as a united world and not letting wrong actions stay ignored because it is uncomfortable to do so.

Today is for our future. For each other. For love. For being together as one world.

Today is every day.

Designed to read

Was just flicking through the latest issue of arthur[t], a free magazine I picked up in some Billyburg shop. It’s a great read, with beautifully simple design and a flowing, art noveau style on great paper stock. Did I mention that it’s free? Go pick one up at your nearest alternative vendelry and find out about modern counter-culture.

For those of you who aren’t in the US or Canada and want to read a different perspective on the world check out we make money not art[t]. This is a great filter on new products, designs and art around the world.

Now off to work. For the last few weeks all has been crazyness getting ready for some imminent new stuff (watch this space). Not sure when the crazyness will end, but in the meantime I’ve found that working really really late and getting much less sleep than I normally do is making me feel pretty darn chipper. That and the weather here in NY of C is beautiful now – sunny but not too hot. Ah, fall how I love thee.

Beside the seaside

Another fun day down at Coney Island, recovering from the excellent enjoyment of the Thompson wedding yesterday. Beautiful sunny day, still warm waters with little fishes swimming in it and even a lovely man selling pre cut mangoes on a stick. Yay! Only downside was watching a guy get dragged out of the sea about 20m away from us who the lifeguards weren’t able to resucitate. Pretty upsetting. Or just ‘good tv’ if you were one of the large crowd that gathered to watch the drama unfold.

What made this death at Coney Beach drama all the more unsettling was that under an hour later the lifeguards’ whistles blew again and someone else was dragged from the water! I belive this person survived though, helped by the fact that the police and other emergency services were still around. This was good news for him given that it took a good 15-20 minutes for any sort of rescue vehicle to turn up for the first guy. All in all very unsettling. Perhaps Coney Island is suffering an visitation of Australia’s finest killer jelly fish the irikanji?

On the subject of large cockroaches… Here’s one from Thailand last year. Guess insects also like to have minty fresh mandibles or whatever.