shinyPlasticBag

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.

For whatever reason, a copy of the Windows 1.0.1 splash screen was making the rounds on reddit today. I was inspired to make a wallpaper, but of course, I’m a Mac man, m’self.

Here’s the boot-up screen from System 7, circa 1991:

Here’s a screenshot of my desktop with a new version of it:

So, world, here’s my Welcome to Mac OS wallpaper (1280×800), and in case you want to play with it, here’s the Photoshop version. Everything should be scalable.

So, today was SHDH 32, and it was in Oakland. It was at a really interesting workshop space called the Department of Spontaneous Combustion, which was filled with interesting, Burning Man-esque creations (take a look at that link). Unfortunately, there weren’t enough places to sit, and the Internet just didn’t work. It’s hard to provide infrastructure for a hundred people with laptops and phones and all that jazz. Still, it was pretty frustrating to have driven 40 minutes to the opposite side of the bay and just sort of stand around being annoyed. Plus, it was in a vaguely sketchy sort of part of town. Generally speaking, not my favourite devhouse — although it was fun to beat JP at chess.

You know, I’m pretty good at chess, but I really don’t strategize at all while I play. I prefer to be reactionary, hedging my own position and moving in when I can. I don’t have a particularly great success rate, though, because I get bored and distracted. I really wish I didn’t — I LOVED chess back in junior high. One of my crowning achievements was beating Ms. Meadows, the librarian, in a game. No one else I knew had ever done that.

Anyway, driving home today, vaguely grumpy after an unsatisfying nerd experience, Casey and I dragged Andrew to an In-n-Out burger. I’ve been extolling the wonders of their amazing food ever since he moved here in October, and since he doesn’t have a car (and we live in an 25 km long In-n-Out deadzone), he hadn’t made it there. It was, of course, delicious.

Casey and I also stopped in to OSH and picked up some herbs and peppers. I’ve been wanting to have a little garden ever since I moved into Queen Street two years ago, so I’m glad she’s kept reminding me, and I’m very excited. I got a jalapeno plant, some corn, some tomatoes, some sage, and then various little spicy peppers. The next issue is finding a good spot to put them where they’ll get enough sun, but yeah. Excited.

Anyway, that’s enough boring nerdery for now. Ciao, world.

You know, one of the things I hate most about human existence — and I say that because I’m pretty sure this is universal — is the unpleasantness of consciousness context switching. That is, I hate going to bed — I always want to stay up and keep watching TV, or surfing the Interwebs. However, once I’m asleep, I never want to get up. It’s annoying.

I like sleeping in so much that I used to fantasize about taking a Sleep Day and just not getting out of bed. Working nightshifts for a few years pretty much beat that out of me, though. Waking up at 3 or 4 in the afternoon was really sucky.

Anyway. Random.

Wonderful sunshine.

I’m in Willits, CA en route back home to Redwood City with Mom & Joey. We spent the weekend up in Fortuna, although we didn’t spend any time in Fortuna itself. We wanted through the Avenue of the Giants and scrambled along the shores of Eel River, and we bought interesting things from a gem & mineral shop. I got Dad a weird agate rock and a cute little ammonite fossil for Casey.

It is fantastically sunny outside today. Sometime, I really want to spend a few weeks and drive right across the continent, stopping at some optimal number of roadside attractions and tourist traps, and maybe fly back or something. I’ve wanted to do that since I was in high school (I recall planning a roadtrip to Chicago in grade 12 that never came to be). It’s really a funny thing to want to do, since I generally dislike driving. Weird personality facet, I suppose.

Anyway, laptopping in the backseat of my car is somewhat uncomfortable, so I’m done typing now.

Dear lord, this blog has just completely slipped out of my mental radar. What’s wrong with me? Ugh!

Anyway, I’ve been having a delightful week: Mom & Joey are in town, so I’ve been doing my best to entertain them and show them interesting things. For example, we went to Muir National Monument on the weekend, which was spectacular. They have some massive redwood trees there — it’s a pretty amazing park. Definitely on my ‘return to’ list.

Wednesday night, we went up to San Francisco (with Lynn as our navigator) and went through Chinatown and North Beach. We had dinner at Michelangelo’s Caffe, which I love. I went there with Lynn when I first got here and was completely won over by the plate of gummy bears they bring you after your dinner. Fantastic. Anyway, Lynn successfully managed to pay for our dinner, so now the rest of us are scheming of ways of making it back up to her.

Work is crazy busy. It’s great to have so much to do, but it’s always a bit alarming to look at todo lists that are constantly growing. It’s going to be one hell of a summer. Oddly enough, I’m looking forward to the challenge. This is what startup life is supposed to be like.

Anyway, Mom and Joey are here for another week or so, so we’re heading up north this weekend so they can see the humongous redwood forests of northern California (and maybe southern Oregon). It should be a lot of fun. I really like roadtrips, and this is a fun route to take. Lots of windy roads through mountains and forests with the occasional breathtaking view. It’s wonderful.

Anyhoo, I’ve got to get a-workin’. Until next time, blog.

I just got out of interaction09 redux, which was at Adaptive Path’s office in San Francisco. interaction09 was a design conference that happened in Vancouver last month. Someone noticed that so many people there were from the Bay Area that they could stand to do a micro “redux” edition in San Francisco. I went with Mike.

It was interesting, although I’m finding the more I’m exposed to “designer-y events”, the less interest I actually have in design. It’s clearly not my speciality, even though I like to think of myself as more enlightened than your average code monkey. Live and learn, I guess.

Anyway, as I was walking down the sidewalk (past a man pushing an empty shopping cart whilst wearing a bathrobe and smoking a cigar), I was hit with yet another “Holy crap. California.” moment. I really haven’t been taking full advantage of my enviable position here. It’s Silicon freaking Valley.

So, new personal commitment: attend, on average, one tech event per week. It shouldn’t be too hard: I’m on Caltrain en route to SuperHappyDevHouse, which will be my second tech event of the day, and I went to BayCHI’s “Dancing with Ambiguity” event at Xerox PARC on Tuesday. This week has been busy.

Ye gods, it’s been a long time since I’ve posted anything here. Life hasn’t been particularly dull or anything, but I haven’t been struck by the urge to blog at any point when I’m idle.

Common places for the muse to strike me:
– The gym
– Work
– Driving home from work (evaporates by the time I arrive home)

But, thanks to Alexa’s prodding on Facebook, I’ve been reminded of it whilst idle. Thanks.

Anyway, not much is new here. It’s definitely spring, which is cool — not super warm yet (15ish) but certainly nice. Casey and I attempted to go do something outside-y yesterday, but just ended up driving up to Pacifica and not getting any appreciable amount of exercise out of the excursion. Incidentally, that reminds me that I still have half of a Subway sub waiting to be consumed…

Tomorrow’s a pretty big day at work: we’re finally flipping the kill switch on PBwiki 1.0. You see, back when we decided to revamp the product (a process that was well underway when I arrived at PBwiki), we didn’t really separate PBwiki 1.0 from PBwiki 2.0. It was the same code, just periodically checking whether we were supposed to be acting like version 1 or version 2. Unfortunately, this is a pretty horrible solution to find yourself in, because it made a lot of things much more complicated than they needed to be. Over time, we migrated more of the old code into its own files, but the complexity was still there. Until we reached a high enough percentage of people using the new product, however, we couldn’t get rid of the old one. Back in December, we finally felt confident in doing that, and tomorrow’s the big day.

I’m excited because I’ll get to clean up a lot of gross code, and I’m the engineer in charge of the whole switcharoo. I can’t wait. That being said, tomorrow’s gonna be rough for a lot of people: folks are going to go to their wikis and see a new version. We’ve made some changes to make sure everything is smooth, but nothing is perfect. Wish us luck.

It’s been snowing all day and it’s absolutely wonderful. This is exactly what I’d hoped for: nice, winterish weather with at least one decent but harmless storm somewhere. It’s been snowing since this morning, but I’m toastily inside teaching Mom & Joey how to use GarageBand. It’s been a lot of fun.

So far, I’ve had a great week. Tuesday night with Picnicface had a great turnout, including a big ass gathering at Talay Thai for a pre-show meal. We got the whole back room to ourselves, which was fun. I’m sure we were rowdy.

Anyway, Mom and I are off to a wine tasting thing this evening, even in the horrible snow storm. Wish us luck in the whole “Not crashing” department, and I’ll see lots of you soon.

Huzzah, I’m home. After a typically grueling cross continental trip yesterday, I landed to meet Mom & Dad. We went to Best Buy so I could pick up a shiny new laptop (named “entropy”, keeping in the science-y name tradition), and then headed back to Mom’s Secret Valley Lair. It’s really nice here, just up from the main drag in Wolfville. It’s a nice home-away-from-home, and actually, you know, decorated and full of Mom’s personality, unlike the condo she was at in Bedford.

So, having been away for 30-something hours yesterday, I forced myself to stay awake until a reasonable time last night and slept like I was in a coma. I woke up nice and dejetlagged this morning — almost a first! I’m just relaxing for the morning, waiting for my new Mac to finish the Migration Wizard from the old one. The Family is coming up here for a day of fooding, socializing, and playing Rock Band.

In the meantime, I’m off to watch the first Austin Powers movie is on. Mom has gotten digital cable, which offers several hundred trillion channels of nothingness for me to flip through (well, 690ish, but still)…until next time, Internet.