Weird Science

by Oingo Boingo from Dead Man's Party

Hello from downtown Mountain View on an usually warm November day. I am at Tapioca Express, enjoying a pearl tea, while I update my blog. First thing, yes I am cheating on my one caffeinated drink per week rule. I had a very good reason for that which I will get to. First off, I would like to say that this usually warm day is a result of an Indian summer but more than likely it is the result of global warming. The reason why I am drinking my second caffeinated drink this week is because I spent the first half in San Diego for Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) conference. Some of you Dave-blog readers know that I was originally going to write a note for this conference until some well more scholarly colleagues of mine told me I didn't stand a chance. It turns out they were write. After going to the conference, my paper definitely didn't fit.

As with most conferences, the papers and talks were a mixed bag. Some papers I really enjoyed such as an interesting paper by Jeffrey Hancock on using Facebook profile information to better ingratiate yourself to someone else. There was also an interesting talk on social tagging, where they invited two discussants to basically argue against the findings in the two previous papers presented. It was the first time I have ever seen that happen. It led to an interesting discussion. Of the part that I got, there was basically a big disagreement on whether people are influenced by other people's tags when they tag content. One paper said that, for the most part, people tagged following their own personal scheme for organization and retrieval later. Some other papers said otherwise. Personally, I fall into the personal tagging style. Of course there was some duds, including papers that all I could say was "Really? You managed to write more than 50 words about this?" Oh yeah, and in the tradition of countless conferences in the past, the closing keynote was an absolute dud. Note to speakers, using outdated slides with a very hard to read color scheme plus having absolutely no connecting narrative is a sure fire way to bomb.

As for the non-talk/paper aspects of the conferences, it was a blast. I got to see some current/former SIers and Google interns. It's nice that the HCI/UX field is still relatively small so you can recognize people and names. Also San Diego was great. Seeing that it has the best weather in CA, thus having some of the best weather in the world, it was a great place to have a conference. The last time I went to San Diego was 8 years ago and didn't really see that much. I skipped the morning session on Wednesday and decided to go running. It was awesome weather but alas, I underestimated the distance of my run and ended running farther than I probably should have. The one bad thing about San Diego is its airport. So I flew American so silly me, I went to the terminal 2 where American is at. I see the departure screen has me scheduled to leave from gate 2, which is actually in terminal 1. So I head over to terminal 1 to go to gate 2. Whoops, actually it means gate 2 in the commuter terminal. Silly me! What an idiot I am going to Gate 2 when the boarding pass and departure screen says gate 2 but makes no mention of the commuter terminal. Yeah that was annoying.

I decided to take Friday off from work, since I spent most of the week at the conference. Oh yeah there is some work news. As some of you know, I spent most of my time at Google working on Ads related stuff. Well after almost 2.5 years, I am switching product areas. So what will I be working on? I am going to be working on Chrome, the Google web browser. So yeah, feel free to gripe to me about your Chrome problems all 2.5% of you who are actively using Chrome.

Anyway that is all from me. Hope everyone has a good November. Until next time, peace.