Supper Club
Posted by Joel Sat, 16 Dec 2006 08:42:00 GMT
A couple weeks ago Marc hosted a "Chili con Carnival" at our place. Many of his friends from Google came over and we basically spent the time eating chili, drinking, and playing Wii. Really a hilarious time.
Yesterday was a Christmas party for LuckyOliver. We went up to the city to a place called the Supper Club. It was a really odd place, featuring "Diva Dan", the cross-dressing host, as well as some songs and other oddities. The food was a five-course meal on a set menu, but very good. You eat on a bed, which is more comfortable than it sounds, really. I really just had a lot of fun, all of the zaniness and costumes reminded me a bit of Burning Man.
Today Marc got a PS3. We don't have any games yet but we played some of the demos. The graphics are really very good and the games were fun. The system itself is a behemoth, bigger than the original X-Box, and will look really dated in a few years.
LuckyOliver is finally using a RAID setup on a separate file server. I'm going to make it host the database too. Scaling is a very interesting process and I'm getting a feel for it. There were a number of sleepless nights there though. I resolved a number of bugs last week. Now I can get back to features.
I've been working on some interesting algorithms which harness the power of tagging to determine relevance. I've managed to get it pretty fast with some special secrets, and on our tests so far the search results are just wildly improved. It extrapolates lots of information from just the few tags you supply and gives you the ones that best match the overall concept, via some mystical voodoo. It's similar in base concept to the black magic which fuels the tag intersection and related images.
