On my way to LCA2012

I'm starting the first leg of a literal `round-the-world business trip.

I'm flying from my home in Seattle, via LAX, to Melbourne Australia.  There I will meet up with my friend Stewart Smith, the Director of Engineering at Percona. He is fellow survivor of MySQL & Sun, and a fellow contributor to Drizzle.

Other good friends of mine who are converging on Australia for LCA 2012 are Sarah Novotny, Monty Tayler, and Jacob Applebaum.

Why am I going to Australia?  Geeks into open source who are "in the know" know the Linux.conf.au conference to be one of the best open source conferences in the world.  This year it will be held in Ballarat, which is not far from Melbourne.  This will be my 4th LCA, having attended past ones in Brisbane, Wellington, and Tazmania

At that conference, I will be speaking in the SysAdmin Miniconf, to demo OpenShift, Red Hat's cloud PaaS.  (Sign up with the promo code LCA2012.)


This is only the first leg of this trip.  After LCA, I will be heading to Bangalore India to present at JUDCon:India.

And after that, I will keep heading west to Europe, to present at FOSDEM in Brussels.

And then who knows where I will go next?

Thoughts on travelling and OkCupid matching

I've had an OkCupid profile about 10 years, and have answered over 1200 questions in their database.

When I travel, I sometimes reset my location in OkC to be the city I'm in.  It makes for an interesting view into the place that I'm at.

When I'm in Seattle, there are surprisingly large number of people who match me at 95% or above.   When I am traveling, there are relatively few people who match that closely.  Often, there are none.  Even in very densely populated areas with an order of magnitude more people to match against.

I find that very interesting.

Did I end up living in Seattle because it's friendly to "people like me"?  Or is it the other way around, and being around Seattle has made me more like the people here I match so closely with?

And then there are even more interesting questions one could ask and answer with the OkC database.  Does this kind of "lots of close matches" effect happen in every city?  How much dispersion is there in a given city?  After all, even if there are many people I match closely with, there are a LOT more in Seattle that I don't match at all.  How do other cities compare that way?

Hopefully the data geeks inside OkC will someday answer these questions.