I’m Alive!
September 18, 2008
I have, for the past month or so, utterly failed as a blogger. So much has happened and I’ve been so busy that I totally neglected to keep the blog updated with all of my adventures (and, as will be explained shortly, misadventures).
Well I’m ending this egregious lapse in good judgment here and now!
So what’s happened…
First and foremost, I stopped my once-a-week blogging routine because I endured a nasty bike crash on August 29th (so a week after my previous post). The short story: drafting is a lot more risky than I previously thought (the caveat being I didn’t think it dangerous at all before the crash! But at least now my fears and concerns are now more closely aligned with reality!) For the long version you can read my accident report on the SF2G blog. As you’ll notice, there was a lot of crying, a lot of pain, and a lot of bad fashion decisions. And, for the visually inclined, the picture to the right gives you an idea of what one of my cuts looked like 24 hours after the moment of badness, darkness, and evil. When I took the bandages off this sucker I literally started the blackout process. I looked down, saw how gross it was (and felt how painful it was), and my vision tunneled and my hearing warped. I then proceeded to say over and over “I’m gonna pass out…uuhhhh…I’m gonna throw up….uhh… pass out…throw up” It was no good. The accident was also bad from a cost perspective. I still haven’t gotten the ambulance bill (gods help me) but somehow my beautiful SIDI bike shoes were somehow lost!! I remember the nurse taking them off in the ER and that was the last time I saw them. My babies!! So I had to go buy new ones and it sucked on two counts: 1) That was $220 I would have rather NOT spent, and 2) the color scheme of my old ones isn’t produced anymore!! So I had to get them in red! But I’m not red! I’m blue! Bikers are either red or blue! You can’t be both!! …so I’m figuring out what to do about that. Oh… and my handlebars are permanently bent. 
Now on to better news… I just got back a few days ago from my first business trip to Europe! I visited the Paris, London, and Dublin offices – all in one crazy hectic week. I was responsible for managing the entire trip for my team – from initial conception all the way through. And so, you can imagine, leading up to the trip I was ridiculously busy. Crap, during the trip I was probably only getting three hours of sleep a night since there was so much to do. I’ll explain more about the trip in a separate post, but for now I’ll say it was probably the single most valuable work-learning experience I’ve ever had. The way I saw the company and my team’s role before the trip is very very different from the way I see those things now. Not only that, but I better appreciate the challenges a truly global team and company faces. That, and now I see how, really, it’s not all like Mountain View. - I started an internal (internal to Google) blog for my team! So now Googlers can keep better up to date with the happenings of their global ethics and compliance team! Yay! An excuse to do my favorite things more (write, take pictures and video, and draw crazy paint pictures!)
- I started taking an online course through Harvard’s extension program. The class is called: Life, Liberty, and Happiness after the Digital Explosion. Take a look at the syllabus and reading list – it’s going to be extremely illuminating and absolutely instrumental to my figuring-out-my-thoughts-on-web 2.0-issues mission. I’m particularly interested in privacy, censorship, and data security – from cultural, legal, and ethical angles – so I think this class will help create a foundation for thinking more clearly about those topics.
I’m still, slowly but surely, chipping away at my larger year-long project with Sally Gibbons from the UCLA Center for Society and Genetics. I’m not sure if I’ve talked about it in any depth before but, on a high level, it’s a paper on creating a new ethical framework from which we can evaluate the value of human enhancement technologies. I presented on it at an undergraduate research conference in Spring (and even got first place for it!) but there’s just an incredible amount of work that still needs to be done on it. But, when I have something that even remotely looks like a draft, you’ll know where you’ll be able to find it 
- And finally, though this will sound a bit cryptic to most, I’m feeling a lot better. And, for the first time in quite a long time, I’m starting to feel like I’m getting back to my old self again. (Oh what would Carl Elliott have to say about that statement!) …but really, I think it’s travel. It makes you sit back and reevaluate… and then realize that your resources are limited and there are better and worse things you can use them up on. So go me!
I’ll write again soon!