Midwest

Another trip to the midwest this week. This time to Champaign IL, home of the University of Illinois and the academic team that founded Nextumi. These guys were a lot of fun. I'm normally afraid of recommendation/personalization technology as they are difficult to productize and notoriously difficult to scale; typically requiring large non-segmentable indices. This stuff is different. I obviously can't let the algorithm out of the bag, but this approach lends itself to parallel index creation and distributed storage. F'ing rad.

Two things struck me on the 2+ hour drive from Chicago:
1) There is a lot of corn here.
2) Illinois uses a lot of i's.

Another thing... On the way in, I could have sworn I saw a 30 foot tall metal Abe Lincoln surrounded by a multitude of giant cranes. I didn't take a picture because it was on the other side of the highway. Unfortunately it had mysteriously disappeared (cranes and all) on the return trip the next day. Maybe the midwest is like the desert... where you get hallucinations, but of ginormous abe lincolns not an oasis. Who knows.