Monday
May232005

whiteboards of the CIT during finals

I'm on the third floor of the computer center (aka the CIT) where the computer science department has just completed amazing renovations. The third floor used to be all offices and belong to the IT people. Now the CS department has taken over, and built such a fantastic space for studying and hanging out and working that students from all departments seem to have found it and made it their study nook. On the whiteboard covering the wall to my left, a large diagram describes the structure of a "Weird Detective Story," with sections like, "Other Characters: Woman, a god, Theodore Roosevelt's ghost, a corpse," and "Context: Several dimensions - in the physical, not time-travel sense. Resurrection of old social movements? Underground and cabalistic." The whiteboard in front of me has a careful top-down view of a string of railroad cars negotiating an s-curve, paired with what appears to be the face of a seal: round and whiskered, but without ears. Do seals have ears? Off to my right is a diagram of the evolution of animals; most of it is too small to read, but the diagram is capped with a manga-ish drawing of a creature with a big belly, labeled "Placental Mammal: Long Live Toro the Forest Spirit!!!"

Brown is... special. I'd like to know which book the lit-crit kids were analyzing... and I bet there's a story behind Toro the Forest Spirit. Mostly I have to congratulate the CS department on creating such a beautiful, usable space. For my last weeks at Brown, I think I'll make this my home.

Friday
May202005

very happy and excited

I am very happy and excited.
And very tired. I return to Providence tomorrow morning.

Thursday
May192005

thoughts on laszlo

Ah. I spent much of today talking to some very interesting people at Laszlo:
David Tempkin is the CTO and a co-founder; Sarah Allen is a co-founder and a hardcore programmer; and Scott Evans is a developer. I also met with Jamie Clark, Andrew McClain, and Pablo Kang, but they don't seem to have weblogs. These are really good people. Good people.

I did a little exploration of the Laszlo platform... i made a little rss presentation widget. There's not much to it; it's maybe ten lines of xml, with no error checking... but the technologies just fit together: rss and lzx, the lazlo language.

I'm very, very happy. I've promised myself, and someone else, that I won't make any commitments until Tuesday. The next few weeks are going to be challenging and uncertain, and in some ways I'd like to end the whole process right now by saying "yes! sign me up! put me to work at laszlo!" but I know that would be a short-circuit. Just to make the right decision isn't enough; I need to make the decision rightly.

Thursday
May192005

archive links

I've fixed my archive links. Thanks to Scott Evans for reminding me they were broken.

Wednesday
May182005

off to california

I'm off to California for a few days. I might fall in love with California again. Never fell out of love, really. California, or Seattle? Old friends, or young nephews? I just don't know.