John Collison’s blog

Just back from the Limerick OpenCoffeeClub meetup in the Absolute Hotel. Had a great time, met loadsa cool folks, got away with a nifty TouristR t-shirt and saw the work of a marketing team who have not been to Limerick recently:

All in the same day!

We hung around in the bar initially as people trickled in. Patrick and I got chatting to some of the other early attendees. Met lots of fellow EI-haters (always fun!) and also spent lots of time with the TouristR crowd. Conor, Jan and Juanita are making a really cool site. They also have a mascot for their site called TR who’s reminiscent of the reddit alien and changes for every country. Lovable little feller.

After a while we went into the Brainbox room, and talked about Auctomatic and our experiences in the valley. It was cool giving the chat to all the Limerick OCC attendees, but the awesome thing was Conn O’Muineachain streamed it live to Ustream.tv (link).

Once or twice people posted questions for us on the live Ustream chat. I could feel the head inflating!

We also got to chat about Smalltalk, Seaside, and how incredible they are for building web applications. Hopefully we may have sparked some interest in the subject. Who knows, maybe Limerick might evolve into the first big Seaside hub - three more converts and Limerick will have the largest concentration of seaside developers in the world!

Patrick managed to make it through the whole chat without hating on Rails too much. You could say Auctomatic has a love-hate relationship with Rails - I love it, Patrick hates it. I think he suffered some deep emotional trauma from an RDBMS in his earlier years and still hasn’t gotten over it. I like Rails for being able to write my code in TextMate instead of a VM (and not having to end lines with semicolons like certain other languages who shall remain nameless). As Harj said: “I want to be able to type rails foo and make it seem like I’ve done lots of work”.

Afterwards, we hung out in the cafe. It was cool to be able to drink smoothies talk to lots of people who I’d previously only known from their twitters!

In other news, I’ve just gotten my provisional license so hopefully I’ll be able to drive to the next Limerick OCC meeting in two weeks time!

San Franciscan character of the week

Coming back in a cab from the Mission, we passed this low-riding 70’s red saloon with complete with tailfins and chrome. Rap was blasting out the windows and I fully expected to see this massive guy from the hood inside. Instead, a 5-foot-tall 50-year-old very white guy was behind the wheel, straining to see over it. He was completely bald but had an impressive elaborate French mustache to add to the effect. You only get these characters in SF.

Kickboxing

So I started going kickboxing in the Fairtex Muay Thai place near Bayside. It’s really good - I found out after my induction class that the guy teaching me was an ex-world champion. These dudes are serious. We looked him up on Youtube after the class.

I think the teachers choose one of the two personas - good cop or bad cop. The guy I had the first few days was extremely positive and offered great encouragement. The one we had on Thursday seemed to take pleasure in watching us newbies do pushups, kick things until our feet hurt and deprive us of rest as much as is legal.

iPhone launch

So, yesterday I woke up, ate breakfast and walked down to the Apple Store - arriving at 5.45pm. There was a massive queue heading down the street. The atmosphere was amazing - I chatted to some improv artists who had a giant cardboard iPhone for kids to take their photo with. The cardPhone had a hole cut where the speaker would be above the screen and kids poked their heads through and pretended to be giant iPhones. What is it with Apple and generating this kind of hype?

As I chatted with a guy with a camera attached to a baseball cap on one side and what I could only assume to be a stripper on the other, the line beside me started moving. I edged into the flow, letting the guy who’d been in line since yesterday go in front of me. I found myself walking up the stairs of the Apple Store, being applauded (for my prowess at queuing?) by Apple employees on both sides. The upstairs had a wall of Apple employees guiding me to the queue at the Genius Bar. The place had no customers yet so I was a wee bit intimidated by this human wall of Mac knowledge. I ducked out to the side, explaining that my friend was getting one and I was only here for solidarity… or something. I spent the next 20 minutes playing with the a display model of the iPhone.

It’s pretty sweet. First thing I tried obviously was the texting. Surprisingly, my text to Patrick got a reply - they had working SIMs in the display models. I promptly initiated a conference call with Patrick and Harj, and made a mental note to come back here whenever I was out of credit. I also took some photos and tried calling Dad’s mobile before I realised it was 3am in Ireland.

Kul came down to join me and I think would have bought one except you need to sign a 2-year contract with the devil - not an issue - but for that you need an SSN and a credit history. Maybe next year.

I’m not going to talk about eBay live - there’s too much funny stuff that happened and I wouldn’t do it justice. Instead, more aspects of American life!

Shopping

Safeway is our local “grocery store” - we returned to an empty house after Boston so did some proper shopping. Cereal was obviously first on the agenda. God, all the food in America is so dodgy. I know it’s been said before but jeez. In all the cereal isles - there was one cereal that didn’t contain sugar - Shredded wheat. There was no muesli or anything vaguely resembling something kinda sorta almost nearly natural. Most cereals were “frosted” or had “a touch of honey”. We found Chocolate Lucky Charms which were 50% sugar.

The other worrying thing was that on all the cereals I found the message “Packaging is lined with BHT to preserve freshness”. Worried that most of my solid intake is laced with a substance that sounds like a cow-borne disease, I looked it up on the wiki. It turns out Butylated Hydroxytoluene is a fat-soluble organic compound also known as E321. From the wiki article:

It is also used as an antioxidant in cosmetics, pharmaceutical drugs, jet fuels, rubber, petroleum products, and embalming fluid. … The compound has been banned for use in food in Japan (1958), Romania, Sweden, and Australia.

Lovely.

As Patrick noted in his American-life blog, you can’t get bread without sugar. The bread is actually sick, it’s so sweet. You can’t eat it with things because the sugar drowns out the taste of the things. You can’t eat it on its own because it’s disgusting. Most of the bread also seems to be enriched - Americans love this kind of thing. The milk has “antibiotics and added Vitamin D”. Everything is like “food, on steroids” - literally.

Mauled by the leopard

I installed the Leopard beta after WWDC. Everything is shiny and there’s lots of new features. But’s that’s negated by the fact that it broke everything I need - Rails, sudo and VPN.

16:30: I’m at the Apple store as I write this now. I explained my situation to the nice guy at the Genius Bar, and he told me it’d be $150 for a software reinstall.

The thought process that followed went something like this:

They want to charge me… because I broke it through my own fault… if only it was their fault - the laptop’s under warranty… any way to make it their fault… no… wait… hard drive failure! Of course! I just need to break the hard drive!

I consulted Patrick, and sure enough, there’s a way to do it. He gave me a command to delete the bootloader, the thing that controls the laptop at startup. The laptop won’t be able to boot without it.

21:00: I felt really sorry for the guy at the Genius Bar. I had deleted /bin (all the system files) and he was trying to diagnose it. I wanted to tell him what was wrong, but obviously I couldn’t. Eventually he reinstalled Tiger and I was a happy camper again.

Theft reared its head in many forms today - identity theft, theft of our expectations, theft of our brothers and finally theft of my usual night’s sleep.

Identity theft
As you might know, the big Apple developer conference WWDC started today and a few days ago Patrick and I decided we wanted to go. Patrick had managed to blag a free pass due to his Croma article and general being-Irishness but I wanted to go too. A friend of his had some time ago offered his pass to Patrick (he wasn’t able to go). The answer was obvious. I had to become him. And I had only a few hours to do it.Eventually, we worked out a system. At 6.30 this morning Patrick turned up at the Moscone Centre with a college identity card and his photo ID. He picked up his student pass without issue. 2 hours later I met Patrick and picked up my pass. The various hired goons didn’t seem to take issue with the college student presenting his pass being shorter, younger and generally differenter than I should have been.

Expectation theft
I was ushered along with the other students to the waiting area. It was a major letdown when we were told they would not be in the main auditorium for Steve Jobs’s keynote. The group of students felt odd too… there were lots of cliques of nerds talking together and I felt out of place. It was like a serious nerd camp. Like CTYI on steroids. I saw one sixty-something guy who was thin as a stick insect, had a rapidly thinning head of gray hair down past his shoulders, thick half moon spectacles and was hunched over… a Macbook. And he had a pass that proclaimed him to be a student. I don’t think I want to know the background to that particular story. Patrick and I both agreed after the keynote that it didn’t live up to our expectations. The three parts were:

• features of Leopard, most of which everyone knew going in,
• Apple’s Safari browser released for Windows XP and Vista (yay?), and
• the development platform for the iPhone, which basically boiled down to “no, you can’t make apps for it”

We did get free food though so it wasn’t all bad.

Theft of our brothers
Earlier this evening, Harj and Kul left for Boston. Before they went we had innumerable penalty shootouts to make up for the ones we wouldn’t be able to have in Boston. On the way to the airport they dropped by the justin.tv office (Justin.tv is another YC funded company where the founder is videocasting his life 24/7) and picked us up a camara for eBay live. We’re going to be broadcasting from our booth and hopefully we’ll score some publicity with it.

Theft of my sleep
I’m not sure how to put this. Let’s just say I’m not known for my capacity for dealing with a lack of sleep (Patrick, on the other hand, got no sleep the night before last and 2 hours last night, and is merry as a Frenchman). So when I realised (i.e. Patrick drilled it into me) that we’ve a lot of features we need to get ready for launch, I knew it was gonna be a long night. At 2am Patrick headed to bed and I stayed coding our ‘listings view’ feature. I nearly gave up trying to figure out AUTableInterface without Patrick to poke and annoy into helping me, but my saviour came in the form of the Wolfe Tones on Patrick’s laptop. After a few choruses of ‘Come out ye Black and Tans!’, the coding team found the problem and ruthlessly ambushed him. We had an insider order a ‘Self Halt!’ command and we opened a debugger fire from behind the tableHeadings.

As I write this, I’m probably the closest I’ll come to being high without taking illegal substances. My attack on bugs and lameness in the app was fuelled by adrenaline and ridiculously strong coffee, tea and sugared Red Bull. I was high as a kite, but I had the talking Australian clownfish on my shoulder to point out errors and keep me on the straight and narrow.

I like how being up before 12 makes Harj the apartment’s early riser.

Current group schedule seems to go like this: Get up 11 to half 12ish. Check email, dress and eat breakfast in that order. Lunch at 5ish. Dinner generally consists of pizza, Harj’s cooking or 2 bowls of Lucky Charms (muesli for me) at 11ish. I should probably put in a note about Lucky Charms here. It’s a really popular American cereal, especially in this apartment. It features Cheerio-like sugary wheat things and various “Lucky Charms” - coloured marshmallow pieces resembling green clovers, pink hearts, blue moons etc. A lot of the people assume that it’s a really popular Irish cereal because the mascot’s a leprechaun called Lucky and it’s marketed as such. The guys are a bit crazy for it.

I went for a run this evening along the Embarcadero. The views are absolutely amazing. I was running beside the sea the whole time, with beautiful buildings all around and fantastic views over the bay. Tommy, you should recognise some of the views from Driver 1. The atmosphere was amazing. Tram bells clanged around me on my left, and on my right I would see a quaint smelly trawler on a rotting wooden pier right beside a shiny full length cruise ship. I passed a young businessman in a suit riding home on a skateboard, a 90-year-old woman powerwalking with great enthusiasm at 2 mph and many other joggers. I passed a warehouse full of old streetcars, many stretch limos (what’s up with the number of them in this city?) and some stretch Humvees too. I passed clubs, a dodgy looking circus, tackle-shops-turned-bars, ferry terminals and hawks flogging tickets for the Giants game. Needless to say, the surroundings make for an interesting run.

The corporate culture at Auctomatic is great too. We put an airbed up against one of the walls as a soccer goal and use Kul’s kickboxing handwrap as a ball. It’s a common occurrence for someone to be working away and this little cloth blur to fly past their monitor or hit them on the head. Yesterday 2 of our servers arrived and reside now on the floor next to the football goal. We find it funny to be playing soccer next to our fragile $6k worth of servers, but we play on anyway. Our other 3 servers have just arrived today though so we might have to revise this.

We’re heading out to eat now so I’ll have to wrap this up. It’s Harj’s 22nd birthday so we’re having a wee celebration. Talkcha.

I like San Francisco.

To start off with, my flight on Wednesday was greatly improved by Mum’s nervousness at her son flying such a long distance alone. The AA employee took care of me, walked me through immigration (stamped without a second thought) and at boarding said “here, I’ll move you to a better seat on the flight”. Specifically seat 5E, in business class. Business class was… roomy. I’ve decided I’m going to be a nervous and helpless unaccompanied minor more often. Interestingly, when I asked the hostess for “just a glass of water, please” her face brightened and she told me that I was the first person she had served here who’d said please. What are business class travellers like?

After my (economy class) flight to SFO, I chatted to the couple who had been sitting beside me while we waited for bags. Of course it turned out they had been to Ireland and were half Irish themselves and so on. Walking out, a girl laughed and told me “Heard you getting burnt over the Irish thing… where you from?”. It turned out, of course that she was from Limerick also and we both knew James Collins because she used to live in Mungret and other such connections. It’s a small world after all. On reaching Bayside I met Harj and decided I liked the apartment so much I am going to stay a little longer than two weeks. I cancelled my return flight and ate muesli.

Working on Auctomatic is class. Learning Smalltalk is an annoyance, but I can already see it’s a pretty cool language. The first thing I wrote in it was a converter to parse .csv files, because we couldn’t find one. I plan to open source my code for it - I will be the author of the only Smalltalk csv parser on the internet. That gives you an idea of the number of people using SmallTalk. Meanwhile, Patrick’s got the whole Inventory management stuff nailed down pretty well. Our plan for eBay live is to have limited functionality working really well. Well, that’s one part. The other is to have lots of stickers, signs and free food.

Living here is great fun. Bayside is really where it’s at (close up Google Maps photo of our apartment here - kinda scary…). Market Street is only five minutes walk and has food, shops and the Apple Store. From our apartment we’ve views of the bay and its bridge - and it’s not the Golden Gate before you think it! And of course the swimming pool 5 yards from our door

Speaking of the Apple Store - we love it. Not just for the stuff in it, but for the comfy seats and open wi-fi when we’re out and need internet. Day before yesterday, Patrick decided he was constrained by his mere 23″ monitor and bought a 30″. I’m using the old one now - we’ve a little Apple store going in Bayside:

Instead of doing group emails, I’ll just blog here and people can read it in their own time. First post will come soon.