I bought a Dartmouth Diploma Frame at TuckStuff. Good price, and they had free delivery!

A dance lesson from the godfather, via VSL

We lost the great pianist Oscar Peterson this week. (NY Times Obituary)

I regret never having seen him perform live. My favorite records are “We Get Requests,” and “Sonny Stitt Meets the Oscar Peterson Trio.” Both showcase his amazing piano playing, as well as the great big-band like arrangements that his trio played.

Here’s a monster performance of Duke Ellington’s Caravan, with NHOP on bass:

I’m bummed I couldn’t make the musical event of the year, Sonny Rollins’ special 50th Anniversary Carnegie Hall concert. Luckly, it’ll be out on CD next year.

Here’s some rehearsal and backstage footage — it is absurd how bad Roy Haynes is at 82!

I have my high school reunion coming up, so I have been reminiscing a lot lately. I keep feeling like life is moving in fast-forward, particularly in the technology world. In the midst of all the web 2.0 hype and plans for world domination, it is interesting to look back and reflect about the pace of change.  Some examples:

1. Its almost three years (back to March ‘05), since Paul Graham gave his talk “How to Start a Startup“ to a standing-room-only audience at Harvard. This talk led to the founding of ycombinator, and now something like 50 startups. I was there for the talk, loved it, but haven’t applied any of the wisdom. Time to get going.

2. It its just over three years (summer ‘04) since Ruby on Rails was released. I first discovered the framework in December ‘04 and have used it to create a few sites in my spare time. It truly is a joy to use, and I am also inspired by the underlying philosophy that drives it forward. 

3. It has been almost four years since Gmail was released. Think of all the ways in which this product re-defined e-mail: conversations, tags, search, massive storage, targeted advertising, and AJAX. Truly groundbreaking.

4. Back in my grad school days, almost five years ago (spring ‘03), I heard Bob Metcalfe give a talk on “The Video Internet”. He laid out a grand vision for internet-based video, and described the technical challenges that would be required to enable it. Of course, that is well underway now.

At another talk in grad school, John Gage put forth a theory of how technology evolves: not as something driven by great breakthroughs, but as a series of incremental innovations that, combined together, enable new applications. (He demo’ed Keyhole, a breathtaking new mapping program that combined 3-D graphics, and streamed sattelite images to demonstrate his point. This of course, was an early version of Google earth.) Things sure are moving fast… what’s next?

Here’s one to watch: 23AndMe, a California startup co-founded by Anne Wojicki, Sergey Brin’s wife, has launched its initial Personal Genome Service. (NYT Coverage, WIRED Coverage)

To use the service, customers submit a saliva sample, which is analyzed for a set of SNP’s  on a microarray by Illumina. Then, the data is analyzed by 23AndMe’s software. The initial offerings from the service include a Gene Journal that provides personalized risk assessments, analyses of one’s ancestry and family tree, and general visualization tools to browse your genome.

It will be interesting to see if this can get any traction in the marketplace, given the $999 price tag, and the positioning toward general interest in genetics, rather than therapeutic applications. I for one, would love to do this. But I can’t quite afford it. Someday.

Sonny Rollins on music and happiness

A nice reminder of why I need to get at this again:

“I think blogging, or keeping a diary, would be extremely helpful to them. The simple act of writing every day, even when you think have nothing to say, is essential to becoming a confident writer.”

– Fred Wilson

My trip to London this week coincided with a thick blanket of fog that covered southern part of the country for most of the week. It was a pretty amazing thing to witness. When we landed, we descended into the clouds, and the next thing we knew it, were on the ground. There visibility was non-existent, and it took us about an hour to get to the gate. This caused major delays at the airport, surprisingly not because it affected takeoffs or landings, but because planes couldn’t see where they were going on the taxiways. All this caused the airport to cancel most domestic and European flights, causing major headaches before the Christmas travel season. Maybe I’m bad luck: last time I visited London, there was a strike at the airport.

Aside from the weather, the trip had a couple highlights. I got in a pre-dawn run through Chelsea to the banks of the Thames. “Pre-dawn” sounds more ambitious than it really was, since the sun came up at 8AM this time of year. Still, the streets were empty, and the streetlights were on, which made for a fun atmosphere to explore the city. We also enjoyed a nice dinner at Le Suquet, a French seafood place. I had a smoky bouillabaisse and an entree of scallops in wine sauce.

Today was the sign-up for the Covered Bridges Half Marathon, my favorite race. This year all 2,000 spots in the race sold out in just three hours! I’m really glad I was able to get a spot, and am looking forward to running it for my fifth time this June.