Today, I was traveling to PyCon, a Python Open Source conference. I was thinking about posting a photo of traveling to the conference (I have a lot of photos showing planes and such), but then I stuck with the community. This is a photo of the first place I visited when I met new people I didn't know before PyCon. A brewery in downtown Atlanta.
We talked a lot about web applications, security, etc. It was fun! :)
This is what it looks like when we release software at Mozilla. Except for when it doesn't. This was actually a fairly unusual day, when (most) developers, IT, product, and QA all found themselves in a conference room in Mountain View. Usually, this is much more virtual, with the "room" being an IRC channel or perhaps a conference call, all of which spanning multiple time zones.
Because releasing software alone wasn't challenge enough :)
This is a tiny little coffee roaster on display at Dana Street Coffee in Mountain View. Dana Street is a locally-owned local coffee roaster that I enjoy going to much more than the omnipresent Starbucks. For their excellent coffee as much as their hand-drawn signs everywhere. And besides this little roaster, they also have a full-blown one (with an exhaust through the ceiling), right in the middle of the place, next to all the tables and plenty of coffee bags. Very charming.
The roaster itself is apparently an AJ Deer Company "Royal No. 4" coffee roaster, could well be over a hundred years old. You can guess what kind of gem this is when you see that a (restored) one of these roasters was on sale here for almost 10,000 dollars. Awesome!
Today, the PyPy team came to Mozilla HQ to give a presentation about the project and its comparison with CPython. The title of this particular slide, "Python is Complicated", sounded like a good overall headline for the topic to me.
Thanks to the PyPy team for stepping by. This was an excellent warmup for PyCon!
This week we bought an Ikea futon for the guest room, which I finally built today. All future guests of ours will be happy to know the odds of not having to sleep on the floor have just dramatically increased :).
The photo is a 14mm wide angle shot with flash, both of which explain the vignetting. I also raised the contrast a bit to make the squares on the futon cover stand out more.
Along the same lines of my industrial design-inspired photo on day 55, I really like this photo of one of our lamps because of its straight lines and the simplicity of its dangling pull chain. To my dismay, it is a little crooked (oops) but still. Another subtle detail I enjoy is the parabola shape the light makes on the wall.
A side note on the postprocessing: On some of my other pictures, I've pretty aggressively fixed the white balance before, so that what's white in daylight was white in the photo too despite the artificial light I took the photo in. On this one, I deliberately didn't do that: I like how the photo shows how the shade actually looks (the bulb inside has a "warm white", i.e. somewhat yellowish, hue), rather than what it would look like if there somehow was daylight shining on the inside.
There's one kind of letter the financially handicapped State of California will always find enough postage to send: The yearly registration renewal notices from the DMV. And not only do they cordially invite me to pay my fees on time (conveniently mentioning just how expensive it gets if I don't). Being the good salesmen they are, they let me order personalizes license plates along with it! For only a handful of dollars, you too can be a patriot today!
Mozilla isn't the only company with dinosaurs. This is the gigantic T-Rex skeleton on Google's main campus in Mountain View, CA.
It's pretty awesome.
(For a while now it's had some plastic flamingos stuck in it, but hey, who's going to be critical.)
I spent a substantial part of this week (and today in particular) interviewing applicants for various positions in the general vicinity of myself in the organization. It's a lot of work, but it was also a lot of fun talking to some of them who brought some really interesting experience to the table and I hope I will get to work with them soon.
If you think you should be one of my colleagues here at Mozilla, check out our jobs page and apply!
(Yes, this is a close-up of the actual questions I used today. The attentive among you now know that I ask some general questions that have something to do with Mozilla during my interviews. Surprised? I hope not!)
In one of the other offices here in the same building as Mozilla headquarters, one can see this desk from the outside. I kid you not, this is a 1998 book on Building COM Applications with Internet Explorer. It makes me smile everytime I walk by. Of course, one would hope this person does not actually use this as a daily reference -- but given that the book stands next to what I believe is an Opera logo, it is probably meant as a joke. Well played!
This is probably by far the worst-quality photo I have had in my project 365 so far (do not look at it at full size), and I apologize. But the subject was just too good to pass up on.
