May 15: Good lord it's hot out

May 12: Voodoo was in the name

Oddly, shinyplasticbag would appear to have eaten my most recent blog entry. I wrote it this afternoon at work, and apparently, it never made it as far as actually getting saved. That sucks.

We had a meeting at work today about the new medical benefits packaged we're switching to next month. Apparently, it's a vast improvement over the old one, but it's all crazy to me — the US health care system scares the crap out of me. The dental and vision stuff seems pretty much the same as back home, but the idea of selecting an emergency room based on cost is just horrifying. I hope I never get sick. You know, more so than usual.

The benefits package is a bit too inclusive, though. They explicitly don't pay for Scientology extortion “treatment”, but they do cover “Christian Science Practitioners”, ie, morons who pretend that praying for you to feel better might actually accomplish something. It's 2008, people. Man, alive. Casey wondered aloud if they might also pay for voodoo, or crystal therapy. Why stop with just one brand of magic? That's downright prejudiced.

Interestingly, a lack of overlap between this plan and the previous one means that I should probably get a new pair of glasses before the new plan kicks in — both will pay for a new pair every 24 months or so. My current glasses aren't that old, but I think the prescription could use a little update. My eyes are fail.

Anyway, I've got to go finish up what I'm working on. I left work early so I could get a lift home from Joël, but I wasn't quite done what I was working on. Ah, Internet at home, how I love you. And I love my computer nook, which will no doubt be the subject of a future blog entry.

April 29: Impatience & Expertise

Work life for me here in Nerdvana is a lot faster than it was back home. I've found that in adjusting myself to the new pace, I'm less and less tolerant of minor slowdowns. I don't mean to say that I'm becoming one of those type-a impatient types, just that I'm aware of the fact that whatever I'm working on is taking me significantly longer because, say, my Internet connection sucks and it's making my SSH connections all laggy. These momentary delays, usually spent staring at a progress bar hovering near 100%, provide a good time for reflection on what I could do to improve the process. It's important to separate things into things I can improve and things I can't, and to not get too annoyed by the things outside of my sphere of influence.

It's on that note that I've decided to finally bite the bullet and learn a real text editor, in this case xemacs. I've been fighting with nano, the only Unix-y text editor I can use whatsoever, since I got here. It just doesn't work well for me most of the time — the screen gets corrupted, key bindings are wonky, all kinds of stuff. Plus, it's a bit embarrassing to be an Expert Computer Nerd(tm) who doesn't know Vi(m) or (x)emacs. I am strongly annoyed by emacs' crazy terminology, which is completely different from the rest of computerdom, but recognize that it is outside of my sphere of influence, and therefore not worth getting upset about.

As I flipped through the emacs manual at work, I sort of chuckled to myself about the fact that I was finally learn emacs because I was impatient. Who would've thought that being impatient would be what drove me to start scaling a famously daunting learning curve? Based on my nerdly readings, I've noticed that two of the most obvious personality traits of nerds (I'm thinking of famous ones like Linus Torvalds or Larry Wall) are laziness and impatience. These two combine to make people want to have powerful tools they can master. A long learning curve isn't a problem if it saves effort in the long run — nerds don't mind those sorts of value propositions. It's okay if it takes you months to become proficient at emacs if it lets you work twice as fast. Impatience breeds expertise.

Hopefully.

April 21: Noise cancellation

I got new headphones, and they're awesome.

Deep breaths, deep breaths. I know this is a mind-boggling statement. Bear with me. They are Philips SBC HN100s and I love them dearly. They have noise cancellation magic built in, so it constantly sounds like I am in a quiet room. Plus, if I cover the little microphone things that make that work, it makes things sound like I'm underwater. It's literally hoursminutes of fun.

Anyway, things are good down here in cloudy California. It's been a bit chillier the past few days than I would like, but things are fun and I'm keeping busy. This weekend saw SHDH 24.5 (also known as Mini Happy Dev House and Startup Happy Dev House). It was a lower-key event than usual because it's in between two big ones and basically just existed for the benefit of folks who were attending Startup School. Still, I had a good time nerding out and got some work done, which is good.

Speaking of good things, I'm FINALLY getting an Internet connection at home. I've been putting it off forever because I'm lazy and couldn't make a decision about which company to go with, but I've settled on Comcast because (a) they're the fastest and (b) DSL isn't available in my area anyway. As a bonus, I managed to whine my way out of the $99 installation fee. I'm not sure what sort of karmic debt this will put me in, but for now, I'm happy. Theoretically, as of 4 PM this Saturday, I'll be wasting my days on the Internet in style. Huzzah.


Alas, I must get back to work. Until next time.

April 11: Aaaand, we're back

Howdy, world. It's been absolutely ages since I have had the time or inclination to actually update here, which sucks.

Mom was out here last week to help me get more completely settled in. She got me some pots and pans and forced me to unpack — standard motherly things. She also dropped off emergency rations from home — several boxes of Kraft Dinner and a few bottles of IRN-BRU. It's weird the things you miss. Anyway, thanks to her efforts, the apartment is starting to feel a bit more like home, although it's not without its problems: it's surprisingly cold, at least on the lower level. The first few nights I slept there, I had no heat, because I had foolishly extinguished the pilot light (retro!) on the heater and couldn't figure out how to get it lit again. I am awe-inspiringly bad at practical things.

Anyway, whilst Mom was here, we did all sorts of fun touristy things, like visiting the Monterey Bay Aquarium and the Winchester Mystery House. I tried to show off Silicon Valley nerd culture a bit by dragging her to the Mozilla 10th anniversary party, which was quite fun. It's always surprising how fast time can go by when you have someone visiting.

This week has gone by pretty quickly, too. PBwiki went on a teambuilding activity yesterday, indoor skydiving at iFly in Union City. Nathan has posted a heap of pictures of the event (look for lots of fun pictures of me looking ridiculous in my flight jumpsuit thingy). It's crazy how big this company is getting and how well everyone gets along with each other. It was a lot of fun, and I can't wait to see what the next event will be. Lynn has been soliciting suggestions from people in the office, with responses ranging from the pretty standard (rock climbing) to the outlandishly insane (re-enacting the Stanford Prison Experiment).

I love PBwiki.

March 27: PBwiki 2.0

We just unleashed version 2.0 on the world. Woo!

March 26: Loft

I am all moved into the lofty apartment, and my stuff arrived yesterday. Seeing my TV again was, frankly, AMAZING. I still can't find my remote controls, but I can put up with that. Sweet, sweet pixels. It's sort of weird having possessions again — after a month of it being just me and my laptop, I had sort of gotten used to a sort of minimalism. It makes me want to purge all sorts of crap I don't need, except I've already done that. More purging would be traumatic, I think. I like all of my stuff.

I'm just at work, dealing with a cold or flu or something. It's bad enough that I'm drinking herbal tea, which is a warning sign. I've also taken some DayQuil. It's no good. I hate taking DayQuil. NyQuil works great and knocks you out long enough to feel better (it may or may not just be horse tranquilizers). DayQuil is like NyQuil mixed with espresso or something. Some of the relief with more side-effects than you can shake a stick at. I am not 100% sure I'm not sitting on a chair that is moving right now. Bleh.

Anyway, I've got to go off and be productive. This is a short week for me — Mom arrives at lunchtime on Friday. Huzzah!