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Thursday, September 07, 2006

Summary Update

A quick snapshot the recent past, present, and near future:

Fuzzbean* and I split up early last month. I miss her. I would say more about this, but it would just make me sad.

Burningman (with Burn the Geek) was pretty good this year. The burning bicyclist replaced my previous favorite moving playa art, and the bomb and the waffle were definitely the two most impressive fire displays I have ever seen. The most memorable phrase goes to Peter, for when we were standing in a playa lounge watching a hot, creative, and seemingly tireless stripper dance to unusually good music while the bartenders tried to pawn off free drinks on us, and Peter turned to me and said, "the real world sucks."

It's time for me to depart Los Angeles, but I haven't quite determined my plans yet. Various travel ideas are percolating. The default and most likely plan is to return to New Zealand within the next couple of weeks or so. I'm open to travel companions and other ideas though, if anybody has any adventures brewing... I'm also open to work-trade, if someone wants to travel with me (backpacker style, not business style) and take care of daily logistics including shopping/cooking and such, I will cover living/travel expenses. Particularly because:

I will most likely be working with a team on the Darpa Grand Challenge (yip!), so I need to figure out how to stay highly productive while traveling. Barring logistical assistance, I may just find a nice house to rent somewhere pretty in New Zealand and camp out for a while. I'm hoping to convince the team to take a coding retreat there. :)

A whole nine people have purchased hard copies of After Life, which is about as many as have read it online based on the web logs. If you've read it, I could use some more votes/reviews over at Lulu. Proportional to the number of readers, I've received a good ratio of strongly positive feedback by email. Unfortunately, thus far the book's word-of-mouth coefficient seems to be less than 1.0, meaning its popularity is exponentially decaying rather than increasing. There may be a critical mass required before one can really determine this coefficient, though, so I haven't given up hope just yet.

That's all for the moment.

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