Month: November 2003

I think I mentioned earlier that Apple, as a reward for all the hard work of its employees this year, has given us all the week off. Now, granted, I’m not responsible for this hard work, but I’m still taking the week off.

Yesterday I went out to Castle Rock with my brother to do some bouldering. It was great. The rock there is sandstone, much nicer on your hands than granite (Hueco Tanks, Enchanted Rock), but not quite as nice as limestone (Reimers). Still, with the cool weather and the sandpaper texture, you seem to stick spiderman-style to everything, which is a great ego boost. Of course, I forgot my camera. We’re thinking about dragging Doug and George out there for some nature this weekend.

The rest of the day was soaked up finding and buying a (free-range) turkey, ditching our digital cable box like a bad habit ($15 a month so that the channels will change more slowly?), and playing X-2.
You know you’re a hardcore fan of a series when you shell out $50 bucks to watch a former high-summoner run around in a strange japanese idea of a short skirt dancing and singing and changing clothes. Yet the game is strangely excellent, just like all the FF series that seem at first bizarre or tedious (can you say FF tactics?).

More reports to follow as Thanksgiving activities heat up.

Once upon a time a boy named Bryan was born. He grew up strong and in time had a wrist worthy of bearing a watch. Not a big watch, though, for he was a small boy at first. So, he took to wearing women’s watches since the huge chunkiness of men’s watches made it look like he’d strapped a roma tomato to his arm.

This worked for many years until Bryan’s wrist grew too large for women’s watches. He now had to face the cold, harsh world of timepieces built for real men. He found a reasonable watch that had a neat little feature: it would light up when you pressed a button. In time, Bryan lost this watch as he loses most things, even those that are strapped to his body. He bought another watch, and this one showed the date. “What a neat little feature,” he thought. Then he lost this watch.

The process continued through the years, watches being bought and lost, and bought and broken, and slowly Bryan was seduced by the all the neat features he’d seen. He proclaimed, “I shall once and for all have a watch that has all the features I want, consequences be damned!” And to the horror of his friends he bought this:

Weighing in at 17.2 kilograms, the watch had everything Bryan could have ever wanted. It glowed when you pressed a button. It had the date. It had a timer. It had an alarm. It had a big face, and then THREE LITTLE FACES WITH HANDS INSIDE THAT FACE! Imagine the power!

In time, though, Bryan came to realize that he hated the watch. It was huge. It was ugly. And it was heavy. He started taking it off to type, to play piano. Then he started to not even bother putting it on.

A new idea came into his mind. “What I really need a watch to do,” he thought, “is tell me what time it is. And a watch I’m not wearing doesn’t do such a hot job of that.” So he decided to make a drastic change. A vague memory of a better kind of watch echoed in his mind. Something small. Something thin. Something light. Something swiss. A swatch!

This watch, my friends, does not even have a second hand. This watch is 3.9mm thick. This watch is so serious about being light that it is missing most of the material out of it’s links! THINK ABOUT IT! THIS IS THE ANSWER! At last Bryan has found a watch which will satisfy him for the rest of eternity. Will Bryan and the watch live happlily ever after? No one will know until that fateful day comes when the mailman delivers it.

I’m hoping for tomorrow or Monday. The end.

When I started fresh with a new look for overt this summer, I pledged to update everything more frequently. And I’m certainly doing better than I have in the past (i.e., two posts a year). Still, things have been dropping off a bit, and I think I know why.

When I started updating frequently, every week or day had me in a new state or on a new trip or with a new lease or new fundamental plan for my life. Now, I’ve got a plan that’s slightly longer-term. I keep waiting for something worth posting to happen, but it doesn’t because things have settled down.

So I realized what I have to do to keep momentum: start posting boring details about my life. This way, random strangers have access to a more complete picture of who I am.

So on with it! Tonight is Friday night, which as you all know means expensive meat and Japanese beer here at the Greatest Apartment in the World (TM). Today I went with ribeye steak because it cost more than the other meats (this is my level of sophistication when it comes to buying good food). Plus, I have fond memories attached to it and I haven’t had it in years.

Now, I’m waiting for Leslie to come home from her self-imposed torture of grading papers on Friday afternoon. I personally had a great day at work, but, quite frustratingly, I can’t really say why except that I got to see some cool stuff (sense any similarities to working at a three-letter govt agency?). Well, that’s why I took the job, I guess: to play with cool new stuff. I just have to wait for some time to pass before I can point to it and say, “I worked on that.”

I’ve got some other things to blather about, but I’m going to put them in separate posts, mostly just because I’m curious to see how my system handles multiple posts in one day (a pitch of updating frenzy I’ve not previously dared to approach).

Well, another week has gone by. I’m still plugging along at Apple, trying to figure what exactly is the difference between my ass and a hole in the ground. I’m making some slow progress.

I have to accept the fact that unless I start making an effort, my life is going to be pretty boring for the next year. Get up, go to work, come home, fix dinner, sleep. I know the cycle, I’ve done it for internships before. It was easier then because it only lasted for three months. We’ll see how I take to it in the long term.

Up until last week I had been riding my bike to work (it’s about 4.5 miles, maybe 15-20 mins). I was feeling green and self-satisfied, but then my shoulders started to get really knotted (they generally have a propensity to do this, but they were really bad). So I’m trying to figure out what exactly to do on that front. It seems like I’ve outgrown my bike (purchased at the end of high school, yet somehow too small now…). So (according to one bike guy I talked to) it’s cramping up my arms and shoulders. I have no clue; I just know if I don’t figure how to solve the issue I’m stuck driving to work everyday, which is just too Californian for me at the moment. So maybe I’ll try to get my bike adjusted, or maybe get a new bike. I even toyed with the idea of getting a recumbent bicycle, but they are $$$ and it seems like it would be counter productive to save money on gas to buy a minimum $500 bike.

Leslie is in San Diego this weekend at a teaching conference. The weather may usually be nice here, but it’s always nice there. Why did I not go to UCSD again? I guess here the weather changes at least a little, which can be entertaining.

Tonight I’m going to a giant party (~1000 people) that Apple is throwing for all of hardware engineering. Should be an interesting peek into the dynamics of company culture. And tomorrow, I’m running in the iRun (seriously, that’s what it’s called) 5k run they’re having at infinite loop.

And for the usual video-games-that-rock-my-world comment, I found out today that there will indeed be a disk with basically all the old Zelda games (thanks for the tip, cam) on it that Nintendo is giving away later this month (a little birthday present for myself). For those who might have trouble understanding a fascination with video games that persists into my twenties, I simply submit that it could have been a heroin addiction.