overt.org

That’s us. Leslie just got her eyes lasered yesterday and she’s already posting at 20/20. I tried to get her to go in for the 3X optical zoom and memory upgrade, but she was too cheap.

My week thus far has involved a trip up to Pleasonton on Sunday with Phil to eat with some of his friends at a place called “Stacey’s Cafe” that’s co-owned by Scott Adams (who Phil told me is picky about his food). I got something called “Scott’s favorite pasta.” It was pretty good–walnuts and capellini and tomatos in a pesto sauce. It had clearly suffered under a heatlamp for a good 15 minutes, which didn’t help.

Monday I lazed away playing UT2004 and reading Dune. You might call it “getting in touch with my inner geek,” except my geek is not hiding on the inside. I had a great day at the climbing gym on Tuesday, first climbing a couple of hundred feet on the computerized “treadwall” that makes for a great warm-up, then spending a couple of hours bouldering with a nice guy I met there named Al. We even swapped phone numbers so that we can meet up at Castle Rock in the future.

Yesterday George joined me for dinner and I cooked up the classic spinach-mascarpone stuffed salmon. We didn’t have any breadcrumbs so I improvised by throwing a couple slices of ciabatta into the oven to crisp and then flogging them with the cuisinart. The result was some supremely tasty bread/butter/parmesan coating for the fish, and only a few more dishes to clean.

Today’s not over, but I think it’s big event will be the ticket I got on the way to work this morning. There’s a very long light that you have to wait at to make a left turn. As an alternative, you can go straight through the light, pull a U, then turn right. You can only do this if you studiously ignore the giant “no U turn” sign. Anyway, I got nailed. Just like my one previous ticketing experience, I didn’t even bother trying to argue about it. Him: “Did you see the no U turn sign, Sir?” Me: “Yeah.” The upside of the encounter was that he pointed out that I still had a blob of toothpaste on my face.

I’m going to see if I can take care of the ticket without ever interacting with a human. The courthouse has a call-in line where you can pay the fine and sign up for defensive driving (or “traffic school” as the hippies here call it), and I assume that DefensiveDriving.com can help me out like they did last time.

This morning I went out climbing with Phil and George. Phil had never been before, but he made a valiant showing. He needs to get some climbing shoes. We intended to go with Jeff and his friend Doantam, but I think that wires got crossed some how, since this week he’s in Texas.

Work has been good since I settled the score on Berkeley. Everything feels much more comfortably finite now, and I’m trying to tie up loose ends and put some sort of reasonable cap on the projects I’m working on. I think my big problem with working in general is that if I work harder, and get more done, that just means that I’ll be given more work to do. In school, if I worked hard, I could actually “finish” early, and relax. I’m sure that after some incomprehensibly long time like a year or so, working hard could pay off and I could move up to better pay or a better position or something. But that’s all abstract to me. Plus, it seems to stretch out interminably 40 years into the future. I just don’t work on those timescales yet.

I picked up “Unreal Tournament 2004” at the store a couple of days ago and I’ve been enjoying the heck out of it. Most fun I’ve had with a shooter since Half Life. All of you out there with the inclination should blow the $30 and come play with me online.

Leslie’s about to head out for her week-long trip to Texas. I’m excited for her–she’s getting her eyes lasered! I don’t think either of us has taken a trip that long alone since we moved into this place. Kind of odd, what having a job will do to you.

I’ve been thinking about changing the format of the website to something different, something simpler. I’m planning on using WordPress. What does my readership think? I want to improve the static content (like my resume, things I’ve written, etc), maybe integrate gallery into this site, put up a few new pages. I haven’t worked up the gumption yet to figure out all the CSS to make it pretty, but I’ve a feeling I’ll have a lot of spare time this week to do so should I feel the urge.

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Comments

Ali — 2004-06-24 09:31:10

I’ll try to stop on the way to the climbing gym today… a mouse and unreal tournament please….

bryan — 2004-06-24 12:20:50

that’s the spirit!

clare — 2004-06-25 00:14:51

yay CSS!

This week, I told my manager at Apple that I’m going to Berkeley in the fall. It was sort of the last step in the process that started on a monday morning last August when I told the nice people at UW I wasn’t going to be going to school there and I drove to SF bay. I looked for a job, I applied to schools. I got both.

Classes don’t start until September, but my last day at Apple will be 23 July–our lease is up on the 31st and we’re moving out to Fremont for the next year or so. Fremont has it’s ups and downs. We’ll be close to George, who’s here for the summer, but further from Jeff in Palo Alto. Also, it’s likely that Fremont is even more of a suburban wasteland than Santa Clara. But it is relatively close to San Jose and has a BART station. Just 50 short minutes to Berkeley.

I feel a sort of immense relief at heading back to school. Partly because school is so familiar to me, and partly because it makes me feel like I’m accomplishing something. I know I’ve been making money for this past year, but it’s also felt like my life is on pause. Not that I have some ultimate goal for my life. Maybe it’s just soothing to be earning merit badges again.

Anyway… the self-imposed prohibition on Berkeley posts is hereby lifted. Expect to hear plenty about it in the coming months.

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Comments

clare — 2004-06-15 07:14:02

three cheers for berkeley – just wait for me, my dearest, and i promise i will return to you!

bryan — 2004-06-17 10:45:53

we’ll leave a joint lit for you.

Fun was had this weekend. George arrived in Cali with Clare (surprise!). We spent Friday night on trivial pursuit, taboo, and ultimately Shrek. Jeff and Phil joined us. Saturday was spent shopping for books, seeing the third harry potter movie (fun but unfocused. I don’t think i would have enjoyed it w/out having read the book), and going to the end-of-year TFA “party” at Pixar. The venue was swank, and so was the food (free sushi!). There were several speeches given by both ‘03 (Leslie’s year) and ‘02 (they’re finished now) corps members. It was a long drive to/from Emeryville (near Berkeley) for the event.

Yesterday morning, I carted Clare and George back to the airport. Clare is headed back to Texas, and george is at West Point being a bad-ass as usual. After they left, I came back home and cleaned the bathroom and did a few other chores (such as churning out another 6 DVDs from netflix). Then I hit the climbing gym for stress relief and exercise. I also spent some time on the little eliptical strider thingy–a feature of the gym that might be enough to entice Leslie to join me there once school is out. I went home and promptly dozed until dinner. Dinner itself was beautiful: Leslie got some “sashimi-grade” ahi, which we seared on the stove and glazed in a ginger-garlic-honey sauce. Mmm… half-raw fish.

After dinner I was inspired to rebuild our apartment network by turning our linux server into a router, and relegating our commodity netgear wireless router to the status of simple access point. I did this mostly to give me more control over the firewall after learning that some netgear routers have a back-door administrative account that can’t be disabled, and also so I could easily run an internal DNS server. Yes, I spent hours working on it just so that I could refer to the music server as “music” instead of “192.168.2.74.” Think of it as geek redecoration.