I can’t go into details, but those of you who know your algorithms know how big a deal this is. Better still, the client’s happy.
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Category: What I’m Up To
While doing some “housekeeping” on this blog, it occured to me that Global Nerdy has been ongoing since 2006 and will have its 20th anniversary this August. Over the years, it has garnered more than 10 million pageviews (10,868,814 as I write this) and is on track to hit the 11 million pageview mark this year.
The past couple of months have also shown a climb in readership, probably driven by the AI-related content and traffic directed here by Leo Laporte and my appearances on Intelligent Machines and This Week in Tech:
My thanks to all of you who’ve come by to read! There’s a lot coming up here on the blog and on the Global Nerdy YouTube channel as well. 2026 should be an interesting year!
What’s better than a Pilot G2? A multi-color pack of Pilot G2s!
This little trove of photos is entirely Anil Dash’s fault. He recently made a blog post titled How Markdown Took Over the World with a “hero image” featuring a 2002-era iMac setup — the G4 model, which Jony Ive described as the answer to the question “What computer would the Jetsons have had?”
I stumbled across Anil’s article on a Sunday afternoon while doing some home office housekeeping, and thought, Wow, there’s a blast from the past, which was quickly followed by Hey, didn’t I get someone to take a photo of me with one of those iMacs when they were only days old?
Unlike some people, I’ve been archiving my digital photos since I bought my first digital camera in 1998, so it didn’t take long for me to dig up that iMac G4 photo:
This photo is from a set that I shot while attending the O’Reilly 2002 ETCon, which took place at the Westin Hotel in Santa Clara. It was a little different from the previous year’s edition of the conference, what with everything being scaled down; even the name had been shortened from the original “Emerging Technologies Conference” down to “ETCon.”
(One of us — I don’t recall whom — engaged in a little gallows humor and quipped “Maybe we should call this the Receding Technologies Conference.”)
This was early 2002, when the dot-com bubble burst had grown into a full meltdown. A lot of us had lost our jobs when the companies we worked for had imploded, but most of us had saved enough to attend a couple of conferences, partly to look for our next gigs, and partly because we couldn’t not go and not see our friends and peers.
One of the nice things about this pared-down conference was that it felt a little more personal. There were more opportunities to just hang out as friends and enjoy some “down time” — or what passes for down time when you’re young and have programming skills, spare time, and lots of ideas — with each other.
The geekist lobby on Earth
We did a lot of hanging out in the hotel lobby, which was pretty much a gathering of a lot of Web 2.0 names you might remember from way-back-when, and some of whom are still working away these days.
This was an awesome “hallway track.”
Out for dinner and to see the new iMacs
A whole bunch of us decided to go into town for an unofficial dinner one evening, which included a run to the Apple Store to see the new iMac G4s. I took a cab with Zooko, Wes Felter, and Aaron Swartz.
I suppose I actually attended some conference sessions…
…the only evidence I have of that are these photos.
Attack of the House Party / Attack of the Clones
Star Wars: Attack of the Clones had just been released around the time of the conference, and a number of us decided to go catch the movie. It was decided that we’d pre-game at Quinn Norton’s and Danny O’Brien’s house. This worked well for Aaron, as it wasn’t an age-restricted event at a bar.
After hanging out at the house for a little bit, we made our way to the theatre. We somehow managed to get tickets despite the crowds and our late arrival.
We’d broken up into smaller groups, and Aaron was with me. There were very few seats left, but the front row was still free.
“Front row, then?” I asked Aaron, and he said “Sure.” We took a couple of seats on the left side.
There was still a fair bit of time to kill before the coming attractions came on, never mind the film.
“Dare you to play something,” Aaron said, pointing at my accordion.
“You are so on, young man,” I said. I stood up and played the Star Wars main theme and the Imperial March, getting the audience all riled up.
When the film started, I wanted to get a picture for my blog review. As I pulled out my camera, I said “Keep an eye out for ushers” as I snapped a picture of the opening crawl.
We both got a great laugh out of an all-caps line in the crawl, “CLONE ARMY OF THE REPUBLIC,” and for the next few months, it became a catchphrase for us in IRC chats: “PEER-TO-PEER ARMY OF THE REPUBLIC”, “BOY BAND ARMY OF THE REPUBLIC”, “UNDERPANTS ARMY OF THE REPUBLIC”, and so on.
Final day
On the final day of ETCon, we ditched the lobby and went poolside…
It’s hard to believe it was that long ago.
I’m working on both securing venues and planning topics for Tampa Bay Artificial Intelligence Meetup’s sessions for 2026. My notes above should give you an idea of at least one of the topics we’ll cover soon!
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Lots of interviews, lots of notes
In the ten business days leading up to Christmas Eve and every day since Sunday, January 4, I have either been doing at least one of these a day:
- Being interviewed for a job
- Doing a “take-home assignment” for a job
- Recording a podcast
The trick to staying on top of all this activity is to have good notes at the ready. Ideally, these are hand-written notes and diagrams like the ones pictured above. I find that I remember what I wrote better when I write it out by hand; it’s probably because it’s slower and gives me more time to commit what I’m writing to memory.
I’ve also suspected that the act of forming different letters in the process of handwriting (unlike typing, where every keypress feels the same, and it’s only the location of the key on the keyboard that feels different) helps you remember what you wrote. There’s some research that agrees with my hypothesis.
However, with 14 interviews in December and at least five scheduled for this week, I had a lot of notes to crank out. Writing them all out by hand would be too slow, so I often resorted to the next-best thing: typing them in…
…and printing them out. I could look at a screen, but paper notes allow me to keep my gaze in the general direction of the camera. Using them means that I’m not relying on the keyboard or mouse to go through my notes, and it very clearly shows that I’m not relying on AI during the interview.
These are photos of just a few of the notes I used in my most recent interviews. A lot of my notes include situations that I can cite when answering “behavioral interview” questions — those questions that start with that dreaded phrase, “Tell me about a time when…”
Here’s a promising start to the new year: thanks to a successful appearance on the Intelligent Machines podcast back in October, I was a guest on episode 1065 of Leo Laporte’s main podcast, This Week in Tech.
Leo, Blackbird.AI’s Dan Patterson, and I spent just under three hours on Sunday talking about the week’s tech news and having fun while doing so. The episode takes its title, AI Action Park, from Action Park, an insanely dangerous theme park that I mentioned while we were talking about DeepSeek’s Manifold-Constrained Hyper-Connections architecture.