Housecooling Party

I’m a little late in getting this posted. The party took place on June 28th. It’s Alan (a.k.a. Walendo) and Ellen’s “housecooling” party, which they held at what is now the vacant lot that used to be where their home was. For background on that, please see my posts from May 22nd and May 23rd.

It was amazing to see how quickly what was left of their house had been removed. There were two giant dumpsters on site which were being used to cart off the remainder of the concrete foundation. Ellen and Alan have not yet decided if they’re going to rebuild or buy a new place somewhere else.

It was a fun party and very nice to see some folks I hadn’t seen in quite a while, as well as meet some new people. Ellen, in her private blog, made a really nice comment under the picture of me talking with Victoria and Ian, “Vic, my manager at PARC, on the right, and her boyfriend Ian, on the left. They were chatting with Rob, middle, one of our more socially capable friends who’s good at mingling with new people. Walendo and I worked with Rob at Electric Communities back in 1997-8.”

She then went on to add, “One of my favorite things about Rob was that he once sent out an email saying, ‘This is what you get when you roll your head across the keyboard,’ followed by a bunch of random characters that were indeed recorded by rolling his head across the keyboard.” Haha, yes, well, that’s me! Someone else at the party reminded us that my email was in response to another email from an engineer who was looking for novel ideas on how to produce randomness for use in cryptographic calculations.

Click on each picture to see a larger version along with a brief description.