Christmas Corpses

I went on my usual walk again this morning and started noticing the corpses of this annual holiday lying lifeless beside the road. Why is it necessary for so much of the world to annually cut down trees, torture them by bringing them inside, and then throw them out? It's really insane (and very weird too.)

My honeypot and I will have to think of some other equally weird, but less harmful tradition, for future years. I'm quite confident that we won't ever be having a formerly live tree in our house. And the survival rate of using live trees isn't very good because they come out of hibernation whilst in a warm house during the winter holiday.

Do you have any ideas of a tradition to start for this holiday? Let me know.

Happy New Year!

Projects and Grand Theft Auto

Have you seen this game? It's been out a while and it got quite a bit of attention when it did come out. My honeypot was playing it for a long time tonight. It's so bizarre.

There was one time when we couldn't tell if there was really a couple screaming at each other outside or it was part of the game. (Yes, these things happen more than you would think around our neighborhood.) Truthfully, I think certain cultures are just louder than others. But beyond that, we do have our moments here in the neighborhood.

We've had this extremely long wonderful vacation! I love it. It's been so mellow and amazingly relaxing.

It's given me time to do a bunch of projects; like buying a bed frame, setting it up, and swapping our yoga room with our bedroom. I also wrote a script to automate some of the organization of my digital images. It's pretty cool. I also cleaned out part of our basement. It's still a little chaotic down there but I made some room and progress.

My honeypot built some juggle club holders for the wall and a skateboard holder.

Not Much

Wow. Yar, I'm really sorry you had such a horrible experience. I hope you come over tonight and drink away your frustration. Thuy too. And anybody else that might know who we are.

On another note my honeypot recently got a new camera. A fancy pants camera. I'm including a couple of my favorite pictures here. The first one was actually taken with his cell phone, but it's still pretty special.

On a Happier Note...

Dear Valued US Airways Customer:

Thank you for your patience during our processing of your claim. We appreciate this opportunity to address your concerns regarding your baggage mishandling.

Please accept our sincere apology for any inconvenience and frustration caused by this incident. We assure you that this is not the impression we wish to convey, or the level of service we strive to provide. Information regarding our baggage service is valuable and will be used as a tool for continuous service improvements.

Reimbursement for the full claimed amount will be mailed under a separate cover. Please allow 10-14 business days for receipt of this check.

We hope you will consider this incident the exception and not the rule. We encourage you to try us again, and look forward to welcoming you back on board another US Airways flight.

Sincerely,

US Airways Central Baggage Resolution

Way to go, US Airways!

My Struggle to See Again

Last Thursday, a friend from work invited me to a Sharks game. I haven't been to a hockey game since I was maybe 13 years old, and the ticket was free so I figured why not. We were g0ing to take the CalTrain to SJ, since it takes only half an hour on the express train. Driving takes your entire life. Just as I got out of the car, I decided to bring my glasses with me. He made it sound like our seats were pretty far up, and I didn't want to be sitting there for a couple of hours and not be able to see what was going on.

Turns out, I didn't really need them, which is a good thing, since somewhere between my car and the arena, I dropped my glasses. Great. I can see ok without my glasses, which is why I almost never wear them. The DMV disagrees, unfortunately. I have one good eye and one bad eye, so it doesn't actually affect my ability to see things like cars and people, but it is kind of distracting. So I figure I'll just go get some glasses and whatever, and I'll be done with it.

Turns out glasses cost a lot of money if you don't happen to have a vision plan, which I currently do not. I don't know if I covered this in a previous post, but last year my HR department fucked me, and I have to wait until the New Year before I get to use my fucking insurance. I had my vision checked out for $60 at a place that's close to my work. It's a brand new, but the place is kind of ridiculous. They had their grand opening, but they barely have a staff, and they're still missing a bunch of their equipment. There's just the optometrist and a receptionist. After I got my prescription, I waited a couple of days to see if my glasses would turn up. I wasn't anxious to spend anything on glasses before my insurance kicks in.

I gave up today and went into the shop. I figured that I'd go with contacts, since they don't have to fucking send away for them and make me wait for 7-10 days. The lady sits me down and gives me a contact, and gives me a real brief explanation on how to put them in, and then she disappears into a room to help another customer. So I try to stick this thing into my eye. As expected, this isn't a particularly easy task. I'm not fond of sticking shit in my own eye, and as soon as the thing touches anything my eye shuts. I'm trying to keep my lids spread with my fingers, but there isn't a whole lot to grip onto. The fact that my eyes are tearing the whole time doesn't make it any easier. Eventually, I drop the contact onto the floor, ending the experiment. The thing's contaminated by now, so I can't keep attempting to put it in my eye. I sit there for another five minutes or so while I run through the possibilities of what to do next. I run out of ideas and walk out.

Thinking Lens Crafters (glasses in about an hour!), I head over to the mall. Nothing enhances a bad mood like hanging out at the mall. I go to three glasses shops in the mall, and none of them even approach an hour turn around time. Can I please pay $300 fucking dollars so I can wait 5 days for a pair of glasses? Pearle Vision was my favorite. They were going to charge about $300 for the lenses alone, and about $250 for the frames alone, but they would give me a deal if I got lenses AND frames. 40% off. Or I could get buy one get one free. So no matter what you're purchasing, you either get 40% off or 50% off. I wonder if anyone thinks they're getting a deal. I'm probably just going to have to wait until next year to get a pair of glasses. The whole experience filled me with a dangerous blend of both murderous rage and crippling depression. I just want to be able to fucking see, why should it be so difficult?

Eternity and Mission Successful

My Dad is here! He arrived a day late due to the crazy weather that's hitting the east coast. There's been some schedule changes as a result and it's all working out with time off work and such.

In other news, I've been working on getting my wedding ring finished. (Either the cool one my honeypot was working on or just by buying one.) The cool one that my honeypot made mostly works, but sometimes doesn't. For those who don't know about it here's a description: Basically imagine a Tibetan prayer ring. You know the kind - they have a part in the middle that you can spin. Usually that spin part just rubs on the other part of the ring, but my super star engineer thought it would be much better if it had bearings. And not just any bearings, but sapphire ones. They're these tiny balls. They're pretty cool.

I while ago I spoke with one of his friends who has the skills to get the project successfully done (as my honeypot is worn out from working on it). He seemed pretty reluctant to get involved - even though I was offering to pay him like a normal customer. His reluctance is understandable given his relationship to my honeypot, but he sure would beat some random person found through craigslist. I pretty much gave up after trolling craigslist trying to find somebody to hire. I just want a wedding band that I can actually wear. Is that too much to ask for? I didn't think so.

While we were out walking around Burlingame I ran across this ring in a consignment shop and I like it a lot. The only problem is that it was just a little bit too large. So the purveyor walked over to a jewelry shop with me and I talked to them about fixing it. They did it right then and there by putting these two little beads in it. They also cleaned it and it looks so much better than when I bought it.

It's a really nice ring. That's not to say that I wouldn't love for the original project to be completed. Because really, how cool is a wedding band that moves freely that has bearings? Pretty freakin sweet! But I'm content with my completion of my "wedding band project."

For those who are interested: the new ring is an antique eternity band with blue sapphires made out of 14k white gold mixed with platinum. It's similar to this, but lose the diamonds and the metal is a different color.

Houston and Dad

This past weekend my honeypot and I went to Houston to visit some of his high school friends. They have a 14 month old boy who was really cute and mellow. We were lucky enough to be there long enough for him to be confortable around us. It was nice.

The best part of Houston, besides the super cheap house prices and the warm weather, was that where they lived there were bike paths everywhere. Where they live was clearly at one time a development - as demonstrated by the windy roads and lack of grid streets. I guess it still is a development. However, it was great there. They clearly did not clear cut the land before building because there were lost of nice trees.

The other cool thing about them is that he's a pilot and so he works for blocks of time and then is home for larger blocks of time. She's a stay at home Mom. So they get these larger blocks of time when they don't have to do anything. It's pretty cool. Yeah, I'm jealous. It sure would be nice to not be limited to my weekends - the same time I have to do all my errands that have to be completed during "regular business hours." They deserve to have such a great setup.

In other news, my Dad is coming to visit! He'll be here Thurs night through really early Monday morning. We have plans to go Kart race on Friday at the fun one. And we might go to Maverick's during the weekend. If anybody else has a good idea for something fun to do while he's here, I'm all ears.

Calorie Restriction Society

Yeah, it's a little weird, but it's a little of what I'm into right now. Don't worry, it probably won't last that long. I'm very whimsical like that.
Basically the idea goes like this: Your body has the capacity to efficiently digest X amount of food. When you've digested that X, your body is no longer as efficient of a digestion machine and thus you wear out due to the inefficiencies. You might get cancer, or whatever evil disease you might die from. So what you do is eat less calories per day than you would normally and slow down your metabolism a bit. In this way you live longer and in a more healthy state because you don't wear down your body early. They've shown that this works.
The important thing to remember is that in those less calories per day you must get the exact (or more) amount of nutrients that you need to be healthy. That's pretty much the main difference between this and anorexia. Eat less, but make each bite count more.
Here's a pretty good article about the whole thing.
I've been doing this for a couple weeks now less than perfectly consistently. I feel a lot better and I've discovered that I'm less sensitive to not eating constantly. Previously, If I didn't eat for four hours or so I would get this gnarly headache that would not go away. But now I don't seem to have that problem. I have some theories as to why this is. Perhaps in another post I'll get into that.
Here's another article.
I think the most fascination side effect of this is the amount I'm learning about food. Did you know that a plain bagel has almost 400 calories? That's ridiculous. I wouldn't waste that many of my calories on something so useless nutritionally now. And as a result I'm eating much less of those things that probably were spiking my blood sugar. Cool stuff. Food is life.

Roomba Love!

Today's my birthday. For all practical purposes, I was going to ignore today as a birthday day and instead just play it like any other day.
Last night my honeypot, and I'll say this correctly, got dragged to Gary Danko. I like good food. But my frugality or miserly ways prevents me from eating out at places like these very often. My guilt or bad feelings about the cost destroy the fun. But I decided it was my birthday, and I haven't really treated this day appropriately for a couple years. Today's my birthday!
The restaurant was amazing, and worth every freakin dollar. But, I probably won't ever go there again. I just don't need to. Once was enough fantasticness for me.
A couple days ago I spontantiously, but with much subconsciously thought, bought a roomba. Or maybe that was more like a week ago. Anyway, the roomba arrived, and right now it's vacuuming our living room. I can't believe how much dirt it's collected from the kitchen, which it finished a little while ago. I'm not sure I'll ever be able to live without the roomba again. And I'm simply not kidding.

My Bad Luck Shirt

After a bunch of unfortunate delays, I finally made it to San Francisco on Sunday, but my bag didn't follow me. This isn't the first time that a bag got delayed for me, so I wasn't too worried about it. They said that they'd probably be able to get my bag to me by 8:00PM the same day, so it would really be a pretty minor inconvience. Unfortunately, my bag didn't arrive. Several calls later, I can finally track my bag online, but there is no updated status.

So I wake up today in a particularly bad mood. For whatever reason, I say fuck it, I'm wearing my bad luck shirt today. If today's going to be a fucking bummer, I may as well live it up. Work was... troubling. Nothing too bad right now, but things aren't working out for me, and I'm hoping to avoid big trouble later. At about noon, I hear from the airport, and they say they are going to deliver my bag from 6-8PM. For whatever reason, this doesn't cheer me greatly.

I get home, and wait. The driver shows up at about 9PM. I already know I'm fucked. But there was nothing I could do. I took that bad inside and checked for my GPS. I knew it wasn't going to be there. I know not to pack expensive things in checked luggage. I've made the mistake before, and got screwed then too. The security guys are going to scan your luggage, and if they see something weird, like electronics, they're going to open the bag. And if it's not them, it could be the guys at the airport, or the guy that drives it out to you. The airline refuses to take responsibility, and if they refuse to take responsibility, there is no reason for them to protect against theft.

I'm not superstitious enough to actually believe it's a bad luck shirt. I have just happened to have had some particularly bad experiences while wearing the shirt. Of course it's all coincidental, and my bad feelings about the shirt probably create a self-fulfilling prophecy. But come on, my bad attitude doesn't have anything to do with my GPS being stolen.

Lessons Learned:
1.) Don't pack expensive items in your checked luggage. I actually know this one, but it's been a while, and I wasn't thinking along those lines when I packed.

2.) Retire the shirt already. Maybe I'll burn it in the desert, or maybe I'll just tear it to pieces in a more personal ceremony.

3.) Don't tempt fate. Just because something bad is going to happen, it doesn't mean that things can't get even worse. I had an upset stomach once, so I decided to eat Taco Bell. I figured, if I already have an upset stomach, how much worse could it get? Much worse.

Flying the Sierra (aka Flying the Dog)

We just got back from a family get together at my honeypot's Mom's house. The weather was pretty nice, and the weekend was mellow and fun. We hung out and played with the horses, the dog, some games and each other. It was a nice change of scene.

My honeypot and his sister are into Acroyoga. They have various interesting looking postures that they can do where one person is "flying" the other. Like this. He thought it would be fun to "fly" the dog. She was remarkably tolerant of this behavior. (It's amazing what some animals or even humans will tolerate for a little bit of attention.)

All in all it was a good weekend.

Too many photographs

I've been in Jersey since Monday night, and it hasn't exactly been a thrilling trip. I don't really know anyone beside family out here any more, so I've spent a lot of time watching TV, fixing some things, and not much else. It doesn't feel like there are any new experiences to be had over here anymore.

One of my cousins wanted some old photos for some project she's putting together, so my mom and I went through all the old albums. It was surprising to see all the photos of when I was a kid. I barely know anything about the people in the photos anymore. They all seemed so important at the time, and now they're completely irrelevant. Then there were the photos of the family, some of them going back as far as 1914. It was weird to look at photos in which everyone had passed on. Unpleasant to think about how little they left behind. My mom also has a lot of photos all over the condo. I'm not sure how I feel about having to look at dead people everywhere I go.

It really hasn't been that bad of a trip. Thanksgiving was nice at my cousin's place. I got to catch up with everyone, sort of. It was nice seeing my mom, my uncle, my sister and her husband. It'll be nice to be back in California though.

Careful Consideration of Creative Crafts (and Aliteration)

On Saturday I met up with a friend and had a canning party. We bought some basil, onions and tomatoes at the nearby farmer's market and canned a red sauce and an Indian saucy thing. The red sauce was really more of an orange with the heirloom tomatoes we used. Too bad we were only a couple months late in buying the tomatoes. Next year I might try and can when the tomatoes are plentiful (and cheap), instead of waiting until possibly the last weekend they're available.

The other highlight was having breakfast with my long lost friend who moved to Dublin for a girl. Considering how indecisive he can be, it's a wonder he made it over there. I'm really glad he did because she's really special (and I think it was good for him to go.)

Another highlight was my friend's 31st birthday party on Sunday night. It was quite an event. Besides the homemade enchiladas (complete with homemade mole saucy, that was out of this world) it was an experience to be around so many toddlers. It was chaotic. I was whelmed. I enjoyed watching them be themselves and explore, but wow, those kids sure do have a lot of energy. The parents looked a little .. run down. Especially the ones with the 7 week old. I suppose that's to be expected.

The picture above is the canned goods and the finished hats. The green hat was made by my honeypot and includes some daring dinosaur fins that stand straight up like a Mohawk when worn. The other hat is one that I made in about a day and a half. It helped that I was stuck in an hour and a half of traffic just to get to work. I made about half of the hat then. No, I wasn't driving, I was carpooling.

Another exciting thing in my life is riding my bike to work. I have this super fun bouncy fold up commuter bike that I rode the end of last week to work. It's pretty fun. It has shocks on the seat post.

And the last thing worth mentioning is that I finally finished my wedding album. My work generously bought me this silver engraved wedding album right after I got married and it's been sitting on my desk these many months beckoning me to fill it with the best pictures of our wedding. I finally went through all my hundreds of pictures from friends and hand picked the best ones. I'm impressed with the result and I'm excited to have it (Thanks Stephanie!). There really is something to the tactile nature of physical pictures as opposed to digital ones.

That's one of the reasons I'll be watching closely the success or failure of the Kindle. Amazon's replacement for the book. I can't imagine every giving up the ability to curl the edges of my paperbacks while reading. (I'm currently reading Wicked by Gregory Maguire.)

My Favorite Pictures from New Zealand

Waitomo Caves, Waikato, NZ
This was one of the highlights of this adventure. We had a group of 8 friends traveling around the North Island, and on one of our last days we spent about 6 hours or so cruising through this cave on a private tour. It was amazing. There were glowworms that looked like stars when it was dark. (Their poop glows to catch bugs. Ingenious!)

At the end of it was a sump. This was where the water complete went under the rock for a couple meters and you had to just trust that there would be a room after swimming through this tunnel. Very scary. (I didn't do it.)

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Wellington, NZ
This mustache party was in honor of our friend, Lance. Lance and Erika moved to Wellington for the year. They will thankfully be moving back home soon. They've been missed.

We were out wandering about and we saw these adhesive mustaches and thought "Why not have a mustache party?" And so it was.

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Ferry between Picton and Wellington through Cook Strait and the Marlborough Sounds
This is an example of how scenic it is here. This was taken from the ferry on my way down to the South Island while traveling on my own.

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Kaikoura, NZ (East Coast of S. Island)
We went on a three or four hour hike that went around the coast of this peninsula and cut across. It was breath taking beauty every where you look, and I spotted this different cloud formation.

The best part of this sunny day was we had finally headed to the East Coast after traveling along the West Coast for days in the rain. This sunny day was a delight.

On a different note, have you guys checked out the geotagged photos - yahoo map mashup? It's a little slow, but you can go anywhere and if you're patient enough, see some really cool pictures taken exactly there. You may find it here: http://flickr.com/map/

Craft Time in the Air!

It all started with my honeypot losing his home made hat (from last year) and then later asking for some crochet instructions. And now he has one completed hat, made by me (seen in the picture on his head); and another hat that is almost done, made by him (seen in his hands). Note the start of his dinosaur fins. He inspired me to pick up a craft that I haven't really been doing much of lately.

A couple days after this instructional request was his first ever craft night. Which happened to fall on his 31st birthday. The craft night had a very good turnout, was fun and very crafty!

Last night we stayed at home and crafted some more. I finished off some semi-curtains and have been crocheting all weekend long. (You can see our new semi-curtains behind my honeypot on the right of the window.) We've been doing more projects around the house lately. It's nice and cozy.

My trip to New Zealand was great fun and I intend to do everything I can to have another trip soon. (That would be probably a year or so with work vacation limitations and all.) Basically everywhere in NZ is scenic. Everywhere. The people are friendly, it's very organized, and they have tons of amazing hikes all over the place. Even though the island is relatively small, there is a very large variety of ecosystems and terrain types there. It's amazing!
Pictures here.

0 Days and No More Counting

In a few short hours I leave for New Zealand. I'm really looking forward to the adventure, differences in culture and general way of live.

Lucky for me, I'm already packed and I'm basically blowing time until I need to leave for the airport.

My trip will begin in Wellington where I'll be for a couple days and then I head across Cook Straight via ferry to the Picton and Nelson areas. I'll be here on my own until the 16th at which point I fly to Queenstown to catch up with the crew (Erika, Lance, Davey). We're going out to Milford Sound and then back to Queenstown to catch up with Jeff. With the group of five, we'll make our way up the west side of the southern island and take the ferry back to Wellington. Here we'll catch up with more friends who are arriving (Cindy and Joe) on the 21st and 23rd.

From this point we'll be heading through the north island arriving in Auckland by the 29th, at which point most of us come back to the states.

I'm going to miss my honeypot.

This past weekend was fun! The third annual Berkeley Juggling & Unicycle Festival happened here in Berkeley. There were tons of people around and lots of activities. We also had a bunch of people staying with us. I think all in all everything went pretty smoothly and was a lot of fun.

Eleven Days and Counting

I'm so ready for a vacation. I can't even begin to describe how badly I need this.

I was at work until 1 am on Tues, rewriting a part of a project that went live on Wed. It's a little crazy, but it was the right thing to do. The code was crap, and every time I tried to fix one bug, it would cause other bugs in this part of the project. So on Tues afternoon, knowing full well that we were launching on Wed afternoon, I got permission to rip it up and re-code it. In the end this feature was relatively bug free and it will be so much easier to use that class in other projects.

The crazy thing about it, beyond that it was so close to launch, is that I was sick. I worked from home on Monday because of it, and ended up taking a sick day on Thursday. But I worked 16 hours on Tues. (I'm feeling much better now)

I leave for my trip in 11 days! I'm so excited.

The trip planning is pretty insane with our group. There's very few of us arriving at the same time, at the same place. And there's currently 7 of us.

I have a good idea of what I want to do, but we'll see what works with the schedule.

In other news, I finally bought a new hard drive and have enough space to get all the music I have in one space, organized. I have over 141gb, thanks to yar (He has really good music, lost of hip hop too!). And I installed this program called SimplifyMedia so that we can play those files on other computers, even if they're not stored in iTunes. My honeypot dislikes iTunes and instead uses winamp. But I can still see, and play his music through my iTunes, and he can play mine using iTunes on his computer (without putting his music in iTunes). It's pretty sweet.

En-RAGED

So I've got my little habit. Around 2:00 in the afternoon, when I'm having trouble figuring out how I'm going to survive for the rest of the day, I take a break and go grab some coffee. Coffee at work means the Flavia machine. I grab a cup, go to the freezer, take about 4-5 ice cubes, load up the Flavia with a Sumatra packet, and in less than a minute, I have a nice, strong, ice coffee. Well, it's nice enough anyway, and it's free. For the past few months, this has been going well. Lately though, I've noticed little things that are making me a little suspicious. My Sumatra is being consumed at an unusual rate. I'll climb up (on a chair) to grab the cardboard box with the Sumatra packets, pull down about 20-30 of them, and put them in the drawer. The next day, they're all gone. This has happened for about 3-4 days in a row. Somebody's fucking with my fucking Flavia fix. My guess is that some selfish (and apparantly not very resourceful) person is taking the Sumatra packets back to his or her desk. Either that, or they are deliberatily trying to drive me crazy. I don't think I'm being paranoid. Not sure what I can do about it though, unless I'm willing to do a stakeout. Any ideas?

And the Bull is Born.

A while ago a friend of mine suggested using Picasa. I downloaded it and played with it a little bit and moved on. But I never solved the problem of a good tool to manage my digital pictures. Now, many months later, I'm using Picasa. The more I use it the more I like it. It's actually a really useful program. My favorite feature about it is that it will 'monitor' particular folders and automatically add any new pictures from those folders into your photo storage spot. It's useful when there are two people shooting pictures and storing them in different places, like my honeypot and me. To those of you out there who don't have a good way of looking at your digital images, go check out Picasa.

This weekend was pretty fun and mellow. I went to a friend's baby shower, had a poker night with lots of Sherry, figured out the list of activities I want to do in New Zealand, finally fixed my super slow desktop computer, and got lots of other errands done too.
(New Zealand is 16 days and counting!)

Loyalty and Terpitude

What causes family loyalty? What I'm asking is this: Why do we put up with behaviors from our family members we wouldn't put up with from a friend?

Every so often I repeat a similar situation, by deliberate act of will, and during and after the event I think about the above question. It brings me to this quote:

Insanity is doing the same thing, over and over again, but expecting different results. -Albert Einstein

Here I am, in the same depressing, miserable situation wondering why I even bother. And as I've gotten older, I've bothered less. Perhaps, someday I'll stop bothering at all.

Terpitude is defined as:

Inherent baseness or vileness of principle, words, or actions; depravity.

Another Day in Paradise

This past week or so has been basic hell at my work. And I don't mean due to unreasonable work loads, unreasonable management, or unreasonable expectations. No, this past week was unlucky engineering hell. So many things went wrong that you'd think we were cursed or something. Maybe we collectively have enough disbelief in god that we were put through the wrath of hell as punishment. I'm not really sure. But as my boss said "things are really falling apart." That might be an understatement.

Collectively, in the past week the following things occurred.

We lost 2 development servers, including our source control, bug management software, wiki and other resources running from these machines. Of course we had backups and we were able to reassembly our development lives on another machine. But that took many, many hours and we weren't complete recovered several days later when, BAM!, it happened again. The second time it happened was the last day we had to work before a very large deadline.

To those of you less technical, this situation is the equivalent of being a good driver and blowing out three tires on the same wheel, each occurring about 20 minutes after the previous one had been replaced. It's bad and unlucky. It's probably statistically worst than unlucky. It's down right weird.

We had another situation that I won't get into here, that essentially caused all of our account permissions to be changed in such a drastic way that I couldn't get on the servers I needed to be on to do my work. This caused a large waste of time for all of our developers as we waited and worked towards resolution.

We had a huge deadline late last night and I got up especially early (before 7am) to get to work early so I could possibly not work all night long. I was there for 12 hours before I could do any work because of the second development server that was lost, which I already mentioned above. 12 freakin hours!! Then finally, about dinner time, we were back in business for work. It sucked. The worst thing about it was knowing this huge deadline was so near, and not being able to work towards it. I worked until about 2AM until I was so tired that I wasn't programming well anymore.

Then, lucky me (but not my other co-workers) I was so tired that I slept in this morning and showed up to work about noon. This being just mere minutes before the internet at our office was repaired, because it had been down all morning. So, most people in our office couldn't work. Did I mention that our phone system is also on the internet? There were no phones either. It was a rough day for the whole office.

And! The cream on the cake was that while we had no internet in our office, Google maps changed their API which resulted in the maps on our live website to break. But, we didn't have any internet so it was near impossible to fix. It was fixed by breaking every programming rule in the book. We edited live code on live web servers. Scary. Did I mention how scary that is yet? Well, sometimes you got to do what you got to do.

There are a couple more happenings that belong in this pile of unbelievable bad luck, but the mundane details aren't really worth your time. All you need to know is that I might be cursed so pary to god before you see me next.

In other news, the yard that we're working on clearing out the vines from is doing well. In no time at all we'll be able to build some food gardening beds and start growing our own food. I'm looking forward to that. Also, this past weekend punkinpie and I got together and prototyped custom homemade blinds for our living room windows. I did the sewing and he did the wood working and it came out really cool. Did I mention that their top down bottom up ones?

Burning Man and Back to Work

Punkinpie and I just got back from Burning Man. I had a good time even though the weather was bad. There were several really severe storms (60 mph winds! that lasted hours) and at one point it even rained. The last time I saw rain out there was in 2001.

Other than that, it was interesting to note how much of the novelty wore off. I got out and explored just as much as I wanted to, but it seemed like a lot less than past years. I suppose some of that could be caused by just how blazing hot it was out there. But at night I also wasn't as active as I remember being in the past too. I think part of that had to do with just how tired I was from my 'real' life. I basically arrived at bm with a sleep deficit, and I caught up out there. It was so nice to sleep, even it it was in a camping situation.

A couple things that I really love about bm is the creativity and do-it-yourself attitude out there. There are so many creative projects and art installations. It's really inspiring. I also really enjoy camping with a group. It's cool to see how everyone works together and make it all work.

We got home on Monday around 7am after leaving the event around 6pm the previous evening. It was slow getting out because of the backup at the gate (~2+ hours), and then the two lane road to interstate 80 is always really slow with the large amount of traffic. That took us another 2 or so hours. Then we stopped in Reno for dinner and were so tired driving through the pass that we pulled over and slept.

I really wish I had the time to stay through Monday or later like we used to. For one thing it's so much faster to get out because you don't have to deal with the thousands of people leaving, trying to make it to work. I guess on the other hand staying while everybody is packing gets old because there's so much extra dust in the air due to the cars driving around. This year was an especially dusty year with the storms and such.

Today at work was really nice because I was so much calmer. I had gotten away from a lot of the stress and had that just-back-from-a-vacation mellowness. I hope I can keep that going for a while. Lucky for me, the big gnarly project that we're in the midst of is doing well, and is completely on schedule for the launch next week. That's really nice too.

(They said the population at bm this year was over 48,000)

Company Parties and Recruiting

This evening my company had a party. The idea was by having a good party with our building mates and prospective hires that we would build a reputation as being a fun place to work. And we are a pretty fun place to work.
Today's party was the first time that I actually hung out with everybody. Usually I'll hang around for 10 minutes or so and cal it good and go back to work. I decided today that I deserved to actually party with everybody else. Why is it that the engineers are usually still slaving away while everybody else is partaking in the fun activities that we have? I'm guessing it's a combination of the stereotypical lack of social skills thing and the sheer volume of work that there is. It was hard to not work while being at work and knowing how much there is to get done before the demo. And I'm leaving in a couple work days for a week.
After the company party I headed to the the orbit room to meet up with an old friend who moved away to Ann Arbor. She was briefly in town for a wedding. I'm glad I got to see her because besides being a really amazingly cool person, she always reminds me that I can be a better person in so many ways. I'm in no way stuck here, I choose every minute to be the person I am, right here and right now. In her past she really worked on herself and her issues as as project, and she came out of that a much happier, better adjusted and motivated person. She moved away to go to grad school and pursue a dream that I think all of her work made her realize that she deserved to have. And not later, but now.
She's one of my amazing and inspiring friends. My hat is off to her.

New Toys and One Hand Tied Behind My Back

That's my cat. Isn't she cute?
This picture was taken with the camera found in my new laptop.
I recently got a pretty nice MacBook Pro from work. It's a really nice computer. I decided on a mac because I really wanted to try one and I wasn't that committed to the development tools I use currently. I thought it would be cool to make a mac my primary platform and see what all the fuss was about.
Well, so far, I think the fuss is over nothing. Right now I prefer my pc. There's several reasons for this. The first is that I know all the shortcuts and tricks for getting done what I'm doing at any time on my pc. This is something I expect will fade into the distance as I get 'seasoned' with the mac. The second is that the interface is really slow on the mac. I think they do that on purpose. I know it's not the hardware, because this computer has 4 gigs of ram. Yes, it's crazy, true, and blew my knee high socks off when I figured it out. I guess ram just ain't as expensive as it used to be. Well, that's about it for now. It'll be pretty interesting to see what I say in several months when I'm finally used to this os. I have to say that I really like the fact that this is unix. I like that alot.
The picture above was taken with the camera in my laptop. How weird is that?

Burning man is 7 days away exactly. Right now next week, we should be driving away towards Black Rock City, or at least finishing up packing, I hope.

Four Post Cage

After work on Friday I met my honey pot at the ramp with another friend and had a drink.
Afterwards I spent the rest of my evening hanging around the house. I can't even think of what I did exactly.
Saturday we went out to breakfast and then ran some Burning Man errands. We only have this next weekend to prepare. Tick tock.
Later on we went to our friends going away BBQ at her parents house. I'm pretty sure that they purchased the house brand new and it was very large. They mentioned how the birds were less frequently around there as the developments were being built further down the canyon. My honey pot mentioned how it was so similar to Southern California. There was a hill brown with dryness and the sun was hot and bright.
Today we had a burning man meeting and organized ourselves. I really like that our camp this year doesn't include any new burners, and that there aren't any crazy projects. I say this because it means our camp is so simple. Everybody knows what needs to be done to get there easily and be well prepared, and there aren't any crazy projects consuming tons of time.
After the meeting we went juggling, and I passed with a group of 7 people together! I didn't last very long, but it was pretty fun. I burned out playing pretty quickly because the throws I was receiving were so much harder to catch than the great ones my honey pot throws. I think when I get more comfortable with clubs, I'll try passing with the group again.
Afterwards, yar came over and we hung out. We played some games and brainstormed bm projects. There's a lot of creativity flowing right now. Tis the season.
I'm having a hard time imagining getting done the amount of work that needs to happen in this next week. It's downright scary. It'll be really good to have this vacation after this coming week and a couple days. Our project demos on the 30th. Yikes!

Sleepy, Sleepy and Worky, Worky

I'm so tired right now. This past week I've been having that heavy eye lid thing where I feel like I'm about to just drop into a deep slumber right were I am. It's pretty intense. Work is really busy and I'm working a lot harder lately to make our deadlines.

In fact, I'm just going to go sleep instead of writing this.

Kitty Food and Natural Gas Cars

I just got my new car!
It's so exciting, I can't even describe it.

A friend of mine bought it brand new two years ago, and she's leasing it to me for the next year while they live in another country. The car is a 2005 Honda Civic that runs on natural gas. It can go about 200 miles on a full tank. Besides not using gas, I can also drive over the Bay Bridge without paying the $4 toll, and I can even drive in the car pool lane without having anybody else in the car. As somebody who commutes across that bridge everyday, and usually sits in the backed up traffic, this is pretty special. I'm really glad that I have the opportunity to check out this natural gas car. Maybe I'll go ahead and buy one myself in a year.

The other exciting thing about this car is that it's so new and nice inside. Ooooh La La. I've been driving beaters, or at least old cars, my entire life. For example, take my current car. It's a 1986 VW Jetta Diesel that has over 250,000 miles on it. Yes, that's a quarter of a million miles. Since I've moved to this area I've had 5 windows and 4 stereos stolen. Currently, I just have a hole where the stereo should be, and a bunch of wires hanging out.

We were driving to dinner tonight to celebrate and I was playing this great cd. I noticed that the music moved from one side of the car to the other, and I mentioned it to my honey pot. He made some comment about stereo music. I was listening to stereo music in my car with quality speakers!! How exciting! Yes, I've never had a car with stereo, or at least speakers good enough that you would notice such a thing. I'm so looking forward to rocking out with loud music in this car, my car for now. I'm going to sing at the top of my lungs.

The other exciting and mystifying thing that happened is that Stella seems to love her new food. She's a rather finicky cat, and we recently ran out of her cat food. The one she's been eating for 6 1/2 years. It's good food, made well, with good ingredients. That normally isn't such an issue because I would normally go out and get more. Not this time. The company discontinued making it. I immediately started envisioning my cat, near death, all waif like, refusing to eat because of her missing favorite cat food. Stella needed food, so I bought a random bag of other good food and worried about the future. But when I opened the bag, she seemed excited by it. So I put a scoop in her bowl next to what was left of her old food and went to work. When I got home, she had picked out the new food and left the old food cold and alone in the bowl. Stella seems to love the new food even better than the old! I'm so glad that this was a smooth transition. It could have been really difficult.

In other news, my honey pot and I leave in 14 days for Burning Man! I can't believe how little we've prepared so far. I have done nothing except realize last Sunday that I hadn't even thought about it. Usually by now my honey pot would be so into his projects that I wouldn't have seen him for 4 weeks already. But this is our year of no projects. I like it better this way. We'll be out there a little under 6 days. I was describing it to a co-worker and I felt myself begin to get really excited. It's been slow coming because of the large project we're in the midst of at work right now. I almost feel like I shouldn't be going because it'll be in the absolute worst time for this project. But I can't move this event. If I was going on a vacation that I could change the dates of, I probably would. But I can't. So it is what it is and I'm going.

Blogger is Having Issues

What is up with the missing images on the left? Notice the question marks. Somebody (I'm going to blame the intern here) probably erased an image off a server somewhere. And now, our little expanding rows show questions marks instead of side ways triangles. The nerve..

Beaches, Sun and Sand

This weekend was really fun. It started on Thursday when a friend of ours showed up at games night. He's here visiting for a couple days from New Zealand. Him and his wife are the ones that I'm going be visiting and traveling with in October.

At the end of games he suggested that we all get together on Friday at our place. So we had a bunch of the gamers and jugglers over on Friday night (Yar was there too). The gathering lasted until a little before 3 am and it was fun. I won this new version of Settlers of Cataan called Cities and Knights. (I love this game, so much more than the unexpanded Settlers game which isn't very dynamic. If you place wrong at the start of the game it's almost impossible to win.)

On Saturday, I went into the city with a friend and her two little girls and had brunch at this great restaurant that's owned by her husband. (I can't tell you how exciting it is to watch a friend of mine have success in a business venture like this. It's so impressive!) I always enjoy spending time with her (and him too), though I have to admit that sometimes hanging out with two one year olds can be a little much. (Which is more evidence to me that I shouldn't have kids now.) I'm always excited to see them and watch them grow. I have some other friends that I need to start hanging out with more, because I don't get to see them enough.

After brunch I met some folks in the park, including my honey pot. There was sun, juggling and reading. I'm getting to a point where I can actually juggle and pass clubs. This weekend I did four passes, which is pretty darn good. I'd be so much better if I practiced every week, but I haven't been.

Following the park I walked up Telegraph Ave and ended up in one of my favorite Indian restaurants for dinner. I pulled out my book and had a lovely time reading and people watching. I was really tired when I got home an I took a several hour nap. Delicious. Then I called my sis and caught up a bit.

Today we got up and tried a new (to us) breakfast spot in Piedmont. It was pretty good, and the best part is that it wasn't even half full at any point when we were there. It's the new secret breakfast spot. Yeah! And we could walk there next time because it's not that far away.

After breakfast we headed to our friend's gathering on the beach south of Pacifica. We hung out and played frisbee, drank beer, and were amazed at how cold the ocean was. As Sarah said "it's cold enough to give you an ice cream headache on your feet." Yes, that's California ocean water. Well, northern california ocean water. While I was there I had the unique opportunity to pop a squat near what I noticed later to be a decaying seal carcass. Lucky me, I didn't even smell it. It wasn't until I brought some other carcass curious folks there that I caught a wiff of it at it's strongest. Wowzers. It was a nice day hanging out and some interesting adventures.

Our friends who had the gathering (because he's having is bday today) just got married about a month ago. And they just bought a house in Potrero Hill. They're planning on gutting the entire thing themselves. I think they're crazy, but I'm happy to help. My honey pot and I put in an offer on a place like that in San Francisco. That house needed to be torn down to it's frame and reworked from there up. I have to say that I'm so glad we didn't get that house. I'm not sure we would have made it through that process. And I'm a little scared for the amount of work that sits in front of our friends now.

And the last thing I did was cold chill at home before I had to go to bed and start the week over again. It's really important to me to have this 'down' time before my week starts. Some people recharge by hanging out with others, while I recharge by being alone. I'm more relaxed and content when I have my laundry done and some lunch set up before I go to bed. And this event packed weekend I even got that! Sweet!

Another Day in Paradise

I had a really hard time today getting anything finished at work. I just didn't have too much concentration. I'd start to do something, realize that it wasn't going to be only a couple hour project and move on to something else. I wasn't in the mood for a longer project. Needless to say, I didn't get too much done.

I'm finding that I'm doing less tasks in my personal life, but more is getting done. A while ago, maybe half a year now, I just stopped making lists. I used to make them all the time. You might say I was obsessed with them. And then one day I decided to stop. I figured that I'd either remember the things that were important or I wouldn't, and I'd be back to making lists again soon enough. We'll I do remember the things that are important and I feel like I have so much more time now. I have time to relax. I don't always look at the list and think about what I haven't gotten done yet, or what I still waiting to get done. It's a type of freedom that I've granted myself.

The other side of that is sometimes I just don't know what to do with myself. I have all these great crafts and hobbies that I like to do, but there are moments when I just don't know what to do with myself. I'm at a loss. But don't worry, I figured something out soon enough. Or I just enjoy the nothingness.

I've been enjoying the nothingness more lately.

Things that are not ok

I don't like it when people are brushing their teeth in the public bathroom at work. It makes me feel bad if I have to take a crap, and I don't need that guilt. But what I saw today was just unacceptable. There was a guy at a urinal, brushing his teeth with an automatic toothbrush. He didn't even stop brushing his teeth to flush. I'm all for efficiency, but come on. Just not ok.

It's summer time and it makes me want to travel to far away places and experience an entirely new culture. For some reason I'm making the decision to not travel when I probably should while I can. Partly I would like to go with my punkinpie, and he believes that he can't get time off work. Also, I somehow feel like I shouldn't leave work, or rather take more time off work, in the next several months besides our annul mecca to bm. It's ridiculous really. I should just take off and go somewhere while I can. I think soon enough I will have enough real responsibility (not this perceived dedication and loyalty to my company stuff) where I will no longer have this opportunity. Seize the day!

Some friends are going to New Zealand to visit some other friends in October and I've been thinking that maybe I should join in. The only thing is they're talking about a week long bike trip, and I'm way to lazy for that. Or I think I am. I probably would be okay after my butt callused up. I'm kidding. I could handle it, but I'm not sure it's "my speed". I'm more of a walker.

Lately my cooking "focus" has been indian food. I have a co-working who grew up in India and has been giving me cooking advice and tips. I've learned a lot about Indian cooking and it's so fantastic. For a while now (years..) I've always been on the lookout for real Indian cook books. But they don't exist. At least not in the bookstores I wander around in. And not the ones that will teach you how to make food like those found at Naan n' Curry. (The saucy foods best eaten with bread.) But now, I have some pretty darn good ideas how to make what I love and it makes me happy. My next thing is learning how to make samosas and the non-saucy Indian food favorites.

Wedding Gifts

Today we received our wedding present from Punkinpie's Father. It's beautiful and impressive. He made it. I'm so excited to have that hanging in our house. I especially love that the symbols for us are our Chinese signs. Thank you Mark!

In other news, a product my company released yesterday, called hindsight, made it to the front page of digg. The product enables you to visually explore the sequence of development throughout time in any area in the US. It's pretty nifty, go check it out.

Ode to the Bay Bridge

I am so glad that they fixed the I-580 ramp in the maze early. It was astounding how much and how far away it affected traffic. Usually I can leave work around 7pm and drive at least 50mph the entire way across the bay bridge and home. Also, I can usually leave home around 9am and drive without too much delay into the city. But since that accident happened, traffic has been all messed up hours later and earlier than normal. Essentially the detour through city streets with lights was backing up that traffic all the way across the bridge. The right 4 lanes would crawl and as a result people would move over into the left lanes and block those too. So that when traffic was finished crossing the bridge, it was this cluster f*&^ to merge back into the detour through Oakland. That was no fun. I guess the good news is that it encouraged me to ride the BART more. And riding BART with it's two significant walks on either end took just about as long as driving, but was much more peaceful. But now, it is again much faster to drive. I didn't even slow down coming home tonight. Party time!

In other news, I had my employee review today and it was really great. I mean, I think I would have been pretty shocked if they had said something like "Erica, you suck, and you're fired". But there was nothing negative and there wasn't even any suggestions for areas of improvement.
That's pretty cool.

Nesting, Feng Shui, Coziness and Vacation

This past long weekend has been a much needed holiday. I did a whole lot of nothing and more of things that I wanted to do to make my life more enjoyable. The most notable to me was moving our stereo out of this low to the ground piece of furniture that couldn't quite hold all of our music. The result of this former placement was that it was difficult to find cds to play and also just hard to interact with the stereo because I had to crouch down. It was preventing me from playing music; like what I'm listening to right now. I suppose a good way to sum it up is this: Our stereo setup had bad feng shui, and now it doesn't anymore! I think it's pretty likely that I'll be dancing again to my 'oldies' once again. (Oldies to those kids born in the 90's. Do you realize that the first class that was born in the 90's will be entering cal in the fall?)

Another thing I did was cover our couches with this nice material I bought at my absolute favorite fabric store. This includes the other states I've lived in. That has helped make our living room a great place .. to live.

In other news, our roommate is moving out and we've decided to not replace him (for now). It's a pretty big chunk of money to be losing, but I think I'm ready to just have our own house and not have that third party anymore. He was a good enough roommate, but I didn't really enjoy living with him. I think our astrological charts just didn't match so well. I'm looking forward to and glad to have our house to ourselves. He'll be out by the 1st.

Our garden is going crazy right now. There's tons of flowers and colors. It's pretty nice. I had planned on taking a bunch of pictures and doing a picture blog type of thing, but I never got around to those pictures.

The last thing to mention is that I wrote a journal entry tonight. I used to journal all the time, but haven't really been doing that as much in the past several years. Well, I sat down and did it again. There's something about having to slow down my thoughts enough to write complete sentences and then maintain that thought for more content in the next sentence. It made me realize how rarely I write now. Everything I do is typing, like right now. I do have to say that writing is almost therapeutic.

Good night, Ya'll!

Hiking and Biking

Rainbow and I just got back from a nice weekend getaway. We stopped by the german tourist club and stayed the night next to a babbling brook at about 503 W Blithedale Ave, Mill Valley, California. We put a blow-up mattress in the back of my truck and finally made good use of the new(ish) camper shell. It was a bit like sleeping in a taco, so we might try to get some foam for next time. We woke up in the morning and noticed lots of hikers and bikers going up the hill on the other side of the creek. So we ate some breakfast and followed suit. At the fork at the top of the first trail was a 2 mile trail to Mt. Tam to the left and another ridge trail going off to the right. We weren't up for a long hike so we went right for a bit and then turned around.

There wasn't really room for camping, but there were about 6-8 spots to park nearby, so it might be fun to go back with more people and either ride bikes or hike.

http://www.google.com/maps?q=503+W+Blithedale+Ave,+Mill+Valley,+California+94941,+USA&sa=X&oi=map&ct=image

Thinking of Cherries

I went to the farmers market this weekend and rediscovered I really enjoy the experience. It's not exciting per se, it's a simple pleasure, an activity that links the memories of living in Amsterdam (were I woke to the sounds of the Albert Cuyp Market setting up every morning) with my life in quiet Oakland.
Indeed, I find myself daydreaming about what I might find the next time I go to market. Lately, I have a reoccurring daydream about cherries. As it warms up here in the Bay Area, the names Brooks, Tulare, Rainier, and Bing dance in my head. I can't wait for July when they come into season. I feel a little silly but I will admit that I have already bought canning jars to make jam in anticipation. In the early morning light, while drinking my first cup of coffee, I catch a glance of a leg of duck recipe that I have pined to the wall above the cutting board. Complete with brownish red finger stains from years past, it's ready to be of service when the first fruit of summer arrives with its glorious brilliance.

Of Taxes & Reparations

I was asked on my California taxes to declare the income from any Ottoman Turkish Empire settlement payments I may have received. When I first read this during a late night turbo tax misadventure, I thought I must have picked up the wrong tax year, the Ottoman Empire dissolved circa1922.

After a quick look into the ether, I find it refers to Armenian genocide reparations. If I understand the situation correctly, families who survived a genocide in addition to being lucky enough to be able to wait 90 years to get an insurance claim processed, will now have to pay federal taxes on the proceeds.

Web 2.0 and Indian Food

Today was a good day.
I spent some time at the Web 2.0 Expo in the city and watched a really good speaker, but couldn't last through the entire presentation, despite it's relevance, usefulness and good delivery. What are people thinking when they schedule a speaker for 3 solid hours? Well, maybe I'm in the minority, but I can't sit still for a speaker for that long, no matter how great the content is.
Afterwards I went to Vik's. Yummie!
Last night I had a good time hanging out at the beach chalet. We played poker and engaged in various types of debauchery. It was pretty fun.
My punkinpie left for a business trip today. He'll be back on Wed.
We came up with the idea of a type of cocktail party where everybody has to wear white, or some other black light friendly color/clothes and also wear a headlamp. There would be no other light besides the headlamps and black lights.
Is this just a ridiculous idea? I think it could be fun. I might have to tack some hanging fish from the ceiling just to add some "flair". I've been thinking that I need to throw a themed party soon.

Blogger blows

I wrote an entry ( very long and perhaps my best work yet.... something that I might incorporate in the next great American novel) and when I clicked post.... it choked sputtered.... and left me with a big 404 for my effort.
Bastards.

Thursday, April 12, 2007

New Blogger and Blog*Spot will be briefly unavailable Thursday April 12 at 10:00PM PDT for about 5 minutes for maintenance. Posted by Vincent at 17:56 PDT

Thoughts?

It's springtime, so it's about time for me to start obsessing about my burningman project, whatever that might be. I haven't really come up with any new ideas (even bad ones) for the past couple of months, which is cause for concern. But I was sitting at my desk reading about the difference between 29" and 26" mountain bike wheels when an idea popped into my head.

Now, it may not be a good idea, and it might not even be all that feasible, but hear me out. So I was thinking that an LED river might be fun. I mean, what would you expect to see less in the middle of a desert than a river? And the whole glowing thing is always amusing. The river would be made up of individual swooshes (maybe some long s-shapes and some simple curves). Sort of like many slugs lined up next to each other and in a line to form a river shape. They would be made of fiberglass and have a little bit of a rise to them (like an upside-down parabola, and no more than an inch of so off the surface of the groung) and would taper to a point at each end. Put some LEDs in them, and have the individual units sequence to give a flow effect. Maybe build some additional pieces to sit along the river bank. Maybe even some little speakers with burbling water sounds.

I personally would like to see it, but I can imagine that for something like this, every aspect of it would be difficult, and possibly difficult to scale. I'd also be concerned about the power draw. Then again, I saw someone last year with probably a hundred high-powered LEDS attached to his clothing, so maybe it wouldn't require too great of a power supply.

What do you all think? Is this something that I could pull off?

Sunday Night and Lost Beckons Me

My weekend has been good.
I'm really enjoying my alone time lately. It's such a switch from before when I was working at home, alone, and almost desperate for interaction when my punkinpie got home. Now I'm constantly with people.
I'm squished with them on the bart; I'm interacting with co-workers at work; I'm socializing with friends after work. It just might be a little too little people-less time right now. This weekend I put effort into being by myself, and it's been great. I'm one of those types of people that "recharge" by being alone. As opposed to the opposite type that "recharge" by being social.
I'd like to point out that I'm not a "people disliker" or anything like that. I love people, knowing them, understanding them, and sometimes just trying to figure them out. Everybody has a story and a different view in some way than you. Everybody has something to offer you and the world.
In other news, I found out somebody from my past died a little while ago. I hope he's in a better place now. I and the world will miss you! May you rest in peace.
Oh, and thanks to stucco holmes for keeping it alive (and congratulations too!)!

A Cock And Bull Story

OK, a change of plans. I am going to Kauaʻi not Lānaʻ. I was just getting use to the idea of the first island, now I find that I am not going there at all. I don't know why I thought I was going to Lanai.
Kaui has to be more interesting then what I just read on the wiki:

Kauai is now home to thousands of wild roosters and hens, roaming the island with few natural predators. Wild roosters have been known to disturb evening quiet time at odd hours with their crowing.

Well rereading the entry I find it has a colorful past:

King Kamehameha twice prepared a huge armada of ships and canoes to take the islands by force and twice failed, once due to a storm, once due to a vagina epidemic. In the face of the threat of a further invasion; however, Kaumualiʻi decided to join the kingdom without bloodshed, and became Kamehameha's sex slave in 1810, ceding the island to the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi upon his death.

If it's in the wiki it has to be true... right?
Is there a special word for wiki graffiti?

Lanai

I will be in Lanai for a week. Once the site of the world’s largest pineapple plantation, small and isolated Lanai has no stoplights, one tiny town, and two five-star resorts. My flight is this Thursday. I want to be I excited about it, but I am not. Working 12 to 14 hour days in paradise is not a recipe that gets me psyched.

Workie, Workie

Here I am again.
I wasn't planning on participating anymore, consider the dramatic reduction in usage lately. But here I am.
I'm sitting here on the couch with my newly reformatted laptop with Stella sitting on my arm. I think she might be trying to tell me that it's time for bed.
Work is going well and I still love all the people I work with. It's a pretty great place
I suppose I don't have much to say. I guess that's as good as a sign as any to just to bed already. Goodnight Everybody!

Moab

Hi Everyone,

Woke up a little too early for my first ride in Moab, so I thought I'd post something real quick. Yesterday was entirely consumed by driving. I started at 5:45AM and didn't get to my hotel until around midnight. It was kind of similar to a normal workday, in that it was mostly boredom interspersed with a lots of liquids and bathroom breaks. I woke up this morning, expecting to ride a mile or two to the bike registration. Turns out the bike start is in the hotel next door. So I showed up about an hour early all geared up. I felt a little silly. The older lady checking me in said she loved my accent. My accent? It's pretty cold out here. I don't remember the last time I rode on a day when I could see my breath.

Well, I don't have much to do out here besides ride, so I'll probably have the chance to put up another post this evening.

Hope everyone is doing well...

Wedding

I am getting excited about the big event. One more week.

It's been a while and we have to keep up the post in order to keep people thinking our lives are fascinating. Well, I've got the day off and I'm enjoying it. I took the rings out to Applied Lasers LLC in Concord to have them laser welded. I'm looking forward to seeing their work and really hoping that the rings work, ie. spin and the balls don't fall out because I was asking the machine shop for some very tight tolerances and small features. Looks like I'll be juggling at Willard in the afternoon...

I Would Never Have Thought

I would never have thought what an irritating and profound effect NOT having internet is right now. There's so many things I do through the internet, besides just using it to look up stuff.

Our internet has been down for over 2 days now and I've finally found a coffee shop where I paid $5 for internet for the next 24 hours. The good thing about that is that I can use it tomorrow to finish up what I still haven't done tonight. (This place closes in 45 minutes.)

Here I am blogging when I should be tackling this internet related list I created. It's so ridiculous.

Just so you all know, we don't have internet at home and I rarely do 'fun' internet stuff at work, so don't think there's some change in pattern with my blogging. I'll be back when the internet is back.

Just so nobody thinks I've forgotten about our fascinating blog, here I am. It's a stressful busy time and I don't see it lightening up until after the wedding. Oh well. I'm looking forward to it.

I don't have anything hilarious like Yar's spin class to tell about, but I did find some geese to hang out with at lunch, which makes me happy.

http://www.thefairest.info/top.html
http://www.xkcd.com/

I've become a lurker on my own blog

I should probably post more often, just so I don't have to start every post off with an apology. I have been lurking though, so thanks for keeping up with the posting while I've been busy.

I've been in ITIL training since Monday. Monday was 8:30-5:00, which is brutally early for me. Tuesday, Wednesday and tomorrow have been 7:30-4:30, which is just a little bit excessive. I woke up last night at 3:00AM and thought to myself, hey, it's completely dark, must be time to wake up! I was psyched that I had another two and a half hours more to sleep. It has been a weird couple of days, but maybe that's due to the sleep-dep.

Sunday was tough for me as well. I guess it started with me being sick at around 6AM. Showered, went to sleep again. Woke up at around 1PM. Made it out on my ride by around 3PM, which meant that it would have to be pretty quick if I wanted to beat the sunset. Kevlar said there were going to be a lot of cars on the road, but I figured that would clear up once the superbowl started. Was I wrong. Turned out the Queen Mary II was coming into SF and most of my bike route, from the Presidio to the Marin Headlands, was clotted with spectators. I didn't even know what it was about until I talked to a ranger on the Marin-side of the bridge. The boat was pretty big, but it wasn't like it hit the bridge or anything. Rode pretty slow since I was still feeling a bit of the hangover.

Then I've been in class. Class has been ok, but it's hard to stay focused for that long. I used to about twice the number of bathroom breaks normally, so just chilling and drinking water (which is the only thing you can actually do) is pretty excruciating.

On Tuesday, I went to spin class at my work. There were two very attractive girls, which is sort of unheard of (one is kind of unheard of), but kind of a nice change. Not an entirely positive change though, because the bikes are all in a half-circle, and you're pedaling for about an hour, and... you've got to look at something. So I had to try to not be a pervert (or be perceived to be a pervert) so I'm looking at the ground, my handlebars, the clock on the wall, but not too long over by the clock, because there was another girl on the treadmill who wasn't really all that attractive, but had a... an extreme bouncing issue. After she finally stopped bouncing away, another woman came over her to talk about something. The woman who came over casually leaned up against the treadmill and put her foot on the treadmill. Not realizing the treadmill was still running, she went from a relaxed lean to lump on the ground in about a millisecond. Everyone got quiet, but it turned out she was ok. It was hilarious, but I couldn't laugh since everyone was soooo concerned. It was totally something I could see myself doing.

On Tuesday I realized I was a week ahead. What I mean by that is that I was completely convinced that it was the 12th. I actually gained a week, which felt pretty awesome. It's like daylight savings x 168. Actually I was pretty psyched that Valentine's day was coming up so quick, so I wouldn't have to think about it anymore. I dread Feb 14th the way that some people dread Friday the 13th.

Wednesday was uneventful, tomorrow will probably be fairly uneventful too. Going to probably go indoor rock climbing with my friend that's back from Colorado tomorrow night, so that's something to look forward to.

It's 10:30PM now, so I better get ready for bed!