Offline for a wee while

Just an fyi, I'll be at a 10-day Vipassana course from Dec26-Jan6.

Best. Christmas present. Ever.

Bag of Bella Viva pistachios, from Uncle Nate.

(I'm all about edible gifts.)

MouseRug

Saw it in the Asian Art Museum's gift shop, couldn't resist. More here, mine's the Tibetan Dragon one.

More Lazyweb: Sci-fi?

Now that I've almost worked my way through Firefly and Battlestar Galactica, what other sci-fi should I check out?

Oh Lazyweb...

Can you find me any Yosa Buson posters or prints? I'm particularly fond of his "lonely traveler" paintings, which are currently on display at the Asian Art Museum here in SF.

Here's an example:


(I also enjoyed Song Yulin's paintings, and am unable to find prints of his either...)

Playlist of the Day

Yesterday in iTunes I selected all my Death Cab (4 albums) and Belle and Sebastian (also 4 albums), clicked Shuffle, and hit Play.

It was delightful.

Google Hiring Mac Engineers

If you're a Mac hacker and might be interested in working on Mac stuff at Google, let me know. These positions were just posted:

• Mac QA Engineer - Mountain View
• Mac Software Engineer in Test - Mountain View

And these were posted a little while ago:

• Macintosh Developer - Mountain View
• Senior Macintosh Developer - Mountain View

[also posted to FA:OSX]

New Gmail Stuff

The Gmail team has released a whole pile of stuff lately (and they should have a blog where they talk about all of it):

• Mobile interface
  
• Vacation auto-responder
• Contact Groups (this one's for you, Jack)
• Shortcut links for package tracking, directions, etc.

Dubai Conference Writeup

Here's Mahmood's fantastic writeup of the Conference we attended in Dubai last week.

And us at lunch:


(originally uploaded by malyousif)

Four Year Bender

I just saw these guys at The Independent - they were really, really good. Give 'em a listen.

Progress...

(list at the bottom of this page)

Meditation

Lots of folks have linked this already, but I wanted to highlight these quotes:

"The study also indicates that regular meditation may slow age-related thinning of the frontal cortex."

and

"The study participants were people with jobs and families. They just meditated on average 40 minutes each day, you don't have to be a monk."

Ski Dubai

I had a ~6 hour layover in Dubai today, so I decided to go snowboarding with Jehane:

Podcast from Dubai

(posting from Doha, Qatar)

A few days ago I did a quick Odeo demo for John Gage and Geoff Cowan from the conference. Not much there, but it was fun to see how easy it was to a) record an audio snippet from a web browser, b) snap a photo with my Treo and c) associate it with the podcast on Odeo's site. Check it out:

http://odeo.com/audio/482764/view

Greetings

from Dubai

(demo for Geoff Cowan)

Demo

Hello from Dubai, the conference is full of interesting people!

(demoing for John Gage)

View from my hotel room

Burj Al Arab, and for me it's invoking similar feelings as Taj Mahal... it's just breathtakingly, heart-stoppingly beautiful.

Update: Alas, the inside was rather disappointing... gaudy, shiny, ick. Oh well.

Coffee and Melatonin

-got in late last night, took ~20 hours to get here (KLM via Amsterdam)

-Goldman was right about Melatonin - it's how to deal with jetlag

-spent a while this morning chatting with Ahmad Al-Rikabi, who started Radio Dijla in Iraq. He's got some fascinating stories (and hopefully he'll be blogging them soon).

-I need to read Salam Pax's book

-chatted with Gordon Robison, proprietor of mideastanalysis.com

-Internet access in the hotel is ridiculously expensive, and they only have wifi in the Business Center. WiFi needs to be everywhere, and free.

-no problems getting to Flickr, but perhaps the filtering doesn't affect the hotel?

Surf Dubai

Excellent.

(I've got one free day after the conference, hopefully there'll be a swell!)

UAE Censorship

This afternoon I'm flying to Dubai for a conference, but apparently I won't be able to use Flickr while I'm there.

Sigh. I hope Blogger works... it's sort of why I'm going and all.

Update: Flickr works fine from the hotel, but perhaps the filtering is different here? Blogger's working fine too.