After the conference ended, Cory, Lisa, Wendy, Schuyler and I went out for lunch at some Thai restaurant. The discussion turned (naturally) to my odd eating habits. “You know,” Cory said, “supertasters have a greater risk of colon cancer” (much of what Cory says is taken from boingboing headlines; I hadn’t read boingboing for a couple days, so it worked out fine most of the time). “I’m not a su—” I said instinctively. But as I began to think about it, it made more and more sense. I don’t like foods with strong tastes, especially sour ones, etc. We wondered how to see if one’s a supertaster. I suggested putting my tongue under a microscope; Cory suggested cutting it out for this purpose.
Then we headed to a Borders, where Cory autographed a couple copies of his novel (photo). “The important thing about autographed copies,” he said, “is that you can’t return them.” Apparently the SF Bay Area is filled with unsold autographed copies of Cory’s novel. “Sometimes I joke that folks have one of the rare unsigned copies,” he added.
Then we went to Cowboy Fry’s where Cory bought a $70 camera smaller than a cigarette lighter with no Flash, no visual feedback with the focus, and no Mac driver. But it beeps!
We dropped Schuyler off back at Stanford and headed over to see Ada T. Norton, the high-tech latest consumer gadget. She was on display at the giant underground mall of suburban California, which seemed to go on infinitely in all directions, filled with every upscale store. “All this place needs is an Apple Store,” I said. When we turned the corner there was one.
Ada was with all of her parents in the food court and Cory kept doing the Ada-Danny-Gilbert-Ada-Gilbert-Danny thing. Quinn and Danny described their struggle with the parental hormones: “Must remain rational. Baby is ugly. All babies are ug—” then they started smiling: “aww, isn’t it cute!” And she was cute, in a wow-i-didn’t-know-the-Japanese-could-make-these-that-small sort of way.
I was wondering if after their home birth they sent away for a mail order birth certificate. They said that they’d hired a liberal Californian lawyer to see if they could get all three names on the birth certificate (being the first family to try).
All too soon time was up, and we had to leave baby Ada and her mega-transformer stroller. We headed over to Joi Ito’s party, where I met all sorts of famously attractive webloggers, like Justin Hall, Gnome-Girl, James Home, and the guy who did the Tolkien Name Generator. And I got to see some Blogger people and Ben and Mena. (Someone alleged that Ben and Mena were actually siblings, not husband-and-wife, because we never see them kiss. Ben and Mena didn’t know what to say to that.) Ben lamented that he never wanted to be a weblog engine programmer. He always wanted to be… a lumberjac—I mean a crypto coder. Hashing from trie to trie, signing and encrypting arbitrary bytes, doing Diffie-Hellman key exchanges. I know how he feels.
Anil Dash told Cory how he was now a famous celebrity. Cory’s gotten good at “aw, shucks” dances for moments like these. Everyone came up to tell him how great his novel was, even though they were only on the second chapter.
Then Cory took me back to my hotel, and I went to sleep.
The next morning I woke up and had breakfast at the hotel and wrote this. I dragged my suitcase over to Stanford, where the CC offices are. Larry had a class this morning, but no one told me (no one ever tells me these things) so I missed it. After his class Larry came down and we discussed new things for a bit, then Glenn drove me to the hotel where I took a shuttle to the airport where there is again wireless Internet access right by the gate that refuses to let me pay for it.
Aha! I figured out why it wasn’t working. The reply comes in a popup, which both browsers I tried block. Bad web designers! Bad! Anyway, I’m on and using it to post this.