Category Archives: california

Bay Area Driving Tip: Stay off the roads..

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I´m in the Bay Area several times each year, but I never get used to the traffic here, which seems to get worse each year.

A good tip I am finally starting to follow is to avoid driving before 9am and avoid driving between 3 and 7pm.    Obviously that is sometimes not possible, but often you can arrange meetings and schedule around that.

I am usually driving alone here, but if you have two or more in the car you can use the carpool lanes which always seem very clear.  I think in that case the hours are not as important, though you will still get gummed up when there is no car pool lane.

Web 2.0 Conference

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WebGuild of Silicon Valley sponsored a great one day conference last week.   I missed the event but here are some pictures  courtesy of Reshma Kumar and Daya Baran, the Vice President and President of WebGuild who have really done an extraordinary job making that group one of the premier internet insider gatherings in the world.

This year Craig Newmark from Craigslist gave one of the keynotes.    He’s one of the most interesting folks in the internet landscape and it would really have been fun to hear his talk.      For me, the huge success of Craigslist, combined with the simple and spartan look and structure, supports the idea that the internet at a core level is about *people and information* more than anything else. 

Xiamen, China

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Update:   I’m going to China in April but will miss SMX China.  Xiamen was harder to get to than I’d originally thought given the rest of our schedule and China contacts are popping up in other places, so the new trip is Hong Kong April 1-4, Shanghai April 5-8, Beijing April 9-15, home to Oregon. 

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Still planning the trip to China for SES  SMX China 2008 in Xiamen, Beijing, Hong Kong, and Shanghai.    I am running into the internet challenge of really old information though.   For example I’d heard about a really cool ocean ferry that goes from Hong Kong to Xiamen.   It’s listed in my very new guidebook but some online sources say it’s not running anymore.   I got hopeful with this online blurb:

Hong Kong – Xiamen 1400 0800 Weekday 7245 from China Hong Kong City Pier  Xiamen – Hong Kong 1500 0900 EveryMon, Wed, Thu, Sat to China Hong Kong City Pier

Only to find the page was last updated…in 1997!

Google’s travel listings are pretty challenged in the USA so I should not be surprised that finding accurate China info could be trouble.    I’m online most of the day but have to admit the best sources of general China travel information so far have probably been word of mouth and my guidebook rather than online, though I’ve been using all of them together for best results.

The plan as of now is to fly to Hong Kong and spend about 3 days, then Train to Shanghai (20 hours, sleeper) for about 2 days, then to Beijing (13 hours by train) for about 3 days, then to Xiamen for Conference (which I’m hoping will be at the Xianglu Grand Hotel because it looks simply awesome!) then back to Hong Kong for the flight home.   But we are coordinating 3 schedules so we’ve still got some logistics to go.

China Visas appear to be a bit of a challenge as you can’t get them by mail.  I think most travel agencies will do this for you, but we are not planning to use one so somebody may need to go to San Francisco Chinese consulate.  Not a big deal as Charley lives down there and I’ll be near there later in January at the Web 2.0 Conference.

Are you biased?

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My friend Marvin dropped in today on his way down to California and we were discussing artificial intelligence.    Like most of my programming pals he’s much more skeptical than I am about how soon we’ll have conscious computing, but they are also far more knowlegeable about the difficulty of programming complex routines, let alone consciousness.    Of course, they are not nearly as pretty as Google uber-Engineer Marissa Mayer who estimated 10-15 years, so I’m going with her estimate.  

I’m still trying to decide if programmers are viewing things too narrowly by generally assuming that the circumstances required for conscious thought are so very profoundly complex that engineering for them will be nearly impossible.   I prefer the idea that simply having brain-equivalent speedy and massive computational power is going to push machines very close to consciousness after (relatively) simple routines are developed that will create conversations within those systems.  

When I noted that many in the AI community are now wildly optimistic about the prospects for strong AI within 10-20 years, Marvin correctly noted that people in the AI community were predicting strong AI a *long* time ago.   This led to the interesting question of “prediction bias”.    How often in history are predictions  reasonably accurate, and how do the time estimates on those accurate predictions hold up?   This would be a fun mini-research project to do sometime though obviously it would itself be subject to a lot of bias depending on how you picked the criteria, the predictors, and the predictions.

Along those bias lines this great Wikipedia article popped up showing a huge number of cognitive biases.    All of us should take a look at these and reflect on how often we fall into these irrational traps.

Web 2.0 Conference and Expo

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WebGuild will be presenting the second annual Web 2.0 Conference and Expo on January 29, 2008.   The location is the Santa Clara Marriot.  I missed this event last year but will be there this time and I’m really looking forward to it.   Last year Marissa Mayer was the keynote and I’m hoping she’ll be speaking again.  She’s one of the best thinking technologists anywhere, and a major reason Google continues to dominate the online landscape.

Note that this event is not to be confused with the Web 2.0 Expo series put on by O’Reilly Media or the Web 2.0 Summit also by O’Reilly.

Most Dangerous Cities in America along with the safest

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CNN reports results from a recent study of crime in American cities, noting these as the most dangerous and safest ten USA Cities in each category:

Ranked Most Dangerous

1. Detroit, Michigan
2. St. Louis, Missouri
3. Flint, Michigan
4. Oakland, California
5. Camden, New Jersey
6. Birmingham, Alabama
7. North Charleston, South Carolina
8. Memphis, Tennessee
9. Richmond, California
10. Cleveland, Ohio

Ranked Safest
1. Mission Viejo, California
2. Clarkstown, New York
3. Brick Township, New Jersey
4. Amherst, New York
5. Sugar Land, Texas
6. Colonie, New York
7. Thousand Oaks, California
8. Newton, Massachusetts
9. Toms River Township, N.J.
10. Lake Forest, California

Since the results are the result of weighted crime stats it’s true you might come to different conclusions about safe and dangerous, and of course safety and danger are not just a function of crime.   I think I’d take a slight crime boost if it meant a big reduction in dirtiness and pollution, though usually most of the bad stuff goes together.    I was amazed at how Philadelphia was so much nastier in terms of downtown cleanliness than the Amish country around Lancaster, PA and I’m always surprised in San Jose and Silicon Valley how much dirtier and harsher the cityscape is compared to the nearby suburbs, which are generally “too tidy” for me.    Here in rural Oregon you kind of feel cozy when you see dozens of dirty lawn flamingos in the yard and 14 used cars in somebody’s driveway.

CNN Reports

Driving under the influence of computers

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 The DARPA autonomous vehicle competion is on today in California.   It’s sponsored by the US military’s advanced technology division and seeks to create vehicles that can navigate without human intervention.  

The stakes are high in this competition where the top vehicles will take home millions in prize money – presumably for their university research.

These vehicles would be remarkable enough if they simply roamed through the desert as in past competitions, but this year the DARPA challenge is taking place in an urban environment, where fifty regular cars with human drivers will be zigging and zagging and presenting the autonomous vehicles with the advanced challenges of driving in a city.

Ashlee at The Register is liveblogging the event, though she seems pretty grumpy from the lack of coffee.   C’mon Ashlee, the military only has a $500,000,000,000 budget – and you want free coffee?

An autonomous ground vehicle is a vehicle that navigates and drives entirely on its own with no human driver and no remote control. Through the use of various sensors and positioning systems, the vehicle determines all the characteristics of its environment required to enable it to carry out the task it has been assigned

San Jose Mercury News – A Cautionary Tale from Business Week

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There is a great summary at Business Week of the  remarkable rise and pending fall of Silicon Valley’s newspaper – the San Jose Mercury News.     They note that in many ways the Mercury News saw it all coming, but still failed to position itself to profit from the migration of offline info to online info.  

Although the article does not make this point, to me the failure supports the idea that paradigm shifts do not come from old systems evolving into new ones even when the old systems “get it”, rather they come from new folks thinking out of the old boxes and building the next generation of innovative solutions basically from scratch.  

Obviously new technology rests on the shoulders of old technology, but it seems reasonable to assume that the next big things are not going to come from the previous big things, they are going to spring up from the harsh, quirky, and shifting sands of technology and innovation.     I would suggest that IBM might be an exception to this notion but clearly Microsoft, then Yahoo and Google, now YouTube, Myspace and Facebook all fit this model of major changes coming more from scratch than from a slow simmering of existing ideas.     This also helps explain the challenges of Venture Capitalism in finding “the next big thing”, which may right now only be known by the glimmer in a college kid’s eye.

If so, who is next?

Pearls before Twine

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update:  I think I was in a bad mood on this – not fair to be so hard on a new company without even trying it.   Sorry Twine, I hope you … ROCK! 

Twine is the new social network applications just “launched” at the Web 2.0 summit in Silicon Valley.   Like Paul Kedrowsky   I’m skeptical before I’ve even had a chance to test Twine.   (I will test it and review as soon as I get an invite…).

No, this is not fair but I’m getting sick of applications priming the buzz machine with hyperbole before they have even put out the application to enough people that you can figure out if it’s “Web 3.0” as Twine claims it is, or just another overhyped social application that needs widespread adoption to be useful.   

My favorite 2.0 observer, Tim O’Reilly, has a detailed review of the Twine demo after which he wonders if they’ve succeeded.    Note to Twine – if you can’t convince people in a demo that you are great you probably have some work to do, and you might even suck.

Now I really feel like an Assclown 2.0 to be so critical of what is clearly a thoughtful and potentially great application from Nova Spivak, a very clever Web 2.0 fellow. 

But I think I’m suffering from Web 2.0 stress syndrome where the hype, lies, and video clips are overwhelming me with irrelevant stuff while I try desparately to winnow out the good stuff from the bad.   We need an automated routine (aka ‘search agent’) that  does the preliminary winnowing of content and organization of other stuff and my stuff for us.  Now THAT would be web 3.0 and THAT would be worth my time as well as the time of all the moms, pops, and kids out there who are the backbone of the new web.   Silicon Valley often spills out silly companies and ideas as if the other 99.9% of the global population is clueless or irrelevant.   Theoretically Web 2.0 was to change that and make people, not computers, the center of the internet universe.   But sometimes I wonder if the Silicon folks have even paid any attention to that change.  

Real Estate prices. Highest to lowest cities show more than a 1000% difference.

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Wow, Coldwell Banker is reporting these stats on the most expensive vs cheapest USA markets for a comparable  4 BR house.  I’ve been wondering about this for some time and this indicates clearly the truth of the old maxim in real estate “location, location, location”Looks like here in southern Oregon we are near the national average of about 410k for a 4BR house.

City

 Price
Greenwich, Conn. $2,018,750
Santa Monica, Calif. $1,785,000
Newport Beach, Calif. $1,617,500
San Mateo, Calif. $1,498,023
Boston, Mass. $1,381,250

Most affordable markets
City Price
Minot, N.D. $139,033
Canton, Ohio $146,333
Topeka, Kan. $150,075
Tulsa, Okla. $153,750
Wichita, Kansas $156,500