Coffee on the Keyboard

It’s summer, and you know what that means: big life change blog post!

This one isn’t quite as big. I love the work I’m doing at Mozilla and not looking to make a change there. But I am moving across the country. Again.

In July, a week after the Mozilla Summit, I’ll be picking up and making the move to New York.

I will miss the Mozilla office. As I deliberated and thought about this decision, that was the colossal “pro” for staying in the Bay Area. I’ve made a number of friends here, even though I haven’t done a good enough job of getting to know people. Feel free to think back on your favorite, relevant Bilbo Baggins quote.

I’ll also miss the fantastic working environment Mozilla HQ offers. I joked about having 20 people in the same room talking to each other on IRC, but the truth is it’s a wonderfully collaborative environment, and having people nearby to talk through a problem will be hard to replace.

Seriously, it’s awesome.

But the East Coast, and New York in particular, has my family. And my family can take Mozilla HQ in a fight.

It’s not just about family, but family by itself is enough to sway me. It’s family and a bucket of little-to-medium things. The more I thought about it, the more of those piled up on the New York side—weather and climate, time zone, culture, music, night life, urban personality, getting rid of my car, and so on—all the little things to add up to quality of life.

(“Weather and climate?” I hear you inquire. Yes, weather. I’m a northerner. I grew up with 4 seasons—they weren’t all 3 months but they were all there—and they mark time for me. And frankly, I miss weather. The Valley has a climate, but it doesn’t really have “weather,” not in the sense I know.)

I don’t know exactly where I’ll be yet. Definitely Manhattan or Brooklyn, but I’m looking at a number of different neighborhoods, from the Upper West Side to Murray Hill to Fort Greene.

Fortunately—obviously, I suppose—I have family I can stay with for a bit while I find a place. If anyone has realtor recommendations, I’m very interested!

New York is home. It’s where I was born. It’s where my father was born. It’s the best city in the world—Paris is a surprisingly close second—and it’s where I want to be.

See the form below?

Where’s home for you?

Google has announced a new Chrome-based operating system. Of course, if you read blogs like mine, there’s no way you didn’t already know that.

It amazes me how many people assume Google wants to drive Microsoft out of business. From a ZDNet article: “The Chrome OS is a direct attack against Microsoft’s lucrative – albeit vulnerable – Windows operating system.”

“Lucrative?” Isn’t Google’s OS free? “Vulerable?” Most people don’t know enough to change browsers, let alone operating systems. Most of them want it to “just work,” not to be forced to learn new things.

Maybe, deep inside Google, in the minds of some of its most hardcore decision makers, Microsoft is the evil empire, to be vanquished heroically. But on a more realistic level, I think Google is happier when there’s more competition, not less. If you listen to many of the comments surrounding the release of Chrome and its source code, there is a distinct sense that Google itself is better off if there are a dozens major browsers, all competing and driving standards adoption and development.

So too, I think, with operating systems. Google is designing an open-source system that will, hopefully, lead to the creation of additional platforms and push others to make their user experiences better.

Google isn’t trying to take Microsoft down, but encouraging a more competitive marketplace, in the hope that competition will keep everyone innovative and honest.

The McCain campaign will probably go down in history as one of the worst-run campaigns in American history. Not because of a few horrible gaffs (“helped create” the BlackBerry? intended to insult the Prime Minister of Spain? speaking in front of a green screen?) but because they forgot who their candidate was.

The following does not constitute rigorous proof. Just observation and conjecture.

For an experiment, I went to Google News and searched for “mccain” “palin” “obama” and “biden”, all separately, and just looked at the total results. (I looked on the second page because Google’s duplicate-finding algorithms usually seem to pare down results by the time you get to page 2.)

Here are the results:

• obama — 433.631
• mccain — 416,804
• biden — 86,164
• palin — 202,033

Obama and McCain are fairly even (unsurprising, since most articles that mention one mention the other). What shocks me is that Sarah Palin, who almost no one in the country had heard of until two months ago, has already caught up to half of the candidates, who have been on the trail for a year and a half.

Unless Michael Palin has been making tons of news, lately?

She’s got two and a half times the press of Joe Biden, who’s been a US Senator for 35 years, so probably has some old mentions in there.

We see a similar trend in the regular Google search:

• obama — 206,000,000
• mccain — 146,000,000
• biden — 37,900,000
• palin — 107,000,000

Here I attribute the difference between Obama and McCain to Obama’s lead among young voters. But Palin has even more momentum here, half of Obama and two-thirds of McCain. (I re-ran this search several times, because Google said it was customizing my results based on my recent queries.)

Why?

McCain picked an ambitious, photogenic campaigner. He, on the other hand, is an occasionally ornery, but usually soft-spoken old man. Barack Obama is a well-spoken Black man with a thousand-watt smile. Biden is the soft-spoken older man on that ticket.

Unfortunately for Senator McCain, he also picked an unknown, inexperienced Governor who usually sounds like a high school student who didn’t read the book, and looks like Tina Fey. Comic. Gold.

I realize that picking someone less exciting that John McCain may have been difficult, but picking someone much more interesting, and not in a particularly good way, was definitely a bad choice. Yes she energized the base. She also energized every comedian and reporter. So much so that they forgot about John McCain.

They are “voting for the chick.”

For disclosure, I only identify as a Democrat because they’re as far left as I can get and still have a realistic chance of winning. I’m roughly in the left side of the British Liberal Democrat party.

But, if I was a Republican, I would be angry about this. As a liberal, it’s just funny.