Story Archive - November 2006

Another Tofurky Day (11/23/2006)

I never have an original quote; I just regurgitate the quotes of other people. - Jeremy Allison

It's Thanksgiving! I'm down at the closest local coffee shop that has free WiFi where I expect to be spending more of my non-work time. It doesn't have the same feel to it as the Zocola in San Leandro, but it has enough of a community atmosphere to mostly rest well with me soul. I always run iChat Bonjour in these types of public networks, and while I often got chats from random people at the Zocola, there are rarely people online in this establishment. Until the home high bandwidth network gets restored, this is where I will enjoy bagels with cream cheese and double lattes. The download speeds here are not fast--around a meg a minute--so downloading my thirty megabyte podcast requires half an hour of coffee sipping and life pondering.

It's Thanksgiving again, and that means it's time to take a moment and think about everything wonderful the last year has brought my way. During my restlessness at night before falling asleep I usually do a rerun the day of the day just to remember how I can keep doing the good parts and stop doing the bad ones.

This past year didn't bring any big changes into my life. Instead, it's been a year where all the good parts got a little better and all the bad parts faded a little bit away. Those are harder years to be remember to be happy about. It's easy to notice the big changes, but we often forget all the little things.

I'm thankful for the freedom that my life bring to me and the inspiration that my friends and family bring to me. My job is good enough to bring me some good financial freedom and I'm only tethered by things I want to be tethered with. It's been like that for a while, but I haven't taken much advantage of that freedom in previous years. That freedom brought me two trips to Disneyland, a trip to Hawaii, the trip to AX2006, the trip to Clearlake and a trip to San Diego.

The job is still mostly good. I'm not sure I could ever find a "normal" job that I liked perfectly. I like my job in nearly all respects. The biggest challenge, the one I'm not sure how to get rid of, is working in the evenings. There are those people out there who leave work behind when they go home from the day. Their evenings are theirs. Those people can choose to work in the evenings to get ahead, but they don't have to. It's basically impossible for me to succeed in my job without putting in hours in the evening to talk with the global team. In world growing continually flatter, I think it's hard to really find a fantastic company in mine line of work that doesn't have this issue.

The girl is the wonderful girl, a short decaf extra hot Maria-latte. We've only been dating about a year and half now. When she's around, it's so comfortable, it feels like it's been a lot longer than that. We had a big trip to Hawaii for our joint birthday party and it was amazing fun.

The housing situation is good. It's expensive. The rent is going up. The internet is dead. Even with those issues, it's an amazing place to live full of young and happy multi-national families. We have Germans across from us, Brits right down from them, Greeks around one corner and Japanese around another. It's fantastic and I love living here. I like walking to the shopping center. I love sitting at the table out front.

The life rating is high. I'm thankful for it. All the arrows are pointing in the right direction. Stay on target.

Agony of the Feet (11/22/2006)

I hate technology. I have no landline. I have no mobile phone (it's currently almost literally thrashing around in the throes of death). I'm nearly useless now. - Eric Cheng

My home internet got shut down by the man. I hate him for always keeping me down. It's been shut down for nearly a week now, and it hurts. It hurts because I can't download my Podcasts but it hurts more because I can't work from home. I need to work from home. Now more than ever. I work at a company where the vast majority of employees are on the other side of the globe from us and we have roughly zero overlapping hours of the working day. When I can't work at home, bad things happen.

I live in a location where a single company is the only company that can provide my internet, phone and cable service. So I have no alternative methods of getting broadband. I'm connected once again at slow speeds. My phone, my good old reliable Sony Ericsson T616 which I got over three years ago is able to give me a data connection to the tubes at a fast 100 Kbps. It's not great, but it's good enough to check email and do instant messenger, which are the two major requirements of my job after 5pm. Glory be!

It's actually a dream I've had for a long time. Now, no matter where I am, if I have mobile phone reception I have internet access on my computer. That's how it should be. That's how it should have been for a long time now. I even got a special rate for being Cingular Blue. I know a lot of people who hate their wireless plan, but AT&T wireless has always treated me very well.

Candied Yams (11/16/2006)

Thanksgiving dinners take eighteen hours to prepare. They are consumed in twelve minutes. Half-times take twelve minutes. This is not coincidence. - Erma Bombeck

The office is doing a cool Thanksgiving Day celebration where we all bring in a potluck dish and enjoy a dinner together at lunchtime. I decided to take on a challenge and make candied yams. It's not that onerous, but well above the mash potatoes that I typically made when I was growing up. I also liked the idea of having some extra marshmallows lying around the house to put in my cocoa or just eat directly.

My standard meal at home consists of meat off the BBQ, vegetables boiled from a frozen bag and rice from the rice maker. I've started blending white rice with brown rice in the mix. Half-and-half seems about the right blend to have enough brown rice to taste healthy and enough white rice to taste good. The problem is that the brown rice clearly takes longer and always comes out a bit al dente. I keep thinking that I haven't made my signature pound-and-half cake in a long time. This cake is so tasty it prompted my older brother to once say, "Damn! You're going to make a great wife someday."

I think I'd have a good time improving on my cooking. Alas, free time is not something I have much of these days and I prioritize learning to cook below other activities like paying the bills. I'm looking forward to the holiday freeze at work! Very soon I will no longer be working every night with the international team!

Too Young to Date (11/10/2006)

Save a boyfriend for a rainy day - and another, in case it doesn't rain. - Mae West

What age do you let your children start dating? The question came up over the weekend at a lunch of three nearly-thirty-year-old childless couples. I'm of the opinion there is not restriction on this. Children should start dating when they feel ready to start dating. Certainly there should be other important rules. I'm sure I'll want to meet all the young boyfriends of my daughter and use fear and intimidation tactics on them.

The pattern I've noticed is people who weren't allowed to date until a certain age, and weren't ready to anyway, think it's just dandy. That goes to my opinion that children will start dating when they are ready. It doesn't surprise me that children who weren't ready to start dating in their teenage years think it is a good rule for their children. The problem would occur if their children are earlier bloomers but are being forced not to.

That leads to my last category of people. Those people who weren't allowed to date during their younger years, but were ready and eager. You know what those kids did? They dated anyway without telling their parents. I know. I dated some of them. Maybe they had a girlfriend at school they didn't tell parents about. Maybe they would go out with groups of friends that included their other-half. Maybe their older boyfriend would pick them up from Jr. High while the parents were still at work (*cough* *cough*). Who knows?

I think I would rather my children didn't hide it from me. If it's okay for them to date, then they are more likely to tell mom and dad. That's really what I want: as much disclosure as possible.

San Francisco Values (11/08/2006)

Anybody who's ever dealt with me knows not to mess with me. - Nancy Pelosi

I voted a straight Mac ballot. Apple all the way. I've been gleefully watching the rumors of the iPhone and I'm very excited by the possibility of it. I currently carry my phone (Ericsson T610) and my Palm (m505) everywhere I go. I often have my iPod (4GB Mini). I dream about the iPhone, because I have this hunch that it will let me drop those three items into a single slick device. While I have no doubt and iPhone would sync gorgeously with iCal, I'm not so sure it'll have any hope to sync with Exchange. The one killer feature the Palm always brings to me with Hotsync is the ability to sync my iCal to my Palm to my Exchange and have one universal calendar for work and life.

With Mac, life is always better when it's all Apple. When I first made the switch I was using Entourage, because I was a former Outlook user and I thought it would be a natural choice. One day I decided to give it up and embrace full Mail, iCal and Address Book. Everything is happier that way. Mail items magically put the photos of my friends from the Address Book and ICS attachments magically become event invites in iCal. It just works.

Technology is slowing taking over my life. It's started putting me to sleep and waking me up. I came across this fantastic program called Pzizz that builds naps and sleeps for you. It basically uses voice and sounds to do neuro-linguistic programming and invoke a hypnotic state. I've been using it to take me to sleep at night. I've been using it take naps when I can grab. There's no wake-up mode, so I built my own track for that in Garage Band. I was sleeping so soundly a few nights ago, I woke up to find my arm complete numb from being laid upon. I'm not talking asleep, I mean completely numb. I couldn't move it. I thought it was dead. I picked it up with my other arm, and shook it and shook it and jumped up getting ready to call 911 but it finally started the tingly sensation and came back to life. Crazy!