Tag: personal

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.

shamelessly stolen from cameron via leslie’s blog:
http://members.cox.net/impunity/endofworld.swf

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.

I voted against it. Sigh.

So, I have reached the point in my job hunt where I’ve got a job (a great one), that I would have started a week ago if it weren’t for paperwork. So, I’m waiting now for all the paperwork to go through. I’m not 100% sure (maybe we’ll say 93.4%) that everything will work out, so I’m resisting the urge to post all the details.

In the meantime, I still have a lot of time to kill, except I can’t really kill it with job hunting anymore. So, I’ve been whiling the hours away reading news, books, websites, practicing piano, guitar, running, reading the same websites again, and so forth. I know this kind of activity must sound like bliss to pretty much everyone else, but its really starting to drive me insane.

Does anyone have any great books or websites or drug addictions that they’d like to share? I just need something to pass a bit more time, then I’m sure my normal leisure inclinations will be plenty to fill all the extra minutes I have outside of work.

One of the ideas I toyed with when I was thinking about what to do with myself after I graduated was to move to the Bay with Leslie, and to work for some cool Silicon Valley company. Well, a lot has happened in the last few months, and here I am: in Silicon Valley. I have an apartment (the best apartment in the world; you should come visit and bask in its glory). Leslie is a teacher. The only lacking component is a job for me.

Well, it’s probably an understatement to say that the Valley is not the best place to be looking for a job these days. So I spent my first couple of weeks here spewing out resumes to all kinds of companies and jobs (23 companies, over 60 jobs was my last count). I forced myself everyday to spend at least a few hours looking for listings and companies and trying to contact anyone in any way I could.

As most of you may know, I’m not a very patient person, especially when I’m idle. So the waiting was very hard for me, but eventually I got lucky. I got a call from, all told, three managers who wanted to talk to me about jobs.

I spent the next couple of weeks in interviews (lots of them), trying to juggle all the different positions. The last week has been soaked up just trying to get the timing together on offers. But it seems like at last, I will be getting an offer for a job that I’d love to take. I don’t have it in my hands yet, so I should probably still avoid from talking about job specifics, but I’m feeling very confident about it. Hopefully in the next few days everything will be settled.

When we first moved into our apartment, I had a lot of empty time to fill in the days while the job search was warming up (okay, let’s be honest, I still have a lot of free time, but at least I occasionally go out for an interview now). Anyway, because I’m not a very patient guy, and I probably had at least a few weeks of waiting around doing basically nothing while trying to get a job, I decided to try to grow a bansai tree from this tiny little kit that Leslie had.

I opened the book, and it said the first thing that you should do is to soak the seeds in water for 24 hours. Now, for me, this is a real problem, because I don’t like to wait 24 hours for something interesting to start happening. But, in an effort to teach myself some patience I buckled down and soaked them. After a day, I looked in the book for the next step and was appalled to discover that next I was to stick them in the fridge in a damp paper towel for seven days. That is an unbelievably long time.

But I did it anyway. After seven days, I took out the seeds, soaked the peat that came with the kit in warm water, and put the seeds and the dirt in the impossibly small pot provided to grow the tree in.

More than a week passed, and there was no sign of any life in the little pot, except for the mold that grew because I dutifully kept the soil wet.

Then, finally, a few days ago a little stem thing started to push out of the dirt, and now there is a very very small pine tree that’s starting to grow:

And so this week, I think I’ll get a job.