A geeky Thanksgiving

It was nothing like what was experienced by the first pilgrims in America with the native american Indians.  I can’t imagine that the settlers and the indians each whipped out their laptops after the first Thanksgiving dinner to show off their coding abilities, but that is what happened in the year 2008.

Jeremy and Nick were visiting (from SF and LA respectively).  We all had a nice thanksgiving dinner and posed for some pictures.  I’m the one standing on the step so I look taller

After dinner, and billiards, and the famous “find the money” game, they both got to talking about work and technology.  Nick and I had already been checking out videos on our laptops, sharing iTunes music over a shared wireless connection and talking generally geeky engineering and technology stuff.

(Jeremy works at Slide – a web application and social network widget company – and Nick at Media Temple – a web hosting company).

They started talking about python and perl and java and other one-word programming languages and about recent programs they had written and had implemented.  Jeremy had just been lead on SuperPoke Pets which is a virtual pet application on MySpace where people can buy and adopt pets and all the necessary virtual pet accessories.  It has been apparently very successful in the short time since it has been launched.  Nick has written a program to remotely monitor power related measurements at all their hosted server locations and to adjust accordingly.

Then – they each to whip our their handy laptops, iPhones and assorted technology and log into their respective systems.  It was pretty awesome to watch and a pretty proud father moment.  They also shared stories of mis-steps in programming, which I promised not to write about.

So all in all, not a traditional holiday dinner or story, but heartwarming just the same!!!!