Strawberry Pancakes

Minimalist Tip

2011-08-05T19:34:00.000-07:00

Minimalist tip: Create a "To get rid of" category in your ToDo list. Clear the section ASAP.

Hoodie

2011-01-24T22:07:00.001-08:00

This is my second sewing project, and the first where I actually planned what I wanted, went to the fabric store, and put the whole thing together.

The reason-- besides having a hobby away from the computer when I go home from work, was to have some super comfortable lounge wear. "Oversized" sweatshirts are more like "vaguely appropriate" sized to me and I always get gipped on my gorilla arms. I figured I could make one myself with all the excesses size I desired.

I found a tutorial here:

http://www.craftstylish.com/item/30695/how-to-make-a-mens-fleece-hoodie

I wanted to reclaim whatever manliness I lost by using a sewing machine so I bought some kickass skull and cross-bone pirate fabric. The fact that it's super soft fleece doesn't help, but I'm not wearing it out-of-doors so only the internet knows. Having but one sweatshirt to pattern from, I turned to my Strong Bad hoodie, which I also think is pretty sweet. My wife points out that I should have changed the quilt on the guest bedroom to maintain my image, but I guess it's too late for that.

The instructions start by folding the sweatshirt and cutting out the body with room for seams. I couldn't tell at the time I took this picture, but that cutout is MUCH larger than my sweatshirt+seams; this could probably fit André the Giant.

Sewing up the body and the sleeves was no problem, but I did have to turn to the internet to figure out how to sew the two together. This video was extraordinarily helpful.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-HIqxLokrkI

Despite the fact that the sleeves were the most difficult, I made the most mistakes on the hood. I had already hemmed the neck, which was a mistake. I also found the neck shrank after putting it on, so I had to rip out the seam and cut a larger V-Neck. Fortunately, I over-cut the hood (like everything else) so I had room along the bottom to sew into the V.

The finishing touch was a pocket just the right size for my iPhone. Because of the crazy pattern, I can't take any good pictures to show it off so just call that a "feature" that the iPhone pocket is camouflaged.

My next goal is to make something I can wear out of the house without looking like a clown :)

Word Lens

2010-12-17T10:35:00.001-08:00

This is so awesome:

http://questvisual.com/

I just downloaded the app to my iPhone, and it works impressively well. The app is free with a demo mode that reverses words, and language packs are $5. The best part is the whole app works offline, so it works, you know, when you actually need it.

I did buy the Spanish to English pack for emergencies, but this picture is really fun so I'll post it instead. Can you read it? (iPad is apparently not in their dictionary.) Note the crazy angles and it even got my keyboard keys!

Put this on blog

2010-10-31T21:22:00.000-07:00

I have begun to love reading the Put This On blog. It's a different perspective on life than I usually get. Granted, a materialistic one. However, a lot of the posts and links are paired with some pretty astute social commentary. For example,

You don’t need more. You need better.

http://putthison.com/post/1412501470/in-2008-americans-owned-an-average-of-92-items-of

Be sure to watch the episode videos.

Awesome camera bag

2010-10-30T16:52:00.000-07:00

I just got a new Nikon D3100 digital SLR camera. I've always wanted to learn more about photography and have more control over my photos, and with our honeymoon coming up it seemed like a good time.

The D3100 is a pretty entry level camera. I liked it because Nikon is what a bunch of people I know use so there's potential for Lens swapping. The main features I wanted were small body size, fast shutter, and the ability to shoot video and geotag (that part is an extra attachment).

Along with my camera, I decided to get a new bag. We are going to the caribbean so I wanted a bag that would protect my camera, had the highest quality, but didn't look like a camera bag at all. I found that at Saddleback Leather.

And it fits my camera, plus many future accessories very well. (That's my iPad sitting horizontally in the left side pocket too!)

That's the Chestnut large satchel. I love the size and quality of the bag. It's expensive, but as I told my wife, "It's the same price as a decent Coach bag, but it's got a 100 year warrantee." It also just looks so classy.

There are a couple cons to be aware of if you are considering this bag. It comes stiff, and without zippers and snaps (that could break) it's not the quickest bag to get into. I'm already noticing it get broken in and that's helping. It's also heavy, and the strap is too long. The length is so it can be converted to a backpack, but I don't see myself doing that.

But after using it this week, I am very pleased with my purchase and I think it will serve me well for a long time.

Engineer's guide to getting married: Pt 2

2010-10-30T15:42:00.000-07:00

We've already covered getting the ring and proposal, so now let's talk about planning the wedding. If you're lucky like me, your fiance is a super organized planner. If not, here are some things you might want to recommend.

Spreadsheets. Our whole wedding, plus a dozen alternate weddings we could have had, is documented through spreadsheets. We used Google Docs because you can easily share and collaborate.

There are certain benefits to picking and choosing between existing customs and not being tied down to one. We chose to do an Asian banquet style reception, meaning the location, food and service were all wrapped up in one price. It was a big price, but only as much as just the food would have cost elsewhere. But we also had a christian wedding and a Vietnamese tea ceremony so it was a lot of fun.

Cake: trials are awesome, and I think cake makers are kinda lonely because they seemed to love to have us come try their cake and chat with us. In the end, we liked the cake best from a Vietnamese bakery and it was so much less expensive.

Photography: For us, having a strong director as photographer was really useful. He had the authority to move the whole group of people or tell everyone to be quiet. I'm sure there will be other strong personalities that want to take control, but I highly recommend getting a photographer who can and will direct.

I don't have as much to say about that as I thought I did. And that is the final lesson, guys. Have an opinion but don't say more than you need to keep the ball rolling. She has so many ideas and life long plans that she'll never need you to come up with an idea, just to put to rest the multitude of options she's set herself up for.

The last part will be honeymoons, which will have to wait because we haven't taken ours yet!

Engineer's guide to getting married: Part 1: Rings

2010-10-30T14:23:00.000-07:00

Yup, long time no bloggy. I've been working on a special project that's going to reap rewards for my entire lifetime. That project is foreign to many men, especially engineers so I attempt to distill the past 10-11 months into one place.

~% man marriage

Usage: sudo marriage -proposal <>

You can't just walk into a ring store and choose the one with the best specs. Not only is the ring a girl's most anticipated piece of jewelry, it has to be with her every day for the rest of her life. So it has to fit her personality, her style, her lifestyle, and hopefully your budget. Therefore, I can't give any advice on what to look for in a ring but I can recommend that you look at rings together and strongly consider letting her choose or design the ring herself. In my situation, we went to a bunch of ring stores and she showed me a ton of characteristics about rings that she really didn't want. So I had to figure out what a ring would look like that didn't have those characteristics and try to convey that to the jeweler.

Some of the features I had to avoid were:

No bezeled gems: They don't let enough light in for full sparkly goodness
No barrel cut gems: They look glassy and fake
No encrustations (lots of little diamonds)
No asymmetric rings
Nothing that sticks out too much or has sharp corners
No yellow gold
Nothing too thick or heavy for her delicate hands
Classic looking without being common looking
No diamond as the main stone, but auxiliary diamonds ok

You would need to know where your girl stands on these issues, because some are make or break in either direction for your particular bride.

As for giving her the ring, you should know what the answer will be before you propose. The time and location can and should be a surprise. I ended up taking off a day of work unbeknownst to her so that I could get the ring before our trip to Colorado. She knew I'd propose eventually because of the ring store trips but really didn't think I'd have time to get it done. Us guys tend to act so abnormal on the day we propose that she always knows something's up by the time it happens.

That's really enough for one post, so I'll make this a series. Tune in next time, same Bat time, same Bat channel.

Using git for sync and backup

2010-08-20T18:38:00.001-07:00

Nerd alert! I need to put this list of instructions for using git somewhere so it's going here. I hope it might be useful for someone else too.

Why: One of my most valuable assets at my job is a directory full of sample code projects I've created over the years. Sometimes, it's a command line tool such as "nsdictionary" which I created to test something with that API, or sometimes it'll be a full App like "ThreadedQCLayersAndBindings" which tests complicated interrelationships. They were quick and dirty, taught me something specific, and useful as templates for future exploration and now I can't bare to lose them.

As with any set of files, there's two main concerns: backup and synchronization. Backup is really two parts

If the hard drive fails I want to have stuff stored on another disk.
If I change a project by experimenting and that experiment fails, I want to be able to revert changes quickly and easily across all files.

Synchronization just means I want to have my desktop and laptop in sync.

There are lots of tools that could work... Rsync, svn, cvs, rcs, etc. Each have their merits, but in the end take too much time to maintain or don't provide enough features to be worth the time to set up.

Then I heard glowing reviews about Git and how it's a distributed version control system. So I gave it a shot. Here's a mini tutorial, if everything you've read (or skimmed) sounds good:

The setup: Mac Desktop and Mac Laptop and I mount the HD of one on the other over AFP. This is NOT a tutorial for setting up a git server. There may be plenty of those but that's more than I wanted to accomplish so I didn't even read them. Git is installed by default on Snow Leopard so this is also NOT a tutorial for setting up Git on Mac OS X. This is glorified Rsync with revisions.

1.) Create a Git repository for revisioned files

cd /Volumes/DesktopHD/Sources/tests

git init

git add -a

git commit

Yep, it's really that easy to set up git. At this point, you can track history through the log of commit messages, and roll back as necessary.

2.) Mount the LaptopHD over afp:// by browsing in Finder, or whatever you're used to. This also probably works for iDisk and other transport types but for now, we'll call it LaptopHD.

3.) Clone the repository of tests to the mounted drive

cd /Volumes/LaptopHD/Sources

git clone /Volumes/DesktopHD/Sources/tests tests

cd tests

git fetch

Wow that's pretty easy too.

4.) Add the tests I've already created on the Laptop to the repository

cp -r /Volumes/LaptopHD/Sources/old_tests/* /Volumes/LaptopHD/Sources/tests

git add -a

git commit

Woo I'm invincible!

5.) Then I wanted to push the new files back to the desktop (remember right now I'm at /Volumes/LaptopHD/Sources)

git push ##Don't do this

What the... NOOOOO!!!!!! What have I done!?!?

Only use git push if you are smarter than me, which isn't possible so just don't. The designers put this in by mistake and it's really horrible (I'm just being inflammatory now so somebody will come along and correct me. That's how the internet works; I don't question it.)

First, the correct thing to do in a setup like mine:

5.) Go back to each place that's out of date and pull the changes back

cd /Volumes/DesktopHD/Sources/tests

git pull /Volumes/LaptopHD/Sources/tests/.git

Now the reason git push sucks:

When I did git push, I went back to DesktopHD expecting the files to be there. They weren't so I did a git pull. Nope, files are up to date. I did a git status on the LaptopHD version, everything was checked in. Back on the DesktopHD version I did git status and all my files were in the status and marked for deletion. What??? So I killed that repository, started from scratch by copying files from the LaptopHD and did all the steps again, except with the second step 5 rather than the first.

Searching online, it looks like maybe there's a way to set up a --bare repository and use hooks to automatically forward to your main repository or something. Crap on that. It's easier to understand, "This is a distributed versioning system, you always pull your changes from elsewhere" and with a couple git remote add commands, pulling from multiple sources is pretty painless.

So there's my story. I really like git now, just so long as I don't use git push ever.

Kick Scooters

2010-06-15T09:29:00.001-07:00

Thu and I got Xootr kick scooters last weekend. They are pretty awesome.

Despite California being so environmental, it's a major pain to ride a bike here. Yep, California, you suck at green. On the road, bikers are lucky to get a lane for themselves. But even then, the severe lack of driving skills scares me off the road. To top it all off, bike racks are super rare. I could take my bike in with me to my appartment I guess, but at the grocery store? restaurants? my office? Not so much.

Where scooters win is their portability. You can ride on the sidewalks and then fold them up and carry them with a shoulder strap.

In high school, having a car was freedom. Now I feel the same way with a kick scooter because I can go further than walking, but I'm free from using oil. With all the anger over BP's fuckup, it's nice to be able to actually do something about it.

Be creative

2010-03-09T11:01:00.000-08:00

http://mrdoob.com/lab/javascript/harmony/

go.

2009-12-05T08:29:00.000-08:00

People like to make flowcharts of things.

So I made one.

Fixing things

2009-08-17T19:29:00.000-07:00

My beloved Mac Mini died a while ago. The hard drive went out, so it failed to boot but I had it backed up (Go Time Machine!) so I didn't lose anything. This would be a pretty epic failure for most, but I'm a computer guy so it wasn't a huge worry for me.

This weekend, my car's dashboard lit up with a "Check Tire Pressure" dummy light. I was freaked. I thought sure it would be a trip to the dealer, a couple hundred dollars and/or lost time to get it fixed. (I really didn't assume it was ACTUALLY just tire pressure, but that's because cars are a mystery to me.)

Well today, I fixed both; and I'm quite pleased with myself.

I ordered a new laptop hard drive from Amazon, cracked open my Mini, detached the WiFi antenna, unscrewed the mother board from the housing, detached the hard drive, slid in a new one, and got everything back together and it works!

But the thing that really stressed me out, was this car light. I couldn't see any difference in the tires so I thought it was a bad sensor. But when I took the pressure of each tire and compared it to the manual, I discovered that the front driver side wheel was 20 psi when it should be 35. So I filled it up with $.75 of air and the light went off! It's called a dummy light for a reason.

So tonight I'm celebrating the small victories in life. Here's to proactive backups and easy car maintenance!

Dream Merger

2009-08-04T13:34:00.000-07:00

I'm getting married! I'll start from the end and work backwards.

Most recently, we put up our website at http://www.DreamMerger.com/, so I can finally blog and link to it. You can also just google for [Troy and Thu Wedding] because we're awesome and have the top hit. You'll have to do that because we don't yet have a lot of details like time or location (who said you're invited?) but you may read our stories and get to know us. We've always joked how an Apple and Google employee would be like a corporate merger, hence Dream Merger.

Secondly, the proposal was accepted in Boulder, Colorado under the beautiful Flatirons while we took a 4th of July holiday. Boulder is a special place for me, and I selfishly wanted to plant pleasant memories in Thu's head of the most beautiful place in the world. I don't think I needed to buy a rock for that, but it didn't hurt.

And firstly, the ring I selected is a sapphire stone accented by small diamonds. Thu and I had been shopping so I could understand what she liked. Instead, she told me all the things she didn't like and I took lots of notes on my iPhone so I could extrapolate what she wanted. Wanting it to be a surprise, I took the day off work and rode the Bart into San Francisco to the San Francisco Provident Loan Association where Ben and Allison made me an extremely happy customer.

Jump back with me to WWDC '09 (2 months ago), I had just finished presenting Quartz Composer to hundreds of raving developers and knew I'd finally have some time to go ring shopping. SFPLA was the highest rated jewelry store on Yelp so I walked up to Mission street where they are located. For those of you who know San Francisco neighborhoods, Mission district can be -colorful-; so it comes at no surprise that the building looked like a cross between a 1920s bank and a jail with bars on the windows and thick plastered walls.

But the ominous exterior was no indication of the attitude within. I met Ben for the first time, and he made me feel so comfortable answering my questions about rings, giving me advice about the proposal itself. He recently got married himself, so it was like having an older brother in the jewelry business. I felt no pressure at all and he was very knowledgeable.

Contrast this with some of the places that Thu and I went after that day with shoddy quality and low customer service. The sales associates would push certain styles and "bling" on us. One place even tried to pass the softer, cheaper tanzanite off as sapphire while whispering to each other in vietnamese. Never go ring shopping at the Grand Century mall in San Jose!

So I played hooky and returned to SFPLA on the last day of June. Thu and I were leaving for Colorado the next day, so I didn't have much hope to buy a ring in one day. I talked to Ben some more, and also met Allison who reminded me of a conspiring little sister. She was so excited by my ring selection and it really balanced Ben's stoic humbleness so I felt both confident and excited by the duo.

The two of them were able to get it done, even going so far as to shut down the jewelry portion of the store in order to rush out to their gem suppliers to get me stones to look at, brought the different choices out of lockdown into the sunlight and within reach of that shady Mission neighborhood, then put a rush order on the setting and cleaning so it could be done before I left the city that day. It was all so perfect, and I cannot say enough about them, or the ring that Thu very much enjoys.

As I rode the Bart back home, I texted Thu, "I finished everything I needed to get done before we leave." just to keep up the charade that I had worked all day long.

Conservatism

2009-04-05T23:30:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking a lot about conservatism lately, so when my Dad sent me a couple of recordings of Rush Limbaugh on the subject, I decided to record my feelings in a letter to him. I'm not going to link to that hate monger Rush Limbaugh, but you can probably find the cpac videos on you tube.

On to the letter:

To me conservatism is about personal responsibility and the belief that if you work hard and everyone around you is held accountable, you can make a good life for yourself. It's not about people, it's about yourself.

That means that if I work really hard, I can get a promotion. If my employer produces a good product, they will be profitable. If the United States has the best morals, we can be the most admired country in the world. You can see what is not conservatism by reversing those: If my employer produces a good product, I get a promotion? If America has the best morals then my employer will produce good products? No, the work has to start from the bottom, and we can't rely on the organizations we are a part of to give us what we want just because as a whole they are strong.

Along with the rewards of personal responsibility are the accountabilities. If I don't do a good job at work, I'll be demoted or unemployed. If my employer doesn't produce the products that people want, then they need to cut costs and figure out who is not doing their job right. And if the United States doesn't have the strong morals, then it will need to figure out why and fix it.

But there's something troubling about that belief lately, and it's causing me to doubt. External and uncontrollable factors are creeping in. People who made bad decisions about buying a home are causing turbulence in the financial markets, and it could cause my employer to loose sales, and it could cause profits to be down, and cause arbitrary layoffs of good employees like me.

People lied to us about the Iraq war committed crimes, and they are getting away with it. I don't know whether the former president should have immunity in such matters, but if he tells someone to do something illegal then one or both of them needs to be held accountable. If not, future generations will blindly follow commands because they have no personal responsibility.

Climate change is happening on a broad scale, energy prices are bound to continue upwards, terrorism will still exist in the world and many other systematic problems will plague our world and "conservatism" as I see it cannot solve any of those problems. Really, these systematic failures prove to me that conservatism is false, and that's rather unfortunate.

We have to work together to get out of the financial mess and keep the greedy few accountable on Wall Street. (That includes an end to pussyfooting around with 90% taxes on bonuses and just fire those who lead companies that take bailout money.) We have to work together to make sure that the people who permitted torture in Guantanamo are locked away for a very long time. We need to work together to slow climate change, repair relations with the "others" and drop our dependence on foreign energy.

I hope that big government is NOT the way to do this, but I know that "conservatism" as defined in the dictionary as "preserving the status quo" will not get us there. Nor will listening to a drug addled hate monger like Rush Limbaugh. At the beginning of the 3rd recording he says "Stop assuming that the way to beat them is with better policy ideas." Well Mr. Limbaugh, if you have no ideas stop wasting so much air. The only way to get past all this is with creative thinking, something that we Americans are good at.

We need to be progressive, we need to work together, and we need to understand that there's no easy way out of the mistakes we've already made.

* On the videos themselves, can anyone show me proof that Joe Biden said Bobby Jindal missed a day of work at 7-11 to give his response to Obama's state of the union as Rush joked? It's true that he said that "You cannot go to a 7/11 or a Dunkin’ Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent" which is bad but also years ago so we've all been over that plenty by now.

But pretending that a successful Indian like Jindal or many who work in the silicon valley cannot get further than 7-11 is way worse (7-11 may be the American dream to some, so Biden's comment may be referring simply to the American dream.) The comment about Jindal appears, to my limited search, to be a Limbaugh original. Can anyone point me to video or respectable-news quote attributing Biden? All I can find following that speech is "conservative" ann coulter calling Jindal the "Slumdog candidate" so Rush not only proves himself a racist, but other Republicans follow his leadership.

Multiplayer iPhone games

2009-02-22T18:08:00.000-08:00

I love the iPhone as a gaming system. I've never been much into games, until the Wii that is, but I do think a good game is worth spending money for and doesn't have to be complicated. It's not easy to find multiplayer games for the iPhone though, so here's my list so far.

- Galcon: If you have a friend and you're looking to play a game with them, this is probably the best implementation of fun there is. You own planets, and you shoot little ships at other planets to colonize them. The gameplay is simple enough to learn, but the strategy takes a long time. It's a good 30 second game that is fun for hours. It's also really fun as a solo game, but if you don't have a friend to play with you might as well buy the free version which has everything but the ability to play against someone. This game costs 5$ but as mentioned, try out the free version first.

- Touch Hockey: FS5: It's your basic air hockey game and the controls are good and responsive. There's also a free version of this one you can try out to see if you like paying 2$ to play with your friend.

- Uno: This one has some issues with the computer players. It's an impressive game to be sure, but unless you set some gameplay options, which do not persist between games, the computer players can clobber you with their speed. Also, it appears you need to play it in solo mode to unlock some things like icons and stuff so I can't give it my full support at 5$ and no trail version.

- Fieldrunners: This is not a multiplayer game but if you get as addicted to it as either my girlfriend or I, you'll have no problems getting together, firing it up and ignoring eachother until one breaks a score record of the other. I could very easily replace a 90$ a month cable bill (if I still had one) with this 5$ application for the past 2 months and it shows no sign of wearing out as I just recently started playing Crossroads in Medium hardness mode.

Any other good multiplayer games I should try? Let me know!

New Car

2009-02-02T19:24:00.001-08:00

I got a new car! It's a new 2008 Audi A4. I could have gone with the 2009, but none of them had black leather interior and the beige didn't click with me.

Some people think it's funny how I buy things. I'll hold out against buying, or buy a really low cost version of something for as long as I can. People then associate me with someone who has something against nice things. I resisted getting a cell phone for a long time back when it was the cool thing to do. Then when I got one, I researched everything and got a really nice, small one that I loved. Even today I have a 3G iPhone which is a far cry from my former anti-cell self. Likewise my new car has a lot of cool stuff and is Much better than my old car.

Her name is Audry.

New York

2008-11-30T16:36:00.000-08:00

The grand New York post!

We left Saturday at the leisurely hour of 10:30am for our 1:30pm flight. It was nice not having to scramble to get everything together, but it was a shame to lose a whole day to travel. Thu and I took the SouthAndEastBayShuttle.com and although they took pretty good care of us, Sunnyvale was the first stop so we had to spend a lot more time getting there than anyone else. The flight took less than the expected five and a half hours, but with time change that meant we didn't land until about 10:30pm. We arrived and figured out the AirTrain and LIRR to get into Manhattan, where we met Tabitha and Kyra at the Penn station. We had soup and hot chocolate before traveling up East Harlem where Tab lives.

On Sunday we went with my sisters and the roommates to morning brunch at Isabella's at 77th. The place was very nice, if crowded, and you get a drink included with breakfast (starting at noon). New York is cold in November, but that's not so inconvenient as the extreme HEAT indoors. Seriously you guys, the thermostat is not binary. After brunch we went to a craft market to stock up on cold weather gear and I got some fingerless gloves that transformed into mittens. They were quite practical but Christian said they were girly. I had seen someone with a British accent wearing some on the train the night before, so I decided not to let it bother me.

In the afternoon, my sisters had plans to see a play starring Harry Potter so we went to the Nintendo Store and to the Empire State building. We got to the top just as the sun was slipping behind the horizon, so it was very neat. We went shoe shopping briefly because Thu's feet were starting to hurt and we saw the Times Square new years eve ball inside Macy's! Then we headed up to 107th for a restaurant called Thai Market which was very good. To finish the night, we went back to Tab's place to start making an Apple pie for Thanksgiving dinner.

Monday we had breakfast at Tab's house and then went walking around the north part of Central Park. We tried to go to the New York museum, but it was closed on Mondays. We did see the conservatory garden which was quite different now in the cold than it was in June when I was here.

At 1:30, my parents landed at JFK so we headed back uptown to meet them as they came off the bus. Knowing they would be hungry when they arrived, we went to Reggio's coffee shop in the Village where the first cappuccino machine was brought over to America. Then we all went to the Pod hotel to check out the rooms and to get Thu and I checked in. We went back to Tab's for dinner prepared by Chrystelle and some games and then Thu and I had to take all our stuff to the hotel at about 11:30.

On Tuesday I had gotten tickets for the family to see the Rockettes, which my friend Michelle was an assistant choreographer for. We met for bagels in the morning, but the rain made it hard to eat around the cart so we found shelter in a public building. The show was very impressive, and a good time was had by all. Thu and Christian came with the family. We found the same Brazilian restaurant our family ate at last time we were in NY, but I was not as impressed this time. In the afternoon we went to St. John's cathedral and Columbia university. Then we wanted to try to get somebody tickets for Wicked through the lottery so we all entered our names. I won! Thu and I grabbed some Pizza while the family went to China Town for Dim Sum and to meet our friend Becca at the bus station coming from Boston. The show was fantastic, and the seats were superb.

Wednesday morning we decided to go to the Moma museum and Dave's friend was able to hook us up with free tickets. Most of us stayed for a while to keep out of Tab's way while she prepared turkey dinner but Mom went back early to help. By about 5pm we were all back at here place helping and getting her small, but not so small, apartment ready for eating Turkey. Dinner went well and we had plenty of food. We had planned on seeing the parade balloons being blown up this night, but we were too tired from eating.

Thursday morning we got up early so we could get to 66th street 2.5 hours early. Crowds grew and grew until there was standing room only and everyone kept warm by proximity. Finally the parade started and we saw classics as well as new acts. I saw Rick Astly and yelled out "Rick Roll!" He looked directly in my direction and looked horrified/dismayed, as if I had ruined a magic trick. Turns out he later disappeared into the cartoon's float he rode on and rick rolled the entire nation in front of Macy's.

After the parade we enjoyed mob-rule to get onto the subway (Someone had opened the emergency gates and everyone flowed in, despite the illegality of it but who was going to stop thousands of people trying to get on the train?) We rode up to 90th for Starbucks and Carmines for our second Turkey. This time we had the Balches and Rebecca, so an 18lb turkey was all that would suffice. Since we got there early and had Christian with us, we had excellent service and plenty of company.

At this point, some went home to nap but Mom, Dad, Thu and I went down to Belvedere castle and WTC. Then we met up with the girls for ice skating but were too tired to join, and just watched. Somehow, my parents had enough energy to join the girls for a movie but we decided to go home and finally sleep off the turkey.

On Friday morning, Thu and I packed up and went up to Tab's apartment at 120th and had breakfast with Mom, Dad, and Kyra as they prepared to fly home. Then we went with Tab to do some Black Friday dress shopping, and some excellent pizza at Patsies in the village. We got some cupcakes and then went to karaoke for drinks and songs with Dave, Chrystelle and Christian and of course Tabitha. Then we stumbled over to Mojitos for more drinks and guac, before finally heading home. We tried to watch Wall-E but only got through the Presto short and Up teaser trailer.

On Saturday, we went to the central park and Columbus circle to try and see the indoor snow. It never did snow before we went back to Tab's to make turkey sandwiches and prepare for our flight home. Although the seats in Delta flights are really hard and we were surrounded by Russians who didn't follow the airline educate, we got home without too much problem. The plane got home 45 minutes early, but we circled the airport for at least that long before getting back home.

Our vacation didn't end there, because Sunday was our scheduled Couple's massage at Watercourse Way in Palo Alto. What a great way to end a high-impact vacation! I have never felt so rich-- not wealthy like I had lots of money but upper-class like I was some great thinker or beloved figurehead. The steam room, dry brushing, massage, hot stones and hot oil really took out the knots from cold, stressful walking and sleeping of the week before.

Historic

2008-11-05T08:30:00.001-08:00

The election is over but I still want to keep campaigning. I nominate this as the best quote from Barack's speech.

"This victory alone is not the change we seek--it is only the chance for us to make that change."
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/politics/obama/chi-barack-obama-speech,0,524762.story

McCain also had a very nice speech. But it was absolutely ruined by his supporters, booing whenever Barack was mentioned. You stay classy, Arizona.

http://www.freep.com/article/20081104/NEWS15/81105013/1118/RSS

Winner 2008: YouTube!

2008-11-03T18:54:00.000-08:00

There have been some fantastic videos this year. On election night (since I already voted!) I will be kicking back, watching the election coverage and re-visiting some of my favorite videos this year. You know what? Forget that. It's election-eve, I'm gonna do it now.

I'm not going to embed these since you loose the full-screen button.

- Palin vs. McCain debate
- Synchronized Debates
- Wassup beer commercial parody I didn't like the original and I didn't think I'd like the parody, but this really packs a lot of current events into one package.
- McCain's QVC infomercial
- Yes we can The video that got me interested in Obama.
- Palin rock You may have to sign in to enjoy this one :)
- 3 anti-Prop 8 ads in that endearing Mac style
- The vet who did not vet
- Just neat Obama video
- Will Ferrell as President Bush
- The hilarious presidential roast
- Colin Powell endorses Obama
- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2nsGtd7y3c
- Another cool video
- Explaining the economic crisis
- A message from Sarah Palin
- Lil O'Reilly
- Money as debt
- The great schlep
- Disney presents: Sarah Palin movie
- Backwards candidate

Getting into the election now

2008-10-18T11:51:00.000-07:00

I have never been so informed about an election until this year. In fact, with exception of Apple products I've probably never been so informed about a single issue in all my life. That's not to say I'm a political expert, just interested.

So when my friend asked me where to go for information on the election, I was taken aback because all my information was gleaned over months of daily news reports, speech videos, friends and relatives. How do you get involved this late in the election without all that previous knowledge? Not only knowledge of lipstick and celebrity status, but how anger, experience, the Clintons, age, race, and elitism factor into this race.

I told her how I felt, and planned to gather some resources to help her determine her own view. Here's what I would have sent her, but I found a better site down below for this sort of one shot election decision below.
http://origin.barackobama.com/issues/ - Barack's plan
http://www.johnmccain.com/Informing/Issues/ - McCain's plan
http://www.electoral-vote.com/ - good for daily news and a snapshot of how the election is going.
http://labs.google.com/inquotes/ - Choose what topic you want to know about and get random quotes from candidates on the subject.
http://factcheck.org/, http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/ - Reports on the truthfulness of various ads. I take issue with their method of "unbias". They give equal time to each candidate but not all lies deserve the same weight. Factcheck.org videos are the worst, with the formula being 1 McCain, 1 Obama and one 3rd party ad checked even when there are 3 gregarious lies by McCain and the Obama lie is only a lie in certain contexts.
http://troykoelling.blogspot.com/2008/10/do-you-know-where-money-comes-from-this.html - My own blog pointing to videos about money and the financial crisis.

But then I found this site glassbooth.org. First, it lets you rank issues as important or not. Don't worry if you think it seems like you are supporting an issue you care about, because on the next page it takes only the issues you care about and asks you whether you support or oppose it, and how strongly you feel this way. Finally, it compares your answers with various candidates and shows you which one you are most like. Most importantly, it lets you "find out why" the candidate is aligned with you or not with links to their votes and quotes. Glassbooth.org is a very good site.

If you are interested, I matched 71% with Barack Obama and 58% with John McCain.

So that's my advice for being informed when you go vote. Next challenge: Amendments and Propositions.

Money is debt

2008-10-12T16:43:00.000-07:00

Do you know where money comes from? This video is entirely fascinating and relevant, despite being released two years ago.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cy-fD78zyvI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hfXavRTM4Fg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_yvRZoM-2r8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0p8LepIuVM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PzXZ_Hs1g6U

It's 45 minutes, so get comfortable. Despite that, I've watched it 3 times in the last 2 weeks and learned something new each time. I'm not sure the solutions are viable, but the problems are real, frightening, and immediate. The proof is in the news.

McCain gambles

2008-09-25T22:13:00.000-07:00

McCain is gambling with his political campaign, and so far it's working. Three notable gambles: 1) Sarah Palin 2) Canceling the RNC for the hurricane 3) Pausing the campaign to return to Washington for the economic crisis.

Time magazine profiles each candidate's gambling habits: Candidates' Vices" Craps and Poker

I'm trying to write shorter blog posts, but let me say a quick thing about each of McCain's gambles. Sarah Palin has turned into a pinup girl. The press is allowed to take pictures but no video or audio, and no questions. The RNC hurricane (a better name Might be Gustav but who will remember that?) ended up being a non issue, and McCain played the right bet here. The campaign pause is a total publicity stunt. He has not stopped TV commercials and has made appearances on 5 (five) television networks since he announced he would stop campaigning. If people called "STUNT!" on any of these things, they would realize they cannot vote for John McCain.

Here by accident, is a nice video wrapup of this blog post

Costs

2008-09-23T21:23:00.000-07:00

"Americans in general want a clean, prosperous environment, with lots to do, good paying jobs, nice homes, good transportation, healthy food. But what are we willing to do to get there?" asked a friend. She mentioned that one way she is adjusting to the changes that the US is facing is by a 12$/month unlimited bus pass. I'm jealous! Here's the rest of my reply:

First and foremost, I think that as Americans we need to pay more attention to the total costs associated with our actions. Your bus pass is partially paid by taxes, probably on some people who don't use public transportation very much, if at all. But even though their tax money isn't getting them from point A to point B, they receiving lighter traffic because you seek out alternative means of transportation. They are ensuring that somebody drives less and saves the environment. And they are keeping the bus driver employed, off the streets and earning money to be taxed by the local government. All in all, that sounds like a good cost!

The federal government also has programs that need to be paid for by taxes, but Bush recklessly offered tax cuts (favoring the rich) without cutting the programs those taxes paid for. This irresponsibility caused the budget deficit to rise higher than ever before. Just take a look at this graph, where the national debt (as percent of GDP) is clearly rising over the periods of Regan, Bush Sr. and Bush Jr. http://zfacts.com/p/318.html

But both McCain and Obama know that raising taxes on people who are just scraping by will not help the economy. The difference is that Barack recognizes that there are some people who can afford to continue paying for the programs their representatives voted into place. He has not proposed raising taxes on the rich. Taxes for people making $250k will return to what they were when Bush took office, because Barack is just going to let the tax cuts expire as they are scheduled to do. The republicans have done a good job painting this as a tax increase, but in fact this is just the post-Thanksgiving sale at Bloomingdale's expiring on Friday night.

What are the costs of the Iraq war? Ten billion US dollars a month, Four thousand US casualties and Twenty thousand Iraqi people dead. What are the costs of the Paulson bailout plan? Seven hundred billion dollars per year, non-reviewable, and non-recoupable by us, the tax payers.

You are right that we are going to have to make adjustments no matter who gets elected in November. But to me, the adjustments are in how we pay for these mistakes. We can't just put it on our Chinese Express credit card and hope the problem goes away.

So the image I would like to see the United States follow is one of more intelligence. You know I was called "elitist" for saying that? (by my own mother!) Where else in the world can you elect a candidate because he's not too smart, not too rich, and not too handsome? I think we should be selecting the best president we can, and right now that is Barack Obama.

Golden Parachute

2008-09-17T09:18:00.000-07:00

John McCain admits that the economy is not one of his strong suits, so one of McCain's personal economic advisors is Carly Fiorina. She successfully ran the IPO of Lucent in 1996 and she was named by Fortune magazine as the most powerful woman in business in 1998. But she does not think John McCain or Sarah Palin would be qualified to run a business. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/09/16/fiorina-palin-couldnt-do_n_126827.html

How hard could it be? Well, Fiorina, who successfully ran the IPO of Lucent then went on to smash HP into the ground. On her watch, HP's market value was cut in half and the board of directors asked her to leave.

Now here's what really gets me angry: failures are rewarded. Fiorina was awarded a $21 million dollar cash severance along with the ~$21 stock valuation she held (a valuation that would have been higher had she not wrecked the company). Is this what she thinks happens to people who loose their job? No wonder McCain thinks the economy is doing alright, the unemployment rate is higher than ever so clearly all those people have a nice severance hidden away.

The HP fiasco is personal too. My Dad's aunt was an employee for HP for many years and one of the nicest people you will ever meet. She was within months of retirement when Fiorina led the merger with Compaq, and she was made redundant. Months away from a big party, cake, pension and health care, she was laid off.

Ultimately, a "Golden Parachute" is up to the company's board to dole out but it's encouraging to hear Barack put workers first in this situation:
http://my.barackobama.com/page/community/post/stateupdates/gG5qWh

Recipe for entertainment

2008-09-02T22:03:00.000-07:00

When I want to be entertained, there's a couple things I look for:

- I want to suspend belief. Don't give me every day stories and especially don't give me reality TV. I want to escape my life.
- Create a world for me to believe. While I want to visit a fantastical world, it must have rules that my nerd mind can understand and extrapolate from.
- Give me some mystery. Maybe some of the world's laws aren't fully explained to me at the beginning, or maybe some of the characters have unknown pasts. I need to be engaged in finding out more.
- Romance and sexual tension between the principal characters should be the continuing theme in the show. That means that 99% of the episodes cannot have mushy happy endings, because there needs to be a reason to continue watching.

So here are some of my favorite shows:
- Buffy the Vampire slayer: A world where vampires rule the night, but they can be killed by fire, beheading, and of course, a stake through the heart. Buffy loves Angel, but the real story is Zander and Buffy, two childhood friends who could never be together.
- Alias: A story of agents in the CIA. Physics and Laws are consistent with our own, but the lives of agents are seriously unbelievable. I believe the story was strongest when Will Tippen was around, but there's still a certain "forbidden" aspect of the romance between Sidney and Vaugn.
- Highlander: Immortals live among us and kill eachother with swords. The love interest here is not Duncan, but instead Richie and Tessa. The rules are very strong but we don't know why: Immortals can sense eachother when close, they cannot kill on holy ground and in the end, there can be only one.
- X-Files: This one has less rules and more suspension of belief. Scully and Mulder can never get together, but there will always be the romance.
- Firefly: Captain Mal and Anora are classic examples of the strained romance. If you can believe the post-apocalyptic world they live in, then the cowboy, space theme is not hard to believe.
- Heroes: definitely suspends belief, but the story changes so often it hasn't been able to capture my attention past the first season. Hopefully this will change with the new season.

Great Speakers

2008-08-29T00:22:00.000-07:00

I'm a big fan of speeches. I remember in High School when I discovered Patrick Henry and his speech on freedom.

Today, I've watched 3 great speeches. First, I watched Martin Luther King Jr. on a low resolution, black and white youtube video talking about his children playing with white children. Then, I watched Obama's speech from 2004 on a low resolution, color youtube video, when he talked about there not being a Red America and a Blue America but a United States of America. And finally tonight, I listened to Barack accept the nomination for presidency in front of 75,000 people in my mile high home state on a glorious full resolution, color youtube video with great sound. That's progress!

By choice, I haven't watched any analysis of the speech, and that's the great thing about YouTube. But here are the things that stood out to me:

"We need a President who can face the threats of the future, not keep grasping at the ideas of the past."

"Washington's been talking about our oil addiction for the last thirty years, and John McCain has been there for twenty-six of them."

"America, now is not the time for small plans."

"And Democrats, we must also admit that fulfilling America's promise will require more than just money. It will require a renewed sense of responsibility from each of us to recover what John F. Kennedy called our "intellectual and moral strength." Yes, government must lead on energy independence, but each of us must do our part to make our homes and businesses more efficient. Yes, we must provide more ladders to success for young men who fall into lives of crime and despair. But we must also admit that programs alone can't replace parents; that government can't turn off the television and make a child do her homework; that fathers must take more responsibility for providing the love and guidance their children need."

"Individual responsibility and mutual responsibility - that's the essence of America's promise."

"John McCain likes to say that he'll follow bin Laden to the Gates of Hell - but he won't even go to the cave where he lives."

"We are the party of Roosevelt. We are the party of Kennedy. So don't tell me that Democrats won't defend this country. Don't tell me that Democrats won't keep us safe."

"So let us agree that patriotism has no party. I love this country, and so do you, and so does John McCain. "

"I know there are those who dismiss such beliefs as happy talk. They claim that our insistence on something larger, something firmer and more honest in our public life is just a Trojan Horse for higher taxes and the abandonment of traditional values. And that's to be expected. Because if you don't have any fresh ideas, then you use stale tactics to scare the voters. If you don't have a record to run on, then you paint your opponent as someone people should run from. You make a big election about small things."

"This country of ours has more wealth than any nation, but that's not what makes us rich. We have the most powerful military on Earth, but that's not what makes us strong. Our universities and our culture are the envy of the world, but that's not what keeps the world coming to our shores. Instead, it is that American spirit - that American promise - that pushes us forward even when the path is uncertain; that binds us together in spite of our differences; that makes us fix our eye not on what is seen, but what is unseen, that better place around the bend."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZCrIeRkMhA

Listen up

2008-08-26T11:20:00.000-07:00

Listen up because this is important. How can I support Barack Obama when I believe myself to be conservative? Former representative and Republican, Jim Leach spoke at the Democratic National Convention last night:

...the way today’s Republican Party has broken with its conservative heritage.

The party that once emphasized individual rights has gravitated in recent years toward regulating values. The party of military responsibility has taken us to war with a country that did not attack us. The party that formerly led the world in arms control has moved to undercut treaties crucial to the defense of the earth. The party that prides itself on conservation has abdicated its responsibilities in the face of global warming. And the party historically anchored in fiscal restraint has nearly doubled the national debt, squandering our precious resources in an undisciplined and unprecedented effort to finance a war with tax cuts.

How can anyone call themselves a conservative and support military operations overseas? How can anyone call themselves a conservative if they let the government choose what a woman can do with her body? How can a conservative government have so much power that they may ask telecommunications companies for records which incriminate American citizens, and they would comply? Would a party aligned with conservation spend more than it takes in?

Sure, there are some policies I'm not in favor of because I think they will be costly. But in my voting decision, I'm going for total cost conservatism not just line item.

Joe Biden

2008-08-22T18:18:00.000-07:00

I'm really getting into the election this year. it would be easy to be disenfranchised with this circus, but I'm so sick of the current administration, that I look forward to something new. Like I said last time I wrote about politics, nothing political is worth discussing unless you have nothing to talk about, and I neatly tied up my entire summer in my last post.

I like Obama. There, I said it. And today, he announced he is running with Joe Biden. Horray! More characters in this drama! :) Congratulations Joe and Barrack, good luck to you both!

Summer

2008-08-18T22:34:00.000-07:00

Well it happened again, I haven't kept up with blogging. I feel stuck because I can't create a new post until the old ones are out of my system and the old ones are old. I currently have drafts for 3 posts in my box, and no desire to complete them. But Jen called me out on it this weekend, so I'll quickly sum up and then be done with it. Maybe I'll even be better about blogging :D

1. WWDC happened. It was a lot of work, and I once again presented to a room of over 300 ravenous Quartz Composer developers. I did much better this year too, which is awesome. I also spent some good quality time with Ryan and Jay getting sloshed at the edge of a Hobson's Choice punch bowl.

2. immediately following the daily commute to San Francisco for WWDC, I flew out to NY for some well earned vacation and a visit to my sister, Tabitha. I wasn't sure if I could handle another week of city life, I was kinda sick of San Francisco and last time I visited NY it was oppressive feeling. But I walked, A LOT, and really felt free this time. It was great not to have to drive or even ride in a car for a whole week.

3. I took another vacation to Colorado this past weekend, the 14th of August. My wonderful friends Lily and Andrew were tying the knot (quite literally) and it was a big reunion of some pretty awesome people who have scattered to the wind.

That's the update. Thank goodness that's over now, so I can try updating more often.

SubEthaEdit as a Journal

2008-04-26T10:46:00.000-07:00

I really like SubEthaEdit, a text editor for Mac. It's mostly geared towards programming, but I find that it's a really good editor for anything text-only. For example, my journal is plaintext to avoid file format changes.

I created a script for use within SubEthaEdit's AppleScript menu. It's silly stupid, and doesn't scratch the surface of what SEE's scripts can do but it fits my needs (laziness). Basically, I wanted the same template for all my entries so if I ever want to process them, I have labeled metadata to work with. I also wanted to automatically save them into my Journal directory with a timestamp for sorting.

I know there are other journals, heck I could even use Blogger. But I don't trust online security and other Journal apps either lock you into a file format or are bloated (or both).

So here's my script. I hope it's useful to someone.

on seescriptsettings()
return {keyboardShortcut:"^~@n", displayName:"TKJournal", inContextMenu:"no"}
end seescriptsettings

-- You should type and select the title before invoking this script
tell application "SubEthaEdit"
set mySelection to contents of selection of front document as text
set myHeader to "title: " & mySelection & return
set myHeader to myHeader & "Date: " & (current date) & return
set myHeader to myHeader & "Category: " & "Personal" & return
set myHeader to myHeader & "Tags: " & "journal" & return & return

set contents of selection of front document to myHeader

set myFilePath to POSIX path of (path to home folder)
set myFilePath to myFilePath & "Documents/TKJournal/"
set {year:y, month:m, day:d} to (current date)
set myDateString to y * 1 & "-" & m * 1 & "-" & d * 1
set myFilePath to myFilePath & myDateString & "-" & mySelection & ".txt"
try
save front document in POSIX file myFilePath
end try
end tell

Food

2008-04-04T21:55:00.001-07:00

I have been in California for 2 years and this is the second time I've had Chinese food in that time. Don't get me wrong, I've had Japanese, Thai, Vietnamese, Korean, Mongolian, Philippino, and other Asian cuisine's which would all be lumped together under one roof and called "Chinese" in Colorado. Chef Chu's in Palo Alto was delicious, but like the other place I went to, they didn't even have what I would call Chinese food staples such as Sesame Chicken, Sweet and Sour Pork, etc. The menu was slanted towards seafood, even the hot & sour soup had shrimp in it. I'm sure there's something to be said for authenticity, but sometimes you crave what you're used to.

On the other hand, I am much more sensitive to regional food now. When someone asks if I want to eat Indian, I usually ask whether the restaurant is North or South Indian (I prefer the vegetarian South Indian food). If someone wants to go to a Brittish Pub, I look forward to curry because it's going to be the best thing on the menu (besides the beer).

Laziness

2008-03-26T19:44:00.001-07:00

I remember when I first realized I wanted to be an engineer, I was working at Target and I was constantly thinking of ways I could replace myself with a machine. I was fascinated with the "LRT" scanners and thought of so many ways to make the process better. "Efficiency is intelligent laziness" has been my motto ever since.

This is in stark contrast to the first time I actually tried programming, my eventual major and career. It was so hard, and took so long to do anything that I hated it. I think it was one summer during middle school when I went across the street to learn wood working with my neighbor's father and my neighbor came over to learn programming with my Dad. I think it's pretty cool that we carried the tradition of apprenticeship and I hope my own son will have a similar experience. But I digress. This experience of programming was to write "Hello World" to the screen using c++. It required so many files, a header and an implementation, not to mention the CodeWarrior project file and I was a hunt and peck typist at the time so it took over 2 hours to copy the program from a paper print-out. If it was so hard to write two words to the screen, how would I possibly write a game with graphics?!

One way or another, I stuck through it and now I am a software engineer and I have found ways to apply my motto to school and work. I still hate all the setup of programming though, especially for scripting languages. I wrote these programs to a.) learn them and b.) have a mkscript script that I can use to create a template for new programs. I think it's pretty cleaver that the template comes from the program itself!

Okay so I know perl, that will be obvious by how much better the perl program looks (or maybe perl is better??). But I thought it was lame to claim this is a good method for learning and not put it into practice, so I did Python and Ruby too.


#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;

foreach my $file (@ARGV) {
    if(not -e $file) {
        open (FILE, ">$file");
        open (READ, "$0");
        while(my $string = <READ>) {
            chomp $string;
            print FILE "$string\n";
        }
        system("chmod u+x $file");
    }
}


#!/usr/bin/python
import sys
import os.path

def main(argv):
 for i in range (1, len(sys.argv)):
  if False == os.path.exists(sys.argv[i]):
   writeFile = open(sys.argv[i], 'w')
   readFile = open(sys.argv[0], 'r')
   try:
    for line in readFile:
     writeFile.write(line);
   finally:
    readFile.close()
    writeFile.close()
   os.system("chmod u+x " + sys.argv[i])

if __name__ == "__main__":
    main(sys.argv[1:])


#!/usr/bin/ruby

for file in (ARGV) do
        puts file
        if not File.exist?(file)
                writeFile = File.new(file, "w")
                readFile = File.new($0)
                while (line = readFile.gets)
                        writeFile.puts(line)
                end
                system "chmod u+x #{file}"
        end
end

If it means anything, I knew perl so that one was easy. I knew Python in College, hated it then and hated it now as I wrote this script. Ruby, I have never used and I must say, I'm impressed. I learned and wrote that script faster than I wrote the Python script, which I should still remember. I still like Perl best, but I'd give Ruby a shot if I needed to.

How I get things done

2008-01-24T23:20:00.000-08:00

When I was in High School, I figured out how to take the shortest shower possible. The secret is one of those things that is really simple when you say it, really simple when you apply it, but really hard to accomplish day after day. Letting my mind wander while hot water pours over my body is the only reason I can get out of bed quickly, and since there's no such motivation (except the clock or water heater running out) to get out of the shower I usually hang out for a while.

So what's the secret? Two things: 1.) Use both hands to clean at all times and 2.) Get out when you're done. People will have other tricks like top to bottom washing or soaping dry but really, if you can keep moving you will be clean in under 5 minutes. If you're clean, why are you staying in the shower? (Except girls who shave in the shower, I'm not going to complain :)

This turns out to be the basis of my strategy for getting things done in the new year. 1.) I need to always use all the tools at my disposal. 2.) I need to stop when I am finished.

So far I've blown through a bunch of things that otherwise would have been forgotten, or done at the last possible minute. I got my car registration done which required an oil change, emissions, check writing, getting stamps and mailing. I cleaned out my closet and will take 3 bags of stuff to good will once I also go through my dresser. I researched and got a new credit card. I'm more productive at work also.

In addition to getting a lot done, I've noticed that this is exhausting and I go to bed tired every night. But it is one of those good fatigues that makes you sleep hard and wake up refreshed. I'm making such good progress that I can soon start on something I really want to do verses these things that I needed to do.

2008 Goals

2008-01-08T09:31:00.001-08:00

As 2007 was the first year I created goals, I think it went pretty well. This year I'm going to focus on doing more awesome stuff. Not only adventures, but also completing projects and generally living my life more efficiently.

To help with that, I'm going to try out the GTD craze that everyone has been talking about. I may have missed the fad, but I think it could still help me stay focused and Get Things Done.

Maybe later I'll talk about the actual things I want to get done, and that will be my real set of "goals" this year but if I am going to do more, I need shorter deadlines.

2007 wrapup

2007-12-28T10:20:00.000-08:00

for all practical purposes, this is the first year I made new year's goals since it's the first time they have been written down. So how did I do?

- Do something awesome:
Not many people know this, but I had a patent filed this year. I wont know for a couple years whether it is accepted but I have a copy of the patent application in my desk at work.

- Do something stupid (in the pursuit of awesome):
Although I never finished the story on my blog, my mustache fits this category quite well. Everybody hated it, and I loved it.

I have to tell this story because stories are what this goal was about. I shaved my mustache off and trimmed my sideburns on Christmas eve after everyone went to bed. I wanted to have Christmas eve pictures proving how long it got, but not ruin Christmas day pictures. Over the 2 months I grew it, it had become fairly thick and everyone noticed my mustache so I didn't have the embarrassing situation of people not noticing right away. I wondered if people noticed it because it was out of place on my normally boyish face, so I didn't tell anyone I had shaved it. Waking up, cooking and eating breakfast, gifts, and getting into the car to a movie were all family affairs and nobody noticed. Kyra was watching a video on her camera from Christmas eve and I said, "aww, remember when I had a mustache? Those were good times." Suddenly the car was in an uproar :) Lots of fun.

- Perform something in public:
I'm going to bring this one back to work, which wasn't the intention of the goal but it still fulfills it. I got to speak in front of over 300 people at WWDC this year. I was so prepared to be nervous speaking in front of lots of people that I didn't even consider that the lights would be too bright to see anyone. It was like practicing to an empty room, and it shocked me so much that my presentation was sub par.

- Keep the plants on my deck alive:
Absolutely failed. No excuses, it just didn't happen.

- Plan and take a vacation:
I went to Panama!

So there you have it. I give myself a 3.5 out of 5, since 3 were total successes and one was sub par. New goals will be made on the new year :)

Update

2007-11-08T17:58:00.000-08:00

My moustache is trickling in at a steady rate. It's good enough now that people can notice and laugh. I'm extending my donation's promise to this claim: If you donate to a good cause, you will be assured immunity towards making fun of me :) I think the entire lunch table at work ought to donate now.

In other news, I'm flying back to Colorado... now-ish. So if you live there, call me up and we'll chill.

Horse Racing

2007-11-02T18:10:00.000-07:00

Today Apple had a party at the Horse Races. It was actually a lot of fun. We were given a voucher for some money to play with, and some drink tickets and food. They reserved the entire top section for us and had extra staff around to help teach us how to bet.

One thing I find interesting, not only in this situation but also in life life is how we throw around percentages, and which ones matter. If you can drive across town to save 10 cents per gallon of gas, you save one dollar per tank. I fill up every two weeks so that's 26$ for the year, .03% of my salary. If you just paid off your credit cards earlier, you could be talking about whole percentages saved, quite a bit more than stressing about frugal gas purchases.

Or how about savings? If you move your your extra savings into the stock market, you take on a small risk and (hopefully) your money grows much faster. The goal of any investor is to "beat the market", to get above that magic 20% return that you receive by simply investing in an index fund. But when you go gambling, you don't really feel happy unless you double, or triple your money.

If you played horses like you play the stock market, you would be extremely happy to get 20 cents per dollar. And I don't think that would be very hard. I guess there's some draw to "Winning Big" such as lottery and gambling, that supersedes the plain old "winning".

Movember

2007-11-01T21:49:00.000-07:00

The idea is simple. Bring awareness to prostate cancer by growing out your mustache. How hard can that be? If you're a skinny blond kid like me, it may be a little hard. But I'm going for it anyway. There's a website where you can support my peach fuzz.
https://www.movember.com/us/donate/donate-details.php?action=showrego®o=142643&country=us

I'll even make a deal. I will keep the mustache for 1 month AFTER November for every 5$ you donate. If you want to laugh at my stubble until next year, all you need to do is donate 60$ to prostate cancer (tax deductible). Maybe by then I can grow enough to wax it and curl up like the oldtimey studs. (I'm going to honor the max contribution, so if one person donates 5$ will keep it until the new year, 15$ will keep it through Valentines day)

I'll keep this blog updated with pictures. Be sure to check out Ryan Bruels for a real stud who will probably outgrow me by a meter.
https://www.movember.com/us/donate/donate-details.php?action=showrego®o=141291&country=us

Yosemite

2007-10-29T10:52:00.000-07:00

How to have an adventure:

Go to Yosemite and walk around. It's a very beautiful place full of trees and tall rock formations.

Take a hike on one of the many trails. We went to Glacier point, and it was a crime how many people drove to the top rather than hiking. The path is so sheer you can get a sense of accomplishment as you look over the valley.

Walk home in the dark. It's scary, and probably more than a little stupid but the stars were perfect and the extra effort really bonded the four of us together.

Fly there. Driving is for wimps. Get some of your Google buddies to hop in their private plane and take you to Yosemite. Did I forget to mention that before?

And that's my weekend folks!

Happy Leopard day

2007-10-27T10:30:00.000-07:00

I'm going to ignore the pink elephant in the room and just talk about anything but. If you know me, ask about the pink elephant and I'll let you in but the web is no place for pink elephants.

But in other news, Leopard shipped! Work wrapped up a little bit ago for us because they need to put all the shiny disks in the plastic boxes but it's extremely nice to be able to talk about it finally. You should definitely check out iChat, which uses QuartzComposer to make you look even funnier while video chatting with your friends. There are also some pretty sweet iTunes visualizers and new image filters that are really nice. Of the three new QC screensavers, one started out as a little test I did to make sure the Noise patch was working.

Of course if you're into art or programming or any combination thereof, be sure to install the Quartz Composer editor application by installing the Developer tools. Real live features I put into Leopard are available for you to play with.

Hope you enjoy!

Wrapup

2007-09-18T23:18:00.001-07:00

Why is it so hard to write the last journal entry after a vacation? Is there some fear that the trip is over when that is done? Obviously you can't write a first entry since being back until you write the last entry of the trip so here it is, two weeks out and I'm finally writing.

We're home! Our sketchy Central American airlines got us home; and if you would like to avoid the risk of being stranded somewhere, never fly COPA airlines. If you recall they are the same airlines that abandoned us in Guatamala, and we later learned that our flight was NOT canceled, they just decided that everyone coming from our United flight would get bumped so they could handle the overbooking. That was then. The new sexy is triple booking our seats. You would think that an airline could remember how many people fit on one of their airplanes but apparently that's too much to ask. After I got settled in my seat someone came with an identical, printed, dated ticket as mine. When Tanya got to hers, someone was already sitting in it and someone ELSE had a ticket for it as well. Apparently this happens all the time because the locals took it in stride and somehow everything worked out.

Another fun experience to add to my list was getting selected for a random bag check in customs. They pulled all my stuff out of my bags and cut open some sealed coffee to look for drugs. All part of the experience!

Panama City again

2007-09-01T16:27:00.000-07:00

Well, it´s our last night in Panama. In the last couple days we left David taking an overnight bus to Panama City which was so cold from the AC we didn´t sleep very well. We got in at 6AM and got to the car rental place.

If you like thrillers, drive in Panama City. It´s bad enough inside a Taxi, but then you only have to worry about how nutz your driver is, not the thousands of other taxi drivers around you. We weren´t renting a car to get around the City, it´s easy enough to get a taxi and only costs 2$ anywhere. We wanted to explore some of the inland areas and so we were taking a car trip.

Two nights ago we drove to Pedasi, a sleepy little town with some nice beaches and very nice people. On the way we stopped by the most over developed beach in Panama (Coronado) and it was too developed to even find access to the beach! We also stopped in some little towns with lots of history, found some pretty churches and visited a museum that was so eager to have our business that two of the staff rattled on to us in spanish for 3 hours (2.5 more than we had hoped to spend there)

After Pedasi we drove up to El Valle which was a really nice place. Like Boquete it was up in the mountains so cooler and very green with extreme hills rising vertically all around. We visited a zoo there where you can get right up close to the animals and the only thing stopping you from putting your hand in the cages was a sign "Cuidado".

This morning we drove back to the City, and we´re going to see a folk show and have dinner soon. Tomorrow we get on a plane and with any luck we´ll be back in the USA by tomorrow night at 11:30.

Boquete

2007-08-28T18:29:00.000-07:00

I´m in Boquete now, and it´s raining. Seems like it does that a lot lately, and while my rain jacket was great at lower altitudes it´s actually a bit chilly here.

Today we got up and had some breakfast we bought yesterday in our hostel and then got a Taxi with a nice lady from San Mateo to the bus station. We found the bus to Boquete and had a nice trip through beautiful country to here, where it´s undescribably beautiful. Gigantic hills with shear cliffs covered in green life and clouds floating in and out between them. There isn´t a ton to do here though, so mostly we walk around the hills and look at stuff. We got a fabulous house for 15$ a night with two rooms, living room and kitchen. It looks down into he river, I think it´s the chiquiri river. Tomorrow we´re going to see an indian artisan villiage and tour a coffee roasting company.

I´m loosing track of the days, it feels like I´ve been here forever. I´m starting to miss some things about America like hot showers but I could certainly enjoy this a bit longer.

City of David

2007-08-27T19:28:00.000-07:00

We left Bocas today and in a whorl wind of activity we made it to the city of David. We got on a water taxi which took us to a dock in Almirante, a man carried our bags to a taxi waiting outside who took us to the bus station, the bus left right as we sat down and drove 4 hours to David and a taxi waiting outside took us to the Purple Hostel, a nice little place not far from the center of town.

This city isnt much fun, but it could be the rain. We are trying to figure out where to go next, but it looks like we might cancel our plans to do a hike and just go see Boquete. It is hard switching back into choose your own adventure mode, the days in Bocas have been nice and relaxing and now we need to go back to figuring out who to trust and where to sleep.

Last day in Bocas

2007-08-26T14:18:00.000-07:00

Hey all, We´ve been having a great time in Bocas del Toro, but tomorrow we´re catching a bus out of here. It´s hard to believe we´ve been here more than a week! Yesterday we went exploring an island called Bastimentos and found a really cool surfing beach and today we went on a tour to see dolphins, snorkel and a really secluded beach with beautiful sand.

Miss you all, but not enough to come home yet!

More Bocas

2007-08-24T15:01:00.000-07:00

Hey Everyone! I´m still hanging out in Bocas, getting some sun and having fun. Today I went scuba diving and saw some really great coral, parrot fish, and marvelous undescribable sights. There was a jelly fish that was about 8 inches diameter. After the dive instructor led by example, I petted the jelly. It´s a good thing Pixar taught us that jelly fish only sting on the bottom.

Yesterday we caught a water taxi back to red frog beach with our island friends, Alice, May and Mark. It was so beautiful, with blue sky, white sand and green water. There were little thatched roof umbrellas along the beach to hide from the sun, but I didn´t hide well enough and got a bit burned. It was fun to body surf and play in the sand. I made a horse head sculpture in the sand.

We just moved hotels, our last one was nice but it´s good to have some different experiences. We will probably stay here 2 or 3 more nights and then head towards Boquete and David. I could really get used to this island life.

Bocas del Toro

2007-08-22T17:08:00.000-07:00

Hey everyone, it´s been a while. Computer access here in the islands is limited, and there are half a dozen people in line after me to pay 2$ an hour to use the computers.

Panama City was great, and now I´m in Bocas del Toro. It´s a set of islands in the North part of Panama really close to Costa Rica. We flew in on a small prop plane and had reservations at a nice little bed and breakfast. The town is a lot different than we were used to in Panama City. Everything in the town is walking distance away, and most of the town includes tour shops and hotels, but each hotel contains a restaurant and a bar.

We´ve been using the tour shops a lot, it´s the best way to get around the islands with gaurenteed return. The first day here we went on a trip and saw Dolphins playing in the water. Our captain said some were only hours old, and you could tell they were not going underwater very much and still learning to swim.

Next while others snorkeled, we went to a small indian villiage and hired a guide for 5$ to take us through the jungle. There were many mosquitos but we did manage to see a Sloth, a couple Cayman (alligators) and the beautiful Red Dart Frog. They are tiny, about the size of your thumbnail but the guide told us they had enough poison to kill 20 spanish soldiers when they were invading the area. We got to hold them, because the poison is only dangerous if ingested or injected into the bloodstream with an arrow or dart.

That night we met up with some new friends for dinner and drinks, and it rained so hard that our street was completely flooded and we had to wade home.

This morning we went on a snorkling trip and saw many fish and corel. One beach had Star Fish which were gigantic, up to 16 inches tip to tip. We also got to see Isla Parajaro which was a reall cool pirate looking island.

Pictures will be great, but unfortunately this Windows machine freezes whenever I plug in my camera and I don´t want to try again and retype this again!

Hasta Luego

First day in Panama

2007-08-19T16:08:00.000-07:00

I'm sure you're all wondering if I'm safe after yesterday's message, and I am. We are now in Panama and I love this place.

After I wrote yesterday, we decided to make the most of our delay and see la ciudad de Guatamala. It was really fun, there was a festival going on and all the school children from around were performing in marching bands for the parade. We also went to a beautiful Cathedral and a market. The market was huge, a converted building with 5x5 stalls filling it end to end, 2.5 stories high (two floors on top of eachother, and one was half a story down.) Inside you had the regular tourist stuff, along with sacks of grain, cooked foods, ribbon shops, wedding supplies and live chickens for sale in a basket. Everything the residents of Guatamala could possibly need.

Our taxi driver was really sweet. He offered to come back when we needed to leave and in fact refused payment until he collected us. He was trusted by Marriot so we could trust him. When he returned he couldn't make it to the agreed location because of the festival traffic so he parked 3 blocks away and ran to meet us.

We took our flight and arrived in Panama without further delay. Flying in was beautiful. Fog surrounded the plane all the way there until we were almost there and it broke just in time to throw light on the highrises of Panama City. We shared a cab with some frindly Americans we met on the plane who shared our cancled flight plight. Tanya and I ate dinner and roamed the streets last night, trying to get lost. Interestingly, on closer inspection it appears that although there are more sky scrapers than San Francisco and this looks like a richer city from the outside, inside you can tell that 1/3 of the buildings are under construction and some are empty. There is a lot of investment going on right now and this city could very well boom, but right now it's not quite as metropoliton as it appears.

This morning we got up and went to Casco Viejo, the new, old center of town. It was raining and I was interested to see that the residents seem to stop their lives to stand under an awning and wait for the rain to stop. We waited with them for a while, but decided just to brave the rain, and I'm glad we did because it was still warm and the wet city streets were pretty in their own way.

At one point we saw the ocean so started walking towards it. About 2 blocks from the edge of the peninsula an old woman stopped us, insisting we don't go down that way. She said it was too dangerous. It's really cool that she did, despite the fact that it proved we stuck out as tourists. Everyone has been likewise friendly and helpful. I should point out that Guatamala did not feel safe, and nobody seemed interested in looking at us or helping us except our Taxi driver.

After lunch at a high scale restaurant called Buzios (30$ for both of us) we took a taxi to the Old old part of Panama, Panama Viejo. It was hard to find a taxi driver, and when we finally found one he already had a fair. Didn't matter, he told us to get in and we started driving the opposite direction we wanted to go. All taxi rides had been life and death experiences so far, with the weaving and horn honking and speeding but this guy was 10x worse. Then we entered a complete slum, and I was sure we were being scammed and the other woman in the car was a decoy. She eventually got out and we were off, so I felt a little better but I didn't feel safe until we were out of the car. Later we had a taxi charge us 1/4th the price and drive at a more reasonable speed. We tipped him well.

Old Panama was kinda fun, ruins of the old city before Captain Morgan attacked it and burned it to the ground (the guy you know from the Rum). I was pretty interested in hearing about Morgan, because I knew he got pardoned (and knighted) so I thought he was forgiven. But it was clear the residents don't like him much. The Pirate section of the museum was tucked in the last corner and talked about what a terrible guy he was. Basically, he raised the city because he could, they offered very litte resistance and he took 3000 prisoners ransom and torchured them until they paid. So now I'm more sensitive to their culture, but I can't help marvel at this early entreprenuer.

That's the everything up until now. I really love this city, so many colors and sights. Tonight we plan to go to the new, new center of town and maybe see what the clubs are like here. Tomorrow we see the canal and get on a plane for Bocas Del Toro where we should have a more relaxed schedule.

Greetings from Guatamala!

2007-08-18T07:23:00.000-07:00

... Wait, what?? No, I didn't make it to Panama yet. Our 6am flight from Guatamala to Panama was canceled so they put us up at the Marriot until 2:30pm when we can fly out. They gave us free breakfast and lunch here too, and the food was delicious. We're not sure what to do in Guatamala, I really don't know much about this country. Soon we're going to head out and see if we can find a market or something. Hopefully our plane gets to Panama this evening!

Flying out today

2007-08-17T07:05:00.000-07:00

Today is the day I leave for Panama. I catch a flight from San Francisco to LA at 7:40pm to 9:15pm, from LA to Guatemala at 10:55pm to 4:45am and from Guatemala to Panama City at 6:15am and land at 9:15am. Some people might dread so many flights and arriving so early, but I'm looking forward to flying in to paradise as the sun comes up over the horizon!

iPhone!!!!

2007-07-25T12:42:00.000-07:00

I'm writing this from my new iPhone! It's pretty cool, I really do feel like it is the real web on my phone. I should be paying attention to the presentation right now but I hope you can understand why I'm not.

In other news, I have something cool planned for tanya on her birthday but it is a secret. Then I go to visit friends in Colorado and then I'm off to panama! Exciting times.

K, press over, back to work ( I hope)

I'm going to Panama!

2007-06-27T22:46:00.000-07:00

I just bought tickets to Panama! I'm super excited, and that brings me one step closer to fulfilling my new years goals. I'll be gone for 16 days, which is the longest amount of time of not working since my senior year in high school. Now I need to brush up on spanish, find a digital camera, and dream about beaches. Email me your address if you want a post card!

Russian Party

2007-05-31T23:21:00.000-07:00

Last Memorial day I went to Tanya's Mom's birthday. It was really good, there was so much food. Every time I finished something, someone offered (or simply spooned onto my plate) something new I had never seen before. Caviar, soup made with gelatin so it's eaten like pie, stuffed fish, hand picked mushrooms, Russian salad, spiced chicken, duck liver, and so much more I can't even describe the ingredients but it was delicious.

After an hour of eating I was getting pretty full and I told Tanya it was about time I slowed down to save room for cake. She asked me, “What about the '0Hot meal'?” Yes, we had been eating for an hour and there was a whole 'nother meal coming. And then fruit. And then Desert. And then Cake. And all throughout, wine and vodka. There were 30+ people present who ate more than any Thanksgiving meal I've ever seen and yet there was still plate upon plate of leftovers. People sang, gave toasts, performed acrobatics and I understood none of it but enjoyed it none the less.

Russian's know how to party.

2007-05-27T16:30:00.000-07:00

Quick update: I'm gearing up for WWDC, where I will be speaking! So if you're coming to the 'dub this year, come to session 415 "Mastering the Quartz Composer editor".

Other than that, life is great and there's not much to report. I'm looking at vacation options so if you have any ideas, let me know.

H-1B Visa Cap Reached in One Day

2007-04-05T10:42:00.000-07:00

One of the cool things about living in the silicon valley is meeting all sorts of people. I have friends from foreign countries like Ukraine, Belarus, Russia, China, Iran, France, Poland, Philippines and Fort Collins. Most are citizens, but some rely on work visas to be here. At least two of my friends are affected by this:www.crn.com/it-channel/198800456.

My co-worker from France and one of my salsa friends from Poland have a 1:3 chance that they will not get a visa to stay, even though they have jobs and contribute to the economy of the United States. It's pretty sad what Sept. 11 did to this country, and that we may loose some real talent if they can't work here.

Best of luck to you, Kevin and Ania (and anyone else affected by this)

Standup

2007-02-21T10:56:00.000-08:00

I've done a couple things in the last week and I think I'm pretty satisfied with my most difficult goal, perform something in public. I've made two presentations at work, one to a large group (about 50) and one to half a dozen of the most important people in software engineering at Apple. I was nerveous for both but pulled it off nicely. Then last night I went to the Standford comedy club and got to participate in an improv skit with comedian Jimmy Gun. My mind froze up and I couldn't remember how Sleeping Beauty started but I did get up, got some laughs and had a good time.

In other news, I went to a Cake concert last week and it was fun. As a band, they don't have a very good live show. However, if I ever have a chance to see Honeycut again live I will certainly do so. The music was good, but the way those guys dance just makes you want to get up and join (mostly because it's so bad you could never do worse)

Oh and I'm moving this weekend. :)

What's your favorite color?

2007-01-14T15:17:00.000-08:00

That's a hard question. I like vibrant colors, like corn fields, good music and spicy food, but I also like muted colors like 5:00 am and half empty bottles of champagne (in this case, half empty _is_ the optimistic view). The one color that I don't like is any shade of boring, with apathy being just behind it. If I must pick a favorite, my favorite color is a sincere smile, it looks great when you wear it, and matches with anything.

New Years goals

2007-01-07T20:21:00.000-08:00

When I grow up, I want to be a story teller. The kind of man that gathers a crowd at family gatherings or performs for crowds in parks. Whether that means classic stories, my own life events or maybe spontaneous fictions made up on the spot. Most of my goals this year relate to that dream, and here they are.

- Do something awesome: examples include building an interesting whatsit or finding the meaning of life.
- Do something stupid (in the pursuit of awesome): When I learned to ski in boyscouts, the scout master told me to fall down on the first run of the day, so that it's no longer a fear.
- Perform something in public: I haven't quite figured out how to make this happen, but this is the most frightening goal I have.
- Keep the plants on my deck alive: That means replacing the dead ones currently out there :)
- Plan and take a vacation: I've never been off this content. I've been cool places with my family but I really need to do something I can tell my kids about someday.

Happy new year to all!

Rotation

2006-11-09T09:03:00.000-08:00

Here's a funny bug someone had:

They were wondering why the image on the billboard was being scaled in and out. The reason here is that the size of the image is actually increasing as it is rotated. The corners make the rectangle larger but the billboard stays the same size so there's an implicit scale operation to make it all fit.

The way to fix it, is to either vary the width of the billboard using the dimensions of the image or to rotate the billboard itself.

Clips

2006-10-20T23:28:00.000-07:00

There was a question this week about code reuse in QC, and now I fell compelled to talk about that and modularity. The original question was "Now that I've created all these javascript patches, what do I do if I want to reuse them?" The answer is to make a clip, by saving a composition with just the patch(es) you wish to reuse and publish the important ports. You can save them in ~/Library/Application Support/Apple/Developer Tools/Quartz Composer/Clips and they will be available to you in the Clip Library. When you drag those clips to your workspace, they become macros which are fully editable if you double click on them.

*Insert convenient segue here* Speaking of macros, it's a good idea to organize your compositions inside macros in order to make them more readable. More importantly, name them too. It's a lot easier to figure out why your composition isn't drawing anything when you put all your background elements in one macro and realize that it's drawing above your animation :)

1 year anniversary

2006-10-02T00:05:00.000-07:00

A lot can change in a year. I've graduated college, ended my internship at Qualcomm, lost my grandma, started a job at Apple, moved to California, survived WWDC and the relative lull following, made all new friends and kept in contact with the old ones; and during that entire time, I've been dating Jessie. We haven't even had a fight, despite being in different states longer during our relationship than together. It takes a special girl to make all that worth while, and I'm so happy to have found her.

Width Macro

2006-09-13T17:41:00.000-07:00

I'm going to start posting some of my responses to QC questions from the mailing list. History and justification below, but first let's get started!

Q: How do I ensure a Billboard patch does not get clipped with the aspect ratio changes?

Answer: Compute the width of the billboard as if the height were always 2. We know that the Aspect Ratio is given by (imageX/imageY) so multiply that by the (Rendering Destination Y) and you get (Rendering Destination X). This isn't perfect, it will now be TOO wide if the rendering destination is tall and skinny. So make sure the width is never more than 2 by clamping the value using the Range patch. The end result is:

I've been having trouble figuring out what to do with my blog. Originally, it was to post my photoshop work or websites but I don't have time for that any more. Most of what I do at work is confidential so I can't post that. I can't write about what I do outside of work because I live a boring life and it wouldn't attract many readers ;) So this seems like a good alternative. Keep in mind that I am doing this entirely on my own time so this has no offical capacity what-so-ever. I just find mailing list threads very difficult to traverse and would like to have a place to refer people to my well thought out answers.

CU game!

2006-09-06T12:03:00.000-07:00

Anyone in the SF bay area want to watch the CU game this weekend? I'm going with some of my Colorado friends and 2 of the CU guys are busy (romantic weekend together or something) so I need more support! We are going to Old Pro's in Palo Alto. Hopefully CU gets their game on for this, the most important game of the season.

Nice guys

2006-08-25T18:26:00.000-07:00

A while ago I wrote about Green Day's song, Nice Guys Finish Last, and the statement is true. But just consider this ladies: By the time a nice guy has finished, you've finished 10 or 12 times if he's any good at what he does. Think about that next time you listen to the song, it totally fits.

Company

2006-08-20T23:07:00.000-07:00

I had 3 visitors this week, and it was fun having Jessie, Tab and Janet in town. I can't say it was a little cramped in my apartment. Now it's just me, and I'm watching King Kong. I much prefer the original, although if I can separate myself from the way the story should be this one is okay too. Where the first on had a tag line "'Twas beatufy that slew the beast" this one should be, "It was chivalry that slew the heart of the bitch" Because this one has been updated to portray a modern, independent woman who falls in love with Kong. Good flick overall, it's just too bad the film borrows on so many of the good points of the original without following the best aspects of it. Let's see if they can end it right :)

Anyway, other stuff about this week. I took the day off on Wednesday and went camping Tuessday night at Half Moon bay. That was a lot of fun, although I prefer a more planned trip. (i.e. spontaneity is fine as long as I can trust that everyone going understands camping well enough to bring what they need) We also got to go up to the City last weekend and it's the first time I didn't feel like such a tourist while there. This weekend we went to San Jose for a Jazz festival and that was fun as well.

Tomorrow's back to live as usual, so I'm going to watch the rest of this movie and head to bed. Good night all!

wwdc

2006-08-11T13:29:00.000-07:00

So... WWDC came and went and it was fabulous. Given the 100 hour weeks leading up to it, then grueling days of questions and commuting to San Francisco I'm excited for a bit of a break. Last night was an excellent way to end the week, with the campus bash featuring BT. I got to meet some cool developers and some apple folk as well, since nobody in my team or my closest Apple friends didn't come to the bash for some reason. (hello? free beer?) Our team was given today off, so I'm using it to experiment with some of the technologies Apple released this week. I think that Leopard will be a success, if only because the developer level features are so easy to use that we're going to get some awesome applications. Well, that's all for now, back to programming (but not work)

Sympathy busy

2006-07-18T22:56:00.000-07:00

This weekend I went to Santa Rosa to see some people who were in town for a wedding. I didn't know the bride or groom but it was fun seeing all those people who are friends of theirs :)

Other than that, it's just been work. I refuse to tell this internet audience how much I've been working, because everytime I tell someone they become sympathy busy. This is a term I just made up addressing a reaction I get from this hypothetical situation: "Hi how are you doing?" "I'm doing great! I've just been lying out by the pool all day and taking these summer classes. How are you doing?" "I am also doing well, except I've been working x hours a week" "Oh man I totally know what you're talking about. Last weekend I had a paper due in my online class and it took me 30 hours to finish!!! And then I had to go see my friends in the Camen Islands and I had to spend ALL day at the beach and when I got back my boss totally expected me to work 16 hours IN ONE WEEK!!!..." etc.

We all do it of course. When I want to connect with someone who has had a rough day I'll tell them my troubles. But I hate when people play the competition game. Go ahead and tell me how you spent 4 hours counting to 1 million or that you slept till noon for the 3rd time this week. I value you as a person even if you can't relate to my workload.

light-gineer

2006-07-14T22:27:00.000-07:00

Well it's Friday night, 10:30 and I'm at home. Am I a geek? Not for that reason alone, because I just now walked in the door from work. And I got there at 9:30 this morning. And every day this week has been 12+ hours. And I'm working this weekend too :) Don't feel bad for me, I'm bragging. Although I do have a lot of energy and nobody to hang out with so that kinda sucks. I'm half tempted to walk down to the bar and see who I can meet, but in this town I'm not so sure I want to know (hint, it rhymes with gineer. (What is light-gineer? (for the SNL fans out there)))

Movie review

2006-07-09T22:44:00.000-07:00

Pirates of the Caribbean was crap. That's my review.

It's not the rehashed jokes, I wouldn't have minded that since they were thoroughly enjoyable the first time. Or the CG being a little over done, that is expected from a movie based on a ride where fire is created by shining a light on a sheet with a fan behind it. Even the obligatory whoring out the end with an unsolved mystery to get people to see the third movie would be okay, as long as they gave me a full movie worth the price of admission. Instead, they had one movie idea and decided to make two movies out of it.

I'm not against sequels, I think Spiderman, Back to the Future, Indiana Jones, Star Wars and Toy Story got it right, just to name a few off my bookshelf here. Pirates however, took the Matrix approach -- sacrifice the second movie for a decent third (well, I certainly hope the third is better ;). Lord of the rings arguably falls prey to this too, being one nine-hour movie. But each one has a proper story, a villain who rises to power and then falls, and a resolution.

Watch this episode of Ask A Ninja for a good review of the movie.

Car washes

2006-06-26T19:55:00.000-07:00

Californians love car washes. Not just getting their car cleaned, but super expensive, wait in line forever until four guys scrub it down car washes. They love it so much that I've been stuck behind the line they create out into the regular traffic twice in the last 3 days. It's not even like Colorado where it's dry and dusty in the summer or slushy and magnesium chloride-y in the winter. This does, however create a noticeable difference between people like me me and people who give a crap about their cars, so maybe it's a social thing.

Today's music is Jale (pronounced jalay? jail? halay? English is fun!) If you're looking for some good down tempo electro-guitar girl rock, check them out.

2006-06-24T10:51:00.000-07:00

It's superficial update time, because I get better response from it :) So much for the idealistic dream that I could influence people on the web ;)

Work's kicking my ass, but I'm still enjoying it. It's fun being the center of so many secret projects at Apple. No, I can't tell you about them, but some of these things are going to be totally sweet. Today, I'm getting things done around the house including cutting my hair, mopping the floors and scrubbing the sinks and tub. Then I get to go to the beach :)

Music: Hot Hot Heat. They've got a funny name, but a really fun sound :) My favorite song is "Talk to me, Dance with me"

Cars!

2006-06-10T12:15:00.000-07:00

I saw Cars last night and Pixar has done it again! It was a great movie and the animation was fantastic. A movie like cars wouldn't have been possible a couple years ago, because the time spent rendering would have out lasted the time spent writing and modeling. What's the difference in this movie? Rendering reflections requires Ray-tracing meaning you take a ray from your eyes (the camera) and follow what it sees after bouncing off various objects. The time it takes to do this is huge, as I have discovered while rendering my own projects.

Also, I wouldn't have noticed if Jessie hadn't said she heard somewhere that the last couple were not Lasseter projects, but I could tell the humor in this was more adult themed, in line with Bugs Life and Toy Story. Just think about Woody and Little Bo Peep as opposed to Sully and Boo or Mr. and Mrs. Incredible and you'll know what I mean. I would be fun to be a kid and watch these, then grow up and watch them again because the delivery of the adult jokes is so subtle that kids never even realize they're being left out of the fun. I'll be glad to see the movie again because there were things even I missed that we discussed at dinner afterwards.

Disney products

2006-05-18T21:25:00.000-07:00

At first glance, I looked at this and thought "WOW That's cool!" But then I looked again and realized, without much imagination that looks a little goatse to me :-/ Disney, Disney, Disney... so out of touch with reality.

Tool - 10,000 Days

2006-05-08T21:53:00.000-07:00

This post brought to you by Tool - 10,000 Days. Quite literally, I mean I posted yesterday and my track record isn't that great for posting twice in two days. The music on this disk is pretty good. I like Tool, but it's never been anything too special to me and this album is just slightly better so I like it.

I didn't start this post to write about above average music, I wrote it to tell everyone about the FREEKIN' AWESOME BOX!!! It's so cool! There's a flap, with two plastic lenses and each page of the booklet has double images on it. When viewed through the lenses, everything is in 3D! it's so cool! The images are creepy but just fascinating to look at. This is the first CD I've bought in a while because my co-worker was raving about the box. THIS is what's going to stop me from downloading :)

meetup.com

2006-05-07T20:10:00.000-07:00

Last night I went down to San Jose to have some drinks with other "New in San Jose" people I met off of meetup.com. It was a pretty normal group of people. I guess there's not much to say about the event itself, because it was so utterly normal.

Although cool people I did meet, the end goal of my visit to meetup.com was not met. I sent an email to my oldest friend and it bounced so I googled his name. One of the many hits led to that site, so I signed up to send him a message. I'm assuming he used the same email to sign up as I had in my address book, because I haven't heard back from him.

The "rest of the story" I'd like to leave you with is the whole ordeal made me think a lot about meeting people and making friends. The guy I've known longer than anyone has led me to meet new (hopefully) friends. Also that making friends is easier when you have friends, and when you have none it's easier to relax and watch a DVD on Friday night than try to do something about it.

This post is brought to you by "Kaiser Chiefs" album, "Employment". It Rocks! By the way, if you would like to send me an email, I may be able to let you *coughste*alcough* any of these tunes.

I give them props

2006-04-20T17:10:00.000-07:00

Is it wrong to envy Microsoft... BECAUSE they have cool Mac equipment? Now honestly, the MBU has always done great work. Everyone who has used both knows that Word for Mac is better than word for Windows. But our team finally got a new intel mini this week for reproducing bugs, and they've got 64 of 'em :P

Music for the moment is Snow Patrol - Final Straw. Like many of you I downloaded the song "Run" off iTunes when it was free. Like some of you, I then lied when a girl said she liked the band and said I was totally into them, then went to buy the album that evening. Girl is gone, but the music still rocks :)

Creative day

2006-04-15T22:34:00.000-07:00

Today was a good day. First, a friend of mine ran out of gas last night so she stayed at my apartment to figure out the car problem later. In the morning, we walked to the gas station and asked for a gas can so we could take it back and start her car. The gas can was, in a word, stupid. The spout leaked when you tried to pour it and we got more on the ground than in her car. But after constructing a rudimentary funnel by cutting off the top part of a plastic bottle at an angle it made a perfect extension to the spout. In hindsight, the formulation of the idea never had it's usual progression. I was clueless thinking about how I could syphon the gas with some rubber tubing and suddenly I had the great idea of constructing a funnel. It reminded me of the movie "Bishop's Wife" where Cary Grant told the little girl that angles put good ideas in people's heads.

The second bit of creativity probably had nothing to do with angels. I made a pizza tonight with red onion, KC bbq sauce, spicy red sauce, Pecans and a little bit of fresh rosemary I'm growing on my deck. It was quite delicious, though more rosemary and less bbq would have been a better balance of flavors.

The album for today is: Creative Kings - Riot on an Empty street. It's very chill; It makes me want to buy a record player so I can listen to it in front of a fire with friends. There, in the flickering light, I sip herbal tea and contemplate what they think about time travel, salvation, and memories. We have nothing but fond memories, lively debate, and completely original hypotheses that verge on absurd, but contain enough truth to merit discussion. Furthermore, we have no apprehension that this blissful moment will slip from our grasp because this night will last halfway to eternity; the other half being the rosy dawn, when we prepare a fine breakfast and retreat to an isolated meadow to waste the day watching clouds pass. What I'm trying to say here is, I recommend this album.

I didn't know if you wanted to
But I came to pick you up
You didn't even hesitate
And now you and me are on our way
I think I've bought everything we need
Don't look back, don't think of the
All the places we should've been
It's a good thing that you came along with me

LOL

2006-04-09T23:05:00.000-07:00

Internet jargon: LOL meaning "Lots of Laughs" or "Laugh Out Loud" is the same as saying, "I acknowledge that you have made a joke but I found it utterly boring to the point of offense. If you continue speaking to me I will rip out my ears and eat them. Furthermore, I will close the chat window or browser page which delivered the articulation of your offensive buffoonery and discontinue further textual exchanges with you. I am sure that this intervention of communication will be more insulting than the bit about me eating my ears off."

Also, I've been thinking about posting my current favorite music, because I have pretty good taste in music (I think.) This post is brought to you by Travis - Last Train. It's a good song, by a good band. Mix in moderation with a lonely evening for best results.

01:02:03 4/5/06!

2006-04-05T00:59:00.000-07:00

Good morning everyone, I'm posting this (near enough) to a special time. It's one o'two and three seconds on the fifth of April in 2006! I still think we should represent dates as 05/04/06 or even 06/04/05 because then we're either going least significant to least significant, or reverse, but whatever. Happy consecutive times!

Working world

2006-03-22T20:35:00.000-08:00

For those of you in the working world... I hope you've experienced the exhilaration that accompanies using your education in your work. It's a fantastic thing. Today I used Parametric Equations, which I remember learning about in highschool pre-calculus, and used a lot in College but I never thought I'd remember or use the concepts in the real world. It inspires me to go back to my books and see what else I can apply to my work!

Taxes

2006-03-19T14:26:00.000-08:00

I Just did my taxes, and I thought that since the internet is nothing but a huge popularity contest, I should say I found freetaxusa.com to be a relatively painless process. Federal filing is free, state filing is $10 which is as good as you're going to find anywhere. I'm not sure if it supports the more complicated deductions like home businesses, but I was able to get tax credit on tuition I paid last semester and all the regular charitable donation stuff you'd expect is supported. The best part is that I finished in 45 minutes (including two W2s and figuring out what I paid for tuition) and sent it electronically and I should get my refund in about a week :) On the topic of taxes, here's a fun fact: I have more taken out of my paycheck for state/federal taxes, medicare, etc. per hour than I made per hour a year ago. w00t California!

Recipe for dinner

2006-03-18T20:56:00.000-08:00

Tonight I was cooking dinner, and the spirit of Jessie was flowing through me so I decided to go nuts and make up a sauce for the leftover spaghetti noodles I had in the fridge. It turned out quite well, so I thought I'd share.

I buy my chicken ice-frosted in a bag because it's so much easier to cook with than those styrofoam chickenbreasts which (in my mind) leak salmonella juices everywhere. So when I cook dinner, my modus operandi is to skillet one frozen chickenbreast and when it's thawed, add some chopped up onions. I typically add some other stuff and serve with rice or spaghetti but tonight I looked in my fridge and saw my unused bottle of honeymustard that looked so tastey in the store. I put about 3 table spoons of that in a measuring cup with equal amount of water and about a teaspoon of basalmic vinegar. I stirred it up and it looked thin so I added some corn starch and threw it on the cooking chicken. I tasted some of the sauce with a spoon and it was good, but just didn't have the kick I wanted. So I added some ground mustard I had (it's spicy, usually used with a drop or two of water to make a wasabi-like paste) and some red cayenne pepper. I let that cook for a minute so the corn starch could thicken and put that on my noodles. The honey compliments the chicken, and the mustard compliments the onions.

Cooking is fun if you have the right spices and random ingredients!

Serves one, prep time 30 minutes.
1 chicken breast
1/4 onion chopped
some olive oil for cooking chicken and onions
3 tablespoons mustard
3 tablespoons water
1 teaspoon basalmic vinegar
1/2 teaspoon ground mustard
cayenne pepper
salt

Learning by doing

2006-03-15T00:46:00.000-08:00

There are three types of learners. Those who learn by hearing - auditory, those who learn by seeing - visual, and those who learn by doing - kinesthetic. I think a recent trend in education has focused on kinesthetic, because most people are best suited for it. I myself am much quicker to pick up concepts when I write a line of code than when I hear or read about it. But today, sitting on the toilet I had a revelation. I learn by doing because my whole life has been hands on. The trend toward kinesthetic learning is perpetuated by the trend toward kinesthetic learning. And now, as I enter the "Real" world I recognize the fact that I need learning skills that I don't have. I need to be able to sit down, read a paragraph and apply it to the world around me or listen to a two hour description of a solution and be able to apply that to the current problem. I haven't been taught how to listen to lectures, I've been taught how to take notes. I do a sample problem and score pretty well on a test, but what about those problems where there are no samples? The worst part is, future teachers of america learned by doing, so they will inevitably teach... by doing.

Political Thoughts

2006-03-12T23:22:00.000-08:00

Despite a lingering hesitation of making this a "political blog", I'm going to take the plunge. I've decided to write about my politics for a couple reasons:

I have a glimmer of hope that someone cares what I believe politically

It's a blog, therefore I've got a duty to the "powers that be" to mention it

I have a comment feature now

It's not November

It's Saturday night in a city I don't know well and I'm waiting for the water to boil for tea. My first political belief is that nothing worth discussing politically is worth discussing unless you have absolutely nothing better to do.

I'm going to post the page separate from this post, so it doesn't muck up the alignment on my webpage and so I can go back and modify it whenever my opinions change (yes, I'm a flip-flopper.)

With that, let's begin

2006-03-08T23:31:00.000-08:00

When I drove to California, I had lots of time to think. One of the ideas I came up with related directly to driving. While I driving down the road in my U-Haul, I realized I see a whole different class of cars when I can't go that fast as when I'm speeding along in my regular car. I see much less slow cars, and much more fast cars. This led me to think about life in general... When you're traveling along in life, you tend to meet up with people going either much faster than you or much slower. These encounters are short lived and generally ill fated, because you aren't moving at the same pace as the cars around you. This is a lesson for a lot of the girls in my life *coughsharonhannahaliceheatherlizcough*. They are all expecting to establish meaningful relationships while they're speeding along, finishing school, going to grad school and pursueing a professional career. They need to realize that the people they meet are moving much slower than them, and they can't lower their standards just so a slow moving vehicle can keep up. Is life doomed to passing cars left and right until the police pull you over? No, I think we all find our correct road eventually. Some people exit to the residental life and mosey along at a slow pace and others find themselves on the Autobon. Either way, you end up with people going the same pace as you, and when you look around they never pass you or drag behind. It's just a matter of time before you finally find the group of people you can keep pace with, and those are the ones you should create meaningful relationships with.

Happiness

2006-03-06T18:59:00.000-08:00

Good trip, but it's good to be home. When talking to Jessie today, we came to the decision that happiness is not a tank to be filled, it's a binary output based on the sum of all inputs. What that means is, we could be happier together right now, but being apart doesn't mean we're automatically 70% happy like turning in an assignment late with further deductions based on how much you suck at life. It also doesn't mean that time will cause happiness to leak away or slowly build up over time like rain in a bucket. It's something so unnatural in nature to be able to reverse so quickly. It's good to realize that although any one thing might crush your day, moments later you might experience the most beautiful thing in the world if you only keep your eyes open to see it. I'm pretty sure that covers it, but I may have to write more in order to explain it fully.

Anyway, I don't have the links working right if you're seeing this on www.galateadesign.net. If you want to post a comment, click here to do so.

2006-02-28T23:43:00.000-08:00

More California Stuff

Things are going really well here I'd say. It may be 10 degrees warmer in Boulder and sunny, but the rain here is like a summer rain. People here complain like it's the depth of winter, but it's been quite nice all things considered. I've decided I really like where I live, despite people warning me that Sunnyvale was a family overrun suburb. When people said that, I pictured Louisville or worse, Superior; but it's not like that. I live within a block of an Albertsons, Starbucks, Pizza hut, a donut shop, a KFC, a Bread place (I guess they serve breakfast) a BBQ place, a barber shop, dry cleaners and a gas station. I'm probably within walking distance of Murphy Street (the local downtown with no less than 4 irish pubs, some sushi places and Target) but I haven't tried yet. I was sick this weekend when I would have tried that ~1 mile hike.

I also heard that class-ism was big here, but it's not so bad. My car and/or clothes aren't great, but I don't feel like anyone looks down on me for it. People are way to self centered to care about other people. Still working out a definitive plan for meeting people... I'm going to try the Irish pubs like I said, but if they're anything like Boulder it'll be old married people. Kristen told me to try churches with strong singles groups, which despite loving Jessie very much might be worth while. I'm looking to meet other people in their 20s in professional careers but preferably not programming ;)

I'm coming home this weekend! Give me a call if you want to hang out.

Blogger

2006-02-26T23:58:00.000-08:00

I am now using Google's blogger system, and I'm parsing it into my web site. What does that mean to you? Well if you're on the website, old posts are going to look funny. I wanted to provide an archive, but I didn't want to support the old method any longer so I just copy and pasted old posts into new posts on blogger, dated, well yesterday since it is now 30 seconds past midnight. If you're using an agregator such as the wonderful Bloglines you will have needed to change your links (but you already knew that, or else how did you get here?)

Yes, I liked the challenge of writing my own RSS editor, but when Google came out with a dashboard widget to post to their blog so simply... I couldn't resist. Plus this way I can link back to blogger and get the ability for people to comment on posts, legitimate dates and gaurenteed validation in the xml. This is what we in the computer industry call "code reuse". Why re-write it when you can use someone else's service for free?

moved, again!

2006-02-26T23:25:00.000-08:00

Feb 26, 2006++++++When I left Boulder, I went to U-Haul online and saw that I could rent a truck, and tow my car behind it. I reserved it all with one easy click and I figured that would be all. Moving day comes along, I show up at the rental place and they say, "well we have your tow hitch, but no truck. Your truck is up the diagonal." So I wasted precious packing time to drive up, get my truck, drive back to the hitch place, and the lights are broken so I have to come back that afternoon. Two weeks later I'm using U-Haul again, because it's an in town move, no hitch and they can't POSSIBLY screw it up again. I bring my credit card, driver's license and proof of insurance just as they ask but "nooooo we can't rent a truck to someone with an out of state drivers license. You could call someone who lives here and verify you live here." Okay... Ryan's cell number is 303- "Wait no, it has to be a local number." Uh great, the only local numbers I know are office numbers and it's Sunday. Well thanks to my fabulous buddy Ryan, who offered to put the whole thing on his credit card and rent the truck himself (he has a California drivers license) we were able to finally get the truck and move everything up the 3 floors to my new home.

Other than that, life has been pretty good. I played volleyball on Friday with some work people and last night I bought X-Files season 1 and built a new bookshelf/plant stand thing. Next I need to find a couch and finish unpacking and I can finally have some people over.

New Style

2006-02-26T23:24:00.002-08:00

Jan 27, 2006++++++In honor of CU, which has treated me well for four and a half years, my website now has new colors. Check it out!

Moving to California, Part 1

2006-02-26T23:24:00.001-08:00

Feb 17, 2006++++++Okay.... I'm posting again which means I'm stable enough to spare some time to do so. When you just moved you go into killer ninja, survival-of-the-fittest, fight-or-flight and shower-if-you-have-time-to mode. But last night, I cooked my own meal for the first time in 2 weeks. Being self-sufficient is an important thing to the survivalist, which is why I was so happy to move out of the Motel 6 and into my apartment last Wednesday despite the fact that it meant having to sleep on the floor and use tee-shirts as towels. Each example of forthought becomes a small personal victory such as the small roll of toilet paper I almost put into a big, unidentifiable brown box but instead threw into the back seat of my car. I find it important to have someone to share those moments with, as well as the moments not so well thought out, and Jessie has been that to me for which I am eternally greatful. I arrived in California exhausted from driving at least 22 hours over 3 days and sleeping in the cab of the UHaul the night before. I searched all over for the self storage place I had found so easily online and unpacked my entire truck in 2.5 hours. Packing that same truck took 7 hours with help from Jessie and my neighbor Marc. With an hour to spare before the UHaul place closed, I took my empty truck back to navigate this new city I'd soon call home only to get terribly lost. I arrived 7 minutes after 5:00. I did what they recommend not to, and left the truck and hitch there so I didn't have to drive 14' of truck plus 10' of my own car through downtown San Jose. From there I went to the Motel, where I had reservations but my credit card was rejected! I was able to shorten the stay and it cleared but that was the last straw. Jessie was there for me just a phone call away and it made all the difference in the world to hear her voice. Anyway, all that is behind me and things are looking good for the future. I'll be posting more because I had a lot of time to just drive and think on my way down here, so I want to share those thoughts with you, my friends. I sincerely hope that you are all in good health, and I will see you soon.

Powerful

2006-02-26T23:24:00.000-08:00

Jan 31, 2006++++++So last Sunday was my last time at church before leaving. After the service the Sunday school teacher came up to me and told me she was talking about who is powerful in her class that day. Some of the kids said "Troy is!" That made me laugh. Then she told me why... because I work for Bill Gates?!? I'm going to have to learn those kids a thing or two about Apple. I guess stupidity is a common affliction, a dorm neighbor of a friend of mine a few years ago said that Gates was the head of Apple. *sigh*

Big News!

2006-02-26T23:23:00.002-08:00

Jan 18, 2006++++++For those of you who do not know, I've been offered a job at Apple. w00t! Now, I'll have to find out where I fit in a state which is governed by the Terminator, where people describe where they live as time from something rather than distances to; and a half million dollar property is a "fixer-upper". But while the transition will be hard for me, it's always harder for those left behind. I should know, I've been in Boulder all my life and I've seen more than a couple friends move away. Well my thoughts and prayers will be with you and I would love to hear from you, for any reason. Stay tuned, party eminent :)

Hello from Cupertino!

2006-02-26T23:23:00.001-08:00

Jan 12, 2006++++++Update from Troy: I'm sitting in the Cupertino Inn (exhausted) after a full day of interviews at Apple. I did well, I think so now time will tell. San Jose is not as bad as I pictured. I remember LA which seemed like miles and miles of highway with no attractive destination. This has pockets of life. Lastly, Apple seems to be just as attractive as everyone believes to work for, except the hours would indeed be long. Can't get my hopes up, but the fact that I made it here, this trip, this interview, this opportunity speaks well of me and I can be happy to say I had the balls to try.

Sandwich

2006-02-26T23:23:00.000-08:00

Jan 6, 2006++++++I could really go for a good sandwich right now.

Yep, just when you thought I was getting personal on my blog, really spilling my guts, I devoted an entire post to sandwiches. That's just the crazy sort of guy I am.

Success

2006-02-26T23:22:00.000-08:00

Dec 21, 2005++++++What is Success? When I was little my parents played volleyball at the South Boulder Rec center and there were frequently college aged friends playing volleyball, drinking beer and playing cool music on the radio. I never realized how much I wanted that until this summer when it occurred to me that I had become those young adults, and it's an incredible feeling to recognize your own success. It was a real eye opener to me when it happened, and it was then that I noticed young kids building castles in the sand, watching us play.

When I was a little older, going to school and dreading every homework assignment, I really wanted to be done with school. I looked at all those grownups who went off to work and I thought it would be so great to be done with school so I could work. This past summer, I again realized that my goal was met and unlike those sob stories of people who realized they hated work more than school, it was actually great. Sure the job was stressful, but evenings and weekends were spent outside, or programming or vegging out in front of a DVD.

When I started college, I had no car, a terrible job at Target and had to share a bathroom with 40 other guys on my floor. I decided that a metric for my success would be never needing a room mate after I graduated. I actually reached that a little early, I now have a one bedroom apartment of my own and a car as well.

Now I'm looking at career stuff, and I'm trying to decide how it all fits. Do I head West to work in Silicon Valley with an impressive company and bragging rights galore? Do I stay here where I can still hike far enough from town that I can forget civilization for a while, and be back in time to meet my girlfriend for lunch? I've also been going to school for 16.5 years, should I travel a bit before deciding to stay in one spot for the next 3-5 years? Everyone I know pushing me to be successful, when is anyone going to tell me exactly what that is?

Finals coming

2006-02-26T23:21:00.001-08:00

Dec 7, 2005++++++Finals are coming, and I'm pretty excited. No I don't have a sadistic facination with 2.5 hour tests. No, I don't enjoy waking up early for a 7:30AM test ON SATURDAY and then going back to school ON SATURDAY for a 7:30PM final. I'm more excited for what happens after that. Nothing. I graduate and I have the first real "free-time" since Highschool. W00t go me.

Bad Sony!

2006-02-26T23:21:00.000-08:00

Dec 1, 2005++++++Haven't blogged in a while, I keep thinking I'm going to update my blogging software but alas... has not happened. Instead you get this:

For those of you who haven't heard, Sony put software on CDs designed to stop you from copying them. That's not bad, it's their right but it's your right not to use it as long as you know about it. What was bad, is that they created software that creates a huge security hole in your computer, uses other people's software without permission and makes it impossible to remove. Let's be clear that as a libertarian, I do not support any sort of government regulation on this and many other matters, but I believe free markets can regulate companies by selectively boycotting them if they screw up. So if you were thinking about buying a Sony/BMG CD this season, think twice and they'll soon get the message.

More Stuff

2006-02-26T23:20:00.002-08:00

Nov. 18, 2005++++++Just because I feel like I should post, here's more stuff I've done over the ages that my regular viewers may not have seen and potential employers might enjoy. A Trumpet rendering(Blender 3D), Chicago Wallpaper(Illustrator, Photoshop), Carona(The Gimp), and a logo for my church softball team(Illustrator). I'll put up more as I think of it and remember where I put it.

Job applications

2006-02-26T23:20:00.001-08:00

Nov. 3, 2005++++++Horray for job searching! I feel productive, yet stressed out at the same time. If you are visiting for the first time and looking for work samples, I recommend you follow these links:

My Pirate Bulletin Board Coded in PHP and MySQL from scratch. Images done in photoshop, borrowed (academic fair use!) from Disney.

Terminal emulator A flash project to test the power of actionscript.

Flash animation Just weird animated stuff, representing the theme "Patterns"

iDental My senior project. This is not a web based project, but you can see the icons I made in illustrator on this page. It is a OS X native application for chairside dental charting on a Mac. There's more, which I'll probably link up here when I think of it.