Snow

First snow of the season today!

Published
Categorized as Post Tagged

On the Return

I dropped off my passport at the Russian embassy this afternoon to get a Visa. I hope to spend time there and in western Europe in December before returning to Seattle. Plans don’t seem to crystallize until they are already in progress in this part of the world, so details may be somewhat slow to… Continue reading On the Return

Published
Categorized as Post

The last couple weeks have got to be one of the most interesting times in my life so far.

Specifically, I am currently in a Beijing hostel waiting for it to be late enough to be late enough to go to sleep. I spent the last hour talking to a conspiracy theorist about why the Whitehouse being colored pink for breast cancer awareness month was actually a sign of collusion with the Chinese. Its nice that my Chinese is good enough that I can follow conspiracies in both English and chinese, I guess.  The middle aged conspiracy theory lady was interspersed with a teenage girl from Jiangsu taking pictures of me and giggling. Once the lady left she told me it was because a friend thought I was cute, rather than my ineffectual attempts to change the topic of conversation.

This is on the other side of an airplane ride from staying up all night in New York and somehow getting dragged to Korean food at 3am (the rationalization was that I had to leave at 4 for the plane anyways). This was my first trip to new York as an adult, and it seems like a fun place – if somewhat expensive/fast paced.

The conferences were excellent. Bigger media deals than I had come to terms with previously, but a very good set of connections to start making.

The only glitch so far is that I was planning to bring a bottle of mustard back with me since it seems almost impossible to acquire it at PUST, however the supermarkets I visited this evening didn’t stock it either. I guess it doesn’t have quite the following here as elsewhere in the world.

Code for America

I’m super excited to help out Code for America, by volunteering as a Code for Seattle brigade captain over the next year. The parent organization and local chapter are focused on encouraging Civic Hacking – getting programmers to volunteer time towards improving our local community. This to me is the flip-side of government transparency, where… Continue reading Code for America

Published
Categorized as Online