Awesome weekend

As I’ve only got a few days left in the US, I’m really glad that last weekend was a good one; a great one, in fact! It was Independence Day weekend, which is a big holiday over here, and everyone’s was keen on having a fun time.

First thing on Friday, Independence Day morning, I was having breakfast with Pat. He was loudly reciting the Declaration of Independence while I sang our national anthem. He won on duration, I won on tune. The plan for the evening was to go for a sail around the bay; Pat used to have a stake in a trimaran moored in Emeryville that was making an outing. Alongside stocking the cooler and doing some War of Independence research for banter repellent, my preparations included making a red-coat type outfit, complete with patriotic t-shirt:

We managed to co-incide the sail with the fireworks displays, and being in the middle of the bay, we could see the shows in Oakland, San Francisco, Sausalito and Berkeley.

One of the captains of the ships, Tim, is a freegan, who told us about a bakery in the east bay which regularly threw away lots of excess bread. Sure enough, we found six dumpsters full of focaccia, cinnamon bread, challah, baguettes and so on, which is why our freezer door now doesn’t shut.

That was just Friday evening! Our plan for Saturday was to head out east and do some kite surfing in a river delta. After some snafus with cars, we made it out there for the mid-afternoon. Unfortunately, it was an onshore wind, making it hard to launch, so I minced around on the beach with our posse, while Pat went and bust some radical moves.

That evening, there was a kite surf party: the first, and hopefully not last, beach party I go to. We were just lazing around eating some salsa when people started coming out of nowhere with all sorts of stuff: kegs of beer, a huge sound system, barbecues, lights, lasers, … It was a bit better planned and executed than we had expected! We all bounced around to techno music until early, early, all under the stars on a nice warm night.

The UK has got some competition when I come back on Friday!

Cash and Kites

We’ve been up to quite a bit recently. Work and non-work.

Work

The biggest news is that we’ve now got cash in the bank from some investors in England. We’ve got a list of people who wanted us to get back in touch when a round of funding was coming together, so we’ll hopefully be able to close down some more investment over the next week or two.

We were also featured on the Firefox “Recommended Addons” list, which is a pretty big deal for us as it pretty much solves distribution up to a few million users, so long as you’ve got a great product and you can scale the backend…

The product obviously needs more work, but as always, we’ve got lots of good ideas! The backend is a more measurable thing; we know for a fact we can’t scale properly yet as interest spike totally knocked over our servers. That’s what I’m working on at the moment, and really enjoying it.

Non-work

There’s also been lots of fun stuff happening. We’ve been kite-surfing a couple of times now. The first time was a bit grim, as it was pretty cold and I spent about half an hour untangling lines. The second time was awesome, however. I started with a small ~9m² kite, just flying it on the beach. The things pull so strongly, it’s amazing. Even with that small kite, you have to clip it into a harness, and it was easily pulling me along the beach and up into the air.

It went pretty well though, so after a while we put the wet suits on and I tried it for real, with Pat’s behemoth 19m² kite. I did manage to get upright, being pulled along, but I had very little say in which direction I’d be going in next.

After that, we went to Pat’s friend’s office. This office is awesome for a number of reasons:

• it’s on an abandoned air base
• MythBusters is filmed next door
• it’s in the disused air traffic control building
• it’s got 6” naval guns outside it (they don’t work)
• they bought a fire engine, which is now in the back yard
• they’ve converted the ATC tower into a bar, with 4 glass walls

I’m really looking forward to a party I’m planning later this month. The next version of Firefox (the browser we’re targetting) is being released mid-June-ish, so we’re having a launch party… with a difference. The first screen you see after installing the browser is this. So, we’re going to get a bunch of people together to re-create the scene in a park in San Francisco. Artist’s impression on the party wiki. I actually can’t wait.

I am now going to go and eat some watermelon with balsamic vinegar. If you’ve not tried it, you’ve never lived.