[ Text added at 8 pm: ] This is a week full of coincidences. I've already hit it off well with another student in my department at Berkeley, Joyojeet Pal. Now it turns out that he's known a dear friend of mine, Manisha Tomar, for years. She and his mother are old friends. He recognized Manisha in an earlier photo on this site.
Then came another helpful coincidence. I took a break from studying to grab a plate of lasagna and to enjoy the sunset from the cafe in Berkeley's International House (above). See the people in the photo? They were sitting next to my table, and they just happened to be in this sunset shot. After posting the photo I sat down to eat and I overheard the woman describing her experiences working as a user interface designer and consultant for software firms in Asia. Now she's apparently preparing applications for business school. The man she's speaking with poignantly advised her and he revealed some good dirt about the schools and a couple of entertaining war stories from the field.
It turns out that user interface design is my specialty and I'm seriously considering consulting overseas after graduating, so I picked up a few good tips and got a good sense of the current state of the industry from two insiders as I enjoyed dinner and the sunset. Life is good.
Parker took much better parade photos.
It's Zeitgeist Man!
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Daniela's one cool Czech. And one cool chick.
I met her in Paris in 1999 when she worked at my favorite hostel there (the "Young and Happy" on Rue Mouffetard). She gave me and everyone else fantastic underground tips about things to see and do in Paris. Now she's moved to San Francisco so I have a chance to return the favor.
We met for coffee at Cafe Abir in SF. Within five minutes Eric, another San Franciscan who once stayed at the hostel, recognized her as he walked by... It turns out that a friend of Eric's designed the camera in my Nokia cel phone. (That's the same phone that I take these photos on, and the same phone that I'm developing software and metadata structures for in my class at Berkeley.)
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The East Bay has been so hot that for several days now I've headed over to San Francisco to study. When it's unseasonably hot and still out here they call it "earthquake weather." Today it was so hot even in San Francisco that I continued all the way down to the seashore in Pacifica, where it's a perfect day.
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This is the soap dispenser in the bathroom at Muddy Waters Cafe on Valencia near 17th in the Mission, San Francisco.
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I finally joined the 21st Century and set up this live photoblog.
Technically my phonecam belongs to its manufacturer, Nokia. But it's mine for the semester.
(Definitions: A phonecam is a mobile phone with a camera built in. A live photoblog, also called a "moblog," is a site where snapshots from a phonecam appear live as they're taken in the field; the photographer can update the site using nothing but a phonecam.)
The phonecam I'm babysitting is a Nokia 3650; it can capture still photos, audio and short video segments, and it can send this content to any e-mail address. With a little messing around, you can use this to build a photoblog.
I'm working on a project for Nokia at Berkeley; we're developing applications for these phonecams and creating metadata frameworks that we hope will make it easier for regular people to create, annotate, retrieve, share and work with photos and video. Here are details of the project.
Stay tuned...