Linuxworld + Mom
Linuxworld was pretty damn cool. Dan, Will and I met at Dan's house about 5:15am, unpacked and repacked a bunch of kiteboarding gear (for Dan and Will), drove to the airport, flew to Oakland, got a renta-car (4 door Grand Am), mashed the gear in it, checked into the hotel, dropped off bags and hit up the vendors at the Moscone convention center around 9:30. We got lots of schwag and learned a few things. It's amazing how they market to us geeks...using models to promote products. Seems to work, I'm not sure what Pogo Linux sells, but I must buy lots of it and install it everywhere. Novell, Redhat and Sun had the biggest displays, and Mozilla had the coolest shirts. Too bad they cost money. It kind of dissapoints me that LinuxWorld has gone all corporate, but it really does show how much the Linux scene has changed in the last few years. Now it has marketing. ;)
After the convention, we cut out early and went to Chrissy Field. Dan and Will had brought a bunch of kiteboarding equipment with the hopes of kiting in the extreme wind that is generated when a light gale is squeezed between the hills on either side of the Golden Gate. But they both wimped out at a measly 28mph gale. I give them crap but I wouldn't have touched that water with anything less than a Navy frigate. It was overcast, cold, so windy that the sand was blasting my eyes out and the tide was moving out really fast. We booked to a new spot at 3rd Ave, and while I slept, they drove to where they were supposed to go, which turned out to actually be 3rd Street. Dan got out in the water while Will and I watched. Took some cool pics. It was pretty neat to watch those kites flying around. We wrapped up the trip with a cruise around the bay on a small cruise ship. A lot like a Hornblower boat, just not that company. We almost didn't make it...boarding started at 5pm and it was supposed to leave at 6pm. We left the kiting scene at with 15 minutes till 6 and the pedal to the floor. 30 minutes later we found parking a block or two away from the dock and sprinted the whole distance, Will and I both tried to run but ended up hobbling (bad knees). Dan called ahead to another co-worker, Mike, and had him help us delay the boat. When we got there, security was waving us in, waiting to close the gate! I still can't believe we made it. We instantly grabbed drinks to celebrate making it in the nick of time. It turned our to be one of the most picturesque things I've ever done...and all 3 of us forgot out camera's. Dammit! But the pic above was one of the pics I took with my cell phone. And these too:
That night we went out drinking down the street from our hotel. Beer and geeky stuff were the main course, martini's for dessert. Probably the most I've had to drink in a long time. And that damn band never did play the song we requested. Bastards.
Getting up to a highly groggy morning, we left for the airport Thursday around 8am and got back into SD about 2pm that day. I was so dead at work. And it reminds me whey I hate flying. I still can't believe that Southwest was that crowded during the week.
Thursday night, I ventured back down to the Southwest terminal to pick up my mom who flew in from TN. She came out for an end-of-summer long weekend. I'm glad that she loves my new house. Friday, I had to work but she and Tracy went shopping. David drove down late that night. The next morning, Mom, David and I went down to Coronado beach. One of the top 10 beaches in the US. It was so beautiful, with the huge, white, flat sandy beaches and the gold sand glittering in the waves. It's just south of the North Island Naval Base/Airport, so we got to see a few jets landing as well, which was deafening, but really cool. We had some lunch and came home, exhausted. That night, we hung out at home and watched a movie. Sunday, we went and did a little shopping, Mom bought me a housewarming gift: Black and Decker Leaf Hog. It's pretty sweet. I can't wait to use it. David and I chopped down the rest of that damn tree in the back yard as well. No more trees around the pool, yay.
David left about 5pm on Sunday and I dropped Mom off before work at the Airport. I leave Thursday morning for Monterey and the historic races. Damn, this has been a busy summer.
Busy busy busy lately
Been a while since I've written anything. Sorry for no updates, I've been too busy with 'real life' to sit down and update this sucker.
So, I moved. Yes, I now live in a house. No more stinkin apartment. In fact, today I moved the last item. It's taken us about 3 weeks to get settled. We moved in the week of July 4th...it was hectic and hard. I actually got some sort of blood blisters on my poor feet from standing up too much or something. I need to see a pediatrist. David came down to help and we did a bunch of home improvement projects that first day. Swapped up backwards blinds, fixed the garage lights, trimmed all the trees (except the huge Ficus) and a variety of other tasks. We moved most of our stuff that weekend but then immediatly headed out of town to Ohio for a week. The pic to the right was in the airport in Atlanta, waiting to get on our flight to go back to San Diego. It was crowded, and right during the busiest season of the year. Still not too bad tho.
The trip east was fun. Back to see Tracy's college friend get married. The wedding was nice, very traditional, I met some cool people and had a good time. Tracy's dad lives near Smuckers. That's neat. We hung out at Tracy's brother Andy's house a lot, and after the wedding and all that was over, we went up the last day to Cedar Point. Man, that was fun. I really had never been on any coasters like that. So fun, I want to go back and ride the 2 big ones that I missed out on for 'maintenance' reasons. We heard from Tracy's dad that the reason the Top Thrill Dragster was down was because some cable snapped and shot thousands of tiny bits of steel into the foreheads of the front row passengers. Yikes. 120mph and 420 feet, I guess there is a lot of physics involved there. Heh. I actually got a little sick after all the upside down stuff and had to sit out the last coaster. I even got a little queasy on the plane ride home. Hehe.
So after we got back, we immediately started unpacking and fixing up our place. I have done a few more HI projects, including trimming the huge Ficus and installing a water line to the fridge. Tricked out my toilet. Twice. Bought some cool powertoolstoo. Power! Muahaha!
Tracy's Dad is in town this week. He bought us a new grill last night. That thing is bad ass. I am so excited to cook on it!
I go to LinuxWorld next week and my mom comes in the day I get back for the weekend. That next week I go to Monterey for the historic races. Busy busy busy.
walking in sorrento valley
Decided to walk back between buildings after a meeting. A nice day
outside, glad I did it. Sorrento Valley is laced with pockets of
'wilderness'. I did a geo-cache hunt a few years ago in the area under
the I-805 Mira Mesa off-ramp. Neat place, lots of trees and birds and
snakes etc. Should do this more often, I think. ;-)
Birthday Suprize
Yesterday was my 27th birthday. Tracy has been conspiring for a few weeks on a neat birthday for me. I tried not to guess it like last year...but I wasn't even close this time.
She got me up at 7:30 am to hit the road north in the Civic. No idea where we were headed, but I was starting to think she was gonna try to push me out of a plane. After an hour or so, I got a sneaking suspicion that David had some involvement...since Tracy had some secret e-mail thing going and I figured that it was probably with a family member. But she was still not telling me what we were doing. Until we got lost. Finally she spilled the street address to me to help out with the directions. Getty Drive. Well, I think I know where we're going now. Cool! Tracy had set it up so David and Anne would meet us at the Getty, then we'd head to Malibu for some hiking, head downtown for some Dinner and then finally back to David's for cake. How cool! I haven't seen my brother in a long time! So the Getty is the bomb. I took lots of pics. It's such a pretty place. While explaining to Anne some gemoetric math type stuff, David got busted by a guard for touching a 600 year old ceramic tile arrangement. To which he responded under his breath "it was worth it." Hehe. We saw dozens of HUGE extremely old paintings, most of which were painted back in the 1600's. My feet were killing me after a few hours so we went out to the gardens and relaxed for a while and took some more neat pictures. I sat on the damp grass and contracted a mild case of 'swamp ass' for the rest of the afternoon. Then we looked at some more sculpture, had some lunch and decided it was time to go. I highly recommend going to the Getty if you haven't been.
So then we drove North up the 101 to Malibu Creek State Park, a 4000 acre park west of L.A. It's where MAS*H was filmed, so it "looks like Korea". Except we turned on Malibu Road or something like that and ended up just south of where we needed to be, but still at what we thought was the park. Signs pointed us to a place to park the car and hike so we tried it out anyhow. It was deserted and kinda scary. One of the first things muttered on the trail was "we're gonna die out here", followed by the discovery of a building with no windows, a 15 foot wall around the permiter, razor wire and another chain link fence around the whole thing. It could be nothing other than a high security prison filled with raving lunatics. At one point, we were hiking along merrily and all of a sudden a horse comes trotting up behind us and nearly ran over Tracy and Anne. Anne petted it for a bit and then it farted when it walked away. After a while, we just turned around, the trail didn't seem to go anywhere. We made it out alive. I think a few chiggers hitchiked out on my leg tho.
Since it was too late to get dinner downtown, we decided to eat closer, sooner. The drive down the coast was beautiful...the sun was setting, it had turned out to be a very nice day, despite the June Gloom. We had excellent meals at a little Italian place in Malibu that David picked out on-the-fly. The food, service and atmosphere were all great.
After dinner, we headed back to David's for cake and hang time. David and Anne played piano and cello for us, while Tracy took pics of me opening my birthday presents. Mom called right as we were lighting the cake, and she got to sing along and hear me blow out the candles.
The drive back to SD wasn't bad either, mostly because we left at 11:30pm on a Friday night.
All in all, it was a great day. Now, I need to start thinking up something equally cool for Tracy next year. :)
moving sucks
So I have spent the last few days sweating about my move. I have so much to do!
- pack
- transfer phone services
- transfer DSL line
- get TV service (DirecTV?)
- turn on water
- fwd mail
- hire movers
- hire cleaners
- steam carpet
- buy lawnmower
- buy fridge
- turn on electricity
- get more boxes
- die of exhaustion
But this hasn't been a bad week. Just really busy. I had some nice lunches outside. Alehandro's and Tech Center were nice.
And saw some wacky stuff. Check out the Civic parked on top of the vette! Ouch! Apparently they were both parked on Barnes Canyon (good idea) and someone was speeding, swerved to avoid and hit the civic head on. And then sped off. Ouch.
Went to Will's on Wed. night to watch the Padre's game and ended up going out to the Saloon in Encinitas. Played some pool, made fun of the tools at the bar and bitched about work. And drank good Scotch. Lots of it. It was a good time.
Funny links of the week:
Magnitude 5.3
Well, Today was interesting. I started a training class today. It's in another building at work, on main campus. Interesting, I've never been over there early in the morning before. Learned whole new traffic patterns and where to park, even tho it's only about a mile from where my building is. Kinda cool to be on main campus, I liked it.
And then right during class, about 3:30, an earthquake hit. I used to live next to the Gap factory in Gallatin, Tennessee. I've been thru about 50 times as many earthquakes as most Californians have. Let me explain...see, this Gap factory was huge. Something like a mile square was the rumor. And they were constantly building onto it. And so almost every day for 6 months, at 8am and 5pm, they would blast. An alarm would go off that was so far away yet still pretty damn loud. And then the ground would shake for about a second. Pretty voilent too. Sometimes it would just shake plates and glasses and stuff, once or twice it made my bed thump gently against the wall, and once it actually knocked stuff off the top of my TV. The school I worked at was nearby, we had a seismometor in one of the buildings to measure the quakes...to make sure it wasn't cracking any foundations. I was so suprized to come to California and sleep thru nearly all the earthquakes we had. I felt one once about 2am a few years ago. I just thought they'd be stronger.
Well, this one was definatly stronger. I was on the 2nd floor of a building. I watched the ceiling move independant of the floor. Tiny bits of ceiling and stuff landed in my hair. And aftershocks too, about 30 seconds long. Damn, that was kinda scary and neat at the same time. I felt the quick panic that came as everybody ducked under the desks. That pic above was while the aftershocks were still happening. I guess being on the 2nd floor exaggerated it. I snatched a few images off the web that show neat things. California Quake Map, Seismic Hazard map of So Cal, Shake Map and a detailed area map. It's neat to watch the sites because they keep upgrading the size. At first they thought it was a 4.7 East of LA. Then they scratched that completely and put it at 5.1 out in the water. Then they have been moving closer to SD and are up to 5.3 now. heh.
Tracy missed it, she was in the air, coming back from Ohio. Never picked anybody up at terminal 2 before. Cool plane!
tracy's gone
Been doing a lot of nuthin today. Tracy's out of town, headed back to
Ohio to visit a friend that's getting married soon. So I've been doing a
lot of car and computer stuff this week. One thing I've noticed about
her being gone...my eating schedules are terrible. She's not here so I
eat when I'm hungry. Which is at the wrong time of day and usually junk
food. Eating breakfast at lunch. Eating "lunch" about 8pm. Still working
on where dinner fits in. Jeez, I should really pull it together and try
to eat on time.
So, I went to IN-N-OUT tonight to get some lunch. As I'm getting in line
in the drive thru, I guess some girls made a comment about my car. They
were going in to get food. The guys with them were really drunk and
yelled in a highly slurred voice "these bitches want
you...(gurgle)...underage pussy!" To which one of the girls responded
"Hey! I'm legal, I'm 18!" How nice.
Then I go over to Autozone to drop off a container of oil and pick up some black paint and crazy glue. The dude runs my card, it's approved, but his screen says something else. So he doesn't know what to do. So there are like 3 people behind me, all of which are pissed. I'm trying to explain to him that I just got charged and it doesn't matter what his screen says when I realize that he's drunk too.
No point to either of those. I don't care if they're drunk, as long as they don't cost me money or piss me off. I just thought it was funny.
/me opens a beer
I miss my girlfriend.
Batiquitos Lagoon
Saturday, Tracy and I went for a little hike to Batiquitos Lagoon. Tracy's been keeping the hikes light so I could tolerate them. This one was 2.8 miles and mostly flat. Not too hard. But for some reason, I woke up that morning with a footache and I think that wearing running shoes aggrivated it because it hurt the rest of the weekend. Maybe a little tendonitis or something, it seems to never go away completely. Batiquitos Lagoon was neat, but I think that the only reason it exists is because you can't build houses there. Or at least the houses would have a fresh breeze of sewer gas type smells. (Actually, it's bacteria from the lagoon.) Later that night we went to a party downtown. Cool location, an outdoor pool on the 10th floor of a skyscraper in downtown San Diego. I felt all flashy. Tracy's feet got the pain this time, but due to her hot new shoes. D-oh.
Today, after Tracy left for work, I stopped by Home Depot to pick up some leather gloves and then went over to my new house to do yard work. Tyler and I mowed the lawn, groomed the shrubs, trimmed the hedges, ate weeds with the weedeater and cut down large parts of my neighbor's disgusting tree. The one that was hanging over into my yard and over the pool. That is one of the ugliest trees I've ever seen. It looks deformed or something, kinda scary. Like the kind of tree you'd be tied up to and eaten alive by rats. But since the neighbors are moving out, they didn't care how much I cut off. Tyler and I broke out the power saw and did some big cuts. This was my first time to use a hedger or a power saw. I've used chainsaws before, but these were different, cool. I definatly felt MANLY after mutilating a few trees and shrubberies. (A paath! A paath!) And it was good to do work on my house. Just the tip of the iceberg tho. I know it, I can feel it.
I guess I made Tracy sick.
non-gloomy june
Usually
May/June is a gloomy time of year in San Diego. But the last few days
have been beautiful. So this week, I've taken advantage of it and eaten
lunch in pretty places. Wednesday we hit up UTC mall. I sat in the sun
and actually got a sunburn on my arms and nose! Hah! Ran into Matt Webb.
He just got a job at Sangart. Guess they make
some type of synthetic blood. Pretty neato. Also ran into Eddy:
Thursday Eddy and I hit up Tech Center and on Friday I met up with some
friends at Pizza Port to celebrate Arne's last day at his crummy
job.
Interesting links this week:
12 Month Treasury Average (12 MTA)
Interesting Home Loan based on ^ this
You gotta see this: New Way to Fold Shirts.
Today is so pretty. I should go home.