The friendly folks at reddit threw a party this evening to celebrate the open-source release of their site’s software.  I saw the invitation on the reddit blog, so I decided to attend.  The city isn’t that far from Palo Alto, right?

Just for something different, I took the BART into San Francisco.  It wasn’t quite as comfortable as the Caltrain, but it was a lot cheaper than driving, and it dropped me off just a few blocks from the party’s location, Swig.

Inside, I found about 100 people talking, drinking, and having a good time.  From my conversations, it seemed like everybody was somehow involved in the startup community.   Many seemed to have a Y Combinator connection.   There were at least a few famous faces: Alexis and Steve, the founders of reddit.  There was also a guy who looked a lot like Michael Arrington, but I’m not sure if it was him.  Edit: Yup, it was him.

Yes, the open bar was top-notch, the hors d’ouvers were delicious, and the people were friendly.  It was a good time.   They even had swag:

The data isn’t new, but the delivery is elegant.  And scary.

Another way to look at it is that the NPV of the entitlements is something like $60 trillion.  That’s beyond comprehension.

The only viable solutions to that mess will certainly infuriate the very people whose entitlements are causing the problem.

The third major version of Firefox was released this morning to much fanfare.  Yes, there were many improvements in the bookmark and address bar systems, but the thing I’m most excited about is the significantly smaller memory footprint.

I’ve had FF3 running for about six hours now, and it’s  using about 150 MB of RAM.  The old version would have been north of 500 MB and would have been slowing to a crawl.  That’s progress!

Though it’s not Mozilla’s fault, I’m a little disappointed that some of my favorite extensions haven’t been updated.  In the meantime, I’ll have to make do with the ol’ “switch the max version in the xpi’s install.pdf” trick.

The summer hasn’t started off as productively as I had hoped.  In fact, I spent most of yesterday afternoon lounging in a fountian on campus with a group of friends.  Suntan, yes.  Fun, yes.  Productive, hardly.  I don’t regret it.

Most people would classify the xkcd style as minimalist: the characters are nothing more than stick figures. I say, why stop there? I present to you an ultra-minimalist strip: whitespacecomic.

My previous venture into the world of webcomics, zoitz, enjoyed a modest amount of success, garnering about 750,000 views during its two-month revival this spring. We’ll see how this one goes.