deep darc

Sophia and I went to the Bridge School Benefit Concert at Shoreline Amphitheater today, and it rocked. The lineup (in no particular order) included Neil Young, No Doubt, Sheryl Crow, Wolfmother, Fleet Foxes, Jimmy Buffett, Gavin Rossdale, Monsters of Folk, Chris Martin, and Adam Sandler. Seven fraking hours, but totally worth it.

After we settled down on the lawn, I noticed something plastic in the grass. I picked it up and noticed it was a bluetooth headset. Upon further inspection I noticed that it wasn't just any bluetooth headset, it was a Jawbone Prime.

The Jawbone Prime is one of the best bluetooth headsets in the world, and with a retail price of $129.99 it darn well should be. I feel really sorry for whoever lost this thing. There wasn't anyone nearby who could have dropped it where it was, so it must have fallen out of someone's pocket as they were traversing the lawn. Damn shame.

Here are a few teaser pictures from my next hacking project.

Sophia and I arrived back from Taiwan safely last night at around 8pm local time. Overall, the trip was a blast!

But... I unfortunately brought home something extra—some sort of gastrointestinal illness that I contracted about 12 hours before I left Taiwan. I'm feeling a little better now, but I was absolutely miserable the 12 hours before the flight and the 12 hours during the flight. It was the worst possible time to get sick. I'll spare you the gruesome details and just say that it wasn't pretty.

Anyway, we are both at home and comfortable now. I'll post up some more details over the next week or so.

I'm flying out to Taiwan in a few hours. I'll be back next week.

Sophia and I went out to an isolated place tonight to watch the Perseids. We planned to drive down to Santa Cruz and then head north on highway 1 for a bit until we found somewhere nice to hang out for an hour or two. We ended up passing about a dozen fire trucks as we went thru the mountains, but didn't think too much of it.

Heading north on highway 1, I kept an eye out looking for places to stop. One road we went down we notice all of this crap flying in the air. It looked kinda like bugs... or snow.

We kept driving north on 1 and eventually we found a nice cozy beach to watch the meteors. We also found out where all of those firetrucks were headed. Let's just say that meteors weren't the only thing we saw burning up in the atmosphere...

This has to be the most creepy squirrel I have ever seen:

Sophia took these pictures while we were hiking in Steven's Creek County Park this past weekend. We had just got a Nikon D40 DSLR camera and wanted to see what kind of cool pictures we could take—and we ended up finding this zombie squirrel.

Sophia gets the credit of finding the critter and snapping a few pictures of it before it hobbled off looking for more brains.

Why can't sending an event invitation to someone be as easy as sending an email? Why can't I check a friend's availability if they aren't using the same calendar server? Why can't I share a calendar with my friends who don't have an account on my calendar server?

For some reason or another, the concept of Calendar Servers has captured my imagination over the past year or so. I believe this technology could change how people think of time management, but I think it needs three things before it can get to that point:

1. Ability to invite someone to an event who is using a different calendar server.
2. Ability to view availability of someone who is using a different calendar server. (And, as a corollary, the ability to control who can see your availability)
3. Ability to share calendars and events with people who don't have an account on my calendar server.

The key to make all of this possible is something I call Automatic Federation.

UPDATE: After writing this post, individuals have brought to my attention RFC-2446, RFC-2447, and the iSCHEDULE Technical Committee. At first glance, it looks like this may make the stuff I was proposing here somewhat irrelevant, but some investigation is still warranted. I'm not yet sure how these specs prevent abusive things like spoofing and who is allowed to see free-busy information.

A while back a friend of mine mentioned that for programmers starting to learn Objective-C often have difficulty fully understanding how Objective-C handles memory management. Objective-C memory management isn't really all that difficult once you get the gist of it, but it can be confusing at first.

This short article covers the basics of the normal reference-counted Objective-C runtime. Garbage collection can wait for another day.