I'm quite bummed that I have to miss the BIL (Bilateral. Intellectuals. Luminary) conference which is going on during the TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) conference, March 1st and 2nd in Monterey, California. BIL is the BarCamp answer to TED's FOO Camp. If I didn't have a long-planned snowboarding trip to Tahoe with friends that weekend, I'd be down there with my video camera filming the talks. And don't get me wrong, I love TED. I can't get enough of the TED videos, but I also can't afford TED's $6,000 registration fee. I've been lucky enough to have been to both FOO Camp and BarCamp and FOO Camp wins. But BarCamp kicks butt too. I'm sure BIL will be great, and it's FREE. If you're free that weekend and in the area, you should go!

Last weekend I took the Intermediate Coastal Cruising course on a 32' Catalina. This included the on-the-water test, but I still have to pass the written exam. This shouldn't be too difficult though, so soon I will be qualified to charter boats up to 35'. These are much larger than the 26' Santa Cruz sailboats I've been doing day trips on for the past two years. They have a living room area, a galley, a head and can sleep six people! You can go to someplace like the Caribbean or Mexico and charter a boat for about the same amount you would pay for a hotel room, which I plan on doing ASAP.

The course was much fun. Saturday started with heavy rains, but things cleared and we enjoyed 25-30 knot winds until after sundown. Finding a place to anchor for the night was difficult since the heavy Northernly winds made the instructor's preferred location less than ideal. Finally we dropped anchor near the coast of Belvedere right under the 10+ million dollar homes, with our stern facing straight towards the skyline of San Francisco. On Sunday as we sailed near the Golden Gate bridge a family of porpoises followed us for 30 minutes as we surfed six foot swells. I love sailing.

One funny thing that happened was when I was in the school office and I noticed a new Learn to Sail poster they had put up. It had a photo of mine from Flickr on it! I had put it up with a Creative Commons license, so I was mostly pleased to see it used, but when I looked it up later online I noticed that the license I had chosen for it was non-commercial and attribution-required so they totally stole it. Maybe I should have my lawyer offer a discounted charter settlement.

Another thing that happened was that on Saturday morning as I jumped off the boat onto the dock, I dropped my keys into the water. This was a big set, with keys to my house and mailbox, car, motorcycle, safe, six keys for the RV, two client office keys and a couple of keyless entry electronic gizmos. On Monday night I was able to get a big magnet on a rope from the harbor master and I spent some time dropping this magnet into 22' of murky water. I figured my chances were low since there had been strong currents and 50+ hours since I had lost them, but amazingly after twenty minutes I pulled them up! And the electronic transmitter still works even!

Another unconference, this time held at the new Citizen Space office run by Citizen Agency. Citizen Agency is the new project for Chris Messina and Tara Hunt. As I understand it, it is a for-profit venture that gives community and the greater good at least equal footing with the profits themselves. Alternative business structures that give more weight to humanity are of particular interest to me. The description I heard about the venture made me think of one of my inspirations, Semco.

Semco is a Brasilian company that tore down their corporate structure and made everything transparent to their employees. Everything. Employees collaborated on everything from salaries, hiring/firing and office assignments to which products and partnerships to pursue. Everyone. Every employee that needed it was given lessons on how to read the company books. What happened as a result of this commie takeover? Pure capitalism baby. They made record profits, grew in size and quickly had the lowest employee turnover rate in all of Brazil.

Photo: Scott Beale / Laughing Squid

Citizen Summit was a gathering dedicated to showcasing some citizen-friendly ventures and networking with other like-minded individuals. The opening talk was by Scott Kveton of JanRain on the OpenID system. This one was right up my alley, as OpenID is basically something I'd been idly thinking of building for several years now. It is the underlying technology for TypeKey, which was my inspiration in the first place but I never knew that it was based on an open specification. It is a single sign on system where the user has complete control over their identity and with whom it is shared (as opposed to something like Microsoft Passport where a corporation controls access to your identity and can sell you out at any time). Even better, OpenID has a plugin for Ruby on Rails! As the maintainer of the Login Sugar rails user system plugin, I was somewhat shocked that I didn't already know about this project. In fact just the day before at the Ruby on Rails Camp the topic of user login packages for rails came up and I don't think anyone there knew about OpenID. I'm looking forward to giving this a whirl and then trying to see how I can promote its usage in the RoR community. There are so many relatively small rails based web sites out there, I think it would be a great thing if they banded together to promote a better Intraweb login system.

Tantek of Technorati gave a sort of feel-good recap of how the emergence of independent building blocks has allowed community efforts to spread like wildfire on the Internet lately. If I remember right it basically went something like IRC -> Blogger -> Wiki -> Del.icio.us tags -> Foo Camp -> Bar Camp. It was a fun walk down memory lane for me as I participated in all of those things in their early days.

Dave McClure led a round of Half-Baked which is a really fun game where 4-5 person teams grab two random words, mash them together into a dot-com and then in about 5 minutes come up with a product, revenue model, marketing strategy, logo and tagline. Each team does a pitch to the 'investors' and a winner is chosen. The DonutDivorce.com "Let's Make Divorce a Spectator Sport" team took first place with their reputation-based rss-enabled social-network collaborative quicky divorce site. My team somehow managed to snare second prize with VaporizeGrass.com, an SMS-enabled FlashMob lawn mowing service. All the winners got a copy of Ori Brafman's new book The Starfish and the Spider.

Ori spoke next about his book. The analogy is that if you cut off the head of a spider, the organism dies. If you cut off the head of a starfish (surely you watch Spongebob) then not only does the organism survive but you eventually end up with two whole starfish. Helllllo Al-Qaida. In fact Ori said he got a number of contacts from special ops folk in our government after publishing the book, because it gives them a new vocabulary to use in explaining what they are facing in places like Afghanistan. Of course in the context of this summit, the hope is to apply the resiliency of the starfish organizations to positive collaborative efforts.

Technorati Tags: citizen agency, citizen summit, halfbaked

On Thursday I went down to IBM Almaden in San Jose to attend the Ruby on Rails Camp held there. This was a one day unconference (Foo Camp style, more generally popularized by Bar Camp, where the participants create the schedule and lead the sessions) . I keep missing out on the official RoR conferences, so it was good to finally get to attend a rails gathering with more oomph than the local Ruby Meetups.

Some highlights:

• I gave a ride to guy named Caleb who recently spoke at a Ruby Meetup I had missed, so I got a bit of a recap on the state of rails debuggers from him.
• The very first session on memcached was perhaps the most perfect conference session I'd ever attended. Usually sessions are somewhere on the scale between too simplisitic where I learn nothing or too advanced where I learn little. This one was great. I understood everything presented, it was all new information and it was something It was something in which I was truly interested. Hats off to the presenter. Not only did he provide a good run down on what memcached is and how to optimize it, but he has released a number of great tools to the community: MemCache Client Extensions, Custom Benchmarks, and Extended Fragment Cache.
• The performance and scaling session which lasted about 5 minutes when no one could advance the high water mark for rails apps past basecamp. The field is still wide open for an impressive and popular rails based site to become the leader. I believe that the team I'm working with at Pivotal Computing is going to produce a high traffic rails site by mid 2007, but I'm still astounded that no one else has.
• Reg: "a library for pattern matching in ruby data structures. Reg provides Regexp-like match and match-and-replace for all data structures (particularly Arrays, Objects, and Hashes), not just Strings." This was demoed by Caleb (my passenger). Pretty cool concept, although not quite yet up to speed performance-wise.
• Running into a couple of friends at a limited attendance conference where I didn't expect to know anyone. Nym drove up from L.A. and Kaliya was actually the conference facilitator!
• AWS Console by Thorsten von Eicken which was my first exposure to this new EC2 offering from Amazon. His app is a front end to manage servers on the service. It should be released in the next few weeks. EC2 is an on demand virtual server web service that allows you to create a server image and then almost instantly replicate it to as many virtual servers as you want. Each virtual server "predictably provides the equivalent of a system with a 1.7Ghz x86 processor, 1.75GB of RAM, 160GB of local disk, and 250Mb/s of network bandwidth." Wow.
• Unexpectedly being one of the main "presenters" at a Test Driven Development session. It was actually quite a bit of fun although I wish I had been more prepared with examples and such. I think the next time there's an rails based unconference I'll plan ahead and purposefully lead a session. Ideally I'll have more experience with RSpec and BDD by then and could lead two sessions.

The conference organizers put up a decent summary about the general conclusions.

So those of you who signed up for my announcement service or follow kokochi already know that Mie gave birth to our daughter, Tesla Rhea Yaginuma, on July 5th. She came out at 7 pounds even and 19.5 inches in length. It's been quite a ride, but things seem to be settling down into a bit of a manageable routine now.

The labor started on July 4th at 2AM, but I slept through most of that. Throughout the day Mie's contractions were getting stronger, so I was still holding out hope for a July 4th birth. Mainly so she'd have fireworks every year for her birthday, but I also liked the patriotic element. As much as I disapprove of the USA's policies today, I have always believed America has great potential to truly make the world a better place. It's a potential we have squandered, but the coming era of Tesla's generation is probably going to be the one that sees if America gets back on track or becomes a failed state. Hopefully we have that long anyhow.

But back to the labor. Mie's moans during contractions were growing in frequency and volume, but around 5PM I could hear a deep bellowing noise coming from the direction of Survival Research Laboratories HQ a few blocks away that was actually louder and shaking the house. I thought it was nice that SRL was already celebrating Tesla's birth :) I found out later they were testing a german V1 missile engine replica. Mie didn't seem so excited about it though. Her contractions were about 40-60 seconds long at this point and around 4 minutes apart. It seemed like she was getting into that transactional active labor stage. She was worried about going to the hospital too soon though, so we stuck around the house for another couple of hours before heading into the hospital around 7pm.

Once at the hospital, she was already at 4cm so we settled in for the long haul. By 9pm she was in an increased amount of pain and decided to go for the epidural. Our hospital room had a nice view, we could see the July 4th fireworks going off at Pier 39. In fact, here's a short video shot from the room with the fireworks going on outside the window and Mie's moans as her mom massaged her providing the soundtrack. This was right before they administered the epidural. I know, I know, how could I be watching fireworks when my wife is moaning in labor pains? What can I say, after twelve hours of it you can get just a little distracted.

After that kicked in, the pain went away for the most part. However things did not seem to be progressing too quickly, it became apparent that it was going to be a July 5th birth. The contractions kept coming, but Mie didn't seem to be dilating very quickly and the contractions weren't increasing any more. So they gave her a shot of something to stimulate contractions which seemed to work but then after a few hours, the baby's heart rate started decelerating after heavy contractions. This alarmed the doctors enough for them to give Mie a shot to stop the contractions and wheel her into the operating room in case they needed to do an emergency c-section. They told her if they had to, they could have the baby out in about 60 seconds. Tesla's heart rate stabilized though and we went back to the delivery room. The doctors made it clear that if there was no more progression (the dilation was still practically halted) and there were more heart rate dips, they would have to start seriously looking at other options. They gave her another shot to get the contractions going again. Unfortunately once the contractions started up though, the heart rate dropped again. At 9AM they wheeled Mie into the operating room. It was a rough night for all of us but the c-section operation went very smoothly and everything else seemed to stop when we first heard Tesla's cry. I peeked over the operating curtain to see her little head, then shoulders, pop out
of Mie's belly. It really was quite a moment.

Mie's mom and I went with Tesla to the Newborn Intensive Care Unit while they finished sewing up Mie. I wanted to take my shirt off and hold her skin to skin but they had her under this heating lamp thing so I just made sure I was touching her as much as I could until we could bring her back to Mie. Wow. I can't really express what things were like in that hour. I just couldn't take my eyes off her. They had to tell me to stop leaning over her because I was blocking the heat lamp.

;

It felt great to bring her back to Mie. They had only been together for a couple of minutes right after the birth. By the way, Mie is super bloated in that photo of her and Tesla above. She hardly looked any different than normal throughout her whole pregnancy, unless she was standing sideways, but in less than 24 hours a mixture of IV fluids and hormones bloated her out like a usual pregnant woman. It's her first photo with Tesla, so vanity aside it has to be special. The sudden weight gain was funny though, she couldn't even fit her feet in her sandals afterwards.

I try to help out as much as I can, but it's become very apparent to me how special the mother-child bond is and Mie is a wonderful mother. We spent three more night in the hospital in order to let the cesarean section incision heal. The three extra nights of instruction by the nurses and doctors were of enormous help though. It's weird being a new parent, you really don't know what you're doing even though the instinctual route is usually pretty safe. We learned a lot from the different nurses that would come in on how to do everything from changing the diaper to breast feeding. The Kaiser facilities and staff were almost uniformly superb, but we were itching to get home.

On the last day the doctor came in to remove the staples from the c-section incision. Unfortunately there turned out to be a complication called a serona. This means that fluid built up in the wound area that prevented bonding of the flesh. The incision in the uterus wall healed up fine, but when the staples came out the skin and fatty layer above opened right back up again. This will now take another 4-8 weeks to heal. She has to keep the wound stuffed full of wet gauze and twice a day I have to put on surgical gloves and replace the gauze. I have a photo of the wound, but don't click on it if you aren't comfortable with that sort of thing. Cesarean Section / Serona Photo. I tried to find another one on the web, but couldn't find one. Apparently this is a fairly rare complication. I'm happy to report that a couple of weeks later it seems to be healing up right on schedule.

Well this was a long rambling post. And like most things these days it was done in small steps. I probably changed 5 diapers between starting this and finishing it, plus a trip to the hospital for a scheduled appointment and a short nap on the couch with Tesla. Being home with her has been great. It's so more conducive to realizing that we are a family now than living together in the hospital. And speaking of family, major props to Mie's mom, Mikie. She's leaving to go back to Japan in two days, and I suspect things will get either more hectic or more cluttered pretty quickly after (probably both actually). She's been a major source of strength for the past few weeks both in practical around the house matters and in supporting Mie throughout.

I'll stop now. There will be many more posts concerning this adventure we've embarked on.

So this year at Burning Man I had been planning on proposing to Mie. I had written a simple children's story based on our relationship and commissioned illustrations from a woman in Shanghai whom I met on Flickr. The idea was that this could be a book for our own children to enjoy one day. This was something I'd been planning for well over a year, but I am a world-class procrastinator. Seriously, I'd be a contender if procrastination were an Olympic sport.

Well naturally I managed to miss the deadline because the payment for the illustrations didn't arrive in China as quickly as I hoped so I didn't have all the illustrations by the time we left for Black Rock City. Of course, as you may know, Mie took me by surprise and proposed to me at Burning Man. Since the pressure was off I got to procrastinate even more, but I finally managed to get it all put together and presented it to Mie today.

The story recounts how we met at Burning Man and how I convinced her to leave Japan to live with me. The last page ends with me asking her an unspecified question. The plan was to ask The Question directly when she got to that page. Hopefully now Mie (who is much more creative than I) can help me wrap the story up and we can have the final few illustrations done. I'm still trying to come up with a title too.

The entire thing, story and illustrations, is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License. You can download it here: A Story For Mie.pdf (warning: 66 megabytes in size).

Dr. Stephen W. Hawking is doing a short lecture tour (apparently all the way from San Jose to Oakland). Anyone else interested in attending? It ain't cheap ($35-$125), but it seems like a rare opportunity. I'm looking at the November 10 gig in Oakland and considering an $85 seat.

Hawking Rethinks Origin of the Universe I

n two, rare public appearances, at a moment of revolutionary change, world-renowned cosmologist Dr. Stephen Hawking presents a popular lecture entitled "New Perspectives on The Origin of the Universe" at the Center for Performing Arts in San Jose on Monday, November 7th, and at the Paramount Theatre in Oakland, Thursday, November 10th, 2005. Both events begin at 8pm.

Paramount Theatre in Oakland tickets are currently on sale and available through TicketMaster online or at 510-625-TIXS.

Professor Hawking holds the prestigious Lucasian chair at Cambridge University, once held by Sir Isaac Newton. Hawking is one of the early developers of the theory of black holes and author of the international best-selling book A Brief History of Time.

Cosmology is making a paradigm-shift in thinking about the formation of stars, galaxies, black holes and, indeed, about the origin of the universe itself. Seventy percent of the universe is a strange 'dark energy'. The cornerstone theory of gravity itself must be reconsidered.

NASA's Swift satellite, in just the last few months, has revealed startling new details of black hole formation. The Swift observations challenge us to consider a dramatically different view – one that entails multiple explosive outbursts not just a single bang, as previously thought.

Hawking – at the forefront of research on both black holes and the origins of the universe – presents for us his working hypotheses.