I don't live in San Francisco, so it took me a while before I finally made it up there for this year's International Film Festival. I saw the Spanish film Timecrimes aka Los cronocrímenes, by Nacho Vigalondo, at the Clay Theatre. I had no idea what to expect, but it turned out to be entertaining, thought provoking, and a lot of fun.

Similar to Primer, Timecrimes is a take on how ordinary people might handle time travel. I won't try to reproduce the synopsis here; suffice it to say, it was darker and funnier than any time travel movie I'd seen before. If you get the chance, see it!

I'm not much of a film buff, so I won't try to to comment on the festival itself or the San Francisco Film Society, which hosts it. Cynthia saw lots of the other IFF movies this year, so I'll defer to her. I'll have to go to more of the festival next year!

Thanks to Raj and Kieran for organizing...

The last couple months have been eventful, to say the least, so I'm happy to say that I'm taking a vacation. With any luck, my only decisions on a day to day basis will be which hiking trail to explore, which deck to sit and read on, and which chocolate to eat after lunch.

I don't plan to check personal mail regularly, and I don't plan to check work mail at all, so if you don't get a reply, that's probably why. See you in a couple weeks!

If you've talked to me about work during the last couple years, I've probably downplayed it, resorted to generalities, or just changed the subject. No longer! We've finally taken the wraps off our project, Google App Engine. From the docs:

Google App Engine lets you run your web applications on Google's infrastructure. App Engine applications are easy to build, easy to maintain, and easy to scale as your traffic and data storage needs grow. With App Engine, there are no servers to maintain: You just upload your application, and it's ready to serve your users.

Personally, I spent most of my time writing the datastore, both the backend and much of the Python API. When I found extra time, though, I had a lot of fun writing apps and libraries on top of App Engine. I particularly enjoyed writing an interactive shell, an OpenID provider, and a full text search library.

We've been excited about the project since the beginning, and we can't wait to see what people do with it. If you're a developer and you have some spare time, please try it out and let us know what you think!