In 20 minutes, I should be giving my speech in San Jose on Google's recent patent, Information Retrieval Based on Historical Data. Instead, I'm home, in Seattle, anxiously awaiting word of how the reception of my "presentation by proxy" has gone. The slides are all in Macromedia Flash with added voice-over that I recorded yesterday afternoon after getting home from the airport.

The tale itself is a long and tedious one, that involved not one but two cancelled flights (that I had been re-booked on from my original cancelled flight) and lots of dense, heavy, nasty fog, the likes of which have never been seen before in Seattle (at least, not in August).

Fortunately, I will be attending SES, arriving Tuesday in the early afternoon, hopefully in time to catch at least 1 session, the Google party that night, and give my planned speech for Wednesday's Site ECG session. I'm looking forward to seeing everyone there, and hearing about whether my proxy slides worked out. Needless to say, this is a huge dissapointment for me, but the circumstances and luck that has befallen has been so supernaturally purposeful that (despite being a very grounded person) I can't help but wonder if there's something important that I needed to do here first.

In any case, there is a singular benefit to this sad event, which is that people all over the world can now watch and hear my presentation, just as those in San Jose are right now. I recommend downloading this link (use right click and "save target as...") rather than watching it online, as it's nearly 2MB and I did not add a pre-loading system.

Thanks to everyone in San Jose who helped out - in particular Karen DeWeese, Ani Kortikar, Chris Sherman & Dr. Garcia. Without your help, this wouldn't have been possible. Extra thanks to Matt as well for letting me borrow his microphone and sound editing software.