Update

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.