The part of my Burning Man I spent the most time preparing for by far was the Burning Man Ultramarathon. I had run the race six times before, so I knew I could finish it without dying. But I knew from past years my training rigor correlated strongly with how painful the race would be, and how long it would take me to recover. There’s little sense in putting in all the effort of getting to Burning Man only to spend several days of it barely able to move — though it would still be worth it if that were the only option!
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I just came back from a refreshingly packed trip abroad with my friend Patton. We visited several cities each in Japan and Vietnam. I took way too many photos, and given Burning Man is less than a week away now, I’ll post these entries as quickly as I can but likely won’t finish until September. This first one covers Tokyo, the city in which I lived for a year back in 2014, and didn’t realize how much I missed.
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Another year passed too quickly, leaving behind good intentions and hopes and dreams. I am starting to understand all I can reasonably hope for in a year is a slightly greater fraction of my hopes will be realized. But I know one day this hope too will fail me. I hope in the meantime I can build the strength and wisdom to weather the storm.
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In the made prep for Burning Man 2014, I went in with more knowledge than I had the year prior; I knew I needed lights. Now I have an ongoing project that is an exercise in programming and attempted durability.
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Today marks my first Chrome app release! Embedder is a Chrome packaged app for generating embed codes for Google Photos and Picasa Web Albums content. It is available in the Chrome Web Store.
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This morning my friend Walter sent me a link to his cycling heat map on Strava, and it was pretty cool. Even cooler than my silly temperature + Fitbit history chart maker app, Weatherbit 
.
Update: Check out an example map from CityStrides.
This morning my friend Walter sent me a link to his cycling heat map on Strava, and it was pretty cool. I figured there must be a web service that creates these based on Runkeeper data, so I Googled "runkeeper heatmap." Apparently there isn't a readymade service, but the top result gave me exactly what I needed to do it myself.
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As I neared my home, I spotted another man on the sidewalk ahead. There were no street lights nearby, but I could tell he was middle aged and substantial. The fear crept back, but this time it wasn't a safety fear, but rather a social fear. It was just the two of us. I was determined in my pace, but I also felt drawn to the man's eyes as I approached.
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It’s late. I have a morning flight. Time for sleep. And I’ve been trying. My friend, the Buddhist, has long been slumbering, but I stayed up catching up on work. Though I wasn’t at my most productive, I wasn’t really sleepy.
He is beside me, facing away. His left arm decided to go adventuring, and it came to rest across my chest. No big deal; it’s nice to be close, even if it wasn’t a conscious choice. I’ll take what I can get, after all.
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Tim shared with me a post from the blog Nao, which comments on the conflict between China’s working class and the state. The post offers English translations of some of Foxconn laborer Xu Lizhi’s poetry and of his obituary in Shenzhen Evening News. That’s right, Xu is dead, having survived 24 years before taking his life. He followed in the steps of many others, and certainly won’t be the last to do so.
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In early February, I decided to buy some tickets for that impossible to fully describe event called Burning Man. Despite prevaling wisdom, I actually think I had a pretty good idea what I was in for. I knew it is a city that rises on an ancient lakebed within a week and then in even less time diseappears entirely. I knew it is about acceptance and free expression. I knew it is not for the feeble.
What I did not know was how being freer than I ever have been would change me. Realizations, new experiences, new friends. It was undoubtedly the most awesome adventure of my life, even though I know I barely scratched the surface my first year. You really do need to experience it, though hopefully writing about it can help me better live it every day.
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I don't remember exactly how I came up with this idea, but when I was looking at some D3.js powered charts, I decided to make something so I could play with them. Somehow I chose to try pulling my daily step counts through the Fitbit API and graphing it against temperature data. I found a neat weather data API, Forecast.io, and used my Foursquare history to determine which location to use for weather data each day. Once I got this working, I created a web page so others can create their own graphs. And I called it Weatherbit.
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My mom needed arrange for 18 new employees to meet each other via a series of group sessions of four groups meeting at a time. In order to make each session as long as possible, she needed an efficient set of combinations to have each person meet each other person in as few sessions as possible.
She ended up manually grouping all the employees and came up with a solution that required nine sessions, which is pretty good. But I wrote a program that solves her problem using only eight sessions. And it only takes a few seconds, versus the much longer amount of time to do it manually.
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Barely two days after I posted about my new gym lifestyle, the Fitness SF website got replaced Feb. 14 with a cutting open letter from the company's former designer, Frank Jonen.
"Fitness SF preferred to ignore our invoices instead of paying them. As a result this website is no longer operational," Jonen wrote.
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