Saved by the bark…

Last night at about 11:30pm, I'm sitting on the couch next to Rashi, who is curled up in a ball sleeping... I'm getting ready to pick up Krista from SFO... Outta nowhere we hear someone run up our front steps and knock on the door... and try the handle.

Rashi goes nuts, barking like crazy... Though she's just fifty pounds, she sounds ferocious when provoked like this... I head to the door and scream,

"Who is it?" already sensing trouble as we don't get many Sunday night, 11:30pm visitors.

"It's (garbled)..."

"Who?!"...

"It's (garbled)...", he says.

I run around to the bay window to try to get a visual, and at that point I see a cop car with the spotlight swinging from side to side on a search... I stand in the bay window, wave my arms and mouth and pantomime, "He's here!". Plus, Rashi is going ballistic and you could hear her a mile away. The cruiser stops, two cops get out... and for the next half hour proceed to arrest the dude in front of my house.

Rashi is going crazy. I've never seen her like this. She sounds like a wolf with bloodlust, and she's pacing back and forth... She's so amped up that i have to take her with me to pick up Krista.

I talk to a cop that explains that the dude just got out of prison, and he's been attempting breakins in the neighborhood. They'll take it from there... Thanks to the Emeryville cops, who actually went 50 ft. outside of their jurisdiction to deal with this BTW.

I'm still committed to this neighborhood. This is the first serious incident that touched us personally since Krista's car was stolen three years ago. Things are definitely getting better, and hopefully this was just random bad luck.

Upcoming 2.0 Launches!

I knew it was coming, but was blown away when I saw it... Upcoming 2.0 has launched.

Upcoming has been one of my favorite Yahoo sites for quite a while... I cannot believe that such a small team kicks so much ass. Congrats guys!

Why the famous get famouser…

Kottke points to a great article by Columbia's Duncan Watts...

The social context of content has everything to do with it's meaning. It's one of the reasons that I think that a purely pixel-based algorithmic approach to, say, image recognition is doomed. In optimistic moments, I've said that the computer vision community may produce a 98% reliable dog detector... But what we really want is a "funny" detector... or "cool" detector... that's gonna be a long-time coming... or maybe it's already here but involves analyzing people's actions around the pixels v. just the pixels in isolation.