• San Francisco to Los Angeles
• Los Angeles to Honolulu
• Honolulu to Lihue
• Lihue to Honolulu
• Honolulu to Maui
• Maui to Honolulu
• Honolulu to San Francisco
• San Francisco to Seattle
• Seattle to San Francisco
• San Francisco to Frankfurt
• Frankfurt to Venice
• Venice to Barcelona
• Barcelona to Casablanca
• Casablanca to Marrakech (T)
• Marrakech to Casablanca (T)
• Casablanca to Lisbon
• Lisbon to Madeira
• Madeira to Frankfurt
• Frankfurt to Erfurt (T)
• Erfurt to Munich (T)
• Munich to Zurich (T)
• Zurich to Salzburg (T)
• Salzburg to Vienna (T)
• Vienna to Bratislava (T)
• Bratislava to Vienna (T)
• Vienna to Budapest (T)
• Budapest to Oradea (T)
• Oradea to Braşov (T)
• Brașov to București (T)
• București to Kiev (T)
• Kiev to Venice
• Venice to Frankfurt
• Frankfurt to San Francisco
• San Francisco to Seattle
• Seattle to Chicago
• Chicago to Atlanta
• Atlanta to Denver
• Denver to Seattle
• Seattle to Narita
• Narita to Bangkok
• Bangkok to Chiang Rai
• Chiang Rai to Bangkok
• Bangkok to Narita
• Narita to Seattle
• Seattle to Narita
• Narita to Singapore
• Singapore to Denpasar (Bali)

When I ask you for help at the train station, it’s probably because I’m not entirely sure if I’m getting on the right train and I’d prefer not to end up in the middle of nowhere. If you would be so kind as to not direct me the wrong way or to tell me you’re unsure, I’d really appreciate it. I know I’m only a stupid American, but this is your chance yo show me how much smarter you are than me. Telling me the wrong train might be funny but it wastes a lot of my time.

And while we’re here talking, when I speak to you in English and you act like you don’t speak any, then I hear you two minutes later on the phone talking with an English vocabulary larger than mine, well… I think you see where I’m going here. It just makes you look like a jerk. That’s all.

Thanks for listening. And thanks to the few of you who send me the right way. It’s much appreciated.

As many people know, I stopped working at Mozilla in December of last year. The story deserves its own post, though I doubt it’s one I’ll ever write. This post, however, is more of a post-post-mortem, to write about what I’m doing now and where I’m headed.

In mid-February, I sold or disposed of 99% of everything I owned. What’s left of my physical possessions fits into three, fairly heavy carry-on sized suitcases and an over-packed messenger bag. Suffice to say, a year ago, I never saw myself making this type of move.

The beginning

I guess most of this started back in 2008.

That year, I woke up one morning and decided to visit Thailand for my yearly vacation. Most people I know take a couple two-week vacations every year. I prefer to take one long vacation, usually three to four weeks. Being able to truly decompress and relax is something wonderful. But, back to Thailand.

I knew people who had gone to Thailand and, for some reason, I felt the urge to head West. Five months later, I was there. I spent a month in Thailand, enjoying the beaches in the south and the mountains of the north, making friends with locals and expats alike. Coming back to work was the hardest thing I had ever done. While my job was more or less my life, something about the freedom of traveling clinched inside of me.

After returning, my mind was on leaving again. I talked a lot about walking around the world, stopping for a month or two at a time, whenever it felt “right”. Of course, doing so wasn’t something I was yet prepared for. But the seed was planted. I wanted to travel. I wanted to see the world.

In 2009, I got my chance to see more of the world. Traveling over 100,000 miles by air, and many more by car, train, and even boat, I hit four continents, and almost ten countries. More importantly, this lifestyle started to feel right.

The real beginning.

Personally, I’m not really one for superstition, astrology, or any of the related ideas. I find them to be patently false. On the rare occasions when fortune telling works, the resulting fortune seems far too vague for my taste.

Yet in 2004, I attended a party with a coworker that resulted in a startling glimpse of what my future would be. An hour or two into the party, a woman at leaned over to me and asked if I was a Libra. “Indeed, I am.” Unfortunately, she didn’t know the precise information about my particular birthday. A quick trip downstairs and back she was with a large book in hand. I’d later purchase this book just because of how accurate it was.

She read, with increasing accuracy, the details of who I was – who I am. The book described how I was born to travel, how I wasn’t ever satisfied in one place for too long. Sure, it’d be possible to settle down, as long as I could continue to travel while settled.

The next morning, I left for a planned two-week road trip across the US, over seven thousand miles of travel.

Today.

I’m writing this blog post at the Mohammed V airport in Casablanca, Morocco. This year, I’ve completed fifteen travel segments, thirteen by air, two by train. In a few minutes, I’ll be on my fourteenth flight.

What I realized was that I’m happiest on the road and in the air. I relate to movies like Up in the Air, not because I’m destined for a hollow life of travel, but because the freedom that travel brings is truly wonderful. While it wasn’t actually my intention to visit Morocco on this trip, because I did, it likely means I’ll visit six continents this year (curse you, Antarctica!), including two new-to-me ones.

So with that in mind, this blog is hopefully going to change a bit, to include interesting stories from my travels and hopefully some pictures as well.

Countries: 9 (including Puerto Rico)

Miles traveled: 116,843 (of which, 101,897 were on United)

Days on the road: 133

2010 will bring even more travel, starting with Hawaii in January.

After our kickoff meeting with Happy Cog, the design firm we selected, we’ve talked a couple more times and they’ve now started the design process. One of the things we all agreed on was that getting the first pass at a design out before SXSW would be perfect. Doing so gives us a long week of feedback from both members of the Mozilla community as well as members of the design community.

We’re now intending on presenting the new designs in about a week at the weekly design lunch (which you can watch this week and next on Air Mozilla). David will have more information as we get closer to next Thursday.

The first question we need help with is: What other sites out there do you feel does a great job from an experience point of view? Why?

There are lots of websites with great design out there. Hundreds and thousands. But which sites do you think have a great user experience? What sites should we draw on for inspiration with the redesign?

The second question: What words (category labels) do you feel would be meaningful to your audience?

The Mozilla community is huge. There are so many facets and so many different things we do. What words describe Mozilla in general? This can be a long list, but I think three to five words would be ideal. What’s the most meaningful set of words that describe Mozilla?

Besides those two questions, there’s a bunch of other questions that have already been answered and we’re looking for feedback on. Feel free to browse through the questionnaire and provide feedback on any of the questions and answers. Preferably, add your comments to the “Feedback” section of the questionnaire, but feel free to add them to this blog post, send them to me (or David) in email, or ping me (or David) on IRC.

The more I used iPhoto, the more I thought about how Firefox could borrow from a lot of the better geotagging concepts it has introduced to even the most basic of users. There aren’t many players in the geo* market to draw from yet, but the expansion is happening fast and entering the mainstream pretty quick.

Here are a few things I like about the geotagging implementation in iPhoto that I think we can learn from for Geode in Firefox.

Pretty Maps

It’s a simple thing, if you think about it, but Apple has decided not to use the traditional map view from Google Maps and instead use the terrain view by default. The terrain view, of course, still shows roads, cities, and everything else you might want, it just displays them with prettier maps.

Autofill of Common Places

When editing the location of an image that wasn’t geotagged (if you don’t have a fancy new GPS camera like I do), iPhoto autofills the list with common locations as you type. This is in the very same manner as the search box on google.com and the search bar in Firefox. The benefit here is that if you don’t care about the exact address, getting a general city is a few keystrokes away, no need to find it on the map. I’m not sure, but I bet this autofills with common places first, based on where you’ve been. If it doesn’t, it should.

For Geode, we could just as easily have a database of common cities and other places (landmarks and the like) to grab from and display user-entered ones near the top, storing anything the user enters client-side, of course. Doing so would enable someone who, say, frequents a particular coffee shop, to always have that location near the top, likely even in one stroke.

Built-in Search for Finding Specific Locations

If you don’t want to simply enter a city (or if it’s not found), you can click the “New place…” option in the drop down above. That brings up another sheet that allows you to search a map and find specific locations. You can enter cities, towns, house addresses, or even just browse the map and drop the pin wherever you want.

Geode can learn a lot from this. Whether we build in Google Maps or another map provider (or lots of them!), giving users the ability to search and find their specific location is a great feature. Any location that’s added will now appear under “My Places” for easy access.

Specifying a Range

The final feature I really like in iPhoto’s geotagging implementation is the ability to specify the range of accuracy. Translating this to Geode isn’t a far stretch at all. There are many who don’t want their exact address broadcast to websites and finding a decent UI for translating that is hard. iPhoto seems to have hit the right spot.

Overall, I’m impressed with the new iPhoto and I hope we can borrow from and improve on a lot of the ideas that Apple introduced in it when working on integrating Geode with Firefox.

Seattle, WA*
San Francisco, CA*
Lost Angeles, CA*
Memphis, TN
Austin, TX
Las Vegas, NV*
Bangkok, Thailand*
Chiang Mai, Thailand
Phuket, Thailand

(Locations with a * are ones that I stayed at more than once and on non-consecutive days.)

Total miles traveled (not including commuting and such): 56,940 (50,827 flown on United)

Not as many as I thought previously, but it looks like 2009 will include twice as much travel. I’m also considering switching my mileage to Air Canada instead of United for several reasons, though this year I *will* qualify for Premier Executive status which is nice. That might make it hard to switch… I guess we’ll see.