shinyPlasticBag

Hello, world. Here’s an update on my life, in point form, since that’s the easiest way to get it out of my head. And by “update on my life”, I mean “completely random ramblings” (“randomlings”).

- I watched (most of) The Labyrinth with Nathalie last night. We holed up inside a genuine couch-n-blanket fort in the middle of my living room, drank wine, and ate crackers. It was amazing.
- Nathalie is amazing.
- I got hit in the forehead with a shower-head at high velocity last week (this has nothing to do with the previous point). It really, really hurt! I was at the gym, happily showering post-workout, when *blam*, shower-head. That’s not a great time for heavy metal objects to hit you. It hit me about two inches above my right eye. If I was two inches taller, it could’ve blinded me! Or if I was three inches taller and standing an inch to the right, it could’ve broken my nose! Or five inches taller, teeth! I’m really lucky I wasn’t significantly hurt, although it did cut my hand on its way down. Speaking of weight (“way”), it weighed 2.6 pounds. INSANITY. I’m still holding a bit of a grudge against Gold’s Gym, to be honest.
- I was going to come home for a visit in February, for our 27th birthdays, but various things have led to me pushing it back by a month or so. Instead, my birthday will be the tail-end of a four day birthday roadtrip extravaganza with my lovely lady. Adventures await.
- There are a few words I consistently mistype. “Extravaganza” is one of them — I’ve Twittered about that particular issue before — and “furnance” is another. Brains are weird, especially those that are typing as fast as humanly possible and are generally writing code, rather than English.
- Speaking of code, work has been pretty decent lately. Since the recent shake-up, the company has really gone back into startup mode. I was originally pretty stressed out, but I’m really enjoying wearing lots of hats and just working hard on getting things done. It’s nice to branch out into things I never would’ve been doing before. This week, that means designing and implementing a new over-arching navigation interface for workspaces, and next week, it means helping run an honest-to-god usability test. Work just got a lot more interesting.
- Back on the subject of adventures, I drove down to Los Angeles this weekend and met up with Andrew Shell to see the new Pee Wee Herman stage show. It was pretty wonderful — I’m very glad I went. I really hope his comeback is a success, if not with Paul Reubens at the helm, then with someone else (although it must be said that he was fantastic). Pee Wee Herman is a great character and really needs to be brought back into the spotlight. (If you’ve never watched Pee Wee Herman as an adult, you really owe it to yourself to do so. Some of the humour is delightfully gauche.)
- Driving from Redwood City to Los Angeles on a Saturday, and then back again on a Sunday, sucks. It’s about 650 km each way, or about 6 hours of driving time. I took I5 down, which means nothing but farmland and the occasional vineyard to look at as you zip through the Central Valley. On the bright side, I did get to watch a tumbleweed roll across the highway on my way back[1], just moments before the heavens opened up and it started to rain. It’s raining pretty much everywhere in the state[2] right now, and that’s quite an impressive thing when you think of how large California is. The weather has been quite weird; for about 45 seconds today, it hailed like there was no tomorrow. Big, loud, plentiful hail, too — the pellets were probably 5mm across. Good thing my car has a covered parking spot.
- In an effort to cultivate some sort of non-computer form of creativity, I’ve started sketching. Not very much, not very frequently, not very reliably, but Mom got me a sketch pad and some lovely pens for Christmas, so I’m using those from time to time. The end goal isn’t really the cultivation of any sort of skill so much as it is to have a new pattern for my brain to think about for a while. It’s good to breed mental diversity, I think.
- I also tried yoga, but I’m uncoordinated and easily confused, so it was a mild disaster. It was fun, though.
- Speaking of points[3], I really liked outliners. Remember outliners? OmniOutliner is the only current one I can think of, and “current” might not really be the best term for it, since one of the big “ZOMG use this please” quotes refers to a Powerbook, and that dates things back about 4 years. I do love retro Macintosh software, however.
- Retro Macintosh software makes me think of the old school, late-nineties iBook G3 (blueberry!) that Lynn gave me. All that bad boy needs is a new power inverter for its backlight and it’s good to roll. Of course, what I would do with it if I was working is still up for debate. The unused Macintosh SE on my nightstand is still patiently waiting a task.
- The idea of retro computing is much more interesting than actual retro computing.

[1] “Holy crap, I live in California” was a bit of a mental catch phrase for me when I first moved here — geez, nearly two years ago — but occasionally still pops into my head. I’m not sure I’ll ever get over the shock and wonder of living here.
[2] “Pretty much everywhere” meaning all of the places I have in the weather app on my iPhone. At the very least, the Bay Area and Los Angeles are getting rained on until at least Friday.
[3] “Speaking of points” was triggered by the opening paragraph, not the preceding point. It seemed silly to open with a barrage of text about software.

Happy New Year, everyone. And Happy New Decade, for that matter.

I had an amazing time, and then I proceeded to completely pour myself back into life in California. Today’s the first time I’ve had more than an hour or so to myself, so I finally got my act together and labelled some photos.

UK 2009 photo gallery

Unfortunately, iPhoto doesn’t export videos, so I need to come up with some clever way of presenting those — especially since videos were what I made the most of.

This trip reminded me how much I love Scotland, and also how much of the world there’s left for me to see. It was great to re-connect with the Scottishes, and wonderful to get to spend time with my mom again. I can’t wait for the next adventure.

In my Internet-deprived state during the trip, I took to jotting down brief notes of what we were doing. Here’s a day-by-day traveloge. It starts at Saturday, September 5th and ends on Friday, September 18th.

Sat went to ikea, got rental car, saw Jim and Anna and John

Sun Went for a run, Went to Luss with John and Barbara, went to Bonnie Wee Well and Gleniffer Brae

Mon Falkirk Wheel, visited Alan and Isobel

Tue Burrell Collection and Pollock House, then minigolf at Xscape with Mom

Wed went to Edinburgh and the GPS got confused

Thu went to Forres via St Andrews, went to the aquarium there

Fri slept at Mayfield last night, saw the Sueno Stone in Forres. Driving to Tulloch Castle in Dingwall, then to Fort William to meet Brian, Victoria, and Sandy.

Sat got halfway up Ben Nevis, and might’ve gotten a sunburn. Who knew? Bought dinner at a bar called Cobbs. Holy fuck, I’m in Scotland. I love it.

Sun went up the cable car at Nevis Range. Distillery was closed, but we got to feed highland cows instead.

Mon driving to Mallaig to catch the ferry to Skye. Ridiculously scenic drive. Somewhat disappointed by Glendinnan alon the way. Song in my head: Goldfinger – Tell Me What Its Like To Be With You. At Talisker Distillery on Skye. Very peaty scotch. Took the bridge back and stopped at Eilean Donan, the castle from Highlander.

Tue checked out of Burntree and drove to Oban, via Glencoe. Drove 18km each way through Glen Etive. Oban was beautiful but we got stuck on a crazy small road trying to get home.

Wed recovery day. Went to Braehead with Heather and Lloyd whilst Mom slept.

Thu went to Edinburgh and hiked up to Arthur’s Seat, then walked up the Scott Monument. Bought dinner and clothes at Sainsbury.

Fri went into Glasgow. Bought Mom a quache and had tea/lunch with Maryrose & Liz. Family take-out buffet in the evening.

SuperHappyDevHouse #34 was today, and I had an absolutely amazing time. This was the best devhouse ever for me — huge thanks to Tom’s Mom for letting us trash their palatial estate yet again. Take a look at some photos from SHDH 34.

This was the first devhouse where I’ve ever actually successfully made anything. It’s an implementation of one-dimensional cellular automata in JavaScript, which was really just an excuse to learn more about the <canvas> tag. Check it out: CA-nvas. Use the little drop-down at the top to choose between a few interesting patterns. If you’re not using Chrome or Safari, it’s gonna be slow. Even Firefox 3.5 chokes a bit.

I was inspired to do so by the first available chapter of Dive Into HTML 5 (“Let’s Call It a Draw(ing Surface)“) of , recently released by Mark Pilgrim. It’s absolutely gorgeous to look at, and incredibly well-written. It gave me all of the information I needed to get started.

Now, as for the one-dimensional cellular automata bit. It sounds really complicated, but it’s actually stupid simple.

Imagine a sheet graph paper. Each row is a “generation”. For the first row, just fill in some blocks at random. That’s the “seed”. Now, to figure out what the next row should look like, you just apply this rule to each of the blocks: look at the three blocks above it — that is, the one directly above it and the ones to the left and right of that one. You have 8 possible combinations for these “ancestors” — all of them are off, just the one to the right is on, the one in the middle is on, etc. For each of these combinations, you have a rule to tell you whether the block in the next row should be turned on. It’s these different rules that lead to different patterns on your sheet of paper.

That’s it! AMAZING patterns just fall out of this thing. It’s even been speculated that the patterns on mollusk shells are generated by an algorithm similar to this. I love this stuff. You should take a few minutes to learn a bit more about cellular automata, because they’re easy to understand, and will blow your mind.

And on that note, I’m out of here.

So, it turns out I suck at blogging. But hey, life’s been busy, and it’s pretty hard to top a blog entry about ostriches, anyway.

But yes, busy:
– Casey and I broke up. It was amicable, though, which actually makes things more complicated than awful, ugly, hateful break-ups. But things are okay. She’s moved up to Davis (about two hours northeast of here) to for school and seems to be doing okay. I’m really proud of her and glad she’s getting the chance to be on her own and have adventures in a whole new place.
– Work keeps on being crazy and awesome (“crazawesome”). We’ve upped the headcount a bit: we have a brilliant new engineer to warp to our fantastically bizarre and productive ways, and one of our old support folks, Steven, has come back into the fold. For a while there back in the spring, our support team had ballooned up to include a lot of people, and it was hard to get to know everyone. But Steven was awesome, so it’s great that he’s back.
– I spent last week working from Halifax so I could be there for my mom’s birthday and my grandmother’s belated burial thing (it’s been a year already? ugh). It was fun to be back, but it was sort of hard to work from there. Usually, it’d be okay, but it was complicated by (a) the 4 hour time zone difference, wherein my co-workers got online at 2:30 in the afternoon, and (b) the fact that we’re working like crazy on a big new project, which would benefit from conversations the rest of the team. Anyway, lessons learned. I hope to do it again sometime.
– Vacation planning! I leave for Scotland in two and a half weeks for a tromp around the isle with Mom and my aunt & uncle. We’ve been using PBworks to plan it out, which has been great. This is the first time I’ve ever gone over there with any idea of what I’m going to do (and when). I can’t wait! Each of us has come up with one “must do thing” each. Mine’s to visit some standing stones — a weirdness of the UK that I find endlessly fascinating.

Anyway, that’s me and my world. How are you, Internet?

This was a long weekend down here, so Casey and I took a little road trip up to Davis. She’s planning on moving up there for school and a change of scenery. We had a great time! Davis is only about two hours north-east of here, but it really feels like a totally new place. It was beautiful, even if they are bike nuts.

Casey and I both took heaps of photos, so here’s a photo gallery of some of my favourites.

The best part? Well, just watch this video. AWESOME.

These ostriches were just hanging out in a field at the side of the road. We watched them wander around for a few minutes (look how weirdly they walk!) and then Casey fed one of them some pizza. It was super cool! Seeing ostriches at the side of the road is pretty much the most unexpected thing I’ve bumped into in the recent past.

Happy Canada Day, y’all. This is the second year I’ve been gone and, since its not a holiday here, spent the day working. I have to say, I miss it, not because the things we did were ever particularly epic — in fact, we rarely succeeded at having plans at all — but because we usually made the effort.

Yep, it’s just your average, hazy summer day here in the Bay Area. I’m hard at work with Nathan on a re-vamp of some of our internal systems, which is a really nifty, interesting project, but prone to melting my brain after extended periods.

I’m going to see Away We Go tonight with Andrew, Casey, Lynn, and Nathan. It looks somewhat interesting, but I’m reserving judgement until I actually see it. I’ve been trying to wean myself off of movie trailers and the like so that I’m more often surprised by movies. What’s the fun of going to see a movie if you know exactly what’s going to happen?

Today’s the ten year anniversary of my moronic car crash, wherein I totalled Mom’s car less than a month after I got my driver’s license.

Here’s to the wonderfully sturdy engineering of the 1994 Dodge Colt and the summer of memorable misadventures that it helped usher in.

Steve & Keddy, you guys are some of my best friends, and I’m sure that was cemented by our moment of sitting upside down in a ditch. <3.

So, the iPhone GS has been announced, and is due out a week from today. I really, really want one. Or rather, I really, really want to want one. I have been anxiously awaiting the release of the next iPhone for about six months. My first gen is starting to feel a little long in the tooth. Sure, it runs all the apps I want just fine, but the call quality is a bit iffy*, the screen is quite scratched, and every now and then, the screen does a very strange “OMG loose wire somewhere” dance. Plus, it crashes like a mofo.

So, when the keynote started yesterday, I was anxiously awaiting the new device, hanging my hopes on one of the rumors attached to it: tethering. Having the Internet in my pocket has really changed a lot of things in my life, but I really want the Macintosh Internet experience everywhere. Tethering was confirmed as a capability due to some intrepid people ripping apart the iPhone OS 3.0 builds, but carrier support wasn’t determined until yesterday.

Of course, AT&T was not on the list of carriers supporting it at launch. Shit! Trust my luck to move to the only country where phone service is as bad as Canada. Sigh. So, despite the fact that the iPhone GS looks amazingly wonderful, it won’t be coming to live with me until there’s tethering support available (and affordable).

I’m one seriously unhappy nerd.

* Now, somewhat ironically, I can’t entirely blame the call quality on my phone. The two scenarios where I generally make phone calls both have other limiting factors: Google Voice, for my long distance calls to family & friends back home, and my car’s Bluetooth hands-free unit. Google Voice really does mutilate calls at time, but I think I can expect better from the Bluetooth.

This has been a freakishly busy spring for me! Life at PBworks is just blurring by, as we build increasingly awesome things. I’m loving it.

Anyway, I’ve got to say, spring is quickly giving way to summer. It was 33C outside today, and there’s actually a heat weather warning out for tomorrow. Ugh! It’s a bad day when you’re getting gross and sweaty just sitting on your couch. Sigh.

Anyway, I had a fun day. Lynn and I went to a really, really boring historic spot, Dr. Tripp’s General Store, in Woodside. It was nice and scenic, though, so that’s hard to argue with. Then, we met up with Atif in Palo Alto (I say the A9.com building, woot) for coffee. For whatever reason, my car decided to act like it had a dead battery, so we had to walk back to Atif’s to pick up his car. Upon returning to Chuck, it had mysteriously re-invigorated its battery. Ugh — exercise for nothing! I hate that!

In odd news, I received a jury duty summons today, something that is particularly annoying since I’m not eligible for jury duty, so now I’ve got to figure out how to point out of the obvious to the San Mateo court system. Blaaaah.

Jury duty summons are ridiculously frequent here: two people at PBworks had to do jury duty in the past 6 months. I don’t know anyone back in Halifax that has ever had jury duty. I blame spurious lawsuits down here.

Anyway, off to watch The Office. UNTIL NEXT TIME.