I was reading about vdash and inside the presentation, I found this interesting quote: “We are not scanning all those books to be read by people,” explained one of my hosts after my talk (at Google). “We are scanning them to be read by an AI.” That came from George Dyson, in this article on Edge. And as always with Edge, if you read on through the piece to the end, there’s some big ideas. Smart people thinking about important things over there. ...

Compare The Candidates is a nifty web app that I found when looking into AppSpot, a Google cloud computing thingie. It shows a new style of design that rose in the last few years. I really admire it, and I love interacting with sites like this. It’s a little scary though, it feels like a generation gap. I don’t really feel like I know how to make something that feels like it. When HTTP and CGI came on the scene, I had my feet under me right off the bat. With this generation of design sensibility, I feel a little lost still. ...

I am looking forward to Curtis’ 512 words. If he sucks and doesn’t do it often enough, I’ll do them myself here on this site and embarrass him. How’s that for a helpful, encouraging friend? :) Curtis’ adventure to take the time to be a professional writer is really inspiring, and it is part of what brought me back to my blogging. I am also considering to do some recreational fiction writing. Perhaps 512 of Curtis’ words will inspire me even more. ...

Here’s a tiny blurb about life in my new environment: Tesco is down the street. They are the UK’s largest supermarket chain, think Safeway in the US. Generic, filled with irritating British mothers and their unruly children, with prepared food as far as the eye can see and bad produce. (Good arugula though, I have to admit). Tonight Marina and I had our hearts set on risotto. And Tesco, with 500 types of frozen pastys, has only one brand of arborio rice. And it is out of stock. ...

Since I am getting back to tech life, a good first post would be about tech. What caused the big downtime was a not-very-careful switch from a friend’s Linux server to DreamHost. I switched because I am too old, too lazy, and too impatient to do Linux sysadmin anymore. I outsource it now. Especially mail system setup, which has become an infinite nightmare as a result of spam. With just a few clicks at their really excellent control panel, DreamHost let me outsource all the hassles of email to Google, while still keeping control of my web server. And actually DreamHost helps me with that too, because with a few more clicks on the control panel, I installed WordPress in my blog, then upgraded it a few months later. ...

After an extended downtime due to lack of give-a-shit on my part, my blog is back, and I am back to blogging. Expect something here daily, which is my goal. Lots and lots of news… where to start? I suppose at the last post. Since then, Marina and I were evacuated from Chad due to fighting in the town where our project was located. We then found a nice little meningitis emergency in DR Congo. When we came home we had a little vacation, then I went to the USA to see family after close to a year away. We found separate postings with MSF for the summer, which was hard but worthwhile. Marina worked in Myanmar doing mobile clinics from boats, and I went to Oromyia, Ethiopia to participate in an nutritional emergency intervention. ...

Hello everybody, and happy new years. 2008 is going to be really great for me, I have some news to share here to get all those who are interested in my travels back up to date with my life and my plans. First, the most important thing in my whole life… I’ve finally found the perfect girl for me. Her name is Marina, and we’ve been together over a year now. She and I weren’t ready to talk so publicly about our relationship until now, but now the time has come, so that’s the first really great piece of news for the blog in 2008. ...

I was looking for something else and ran across this somewhat ridiculous part of LinkedIn’s web site: Allen, J. This is why in every place my name is used publicly, especially related to work, that I am very careful to use the exact string, “Jeff R. Allen”. It is a habit I started in college when my first academic paper was ever published. When you work with computers from an early age, you have a good understanding of namespaces, and how to best deal with the sub-optimal namespaces favored by humans and their idiosyncratic language. ...

This is the next Internet meme, ladies and gentlemen… and just remember you heard about it here first. This is from the group that my friend Curtis Chen belongs to, the The Richter Scales.

Today I had the afternoon free so I went to Atomium. Here are the pictures I made there.