Cruising, Clapping and Stomach Sleeping

Maddie's doing all of it. She's super solid at pulling herself up and getting to her feet. Also at cruising around the line that we set up for her; a chair, next to a box, next to a shelf. She also claps and hits high fives. It's pretty adorable. A couple nights ago I found her sleeping on her stomach several times. I haven't really seen her roll too much, though I'm confident she can do it easily still.

Maddie and our cat also have a very strange relationship to watch. Our cat will let Maddie grab chunks of fur out of her body. I've even seen her pull so hard that Stella was yanked over to her side. This, the cat that used to be pretty specific about where you would touch. She used to meow to warn you and then she'd get mad. She also has this habit of sitting down next to you and eventually deciding that you're in her space.

Last night the Draw4 crew came over for some games. There's a large change coming and it's really too bad. We'll miss them. But we do plan on visiting. (Tangent: maybe this will give me more persuasive items to help convince my honeypot to visit the NW often? Then it'd be easier for me to really decide if it's okay to eventually drag him up there. Are there other cheap places with tech jobs, because I'd like some different options?)

Maddie had a small fever last night and seemed a little run down during the day too. I ended up going down and hanging out with her pretty early.

Chirp, chirp.

Whirl Wind Weeks

It's been a really busy couple of weeks, and it will probably continue to be until we are out on the playa. No time to blog!

My friends Mari, Nathan, Dora and Amelia arrived on Thursday the 7th and stayed through Wed the 13th. They are a really cool family! They were making the rounds visiting friends and family. They arrived early because they were passing around sickness and didn't want to infect some of the older folks at one of retirement communities that was their previous stop. It's tough being a kid and being sick, but they seemed to handle it pretty well. They're really sweet girls!

Yesterday I went to our new Colo and helped rack a bunch of our new servers. It was lots of fun. I really enjoy hands on stuff besides the programming that I do. It was also really cool and interesting to see all the parts of the Colo on the tour that I did. They have 9 generators that each generate 2.2 Mega Watts each. And there's a 50,000 gallon tank of diesel underneath the building. It's pretty crazy, indeed. I think that place could power a small city. I'll try to get some pictures up when I get them. They're trapped on a co-workers iPhone currently. Here's a tour of a Colo I found online - they're probably all the same.

Next up is trying frantically to finish up all the projects I want to do for Burning Man. We're leaving in 8 days and I'm going to be working for 5 of them. Tick Tock.

I finally got to start drinking my last brew batch last week. It's good. I'm happy with it.

If only I'd known..

We recently discovered that there is, in fact, a pretty easy way to get across the bay after bart stops running. We tried it on Saturday night, and it was an astounding success.

There's a bus that runs around every hour, on the hour. It sweeps through the downtown market street corridor and heads across the bridge. Conveniently for us, it goes down telegraph and has a stop one block from our house. It's beautiful.

In other news, I finally got to meet Molly (and catch up with Kirsta and Bill). Molly is still "minus 2 weeks old." She was born almost 2 months early. Whoa. She's so cute and she looks great!

This weekend was busy, busy in a good way. I'm starting to notice the pressure for burning man preparations. I have lots of projects that I want to complete before then, but not so much time to really work on them. In the end, the most important will get finished and I won't even care that the rest got dropped. 34 days until the man burns, and about 27 before I pack and leave. Yikes.

Riding the Bull

Hi Soli!
Last weekend I went to the Saddle Rack for a friends birthday; complete in a bus. It's a country themed bar, and it was different.
I haven't seen so much tight 80s clothes for decades.
My favorite people watching target was this woman who was wearing a bikini top and tight jeans, complete with a necklace that had a string of shiny stones that hung down between her breasts. It was very classy. This is her riding the bull.

We also had a webcam date with a friend in RI. I haven't really ever played with webcam technology much, so it was new to me. I can see how it can be a really great way to keep in touch with folks. But the delay between the video and the audio makes it really difficult to carry on a natural conversation. I think we also might have exceeded the recommended maximum number of people on one side of a web cam. There were so many people that it was hard to carry on a conversation. It was nice to see everybody.

That's it for now.

And What a Week it's Been

Wow, what a crazy week it's been. I felt like I was constantly running just to keep up with everything that came my way.
There were so many extra errands and so many more social events than normal for me. It was extremely fun, and also draining.
Last week I went to get the visa for my India trip and that took hours of standing in line.
There was this fantastic Girlz Night that I attended on Tuesday night. That was such a blast. It was a new group of friends and we hit it off really well. I hope I get to hang out with them again. An intriguing sounding movie called "The business of being born" came out of our discussions there.
Then on Wed morning we had an apt with our friend, who happens to be the real estate agent that sold us our Oakland house. There's a recently fixed up 4 unit place a couple doors down from us that we were interested in looking at. Slightly for investment purposes, and more for a couple friends that are looking to buy. This place was perfect. It's a reasonably priced spacious 2bd, has a huge yard and the entire building was recently overhauled. New foundation, new roof, new everything. It had been a rental previously. (If you're reading this Yar - what are you waiting for? We would be the perfect neighbors.)
I had two friends from out of town visiting this weekend. My Chicago friend arrived while I was at work on Friday and I didn't get to see him until Sat morning! I had dinner plans after work and a pretty large group of us went to Happy Shabu Shabu. The experience was interesting - the service not so great. Basically each person had a hot pot of boiling water in front of them and then you get served veggies and you make your own food! Sorta like Korean BBQ, except with boiling water instead of a grill. We had a 20 person group which might explain the bad service. The rest of the gang went on to the Cornelius show, and I went home. Before that my co-workers and I went out for drinks at 5pm to celebrate our success. we have about 1/3 of the staff, but we recently beat Zillow in unique visitors per week. It's a huge milestone and really demonstrates our growth, and our potential. Woo Hoo!
Saturday my Chicago friend, my honeypot, and I walked up to Rockridge for a lovely breakfast. Then we all went our own way and I bought supplies for the party we threw that night. It was a lot of fun with hours of gaming. The games went on until 5am! (I thought I was too old to stay up that late. he he he)
Sunday I finally got to see my other friend in town from DC. She was at the shabu dinner on Friday, but she was so far away I didn't really get to talk to her much. We had plans to hike but were both so worn out from our previous nights (she wasn't able to attend the party due to another show she went to) that we chose to walk around 4th ave and browse. It was a lot of fun. I don't really browse anymore. I probably didn't much before either, but I never do it now. Except yesterday. There's quite a bit of unique/weird stuff down there so it was good times. After our shopping experience, we went to Jupiter and had pizza to fulfill my friend's craving and some other friends met up with us. Then we went home, hung out and played some more games. It was fun.
Today I got up and went out to breakfast with my friend from Chicago and finally got some more time to hang out with him. Then I went to work and he prepared for his travels back.
Tonight I had dinner plans, but everybody was just too tired, so it pretty much fell apart. But that's ok. I'm tired. I'm really happy to be home and just relax a bit because I'm leaving for another adventure on Wed afternoon.

Our company has an off site planning week at the start of every year to figure out which projects are most importnat and make a tentative schedule for the year. This year we're all (60 people plus significant others and families) are going up to Tahoe on Wed through Sunday. My honeypot is coming up Thurs night and it sounds like it might get a little crazy. I expect good times!

The trip to India is official - I leave on the 31st and arrive back on the 17th and I'll get 5 days at the end when I'm not working. Also, I have a plane ticket into New Delhi and out of Mumbai.

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/

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!)

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.