We’re in San Francisco for a month so that my wife Stephanie can get knee surgery from a really, really good surgeon.

Since I’m in his clinic every day, this morning I asked him to take a look at a nagging pain in my knees.

While he was examining my left knee, it made a “clunk” sound.

“Huh,” he said.

“Yeah, it always does that,” I said, “what is that?”

“It’s a clunk.”

He then gave me a really good explanation of where the clunk comes from, which I had never understood in 20 years of clunking. (Apparently there’s a fat pad underneath the knee cap which the knee cap rolls over, and if the fat pad is too big, the knee cap makes a sound when it slips over the hump and clunks into place.)

A few recent toys.

Panasonic GF1. This is my new camera and it’s rekindled my love of photography. It’s small enough to fit in a jacket pocket but it takes phenomenal photos and HD video. Because it’s so portable, I carry it around almost all the time. So I’m actually using it, unlike my big SLR, which sits on a shelf most of the time. And since I’m planning to spend a lot of time traveling in 2010, this is feeling like a brilliant purchase.

Here are a few pictures I took with it. I can’t do it justice so you should check out this great review of using it in the Himalayas.

Big thanks to Garrett for recommending this one.

Today was my last day at Novell.

I joined in 2003 when Novell bought Ximian, the Linux startup I founded with my dear friend Miguel de Icaza ten years ago.

Novell gave me some incredible opportunities and the freedom to work on exciting projects, for which I am very grateful. I learned a lot, and had the chance to work with some wonderful people. It was a great ride.

Now, having just gotten married, and with my latest project, SUSE Studio, out the door, it feels like a natural breaking point and time for something new.

So my freshly-minted wife Stephanie and I are seizing this chance to travel around the world in 2010. We don’t have a fixed itinerary or return date and we want to keep it that way as much as possible.

I was talking with a friend about where the best algorithm developers come from.  We were hypothesizing that China, Russian Federation, and Eastern Europe would be on the short list.  There’s obviously no perfect gauge for such a qualitative question.  But, I decided to look at TopCoder’s Top Coder ranking for algorithm developers – and here’s what it looks like:

Thomas Friedman:

The most striking feature of Barack Obama’s campaign for the presidency was the amazing, young, Internet-enabled, grass-roots movement he mobilized to get elected. The most striking feature of Obama’s presidency a year later is how thoroughly that movement has disappeared.