Congratulations Team USA, you made Vancouver 2010 an enjoyable Winter Games. I remember looking at the rosters for the teams of the different countries, and I agreed with most everyone that Canada and Russia, with their superstar players would likely be the gold medal game. Nobody gave USA a second thought, and it was a lot of fun cheering on the scrappy underdog USA team these past couple weeks. Certainly nobody thought they would go undefeated through the tournament–their only loss was in the gold medal game against a team that had much more talent than they did. And they put up a good fight too in a last-minute thriller of a game (highlights video).

And congratulations to my Sharks Olympic medalists, Marleau, Thornton, Heatley, Boyle, and Pavelski!

Thanks Daniel and Lisa, for letting us watch the game at your place!

There’s been a lot of chatter on the internets the iPad, the new, long-rumored tablet Apple announced yesterday. The most interesting part about the iPad for me was the user interface. The iPhone was revolutionary, in large part due to the multitouch interface. At the time, there was just nothing else like it. The iPad makes the same move, only in its large form factor.

I really liked the thought that went into the UI of the applications that were demoed. Previous tablet PCs have been clunky ports of a desktop OS. Even the new generation of tablets running Android look this way (more on that later). Apple approached this differently–if you haven’t seen it already, it’s worth watching Apple’s intro movie for the iPad. If you could use your computer on a touch-screen OS like this, you wouldn’t even miss a mouse.

From the movie, you can see the iPad isn’t simply a port of OSX with touch screen capability. Nor is it a port of the iPhone OS in terms of the UI. The apps themselves have been redesigned to be a touch interface for the larger form-factor and what you get is an elegant, well-designed OS. And from all early accounts from people that have actually spent time with the iPad, it works beautifully.

Caleb’s Computer?

I immediately started to think, is this going to be the way we interact with our computers? (By then will they even be called “computers?”) The mouse was a great invention in bridging the gap between the user and the screen, but using your finger makes so much more sense.

Sure, the external keyboard and mouse won’t be replaced anytime soon, especially for people like me who work on a computer all day, but I believe there will come a day when touch-screen interfaces will have matured to the point where it is comparable and eventually replaces these old input devices.

Hit or Miss?

As to whether or not people will actually buy the iPad, who knows? This is new territory not only for Apple, but for the industry. If haven’t noticed, it seems like every major manufacturer has announced their own tablet recently, most running Andriod. The HP Slate, Viewsonic VTablet 101, Lenovo IdeaPad, and Dell’s unnamed tablet to cite a few.

The most successful device that I can think of that is in the same form factor is Amazon’s Kindle. I like Kevin Rose’s post which compares the iPad to the Kindle DX:

Kindle DX 9.7” – $489.00
—
1024×768 color display upgrade – $1.00
Internet browsing upgrade – $1.00
iPod w/16GB upgrade – $1.00
Run iPhone apps upgrade – $1.00
1Gz A4 processor upgrade – $1.00
H.264 720P HD video upgrade – $1.00
Bluetooth upgrade – $1.00
10hr battery upgrade – $1.00
Multi-touch display upgrade – $1.00
Digital compass/accelerometer – $1.00 
—
Your cost: iPad $499.00

So true…Amazon is going to have to do something about that Kindle DX price point. When you put the Kindle side-by-side with the iPad, it looks like technology from 10 years ago:

The Kindle DX and iPad, both at the $500 price point

There were plenty of mp3 players on the market before the iPod debuted and shook up–and popularized–the industry. The cell phone market was mature and flooded with handsets before the iPhone came in and shook up the (smartphone) industry. It will be interesting to see in the coming years if the iPad can do the same.

A sea of fellow coders and their Macs
photo by kris krüg

I was fortunate enough to attend this year’s An Event Apart web conference at The Palace Hotel in San Francisco for the last two days. It was a fun two days of web design and development goodness! With big names in the web development community such as Jeff Zeldman, Eric Meyer (with whom I got to have lunch with the first day), Jonathan Snook, and Dave Shea, to name a few…I was in awe. These are the pioneers of the web standards movement–guys whose books and articles on the web made it possible for me to be where I am in my career today.

The sessions were a good variety of talks, ranging from high-level looks at what is happening in design right now, to nitty-gritty, head-spinning code. Not surprisingly, jQuery, a Javascript library that I loved from the first time I used it, took center stage at this conference, with every speaker mentioning, evangelizing, and even using jQuery in their demos. Yes, with jQuery, you too, designer-guy, can write javascript!

I loved how Twitter was used there too. AEA set up a live feed page where any Twitter updates with hash tags such as #aea or #aeasf were automatically added. I could see what others in the ballroom were thinking in real-time as the speakers gave their talks. Unfortunately, the only time I updated my Twitter was when I disagreed with Nicole Sullivan’s frowning on location-based CSS:

With the ever-changing nature of the web, it’s vital for web professionals to be able to take time out of the grind of their work and see what others are doing, and what is coming. I came out of the last session more energized about my work and what I do than I have felt in a long time, and already eagerly waiting to go again next year!

Um, Apologies to my Twitter and Facebook friends who were bombarded with geeky web speak for the past two weeks!

Some of the few pictures that I took.

The most adventure-filled time of my life was when I was in high school living in Davao City, Philippines, and I give a lot of credit to my good friend Daniel Peckham and the Peckham family. I went on more hiking, backpacking, rock-climbing/rappelling, scuba, and tubing trips with the Peckhams in those two short years that I have in the rest of my life before or since (this is also the reason I didn’t finish high school on time).

A narrow hallway from the Das Boot
. Picture from Joe’s Guide to
Mt. Zion National Park

Daniel and I have kept in touch through the years and though he hasn’t slowed down in his adventures, I unfortunately don’t live close enough to him that he can easily rope me into his excursions. BUT, tomorrow I leave for Las Vegas–but not for The Hangover type of experience–to join Daniel and Katie and Aaron and Torrey on a canyoneering trip at Mt. Zion National Park. We’re doing a route called “The Subway,” and possibly one called “Das Boot.”

I’ve got my camera, my old diving wetsuit, some new gear, and think I’m ready for tomorrow. I am just happy to be doing one of these trips with Daniel again. It reminds me of my high school days and makes me feel young again, since I am now 30 and that makes me old. Right?

Daniel, Aaron and I will most likely take thousands of pictures between the 3 of us photo nerds, but there are some great pictures of the routes we’re planning on doing over on Joe’s Guide to Zion National Park.

Well, I survived and had a great time! I posted pictures from all three cameras on the family site.

It looks like whenever Oliver and I plan to get together around this time of year, something bad happens. We had been planning, up until Caleb’s eye debacle, to visit Oliver and Nem at their new place this past weekend, and that Saturday, Oliver, in his last couple weeks of his probationary period, was responding to an additional units call when he and his partner collided with another car which was running a red light. Thankfully, he’s doing A-OK, recovering from a broken arm. If you want more details, it’s on my dad’s blog.

Almost exactly 1 year ago (missed it by a week!), I was on my way down to LA to see Oliver’s LAPD badge ceremony when I rolled my car on the I-5. But just like Oliver’s accident, I came out relatively unscathed, which a mere broken thumb and lacerations on the top of my head, that were thankfully not as serious as the doctors feared.

Destroyed

During my recovery, I created this page (new window) for friends and family to see, which details what happened on the I-5 that night.

I know there’s no way that this will ever reach these people, but some thanks are in order from not just me, but Chesney, Caleb, Tyler and the rest of my family:

• Thank you to the guy who was there right when I got out of my car, who called 911, and who was willing to let me put his brand new iPhone 3G up to my bloodied face to make a call to Chesney. Even in my dazed state, I respected the phone enough to say “it’s ok, just put it on speaker.”
• Thank you to the truck driver who stopped and bandaged my head before the paramedics arrived. However, while right in front of me, you could’ve done without mentioning to the paramedic that you might have seen some bone.
• Thank you to the paramedic who talked to me and calmed me down during my first ever helicopter ride (not that great since I strapped to a stretcher and in a neck brace–all I saw were the pretty lights on the ceiling of the cabin).
• Thank you to the ER doctors and nurses at Modesto Memorial, thank you for the conversation, stitches, staples, and most of all, painkillers.

Not my best moment.

And of course I can’t go without thanking Chesney and family, for the love, care, and support during my recovery.

So a year later, I can kind of relate to Oliver and what he’s going through. Best wishes Oliver–we’re praying for you and Nem. I just wish that we had driven down for a visit so that we could’ve been there for you. Heal up, and enjoy your time away from work with some vacation time with Nem! See you on Xbox Live! And Christmas!

Ah well, let’s just not plan on getting together in the last couple weeks of August, 2010!

I was perusing my backups this morning and found this gem of an e-mail that I sent to my friend Daniel back in 1997. I was 17 and a computer geek.

Wed 7-16-97

Well I’m typing again…on our very own, BRAND NEW COMPUTER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1 Finally after four long years of enduring a laptop 486, the Malabuyo’s have actually purchased a good computer–with a CD-ROM drive even! Have you bought your new computer yet? Here’s ours (which I won’t get to use much, since I’ll be away from it most of the time)

Pentium 150 mhz
2.1 Gigabyte hard drive
16 MB RAM
3-CD changer, 6X
28.8 modem

Man Daniel, this is faster, better, everything more than I have ever worked with. I still can’t beleive all that room we have on the hard drive–and it’s not even double spaced yet! (We don’t even have dos–lost it in the great hard drive crash)

This won’t be funny to some of the kiddies, but I just think it’s funny how excited I was about the computer. Because, you know, 2.1 GB of space is crazy. Before double-spacing, even.

Oh how far we’ve come in 12 years. Just to give some perspective, the iPhone 3GS has a 600 mhz processor and 256 MB of RAM.

I have had a couple days to let the news of Google’s Chrome OS announcement sink in and the more I think about it, the more end up thinking about the future of our computing.

A Google OS? I was excited about the mere rumor of this waaaaay back in 2005 (my short blog post). But undoubtedly this begs the obvious question: how will stack up against Windows? Or any “traditional” browser like OSX or Linux, for that matter. From reading the announcement, it doesn’t sound like Chrome OS will really be a direct competitor. The initial focus will be on “cloud computing,” which means doing all of the work that you need to do online. Rather than being a massive OS that will will have everything that you need locally on your hard drive, Chrome OS will be a lightweight gateway into accessing everything over the web.

Speed, simplicity and security are the key aspects of Google Chrome OS. We’re designing the OS to be fast and lightweight, to start up and get you onto the web in a few seconds.

The Google Universe

This strategy is perfect for Google since they happen to be the leader in computing on the web. They offer Google Docs, Google Apps, Gmail, Google Calendar – most everything the average user will need. The only thing holding users back from going completely online is their comfort zone with native applications. It’s a big change to think about using an online text-editor, rather than loading up Microsoft Word.

See Ya Online

Web 2.0 Logos,
by Stabilo Boss on Flickr

See this image on Flickr

But the future of computer use, in my opinion is just that. Everything is moving in the direction of everything being online, available to you anywhere you are. Bandwidth is getting faster and becoming more widespread. Online access everywhere is coming. Companies see this trend and are adapting – the most attractive software almost always has an online component to it, and many new companies are developing web applications for use exclusively online. The rise of the new class of laptops, netbooks is evidence of this trend of cheap, fast, and light, made for the user who spends most of their time on the computer doing things online–there’s no need for lots of storage and a huge processor when you are doing most of your tasks online, in a web browser.

Not convinced? Chances are, you are already halfway there yourself. Think about how much of what you do online right now. Have a Facebook account? Do you use Gmail? Plan your week in Google Calendar? Photo-ordering? Banking or bill pay? For the average user, there really isn’t much that can’t be done online. Besides the every day tasks that were just mentioned, there are even web applications for project-planning, photo-editing, and even intensive graphics work.

It’s coming, and while local computing will never completely go away, especially with professionals in many fields, I believe the masses will be doing most of their computer-time online. And with that in mind, Google Chrome OS has the potential to be the leader/trailblazer in this kind of computing.

To top it all off, Google Chrome OS is free and open-source. “Don’t be evil” indeed.