I had an early soccer game today. We lost 1-0. My team sucks lol. Last weekend was awesome. I had to wake up very early and catch a flight at 6:45 AM. I got to San Jose at noon and met up with Evan at the airport. It was cool to finally meet him after working together and being friends online for 6 years. I got a rental car from Avis. My work gave me some code when I created my account that made me some kind of elite member. The cool thing about this is that when I go to get my car they have my name and a parking space number that I go to. They keys were already in the car and you just show your ID to the toll booth dude before you leave. When you return the car you just get a receipt from a parking attendant and then catch the bus back to the airport. So it was really easy to get a car which started the trip off on the right note. It was about a 15 minute ride to Silicon Valley. I thought it was going to be a real valley with nice landscaping and everything but it was just a street with a bunch of technology compnies on it. My expectations were definately higher than what Silicon Valley actually is. The yahoo campus was neat though. As you can see from my pictures they have a basketball court, sand volleyball, game room, gym, and a big cafeteria. I thought the Yahoo campus was nice overall. Everything was yellow and purple. They had all of this funky furniture around. The first thing Evan and I did was register for Hackday. We got a bunch of gifts including a Hackday t-shirt, 256mb usb flash drive, YPN (Yahoo Publisher Network) thurmus, Hackday branded highlighter, a bunch of stickers, Yahoo branded jelly belly's. I took a picture of all of the stuff once I got home but I haven't posted it yet. Later on O' Reilly put out 200 "Yahoo Hacks" books so I picked up one. Before Hackday actually started there were a bunch of workshops. Evan and I went to the Hackday keynote, something by the creator of PHP, and a workshop on ZoneTag and Upcoming. The ZoneTag one was really cool. This is the technology of uploading pictures from your phone and marking the geolocation based on cell tower information or GPS coordinates.

Ev an and I setup our tents on the lawn in the middle of the 4 yahoo buildings at this point. Hackday starts not too much longer with pizza and beer. Yahoo ordered a bunch of kegs. They just kept bringing them in the entire weekend :-) That first night they must have ordered 200 pizza's. Evan and I bumped into a yahoo database guy while eating. He was telling us about how much data Yahoo has which really is a lot! They had to build their own database because no other commercial database would handle how much data they have. After the pizza there was a concert by Beck. It was neat but at that time it was getting cold. Afterwards I worked on my program all through the night.. I went to be at about 1 or 2 am which is really 3 or 5 am due to the time difference. When I woke up there were probably 200 boxes of Krispy Kreme donuts! I have to say that Yahoo did a really good job of feeding everyone. Not only did they buy this stuff but there were always snacks around, fountain drinks, and coffee. I finished my program Saturday morning. At 3:00 the presentations started. There were some really really cool ones. One of my favorites was the Yahoo Mail - Flickr mashup. It used keywords from your emails and picked out an image from flickr which matched those words. So it was image association which seemed like a cool concept. My presentation went well except that I forgot to tell everyone that they could download it from my website. My program is a wallpaper rotator that uses images from Flickr. A few people came up to me after my presentation to ask me where they could download it but I didn't get the feeling I would win anything - which I did.

Evan's presentation went very well. Everyone was saying "Dont let that guy go home" lol. He did "Search Hack with Dynamic Tagging - Semantic Search using Yahoo Search API for Seed Documents" and it won him 3rd place! The 1st place hack was creative but most of the category winners weren't that great. When it was all over I grabbed an extra shirt for Judy. Then Evan and I packed up our tents and headed to our hotel by the airport. Next day we went home. Overall the trip was cool.

Since I was on a Flickr kick, I integrated it into my site so that I now have an image gallery. :-) The rest of today I am watching football.