Sadly, the sidewalks at that intersection were replaced (and the misspelling corrected) years ago, and I never took the time to take a photo before that happened. Fortunately, the city is full of similarly jumbled sidewalk etchings, and now many years later I find myself walking around with a camera-enabled phone in my pocket, so I finally started to document these misspellings. Herewith a small sampling of those that I’ve found thus far.


Sometimes two letters get swapped…

SHOTEWLL [sic]
18th St and Shotwell St

Sometimes the wrong letters get doubled…

CAAP ST [sic]
18th St and Capp St

Sometimes they use an upside-down M for a W…

WEBSTER [upside down M]
Post St and Webster St

Sometimes they use an upside-down W for an M…

MARIPOSA [upside down W]
Mariposa St and Harrison St

Sometimes a letter gets flipped the wrong way:

FLORIDA [backwards D]
18th St and Florida St

Sometimes they realize their mistake and try it both ways…

F0NSTON [upside down U on right side up U]
Funston Ave and Kirkham St

Sometimes they use a number as a substitute for a letter…

HARR1SON ST [sic]
17th St and Harrison St

Sometimes they get the abbreviation wrong…

19TH TS [sic]
19th St and South Van Ness Ave

Sometimes they forget a letter…

KIRKAM [sic]
28th Ave and Kirkham St

Sometimes they add one letter too many…

OFFARRELL [sic]
O’Farrell St and St Joseph’s Ave

Bonus! It’s not a street name, but this is my favorite sidewalk etching in San Francisco. Yes, it’s a bit crude, but I think it’s great that of all the things this person could immortalize in concrete, they chose this visual pun…

TWO MEN WALKING A BREAST
9th Ave and Irving St

My compulsion is unlikely to go away any time soon, so I’ll continue to keep this Flickr set updated as I find more. If you know of any particularly good ones, add a comment and I’ll go check it out.

The hardest part of this change is leaving my great colleagues at Sun, many of whom I worked with since my earliest days there as a quiet co-op student (intern) and later as a new hire. I’ve learned so much about software development, and a great number of other random/wacky topics as well, from this team. They are a unique bunch, replete with humor, brains, generosity, egos, caring, quirks, ingenuity, and great storytelling abilities. They’re like a family, and that’s why I’ll miss them.

So, what’s next for me? On Monday I will be starting at Plausible Labs, a worker-owned software cooperative here in San Francisco. Java developers may know its founder, Landon Fuller, from his work on SoyLatte and porting OpenJDK to Mac OS X. I’m really excited to be working with Landon and Terri. It should give me a chance to learn new technologies (iPhone and Android, among others) and to see what life is like outside a corporate monolith. I like the concept of the co-op (a relatively rare setup in the software world) and I’m hoping we can make it a viable way to run a business. I also like the idea of building local, community-focused software — creating things that I would use myself, rather than building for unknown “others.”

(I’m also very happy to be working closer to home; no more Caltrain! Well, really I’m just trading one long commute for a shorter one involving the equally unreliable Muni, but at least now biking to work is a reasonable option.)

As part of this transition, I’ve finally set up this new website and blog, where I can keep my professional and personal activities organized in one location. I’m not planning to post to my java.net blog any longer (since I expect to be blogging about non-Java related topics in addition to the usual Java stuff here), so if you’re accustomed to reading my (increasingly infrequent) entries there, be sure to update your bookmarks.

I’ll stay subscribed to a few of the usual Java and OpenJDK-related mailing lists, so I’m not planning to disappear completely. That’s the great part about OpenJDK: it’s possible for me to remain involved even though I’ll no longer be with Sun. (I wish I could say the same for JavaFX!)

Happy 2010! It should be a fun year…