Let's talk about the Camp Fire for a second. My family moved to Paradise in 1991, as I was starting 8th grade. I lived there through high school, until heading to college. The family stayed until all kids had graduated high school - the last in 2004.



While news has referred to Paradise as isolated, we actually were moving from an even smaller town. I'd spent elementary school in Brownsville in Yuba County. When my dad got a new medical practice in Paradise, we were blown away by the McDonald's and "all those power lines".


I only spent one year in the Paradise school district, before my mom got a job teaching at Chico Jr. High. Through high school, I spent every early morning at church in seminary, and then driving down the Skyway to Pleasant Valley High School.


Paradise was always a retirement community. My dad's work was primarily elder care - geriatrics. Sometimes they died. More than once, I accompanied my dad to the coroner's office while on rounds. As he said, either their heart stopped, or they stopped breathing. Circle of life.

But that didn't mean death by other means was impossible. Fire was by far the top concern for the community. Paradise is located on a ridge in the foothills, placed squarely between two canyons. When fire would light, it would often head for the city.

In 1992, my sophomore year of high school, we evacuated twice. See the @ChicoER's coverage of those fires. Notice one of those started -- you guessed it -- at the Skyway. The problem with this, of course, is that was the main road out of town.


In 1992, even as we had yet to unpack from evacuating the first time, ash started to fall on our driveway and house. Thick, black smoke loomed above us, and the fire was closer than ever. Some firebug, in copycat mode, had lit a blaze near city limits. We left again.

Luckily, as with every other time, the fire crews did an amazing job stopping the flames from getting deep into town. We marveled at the burn scars that approached neighbors' property, but didn't take any homes or casualties. Some have argued Paradise is a woodsy town that had no business building where it did. But it's not all the thick forest you may have in your mind.


Long after I left to college and embedded in Silicon Valley, there have been other fires. As with those in the early 1990s, most were stopped. And as @Weather_West and others have reported, there were many plans in place to protect residents if worst-case happened.


So what made the Camp Fire different? How did the above map turn into this scar on the North state? In addition to the exceptionally low humidity and the high winds (which can't be discounted), I'd say the origin of the fire played a huge part.


Previous fires, which started by Skyway or the canyons, and slowly meandered their way to the city, gave residents and firefighters warning. People had time to pack and leave, and routes were not frantic. The Camp Fire was a sneak attack with brutal force.

The Camp Fire didn't start on the lower Paradise side. It started in Pulga, an even tinier community. It started in the more woodsy side, where topology made it nearly impossible to stop, in starved fuel-laden forests, powered by ferocious winds and drought.


The winds pushed the fire into the main part of town, to all the people and all the businesses, and it hasn't stopped. Adventist Health Hospital, where my dad worked, was among the first to go.

When @Weather_West shared a tweet from @Gloria2marie, showing fire South and West of Paradise, I immediately realized the town was gone. In a Slack message to a friend, I wrote:


Classy, I know. But not wrong.

The casualty totals, surpassing all records in California, have not been a surprise. Knowing the aging, slow, immobile population, many who don't drive, and the speed of this fire, we're lucky thousands did not perish. But the loss is still stunning.

That an entire town can be zapped off a map is practically unprecedented. And for those who want to go back... to what exactly? No infrastructure. No power. No water. No cell service. And possibly human remains waiting for you.

Chico, where I went to high school, has for the most part escaped the direct flames. But now the refugees from Paradise are encamped at the town Walmart, a drier, more outdoor version of the Lousiana Superdome during Katrina. Thousands have nowhere to go.

More than 52,000 people have been evacuated since the Camp Fire erupted in Paradise on Thursday, packing parking lots, shelters and hotels across Northern California, and straining the housing stock.

There are still hundreds missing. So many are unaccounted for that law enforcement is releasing names in batches to avoid overload. Imagine that. The fire was so intense, many people may never be found -- incinerated and returned to the dust.

The Camp Fire is not just another news story or a set of headlines, or an unfortunate reason the Bay Area is smoky. It's a remarkable human and modern disaster.



I've read some ridiculous tin foil hat conspiracies on Twitter that you wouldn't believe about how the Camp Fire started. You could say this type of fire was inevitable, but also preventable. Of course climate change played a role. Of course the town makeup played a role.

Either way, this is a conversation we are going to keep having in California, and throughout the Western US and beyond. Is Lake Tahoe safe? Is Sunnyvale? Last year Napa found out the hard way. My grandparents' home in Redding was threatened in the Carr Fire.

It's reality.

This isn't a "feel sorry for us" thread. It's been a while, and my whole family is safe. But they are active in connecting with those who stayed. The woman who prayed her way to safety in a firey ride you may have seen on @Gizmodo was a high school friend I've heard pray before.

This was the last photo I took in Paradise, in May 2015, when I took my boys to a party for my brother's child - their cousin. The home that looks like it was under construction a few short years ago... it's gone now, to dust and ash.

As you lament the bad air and see the numbers rise ever upward, I hope this helps remove the abstract from what seems like a tiny town far away. Like the Woolsey Fire and the Carr Fire and all the others, your home could be the next hashtag. Have a plan.

My children, from a young age, have been surrounded by touch-enabled tablets. They expect my laptop (and in the case of my Chromebook Pixel, accurately) to be touch-enabled. They use voice search constantly to find what they're looking for, and they essentially expect the world's content to be immediately available. But they tire quickly when apps and sites don't do what they want. That can result in complaints to me, or even a thrown tablet or two from a tantrum.

Without sounding too much like PR-speak, from my own experience, I've seen the YouTube Kids app to reduce any surprises from me in terms of what my kids are watching, they more easily navigate the app, find channels and shows they want, and generally are pleased to have something made just for them.

Quoting from today: "Daddy, you taught me how to use your tablet. You taught me everything I know."

She (and her twin brother, Matthew) are constantly talking to the tablet.

"Google, show me pictures of gorillas."
"Google, show me pictures of a blue lizard."
"Google, show me videos of a zebra."

Google Now is amazing, and this generation knows they can get anything in the world and go anywhere, if they just know what to ask.

/via My Google+ Profile.

Hey! Did you guys miss me?

As I wrote up about six weeks ago in my post Hey! Didn't You Use to be a Tech Blogger?, I've relaxed my typical always-on routine for the blog, spending much more time with Google+ (obviously), and keeping the occasional downtime I do have focused on something other than blogging. I still hear plenty of interesting tech news from startups and more established players, which in previous years I'd have stopped everything to write up, but given my more visible role at Google, and other priorities, for the most part I'm letting the rest of the tech world pick those up. But that doesn't mean I've got nothing to share.

In November, probably the most incredible story to tell is the one about how my car, which you may remember I bought from Robert Scoble back in 2009, and had just added personalized plates to last month, got completely wrecked, in my own driveway. While I told the full story on Google+ on November 7th, when it happened, the reality of it is still pretty nuts, and I've retold it several times.

I was watching the kids around 7:30 Monday night, getting ready to put them to bed, when I heard a shockingly loud boom from what I thought was the intersection near my house. I ran out the front door and found the accident was actually in my driveway. A massive boulder that had lined our walkway had been struck by a Toyota Tacoma, which popped it out of its cement foundation and launched it 15 or so feet into the air, where it came into full contact with my car, smashing the back left door, permanently bending the frame, and breaking in half. The Tacoma left skidmarks in my driveway, gashed the trunk and came to a rest against a tree bordering our property with the neighbors'. Amazingly, nobody was hurt, even though the driver's air bags had deployed.

Long story short, the police came by and handled him, while I dealt with insurance the next few days and weeks. Insurance did well, and actually paid me more to replace the car than I had paid to buy it. So I had the tow truck get my car, and I got a newer model of the same car with a new car, and won't end up paying much for the swap. Nobody was hurt, and I got a new car out of it, so I won't complain too much. That said, you have to see the pictures. It's crazy.


While I've spent a lot of time during the day in Mountain View, I get the great pleasure of coming home to increasingly amusing and amazing kids. Braden, the youngest of our three, has far surpassed the grub stage and is now walking up a storm, so we have no crawlers. While I could be wistful about passing one milestone, he is a delightful kid and I was more than happy to share a video I took of him walking last month. If kids are your thing, it's worth the minute to see.



In my time of keeping silent on the blog, I've opened up a Google Doc that has a list of ideas for posts that I'll get to quickly. There's been no push from corporate for me to be quieter here, and I've made that choice myself, but you'll see some interesting things pop up soon. Just wanted to share with you some of the lowlights and highlights from the last month. Braden waves at you.

Living where we do, in Sunnyvale, just by 85 and 280, the twins live right between the headquarters of two of the world's most successful companies, Apple and Google. Some nights, we drive by Cupertino headquarters and point out all the Apple signs in their various colors... "Look daddy! Pink apple!" or we'll head the other way and have the kids play among the Android robots by Building 44 on the Google campus. The twins have mastered Netflix and YouTube on the iPad, and live in a world when they expect any show they want to be on demand immediately to any device. They refer to my 7-inch Samsung Galaxy Tab as "baby iPad", and the 10 inch Galaxy Tab as "robot iPad".

When it comes to the amount of data I share about myself and my family on the Web, there's little question that I am at the odd end of the bell curve. It's not a secret what my family structure looks like. My kids' real names are out there to be discovered, as is my birthday, hometown, religion, political preference and much more. You can see real photos of me and my family if you search hard enough, and videos too.

I use Foursquare to share location data. I use Blippy to share purchase history, and I even use OneTrueFan to make my Web visits public. This hasn't been done with a reckless approach to privacy where I have thrown caution to the wind, but instead, has been more calculated. I believe the major trends on the Web encourage sharing, and if I can be the one sharing and not reacting, I am ahead of the game.

See CNN: The Internet and the 'End of Privacy' for their insight into my sharing behavior.

Some would look at what I choose to share and could suggest I feel that privacy is "dead". I don't believe this at all. What I do believe, however, is that intelligent sharing and knowledge of where personal data is distributed can bring value. Rather than take a more conservative approach, locking down what in other generations would be secret, I've opted to own what is shared, and to operate my life as if what I was not sharing explicitly would not be a disaster if it eventually were to be surfaced.

One needs to look no further than Facebook, the world's dominant social network, to see how the company's approach to privacy has changed in the last few years. Once a stalwart site prized for how it protected your content from prying eyes, more content has become public in practically each update. While some have suggested the best solution is to lock down one's profile, I have instead assumed the content will eventually become public and discoverable, shared to advertisers. This was one reason I downloaded an archive and self-hosted it, making the full copy available myself. (See: http://www.louisgray.com/facebook/)

But even with my level of publicness comes limits. I don't think it makes sense to chronicle the minutiae of my day through status updates. I don't muddy my main broadcast channels with location details, shopping updates or entertainment. I don't air embarrassing scenes with my wife or my kids. I don't post content of them that would be unflattering. And I try not to bore people with inane blather.

For me, the major reason I don't share some things is not because I am frightened my content will be used against me. After all, it took a simple e-mail account hack to get me fighting back on that front earlier this summer, and it wasn't tracked to my use of any of these sites. The major reason I don't overshare is because I believe it wouldn't add value and it would be boring to all who saw it.

In a conversation I recently had with a reporter from CNN.com, he asked if there were parts of my life I would be reticent to share if my transparency were further peeled back. The answer was essentially no. The trick is to live your life in a way that if your employer or future spouse were checking in on you, you would have nothing to fear. This doesn't mean you can't have a good time, but you should assume a consequence if your actions were to become public. Manage yourself well and what's discovered shouldn't turn an eye.

We live in a world with many imperfect people, and some really bad ones. That's no question. But I don't think being afraid to share and reducing the amount of personally identifiable information is the right approach. It makes more sense to assume the world is full of great people, cultivate the ones where this is known, and to be smart about what you share, and where you do. Watch the big networks to see if you think they are taking liberties with your data and prepare for the eventuality if they do.

Through my work with Paladin Advisors Group, one of the longest-running clients has been Emulex Corporation, a networking solutions provider focused on the convergence of Fibre Channel and Ethernet. One of the company's system engineers, Thomas Jones, has caught the social media bug in a big way, getting deep into blogging, Twitter and podcasting. You can find him at @niketown588 and http://www.niketown588.com. A week or so ago, he kindly took the time to talk with me in a wide-ranging conversation that covered not just social media tips and missteps, but blogging strategies, the ongoing debate of iPhone versus Android, and more personal questions, ranging from family to fantasy football.

This laid back, but content-rich podcast, can be found on his Web site in two 30-minute parts, or below in full. His soothing demeanor and friendly style make for good background listening if you want to hear about everything from Sonos to iPad, Mario Kart and TweetDeck.

The full content is below:

As of Tuesday night, after 11 pm, we are officially outnumbered. My wife and I now get the opportunity to contend with three kids, the oldest pair being just over two years old, and the newest, starting his second day as I write. The expansion of the family continues the rapid rate of change brought on with our moving, joining my6sense, and setting other dominoes in motion. One person, in response to the many updates, even included my switch from iPhone to Android as a big move. I guess for any geek this is the case, but the addition of a new member of the family is a huge deal, much more than any operating system, office suite, or handheld.

Like Matthew and Sarah before him, Braden Thomas Gray (his full name) joined us four weeks ahead of schedule, deciding a little over 35 weeks of baking was enough. And as Sarah did in 2008, when the twins arrived, he will be spending a little more special time in the hospital as he gets needed attention.


As many parents know, the act of bringing a child into the world isn't always as beautiful as they show it in the movies. It's not always a few pushes, a cry, a smiling doctor, and a quick cuddle with mom as time of birth, weight and height are announced. It certainly hasn't been this way with us - and last night's experience was far from perfect, even if Braden's smile and fantastic skin show different through the pictures and short video I managed to escape with today. I'll save you the details, but we have had to measure our excitement with concern over the last 24-plus hours, and will keep watching until we get an all clear to take our newest guy home.

I enjoy a lot of things. I think I have more fun than most people. I enjoy interacting with all of you here and in the various places we find each other. I think I listen to more fun music than most people, and I have to self-censor constantly just so I don't ramble on like a comedian who has had a few too many drinks. But nothing has been more fantastic than raising Matthew and Sarah and watching them develop, sometimes slowly, and other times, extremely fast. They are a joy. Braden is here now, and even though I have never held him, or even touched him, he's already part of our family, and has a place.

With his rapid arrival, we're not fully ready. We don't have a car ready for three car seats, one facing backward, and two facing forward (as dictated by law). We don't have a dresser in Braden's room, and haven't found more than two newborn baby boy outfits in our garage, even though we know they are out there from when we did this just over two years ago. But Braden says he's ready, and after a rough start Tuesday night and Wednesday morning, he was looking me in the eyes through the incubator's plastic today, as he took deliberate breaths and balled his fists.


Braden's first YouTube Video

Coming on the back of late Monday's news, you would think I wanted to get everything out of the way in one week, but it's not true. Parenting is not something you get to draw up and then execute against. It takes permanent flexibility, and I look forward to the chance to bring Braden home soon and see just how much flexibility it takes to tangle with a newborn and two two year olds.

Tonight, as former Cleveland Cavalier LeBron James was making his announcement on ESPN that he was headed to play hoops for the Miami Heat, I like many other people, had the TV on to see what he would say. But I had the set on mute, as I was on the phone with my good friend Drew Olanoff, who got better news today than any Miami Heat fan. After a serious scare that had his friends and family worried he was setting up for a second round to fight cancer, he got a call today giving him the all clear, meaning instead of months of chemo, nausea, fatigue and worry, he gained a reprieve.

This is pretty much the best news of the year for me. (With the potential exception of our announcing baby #3 of course)

While I may at times seem detached and automated, and focused on tech, and while many people aren't seeing the real, true, social connections that can happen from the more virtual concepts of networks, "friends" and connections, I can verify they are real, with Drew being among the most clear connections I have gained from this Web experience. Despite our differences, Drew makes sense to me, and he is a close friend of my entire family, and hopefully, I am to his.

I've talked to you about his challenge with Hodgkin's Lymphoma that consumed much of his 2009. I told you about his starting a new phenomenon called BlameDrew'sCancer, which later morphed to BlameCancer, when he first kicked cancer to the curb. And in recent weeks, we morbidly talked about having to start a new domain name of blamedrewscanceragain.com and preparing for a much tougher fight. I had mentally resigned myself to the expectation that cancer was going to challenge him again, and that a fight was inevitable. I know he did too.

But today, on top of all the other news out there, from global issues, to jury verdicts and choices of well-paid basketball icons, there was really only one piece of news that mattered. A friend of mine and to the tech community at large is going to be with us, at full strength. The Web needs Drew, and so does my family. So cancer, please go away and don't come back. We're done with you.

The television has long been referred to as an electronic babysitter for busy parents, or their lazy, less-involved counterparts. Rather than designing interactive projects for their children, it's far easier to flip a switch to the tube and see the kids' faces go blank, but planted in one spot, for hours at a time. Be it children's cartoons, Disney movies or PBS, it's practically a time-honored tradition. In our home, the TV stays off, and the iPads come on, performing a similar function, but with an added twist, where the kids are interacting with the device, selecting programs, or browsing YouTube with their short attention spans and curious minds.

When I purchased the two iPads in our home, the theory was that one of the devices was for me, and the other was for my wife, to be shared with Matthew and Sarah, our twins who turned two years old near the end of June. But the truth is that I am almost exclusively still on the MacBook Air (or the HTC EVO) and use the iPad sporadically. But for my kids, it's practically an obsession. Both kids know how to say "Apple" and can ask for the iPads by name. They will even point to the door to our room, where they know they are stored (and charging) and ask us to go get them.



Matthew Shows His Sports Acumen on the iPad

As my kids have grown up around iPhones, they have practically been raised around touch screen interfaces, and they took to the iPads almost immediately. Matthew and Sarah both play the many sports games on the devices, including an array from Skyworks, ranging from bowling, soccer, baseball, and basketball, to the time-honored Skee-ball. If the game has a ball and consists of you flicking from one side of the screen to the other, they've pretty much got it nailed. And over time, I have seen them learn their favorite applications, and watch them navigate dialog boxes and go from screen to screen to start new parts of the app, or exit to a new one.

In addition to the simple games, Matthew and Sarah both enjoy an application called Doodle Buddy, which lets them essentially fingerpaint on the device, use stamps for frequently-used graphics, from dogs and cats to trees and emoticons.



Matthew and Sarah Get Early Access to iPads

Also, I can't underestimate the pervasiveness of YouTube in our home, now that the iPads have brought the world's amateur video network to be one click away on the iPads. Now it's a common scene to see Sarah in her PJs, sippy cup to one side and snack trap to the other, filled with Cheerios, intently choosing from her YouTube history to watch animals and people in all manner of antics. Sure enough, we get our fair share of annoying theme songs stuck in our head, but unlike the TV, the videos don't last 30 minutes and aren't interrupted by blatant advertising.

As a parent, there are a few changes I would like to make to the iPad in terms of how my kids have access to the device. I would like to have a setting which requires a password to delete applications from the device, or to move them off the dock or around the screen. I've come home to find my Dock empty, and apps in new places, or apps vanish, requiring me to download them again. And I would also like to set a volume maximum so even if Sarah swipes from left to right on her favorite YouTube video, that it's not blaring. I'd love to disable the home button to make the iPad more of a kiosk. And yes, if either of them bump into content that's not my favorite, it would be good to add a specific video or video publisher to a "Don't show again" list, so they don't get rediscovered.

Unlike televisions, the iPads are also light and portable, and can go from room to room or place to place. So while we haven't exercised this option too frequently, we could have the kids watching YouTube in their car seats while tapping into my WiFi hotspot from the front seat. We can even hand each kid an iPad and send them to different rooms if conflicts arrive. And while the Internet is a big place indeed, the kids' ability to point and click keeps them much further away from the darker corners than once they learn the ability to type and search for keywords, so we're in a pretty safe place today, one filled with silly songs, sports, animals and video after video of giggling babies.

I guess that in our home it was pretty much guaranteed our kids would be gadget freaks at a young age. I promise they're getting their share of traditional learning with real hardbound books, blocks, and the usual array of cars, trucks and balls of all kinds, but you throw iPads into the mix, and it opens up a new world that has our TV remaining off. It's a fantastic market segment for Apple that no other manufacturer can match for a combination of ease of use and realm of possibility.