the quest for a watch

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.

proud to be mundane

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).

random update

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.

steak and a movie

I think I should share with all of my faithful readers the joy that is Friday in our little corner of Santa Clara, aka the Best Apartment in the World (TM).

Every week, one or both of us stop at Whole Foods for some joyous yuppie shopping at Whole Foods in Cupertino. Now that I’m working at Apple, I can just swing by on my way home (now you all know the real reason I took the job). It usually involves at least some crusty sourdough bread, some fresh veggies and cheese, and some good fish or beef or lamb. We’ve also taken to rounding things out with some over-priced Japanese beer.

We bring home our booty, maybe go exercise for a bit, then break out the food and make dinner together. It’s so simple… we just steam the veggies, broil the meat, and slice the bread. Then we collapse together on the couch for some movie or a rerun of the west wing. It’s just one of the very best things in life.

I write you now after the exercise, before the eating and couch-potating. Life is good. It’s even better because I got my first paycheck today and very soon won’t been in debt to Les any more. Also, on my way home from getting the steaks I just couldn’t resist dropping by Gamestop to pick up SSX3 (for the blissfully uninitiated, it’s the third iteration of a highly-addictive snow-boarding game that I have an extensive… um… “history” with).

So, roughly 2.2 months into this mostly-unplanned adventure, things seem to have pretty much worked out.

week one

So, the rest of the week went by pretty quickly. Most of my time was soaked up with trying to learn all of the acronyms associated with my projects, and then maybe a few details about them. What was left over was spent choosing a medical plan and setting up my 401(k). On Thursday, apple released iTunes for Windows, and I went down to a little theater on campus to watch a live stream of the presentation with a bunch of other Apple employees. Now, I’ve seen other Steve Jobs presentations before, but it was a unique experience to see it with a bunch of people intensely interested, hanging on every word he was saying. They cared not only because it was their company, but because he might actually say something that would change the projects they had to work on for the next six months (like “we’re going to ship Panther by the end of the year,” which he said this summer).

I’m still totally drowning in new information, and I think I will be for a couple of more weeks or so. But the environment is great, with mostly great people. Apple moment of the week: seeing another employee in his late fifties wearing a grateful dead t-shirt and cutoffs, riding a home-made motorized skateboard across the campus.

And now that it’s the weekend, it’s time for a little Super Mario Sunshine.

day one

Today was my first day at work. It was awesome. I’m going to give the generic rundown here. For the juicy bits, like what computer they gave me, you’ll have to contact me through some other channel.

I pulled in to the Infinite Loop campus at 8am. The training actually didn’t start until 8:30, but I’d lost the little sheet that said when we were supposed to show up, so I hedged. Things in the morning were pretty standard. They introduced all of the various programs and safety policies and talked a bit about benefits. Then they rotated in some speakers to talk about computer accounts and physical security. Pretty ho-hum morning, but necessary.

I then had a free lunch (free means Bryan buys the large sushi combo and yuppie juice) with my new manager. We talked a bit about the group and my possible projects. It was fun. Then I went in to get my badge, which was an experience in itself. The ID room had a professional photographer with indirect lighting (you know, like those little umbrella thingys). Then they took several pictures (turn this way. good. now the other way. Rest your elbow on your knee. Great! Now square your shoulders to the camera…) and let me pick my favorite one. The badge itself has a little red apple logo on it (the color of the apple is randomly assigned based on your employee number), my first name, and the picture.

Then I got set up in my office with a fancy new mac. I met the usually first day horde of people, some whom I’ll be working with and others who are just nearby my office. I say “office,” but what might be a slightly more accurate description might be “vastly overgrown cube.” It has no door, but it is huge, bigger than many small offices i’ve seen, with fancy ergonomic tables and such. The walls are wine and grey colored (as opposed to the white of offices) and every vertical surface is either whiteboard or a place to pin up papers. It has incandescent track lighting and a view out a window. It was apologetically explained that I would have had an office, but there is simply no space left in the building. I stifled a protestation that I actually would prefer the cube to the office.

The rest of the day was whiled away wading through administrative minutiae, but I did have one good meeting with my team (3 people as yet). Then I went home.

Wow. I’ll get into a bit more of the culture and such in forthcoming updates. For now, I’m a tad pooped.

a long summer’s journey into work

I’m starting work on Monday. It’s a bit strange to imagine. I’ll go in, I’ll get my badge, get my office (I already have one decoration lined up: a miniature Texas flag), start meeting people. Eventually, after a period of cluelessness, I’ll start doing useful work.

I realized that this has been the longest period in my life without work or school since I started kindergarten. I haven’t done anything useful since I graduated in May. I have become so bored and frustrated that starting work seems like the best kind of vacation imaginable.

In other news, Zelda: the Wind Waker is definitely one of the top 5 best video games I’ve ever played. And I’ve played a *lot*. So, if you’re ever looking for a good way to kill a week while you’re, I don’t know, waiting for your job to start, I’d highly recommend this RPG full of bright colors and catchy sythesized music.

I’ll be back soon with a full report on work day 1.

a trip to half moon bay and more

We’ve been taking pictures of this and that for a while here, with nothing really adding up to anything worth a whole album on gallery. Today, though, we took a great little trip to Half Moon bay, a burg out west on the coast. We hit the beach on a cool, cloudy afternoon to watch seagulls and waves, throw frisbees, fly kites, and mutilate washed up plant-life. The pictures from this trip are bundled with some flotsam and jetsam from our lives these last few weeks and stuck up on gallery for your viewing pleasure. Enjoy.