Summer of Crafts

This past weekend I went up north to the Oregon Country Fair. If you haven't heard about it, it's probably not what you're thinking. Basically it's the best and most creative artists that you've ever seen together in one place. Everything there had to be hand made in the USA. Most people camp out for the weekend and there was tons of music and good food. Like my favorite, vegan cupcakes. Many people wear costumes and paint their faces and bodies. The vast majority of food was whole food - not deep fried or processed in any way. And there was 20 some odd stages with music. There are around 40 thousand folks that come through there during the three day weekend and most everything you buy is in corn cups, or compostable plates. They even give you metal silverware that you drop back in a bucket that gets washed and given out the next day. It's like a mellower Burning Man in the woods. Very cool.

A week or so before that we went up north to Methow Valley for a wedding. That area of the country is what I'm guessing Lake Tahoe was like 30 years ago. It was remote, beautiful and cheap. We went white water rafting with a little over 30 people the day before the wedding and stayed in this way cute place. Fantastic.
And now I'm getting ready for Burning Man. It's my next trip of the year. I have quite a bit of work to do on my LED hoola hoop. And I have a bunch of ideas for some costume components that I want to make for this year also.

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.

Wedding

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

Okay People, Where Are You?

It's almost two minutes before the 7th of Feb begins and I have to ask this:

Where are you people?

It's been a while and I'm starting to think you've all just fizzled out with all this. Yar, where are you? Note the direct question.

My life has been okay. Yesterday was really stressful for me because I started to realize just how bad it was that I was so hung over Sunday that I wasn't able to get anything done. I think it would be fair to say that I started freakin out.
Here's what's stressing me out:

• Our wedding in 17 days. And I still have no idea of what costume or otherwise I'm going to wear. And there's so many things that we haven't finalized yet. Tick Tock, we are fast running out of time.
  
• Dealing with a house closing in another state that should have closed on Monday that did no due to an escrow officer that made a large mistake. (Yup, it's true folks, it really does matter which paper pusher you choose to use. They can screw up your life and have you worrying about large amounts of money.) Ours wasn't quite like that, but you get the idea. It should close on Thursday now.
  
• Handling the early days of work. Which while I must say I'm getting more comfortable there and more used to everything, I'm still a little worried about my first projects. It's a general fear, there's no real reason for it. I do what I do well, and I do know that. Or as Punkinpie likes to have me say "I'm a smart cookie."
• The general lack of free time that my current working full-time life and dragging my butt to SF to do it in has, as compared to working at home and not concerning myself with making phone calls or handling personal business during regular working hours. I can do this now, but I don't think it's okay to deal with say, 10 phone calls, in a day - which is what Monday, will all that house crap, was about.
  
  

which brings me back to this point:

Where are you people? Am I all lone here?

Sleepy Friday and Work Ethics

I can't believe I'm still awake this late. It's not actually that late, but I was quite sure I would drop down into a deep slumber almost immediately after we checked out the new exhibit where we're having our wedding in a mere 21 days. I'm just that whipped.

Notice I didn't link to our wedding website. Those of you who know me, already know where that is. But I had this interesting experience today where a fellow employee mentioned finding this blog because he monitors who's linking to our company. I know this is public. I mean .. dah! But for some reason it still caught my attention. I know better than to write something that's too public. But, like a story this person told me, it wouldn't be that hard to get all comfy in blog land and maybe come home a little inebriated and write something I really shouldn't have. Anyway, this interaction today gave me pause and made me think. It's a good thing.
I'll have to figure out what the right balance is with all this.

We had an interesting project at work which started yesterday at 4pm and lasted exactly 24 hours. They put us all in mixed discipline teams and we had to do something specific, but creative. It's not released yet, so I'll skip the details.

The project started at 4pm yesterday and I had come in early that day because my ride (Punkinpie) had an early investors meeting on Thurs. I was really surprised how willing folks were to work all night. After being at work for more than 10 hours, and I felt like our brainstorming session was just rehashing the same things, I put my foot down and left. We also had plans last night. As I made my way home, I felt bad about not being dedicated enough to this company. I questioned my priorities, and I ended up bailing on my plans and staying home working on implementing one of our group's ideas. I also questioned my fit with this dot com company and exactly what "dot com" really means.

I have no problem working my tail off for a defined goal. In fact, I almost work better when I'm working on something obsessively all day and all night for some period of time. But somehow I originally didn't see the need to stay all night and work on Thurs. I'm glad I did end up working for hours last night, but it's still a weird situation in my mind. To meet our goal, I worked faster and harder than I've really worked in a long time, like years. Programmers can't work like that for very long before they lose their mind. (I think the official word is: burnout) The phrase fast and furious comes to mind.



The project delivery meeting went well and was fun. This group really is pretty amazing and funny. After the meeting was finished I left. Again today I had gone into work early because we had a 7:45am meeting to sign papers today. (We bought another house!) And I left early too. I was so tired.

I think something for me that I'll have to work on is the balance between work, life and hours. This place has a correct policy about it not being the input but output. Basically, they're saying that they don't watch your hours, instead they care about you getting your work done. And I am totally on that page. But I also feel like I should be able to get my projects finished and polished in a normal 40 hour work week. (Maybe more like the average of the hours I work over a year should be around 40 because of course things ebb and flow.) I guess what it really comes down to is that I didn't really understand the value of this 24 hour project and why it should be superseding my personal, previously scheduled life. I now see a lot more value in doing this project this way, but this same value could be attained with several weeks notice to a 24 hour project like this. I can only hope that those employees that were around before this week, had actually gotten this notice.

Cool Links for Today:
ExxonMobile and Bush Affiliates Pay Scientists to Refute Global Warming Report
Yellow Arrow - More Than Meets the Eye
The Underground Tech Scammer Life
Guerrilla Marketing Plan Gone Awry - or Has It?

Early Unix Morning, Marriage License

Today I woke up way earlier than normal, a full two hours earlier actually and jumped into the shower while the world outside was dark. I was "conferencing" with somebody in Vermont at 7am my time and 10am their time. We did some work and then hit a roadblock that required me to email my boss on a contract and get more info. Because I got done so much earlier than expected, I woke up Punkinpie to go to Oakland and get our wedding license. All along we were going to go today, but then this conference call came up and we rescheduled. Since it ended early, we were back on to going to get that license.
I started the shower for him and we had a quick breakfast. We entered our info on the computer at the county clerk's office and then waited. There, a person told us in repeated detail how to fill out the final wedding license form, and mail it back to them. After we left, it made me question "Do people still mess up this process after all that instruction?". The instructions were markedly redundant.
Punkinpie left me in Oakland (He lacked the time to bring me back home) and I saw a Smart 'n Final where I researched wedding options. They had biodegradable (made out of corn or something) plates that would cost us less to use than renting plates. But all along with the wedding planning, I've been saying how I won't have paper plates. For me, that was an important expectation with our wedding. (Punkinpie didn't care) But here I was price shopping and considering them (because of the rental bill total). I called Punkinpie to ask his thoughts and because I was sure he was still driving, but he wasn't so we ended that call quickly.
I walked 10 or so blocks and caught the BART and walked home from MacArthur Station. While walking home I got a phone call about some documents that Punkinpie had to sign, and they needed to be quickly because other things were depending on them. All along I was under the impression that only I would have to sign those documents, but I found out My Punkinpie did too. Which presented some problems because they needed to be signed during business hours in Oakland, and Punkinpie works in Richmond mostly.
I called him and he was able to meet right then. So I jumped into my car which has been basically out of gas for a week now. (It runs biodiesel and the station has very limited hours in Berkeley). I drove to the meeting and wondered while looking at the needle in the lower part of the red zone for the gas gauge, how accurate I could expect that part of the gauge to be. Then I decided that it would be okay if I ran out of gas coming home, as long as I made it to the meeting.
I did make it home, and now I wonder if I'll have enough gas to make it to the station.
I got that extra info I needed from my boss and called up the guy in Vermont and for the past hour he's been driving my computer from Vermont as if he's sitting at it (using VNC - Yar; admittedly a weird setup).
He's doing some work on some unix servers of one of my clients. And having him come into my computer, and then tunnel into my client's computers allows me to login and logout from the client computers without my subcontractor knowing passwords and such.
And I have to say that subcontracting this part of the contract has been the best thing ever. He's so much faster than me and he really knows what he's doing.
And that's my day so far. I have to say that it's been pretty good.

Cool Links for My Day:
Mashup of Property Sold in the Bay Area and Google Maps
Real Estate Search Engine (I have high hopes for this company)