Tag: personal

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.

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.

Nothing special going on this week. Just slogging through the second-to-last week of school for Leslie. I’ve never anticipated the end of someone else’s year so much. We all know why it will be nice for her to finish. In addition, I’m selfishly looking forward to getting up at 8 again (die, alarm, die).

I bought a membership at a nearby climbing gym, and I’ve been trying to go a few times a week. I’m getting my old strength back quickly, which is encouraging. When I started, it was clear I didn’t have the mettle I did when I left UT. I’ve also been trying to go yoga every week, which is fine, except that there is really only one place in the south bay I can go to. The teacher there, while good, is a little too hardcore. He told me last week that he doesn’t think I should come to the led classes anymore, that “it’s time to take the training wheels off.” What this means is that I’m supposed to come several times a week (6, ideally) in the morning from 6:30-8:00 to do ashtanga so I can “move my practice forward.” Now, I would love to be able to do ashtanga 6 times a week. I’m sure I’d be in great shape if I did. But I’m just not going to rise at 5:15 every morning to drive to Mountain View and pay $11 a class for the pleasure.

Some people see yoga as a part of a religion, or a way to find personal spirituality. To them, it’s less about exercise and more about some abstract concept like wholeness or meditation. Some even pay exorbitant amounts of money to go to india and be abused. They say that if you’re only thinking about the physical aspect, you’re not doing yoga. You’re just stretching. I’d agree to an extent. Except ashtanga is the most ass-kicking type of streching that I’ve even done in my life. It makes me feel looser, gives me more energy, and makes almost all of my aches and pains disappear. The trouble is, the people who often embrace the religious aspects of yoga the most are the teachers. So, as I get better and want to learn more stuff, I have to put up with more spiritual mumbo-jumbo. Can’t I just do second series without bowing to the lotus-feet of Patanjali?

I had a great instructor in Austin who wasn’t at all hung up about the spiritual stuff, but now I’m stymied by the new age hippies here in the Bay.

Leslie suggested that when we’re looking for a new apartment, we could try to find a place that has a hardwood floor so that I could do yoga at home (carpet is too squishy, bad for the wrists). Brilliant. And George will be here soon, to the east, so hopefully that might motivate me to find another place to do ashtanga.

Another great thing that happened recently: I discovered that KUT is now offering an MP3 stream of their station. So now I can listen to Eklektikos with John Aielli every morning at work. It’s helped me to miss Austin a little less.

One other thing. I have sworn off the Xbox for various rational and irrational reasons, but I’ve still been taunted by a couple of games that have come out for it: Knights of the Old Republic and Halo. So, I pieced together a Windows (shudder) computer from spare parts I had, and bought a copy of the game for PC. It is indeed great. It offers more lattitude in the way you solve problems than I’ve seen in an RPG in a long time. Example: yesterday I had to work logarithms to solve a puzzle. If I’d wanted to, I could have solved the same problem by interrogating a prisoner or simply blasting my way through a bunch of guards. Also, you have the macroscopic option of choosing the light side or the dark side of the force. I’ve gone the light side, mostly because I made the decision early before I realized that being dark wasn’t a disadvantage. But the two paths are rich enough that I could see myself playing through again as dark just to see how evil I could get. Also, the game is broad enough that I’ve never felt hung up or frustrated, and it’s full of optional quests and side games. I haven’t once felt the need to hit up gamefaqs.

T-minus 7 days of teaching left for Leslie.

On the advice of someone who should know, I’ve traveled back in time to 1998 to play Zelda: Ocarina of Time. Since I already played Zelda: Windwaker on the Gamecube, everything seemed very familiar. Too familiar, almost. It’s as though the Zelda: WW game is just a copy of Ocarina with revamped, toon-shaded graphics and new dungeons. Same controls, same items, same sound effects. But I haven’t finished Ocarina yet, so maybe the comparison won’t hold true. Of course, I wouldn’t want that to leave the impression that the game isn’t any good; it’s great. Just fewer polygons.

In other gaming news, I polished off Metroid Prime. I think I rushed through the last half of the game. Played about 40% in one weekend, which in honesty is too much Metroid. In any case, the game kicks ass and you must play it.

You might be thinking to yourself: “Bryan never talks about anything except video games anymore.” Well, you could say that. And you’d be right. This is because I have a job, and although it would be fun to turn this into a blog about the new stuff coming out of Apple, talking about that stuff would probably get me fired fairly rapidly. There is probably a server somewhere on the Infinite Loop campus silently trawling all known employee blogs for any sensitive information, hooked to a machine that prints out pink slips.

And, besides work, my life is a vast and unchanging sea of waking up, coming home, eating, and sleeping. Sure, I try to exercise and go out sometimes. But even the aberrations from my schedule seem so mundane that I have trouble posting them up here. Maybe that’s my problem: I have too high an editorial filter on myself.

So, in an effort to reverse this self-imposed chilling effect, I’ll revisit the highlights of my week so far. Monday is one of the two days every week that Leslie goes to her credentially classes for six hours. Because, after all, it’s not enough to just teach all day and spend every other waking hour planning for teaching and grading. So, I usually have the evenings to myself. I recently leveraged my member’s 20% discount at REI to buy a nice new pair of climbing shoes (Anasazi Velcros, if you must know). I hadn’t broken them in yet, and my old Moccasyms were badly in need of a resole. So, I decided to spend my evening at the local over-priced climbing gym. I dropped off my old shoes for resoling (they should be done in a couple of weeks) and headed over to the bouldering area to see what was left of my climbing skillz after all these months of disuse.

It turned out that I did pretty well, and I also managed to meet and hit it off with a couple of other climbers. I’d sort of forgotten the automatic friendship and community that goes along with climbing. Maybe if I return next week, and I see the same people again, I might establish something like a routine.

Tuesday evening was spent with Les catching up with the daily show using our new PVR bliss. Wednesday was soaked up with ripping netflix DVDs and ocarina. And that brings us to today, which I’m clearly spending working in my cube.

Tomorrow is Friday and payday. Bliss. I might be coming to Austin in a couple of weeks for these alleged graduation shenanigans. We’ll see.

well, life seems to have settled down in into it’s post-vacation routine again. I go to work. I come home, sleep. And so forth.

Nothing really notable has been going on. I’ve been playing a lot more of Metroid Prime. It took me a while to get into, but it proved very rewarding once I did. Once I finish I’ll probably post my impressions of the game overall.

Also, after three months of self-imposed abstention, I bought a toy. It’s a PVR (personal video recorder). The idea is that, while I really don’t watch that much television, the stuff I do like (mostly on comedy central) is only once or twice a week, and I don’t care enough to change what i’m doing so i can sit in front of a TV. Also, I’ve gotten to the point where even one commercial is enough to make me recoil from the TV room in horror. So we got this ReplayTV thing that is supposed to automatically figure out when all your favorite shows are on and record them for you, and when you play them back it automagically skips all the commercials. All this for $120. Sign me up.

Finally, I should mention the freakish weather of the last couple of days. It’s been in the EIGHTIES AND NINETIES. I know. It’s amazing. How quickly I forget my roots.

So, it’s that time again for all our favorite websites to do silly things for April 1st. Slashdot let me down this year, but there were two excellent showings from homestarrunner and maddox. Better hurry; I suspect everything will have returned to normal by tomorrow.

The entirety of last weekend was absorbed in scuba training with Leslie. I was actually certified back when I was sixteen for a trip my family took to Cozumel, and I did a bit of diving in Costa Rica in ’98, and then another trip to Cozumel in (I think) 1999. The upshot is that it’s probably been five years since I’ve been underwater, and so I figured my skills could use a bit of polishing. And, of course, Leslie needed to get the training under her belt, too.

The dive shop where we were trained is called “Diver Dan’s Wet Pleasure.” No, really. It’s very near our apartment, and the staff there really seem to have their shit together. We happened to be trained by some high PADI mucky-muck, so there were a bunch of aspiring instructors there to help. Actually, there were about 10 instructors and only 8 students, so the ratio worked out pretty well. We took the “accelerated course,” which means 3 hours on Friday, 9 on Sat/Sun, and four dives next weekend in Monterrey Bay. In honesty, if you read the book outside of class, the time spent in the pool is really the only time not wasted. I’d suspect Leslie would have been fine just coming in, taking the final exam in about 30 mins, and spending 4 hours or so in the pool.

Let me tell you a story about water temperatures. You might think that 70 degrees is a pleasant temperature to go swimming in. Well, it’s not. It’s really frickin cold. Even 80 can get cold after a while. Why? Because your body is 98.6, and even dropping that a few degrees can cause uncontrollable shivering and hypothermia. And water can wick heat away from your body like no one’s business. Any way, when I first got certified in Austin, we went diving in Lake Travis (Windy Point, to be exact). The water was in the low 70s, and it was pretty damned cold. We’re going for ocean dives in the Pacific, which makes Lake Travis in winter look like a hot tub. The current water temperature in Monterey is 54 degrees. I’m shaking just thinking about it.

We’re supposed to be in Monterey (about an hour and a half from where we live) at 7:30 next Saturday morning. Lemons to lemonade, we’ve decided to make a little weekend trip out of it. We’ll probably head out Friday afternoon, shack up at the Travelodge and take it easy. Maybe on Saturday afternoon when Leslie is recovering/grading papers, I can sneak off and visit Laguna Seca. Hmm…

I went back and forth between loving and hating this article about five times in the course of reading it. Maybe he makes some good points, maybe he just goes in one big, self-indulgent circle.

Instead of worrying about the RIAA sending you a lawsuit, why not pay for privacy? In the end, though, maybe we can legitimize P2P. I don’t know. I always think it’s kind of funny when people try to quash file-sharing on the internet in one way or another, technically or legislatively. It’s funny because what they fundamentally want to prevent people from doing is sending bits to one another, and that’s all the internet does anyway. They want to turn the internet into television, pushing out all the products to you that you should buy. They hate the fact that the quivering masses out there have the ability to push stuff out to, and they especially hate it when they payed for the creation of that stuff. It’s understandable. They just want to make money like any reasonable corporation.

I’m not worried, really. It may be true that corporations are better at purchasing legislation than the American people, but in the end not even as corrupt a government as we have will turn their constituents into criminals. As more and more people realize that for essentially zero marginal cost they can make a copy of their CD, their DVD, their video game, you can bet your DMCA they’re going to do it, regardless of the law. It’s so easy. It doesn’t *feel* illegal. And even when they think of whom they’re screwing, they don’t Imagine it’s Peter Jackson or Eminem. They think of Sony Entertainment and BMG, and who gives a fuck about them, anyway? People just want to listen to music. If it were easier to pay for it, people would. People are lazy.

But it’s too hard to pay for it. Even though, to copy a DVD, I have to rip it, decrypt it, and remove region encoding (30 mins), then I have to trasncode it to fit on a DVD-R (1 hr), then I have to burn the finished product back to a DVD-R (20 mins), which costs me $1 in materials and quite a bit of time, it’s still more compelling than going to the store to spend over $20 for something which will entertain you for at best 6-7 hours for the duration of your ownership.

One of two things is going to happen:
(a) nothing. people will continue to be treated as criminals by media companies with no concern for customer satisfaction beyond the profit motive. Piracy will get easier and easier on old technology (CDs, DVDs, TV) and new technology will get more and more restrictive. It will be a constant arms race between pirates and content producers, and everyone will lose.
(b) someone will figure out how to make money by selling something worth buying. If I could buy a DVD movie for $7, I would do it in a second. I *know* they could make money on it. If I could by a CD for $7, I’d do it in a second. It’d be even easier to make money on that. CDs and DVDs cost pennies to manufacture. Cut prices drastically, and recover production costs in staggering volume.

I don’t have a lot of hope for b. But who knows? Enough ranting, I need to swap my next Netflix disc in to my Mac for ripping…