Guadalajara, Mexico
Eli wakes up to the chill of early morning, glazed windows glowing grey with faint light. He's splayed out in the middle of the king size bed, wrapped in the white cotton sheets. Just a few seconds later a song starts playing, for 2 weeks now he has been listening daily to a random song popular at Sound Cloud: a new day wants new music.
There's a map in the 46" screen on the front wall of the bedroom, the world countries (continents crammed, Pangea-like) overlayed with an astonishing amount of information. The daylight swath, is fast approaching Guadalajara, the local time being 6am. Beneath daylight there's (recorded) citylight in azure blue, oceans in background white, land in grey. Custom labels annotate the countries, regions and events (conferences, gatherings, hanami season...) he cares for and there are a few dozen round face icons (with a tally of unread messages) on the latest known positions of family and friends, about half in the Americas (3/4 of that in North America), and a quarter each in Europe and Asia.
There are also five flow graphs atop the map indicating the realtime source of the past 12 hours of earnings (almost 2e3usd) and visitors (>20e3 uniques) from the active (web) products. Each graph is in a different hue and each is actually made of 2 separate (though highly correlated) flows: revenue and visitors. Each flow graph is placed with its center close to its biggest sources, most sit atop the US, one on France & Germany, and the other one between Japan and China. The vortex center of each flow graph has the logo of the project (from which the flow hue is derived) and most of the incoming flows have a muted favicon label indicating the site that's routing that traffic. The flow graph from JET, his search engine, is still the biggest, bigger than all other flows combined.
A whole lot more information (returns, bounced visitors, longer term trajectories) is conveyed in the map in an ambient, almost incidental fashion. A normal day so far, no major new traffic sources, but in track for the monthly target of a million visitors and 100e3usd in revenue.
The map slides left and text slides in --like most of the text he can manipulate, it's a riot of color. Most visually prominent are three panes corresponding to his planned "story" for today (biggest font-size), for the week, and for the month. In bold is the single most important event of the period. He has been writing these stories for almost 3 years now and it's his answer to todo lists and calendars. A counter shows only 43 days left before SXSW 2015 starts, his presentation there is the crucial event next month. The current cash balance took a small hit during the night, today was probably a due date for a credit card. Log, email, forum, tweet, and fb digests display muted backbars, no urgent messages or fires to put off.
His mind is fresh enough but he grabs the iPad on the side table and selects Daisy Lowe's dancing video to perk up, the airplaying screen fades into a purdy gal prancing sexily. He stands up and puts on some cargo shorts, a white v-necked t-shirt and croc sandals. He walks, dancing, to the bathroom... with both palms facing the front, he can air forward and backward the video. He splashes his face and soaps it, slathers cologne all over his body and with a bit of gel livens up his recently-cut tousle of hair. The methodical making of the (huge) bed wraps up the waking routine.
He moves to the kitchen to make some Earl Grey, cuts an apple into bunny slices, sprinkling them with peccans and guava quarters on a tiny fruit plate. He stands up, munching, by the dining table, where there's a bunch of papers strewn about with yesterday's (printed) sketches. He stares at them for a while, stretches upwards trying to reach the ceiling --yesterday's train of thought starts coming back to him.
He takes some sketches to the standing desk by the street window and starts scribbling on them, taking off the crocs and pressing his toes to the standing gel mat. Outside, the street is quiet, half lit, but neighbors are already starting their day. Today he'll finally try to visualize voices in songs for the MUMU project of general music visualization. He triggers a playlist of voice-driven songs and it starts airplaying on the speakers of the big TV nearby.
He walks to the main workspace. A long desk with nothing on its surface but a simple, state-of-the-art Macbook Pro that most of the time is just a magnificent (mobile) input device and text dashboard. Most of the computing (and graphic processing) happens instead on the (Linux) desktop, most of the storage is handled wirelessly by the 10TB data robot. There are 3 side by side 27-inch computer displays (the center one landscape oriented, the side ones portrait) and a rather monstrous 65-inch TV display on top, almost as wide as the desktop --all the monitors are held by supports from the wall. Together with the portable round rectangles (iPad, iPhone, Android), the computer display on the alternate standing workspace and the TVs around, the whole house packs over 40 million pixels of visual output.
He sits on the reddish-brown Mirra chair and leans back in one smooth glide. Before he starts grinding he looks straight into the front facing webcam and snaps a photo for the twice-weekly Family Portrait: an automated game that delivers every Wednesday & Sunday a collage of the portraits of his entire family. Better to please it now instead of enduring its pesky reminders tomorrow.
3 hours flow by prototyping voice visualization. He tries five big ideas, three are crap, one (detecting male and female voices) is good enough to keep and the final one (rough meter and beat indication) shows enough promise he's bouncing up and down with joy and excitement. Absorbed, he only stands up in the first hour, after finishing his carefully nursed tea, and he walks around and bounces a ball for a while.
By 9am he stands up and fixes himself a banana shake and egg whites with toasted bread, avocado, lettuce and tomato.
Now is time to merge the prototype into the main code. By noon he wraps things up, he pushes his lolcommits to Github sprinkling notes readily (in the commits, around the code, in the readmes) to make it easy to make sense of what he just did, tomorrow or in a month.
He munches a power bar, sets half a cup of rice in the rice cooker, and bikes towards the club. It's a Monday so he'll be swimming instead of hitting the gym: 3 km in about an hour and a quarter, 1 km of uninterrupted butterfly. Afterwards, the day is so bright he walks outside to the recreation pools and enjoys a quick splash with a bit of sun. He takes a long, hot shower for a good 5 minutes. When he returns to the dressing area he glances at the mirrors and is still surprised that's his figure reflected. This is the best shape of his life: his facial skin is clear, his posture naturally upright, his gait graceful, his shoulders clearly delineated and so are his biceps, triceps, and pecs, he can even distinguish abs where once there was just belly. He weighs 75kg, has done so for almost 2 years now.
Returning home he isn't particularly hungry until he starts cooking 200g of salmon in spicy bulgogi sauce and yummy smells start filling the kitchen. He sautees some mushrooms, broccoli and a carrot. He clears his mind while he cooks and even more so while he eats, focusing on flavors and concrete foodstuff as a welcome distraction. He airplays a FFFOUND slideshow on the 46" kitchen TV, with some piano songs by Yann Tiersen, and leisuredly navigates around the photos and music with air gestures. He washes the dishes and, pleasantly sated, tumbles down for a few minutes atop the bed.
Reluctantly, he leaves the bed and camps at the standing workspace, it always helps to maintain lucidity to be standing when digesting and while it's getting summer hot out there, the AC keeps a nice chill inside all day long. He makes the Macbook Pro extend to the 30-inch display by the standing desk and commits to 2h of general maintenance. He scans the product stories for background and reads the feedback digests, finding nothing new in them but thankful for having outsourced the answering of the over 500 daily support emails. Some JET users have been complaining for over a week now about some finicky bugs in the latest Android --after a bunch of false starts, he finds a work around. The Hindi and French translators sent yesterday the final updates for their translations of EUCLID and JET, he reviews them and sends them payment. And this morning Daniel Teran sent his latest iteration on MUMU's branding, he decides on his favorite changes and sends back his feedback as he savors some papaya.
Around 5pm he dresses up in fancy grey pants & white shirt (previously ironed!) and jumps into the automatic, alabaster-silver 2015 Fit, opening and closing the garage door with the remote. He lingers outside staring at the recently painted facade: Ramon the painter took over a week in the painting a couple of months after buying the flat and it had been totally worth it, the almost 30-years-old house looks new. He heads out for a cafe near Chapultepec where a jazz band with a great female vocalist is scheduled to play, he's looking forward to seeing Aisha back from Monterrey. Her birthday coming up soon, he'd like to invite her to a top suite at the Riu, but she is still hectic in the middle of her biggest project of the year. Anyway, he'll spare no kisses today.
Back home before 8pm, he contributes to five ongoing conversational threads: comments on a post about interfaces at his personal blog, an email thread in Esperanto on language that has been going on for over a month, a tweet conversation in Japanese about the latest light novel, and two threads from his product forums. He scribbles down tomorrow's story, remembering that there's a yoga retreat in Sayulita for the weekend. He airplays the map to the big TV and learns daytime earnings (~3e3usd) and visitors (30e3) have been above average, it's a Monday after all. EUCLID in particular sold 60 copies in the last 24 hours (5usd each), not bad for a 2-year old geometry i-book.
By 9pm he actively disengages after sending a good night video to mom (traveling around with dad in Argentina) and a hi to Martha (who is in Spain for a year of her residency). He takes a green beans salad from the fridge and places it next to the music keyboard, trying for some 20 minutes to play a previously unheard song straight from his songbook. He moves to the bed, his back on the cushy headboard, some papers on his lap desk, and starts scribbling some new music ideas but soon rambles and starts daydreaming about the incoming US trip. He drifts off a bit before 10pm.