2005 LA Auto Show
Geoff, Karen, Zac, Will and I ventured to LA to see the Greater Los Angeles Auto Show. The weather was incredible, raining the whole day and absolutely pouring on the way home. But we survived.
Saw a lot of neat cars and a lot of stupid ones. Saw the Spyker, a car that I have been wondering about since we saw it parked outside a resturant in Carmel, on our 2004 Monterey trip. It was dark and we couldn't see much other than they looked neat. Well, in the light, they are ugly as hell. Airplane theme on everything (because Spyker used to make plane parts), even the steering wheel. is shaped like a prop, ugg. Read the blurb here.
I think the most interesting car was the Venturi Fetish, an electric sports car. It costs 600K but the rep said that in 10 years or so the parts would be cheap enough to build it for $30k. I look forward to that day. I also pretty much decided that I'm going to buy a Lotus Elise in 2 years.
My pics here.
San Diego Weather
So, the storms ripped down my TV antenna and tossed it in the pool. It tore off my pool's solar heater panels and hurled them into the street. And asshole neighbors drove over them, ruining them completely.
Broke my fence at the base in 2 places on opposite sides of the house.
What the heck man! Hurricane gusts? I expect this in a place like Florida, but not here!
Update Jan 10: Apparently it's all covered by insurance. Yay!
Christmas 2004
This year, Tracy and I stayed in town. After our trip to TN for Thanksgiving, traveling again was just too much. Plus, my family decided to come out here so it made staying in SD an easy choice. David and Anne, Mom and Todd and Joseph came out to visit.
Tracy and I spent a week cleaning the house and I spent 2 weeks building a shower into the guest bathroom. Well, I wouldn't say 'building' so much as 'engineering'. But it looks good and it works. I cleaned out the room previously known as "junk storage". Good to organize all that stuff. I was very proud that my very first exterior illumination project featured 1 kilo-bulb worth. Still not too impressive, but it was fun and cute. We waited a week too long to buy a tree, which we thought would be a bad thing. I figured prices would be way higher. Nope, huge discounts. We went to a Xmas tree lot and saw a Douglas Fir for $70. Screw that. Then we went to Home Depot and the same tree was $49 marked down to $20. Done. This is the first year I've ever had a real Christmas tree. It was so nice to see it in our house, and it smelled so good.
Mom and Joseph stayed with me the first night they arrived. The next day we went up to mom's husband's family's Christmas party. It was fun. Met a distant relative (mom's husband's brother's wife's mother) with foot drop and exchanged my story of success with her and gave her advice on how to deal with her injury. I also realized that I had thrown out some equipment a few days earlier that could benefit her. So, that night when we got home, I dug it up to give to her. When I was tossing it out, I knew someone would want it!
My Mexian neighbors invited my entire family over to their house for their family Christmas celebration. They had broiled a full size lamb in a 50 gallon steel drum that was lined with cactus leaves. Joseph, Mom, Todd, Tracy and I went over to celebrate with them. The food was great and even tho there was a slight language barrier, we had a great time. I drank Tequila with the men when the party was winding down. What a neat experience. David and Ann came down near midnight that night after spending an evening celebrating with Ann's family.
Christmas morning was excellent in San Diego. We all exchanged gifts and watched holiday TV shows. Tracy bought me a GameBoy Advance SP! That thing is so neat! It came with the original NES versions of Super Mario Bros and Legend of Zelda. Hearing the sound effects sure brings back memories.
Arne and Gislea joined us for Christmas lunch/dinner around 2pm. The plan was to go hiking, but we ended up going to the beach that afternoon instead. The weather was great and the setting sun made for some really amazing pictures.
The next morning, they all left for LA, Mom and Todd taking the train and David, Ann and Joseph driving up. Our house was back to normal.
Implosions and Wil Wheaton
ApacheCon 2004 in Vegas was definatly a good convention. Technically it was great, the speakers were good, the people were brainy, the partying was hard core and the demolitions were huge! Tracy came out to stay with me for the first 2 days of the confrence so there was a little bonus there too.
So, a few cool things. Wil Wheaton (aka Wesley Crusher of StarTrek and child star in "Stand By Me") was the keynote. He has been keeping a blog for years, and is one of the few (only?) celebrities to do so. This makes him mega cool in my book. I always identified with his character on the series (imagine that) and so naturally I thought he must be cool. Reading his blog, you realize he's a normal guy like you and me, and he's also a geek! I got to meet him, shake his hand, had a small chat, bought his book and got him to sign it. What a neat guy. The thing that I found intriguing was his keynote. He started off by telling us all he was scared to death to be up in front of all us geeks. A humble celebrity, rad. As he got into telling how the internet and software from Apache.org changed his life for the better, etc, etc (go read his book), he was dropping well placed, obscure and relevant jokes that I found to be quite funny. But most of the geeks in the audience weren't laughing...meanwhile I was giggling away. When I talked to him again later I mentioned this and he told me "I subscribe to the MST3K school of thought...if 5% of the audience laughs I've done my job". I just really like this guy. I felt like kind of a dweeb getting all nervous and telling him I thought he was so cool, etc. I mentioned the implosion, to which he got real excited. I hope he got to see it.
Implosion!? Yes, they blew up the Desert Inn while we were there. Damn, it was cool. We waited around till 2:30 am on Tuesday night just to see it, but it was worth it. While we waited on a sidewalk corner less than a block a way, a friggin jerk semi-truck driver cut the corner and drove over about 3 feet of the curb. He nearly crushed a reporter's camera and tripod and nearly took off this poor girls head with a ladder hanging off the side. The cops didn't even care! But who cares bout that...BOOM! The blast scared us...they gave little warning, just a policeman saying "you have one minute". He was off by 10 seconds. I got some pretty poor shots and a very lousy video. But I got some neat shots of the dust cloud! It shook the ground and thumped our chests. Way cool!
The rest of the trip was mostly doing some gambling in casino's and getting drinks. We stopped by the Las Vegas Hilton on the last night to do more gambling and get a nice dinner...Dan, Mark and I went to the Star Trek Experience. The Klingon Encounter was neat, a 3D ride in a shuttlecraft that feels very real...like the rides at Universal Studio. The Borg Invasion 4D was neat too...wore 3D glasses and got assimilated the chair jabs you in the ribs, it was creepy. They had some cool live action stuff...at one point a borg pulled one of the crew/actors thru the ceiling! It was neat! We went out later that night for some Japanese Steakhouse experiences at Beni Hana.
The rest of the pics are here.
The only problem with the trip in my mind is that we had to get up at 6am to catch a flight back to SD on Thursday, and GO TO WORK. Blech. Maybe skip that next year.
This next week, Tracy and I travel to TN for some t-day fun. Should be a good time.
ApacheCon 2004
So, QC sent me to Las Vegas for ApacheCon 2004. 4 days of nerdy days and Vegas nights. But I nearly missed my 8:30am flight this morning...overslept by an hour, skipped shower and breakfast, had a security escort to the front of the line (keyword "I'll miss my flight" works wonders), ran thru the 1/2 the airport in my socks with my shoes in my hand, etc. But I made it. Whew.
This pic is me in the Hackathon. More to come later, gotta go get Tracy from the airport.
Will's B-day and the sickness
The pic to the right is at The Office in Cardiff Saturday night. We were celebrating Will's birthday.
Tracy and I have been fighting a cold for a week now. It's kind of disheartening to look at a calendar and know it's been a week. Jeeez.
Got a new radio. Trying to get back into the amateur radio hobby. I loved it when I was younger but computers and cell phones kind of squashed it. It isn't amazing anymore to be able to make a duplex phone call for free. But it is amazing to hold a tiny radio in your hand, dial a few codes and talk to someone out in the stix in Australia as if they were 15 feet away with a radio. For free. And to bounce signals off the moon to get around line of sight radio propagation limitations. There are a lot of cool things that the amateur radio license has enabled me to do in the last 10 years, figure it's time to get back into it. Maybe even learn morse code. Who knows.
Halloween came and went with not much fuss. I was all set to go to the Brotherhood party, but it was a week before halloween and neither Tracy or I had much motivation to get costumes ready by then. So our tickets became donations to the party cause. When Halloween came, I had all these aspirations of making my house scary and dressing up to give out candy...but Tracy had to work so I was home alone to hand it out. I opened the door and waited but got very few doorbell rings. Turns out that unlike when I was a kid, parents hover over the kids and don't let them go to a house that doesn't have big bright lights. And my flood lights are automatic...the kids never came close, they never came on. When I finally figured this out and flipped them manually on, it was too late. Oh well. Maybe next year. Met some of the neighbors and gave them those HUGE snickers bars that I bought from Costco. That was a hit. Watched the Charlie Brown special, that's always a treat, and makes me feel like a little kid again. I need to get all those short holiday films on DVD.
It's been cold lately and I finally figured out how to light the pilot on my heater. Man, that was cool. My first gas furnace. It's neat watching it flip on. I even took pics! And boy did that heat feel good after a week of freezing my a55 off.
Not much else has happened in the last week or so. It's been continuing to rain. I've cleaned my pool a lot, but haven't added any water in almost a month. And it's still nearly overflowing. Also haven't washed my car in a while either. D-oh. I wish it would clear up and get warm!
Eddy's B-Day
Eddy had a Birthday this Friday. Went to a gun range, got some dinner at Fidels, got accused of breaking and entering when I went to the bathroom at the 7-11, and watched motorcycle videos at Stan's afterwards. It was a good time.
The pic is cruzing in Webb's bling bling at 2:49am.
Happy B-Day Eddy!
Firefox rox
I hate to be one of those bloggers that blogs the news.
But if you haven't seen it, Firefox is raising money for an ad in the NY times. What a great idea, that is so cool! The pic at right is from work and you can see the Firefox poster that I picked up at LinuxWorld. I put it on the front entrance to our suite. Makes sense for 'web server admin' to be Firefox advocates. :) I'm just stunned at how popular Firefox became....so fast. 5 million downloads! I've been using it since the alpha days of Firebird, but I'm so happy to see that the Internet at large is picking up on it.
"Firefox is increasingly becoming the browser of choice for people fed up with spyware and other internet annoyances." Haha, no way, really? Fed up with spyware and ads? Who isn't? And yesterday, yet another CERT was released for "Multiple Vulnerabilities in Microsoft Internet Explorer". What else is new. They should just put up a big siren that goes off when there are no bugs in IE.
If you're currently using Firefox, I highly recommend you check out the Web Developer, LiveHTTPHeaders, Sage RSS and IEView extensions. They have made my life as a geek so much easier.
Rain, Rain....
Go away.
And don't come back.
...FLASH FLOOD WARNING CONTINUES UNTIL 100 PM...
What is up with this liquid falling from the sky? I pay my taxes, work my ass off to pay for the high cost of living, turn a deaf ear to the masses of liberal idiots, bring back the sun! What do I live in SoCal for anyhow? I mean, I realize it's 'winter' now, but dude, I'd rather have a foot of snow. At least the people that grew up back east know how to drive. Damn. It spits rain here and there are a dozen accidents filling up the freeways. You can't do 85 in the rain pal.
I didn't get any sleep last night because my new house has this totally sweet feature...when the wind blows hard, it spins the exhaust vents on my roof so fast that they oscillate...and set up a vibration in my house that slowly varies in frequency from one minute to the next. That's because it only oscillates and causes the vibration at very high RPM...but once it starts oscillating, it causes friction and slows down. So there are 0.5-1 sec periods of silence as it spins up to infinity, and then the oscillation/vibration slows it back down. And it's LOUD. No sleep for me!
Add to that the TJ shack my mexican neighbors are building...it's made of thin metal. That thing was slapping around all night and morning. Not a wink I tells ya!
Not related to the weather, but related to not sleeping, at 7am this morning about 100 police trainees came running by my house yelling some violent cadence at the top of their lungs. It was so loud, I thought that they were fighting in my living room. I sprang from the bed to see what was the mater, only to find myself standing in my front door, in my boxers, in front of 100 sweaty soon-to-be policemen...who I believe all looked at me and promptly committed my address to memory. Super.
Joseph met Ron Jeremy?
I don't believe it. My little brother met Ron Jeremy before I did? Now what's left for me to do? I mean, now, I have to be in a video with him or something. And that's gonna be a lot harder.