San Francisco and my new goals

I got a chance to go to San Francisco a few weeks ago. I'll tell ya, it is now my favorite place in the entire continental U.S. (thanks Jason for the accurate portrayal of my feelings). The place was outstanding. There were two things in particular that were just perfect.

1. Jobs - In terms of technology, this is where its at. Companies like Google, Yahoo, Facebook, VMWare, Twitter, etc. are really driving so much of what is important to me. Hint Hint: This is why I went out there.
2. Biking - Someone described this as the most biker friendly area in the country. I'd buy that. There were bike lanes on so many of the roads that I went on. I think you'd be hard pressed to find a massively inefficient way of getting from point A to B in that area.

Of course, I had to meet up with my cronies. I got to grab a beer or 2 with Cory the night before my "meeting" which was awesome. He is living the life. So much great stuff going on for him. He will be world famous some day I'm sure.

Met up with Jon Ma as well. He is a clown. We got completely annihilated twice there in what I would call some of the most successful nights of drinking I've ever had. So many absolutely hilarious memories I can't even believe it. Also pictured are Jinen, Slin and Dileep. Son.

I also got so see the lovely Carolina and Sonya Selina Duarte from my Glassmen days. Oh the memories :(. Sonya knows about the horrible pictures that came out of that night. I totally made Carolina cry, but in a good way, it was awesome.

On the way out there, I ran into a friend from LM ELDP. That was outstanding. We talked the entire flight out there. He is up to some REALLY big things. Best of luck to him. While talking to him, we ran into a girl who was interviewing at Facebook. Pretty cool stuff. She was very nice. Turns out she got the job, so she will be leaving the DC area very soon for the greener pastures of Palo Alto. Speaking of that, Facebook has a pretty fun job application process.

So basically it was like the best weekend in a very long time. I fell in love with the area and I would love to get out there more.

Onward, I've been biking quite a bit lately. I think I'm getting out about 3 times a week which is pretty decent for me. I went out on a group ride a week or 2 ago and we were out for about 6 hours. Sadly, due to like 4 flats and horrible road conditions, we only covered about 55 miles. That sucked. I was so hungry.

I'm going scuba diving next weekend. Stoked.

I've got nothing else.

Best Saturday ever

Yesterday the Capitol Hill Bikes shop in DC had a demo day. I got to try a few decent bikes. I tried the Cannondale CAAD9 Optimo 3, the Cannondale Synapse 1, and the Bianchi Via Nirone 7. It was pretty decent to try the bikes, but the responses they were looking for when we discussed the bikes were basically not what I know about bikes. I thought that was weird. Basically I don't know what I'm doing on a bike to know how it flows and grips the road and what a hard ride is. So I think I'm going to start riding as much as I can. I'll see if I can ride even if I don't have 4 hours to set aside. Each of the next 10 days looks like they will be warmer than the last so I'm cool with that. I think I can get quite a few rides in there.

On that note, I got my GPS back.

A few weeks back I signed up for meetup.com. Its a site where you basically just meet up with people wo do things that you like to do. I've joined 2 groups. One for biking in Gaithersburg, they do rides all over Gaithersburg, Monroe County and DC. I also joined another group for playing ultimate Frisbee. I found that they were playing yesterday so I met up with them (go figure). It was awesome. We played on the mall while people were walking around (and through the field). People would stop by and watch us play and take pictures. For one of the first times since I moved down here I felt like I was local. It was pretty cool. I'm definitely going to play with these guys again.

Later that night Joel had a cookout/housewarming/Tina'sBirthdayParty. It was awesome. It had been awhile since I had seen many of those cats. I ended up making plans with people to play Ultimate, and do like 2o happy hours. So that'll be awesome. We carried on a running joke about my 3rd nipple and my pig liver. I was also able to vandalize the cupcakes that someone brought in by rearranging them to spell "Joel Sucks". I laughed.

So it was a good day.

Fun with Google tools

Over the past few months I've decided to be productive. I got into a few coding projects I've always wanted to get into so I could practice some languages that I didn't really know. Like my
Athletic Tracking thing (with awesome styles of course)(oh by the way, I'll be getting my broken GPS back so I can start exercising again)(3rd paren: I wonder if its a good idea to post live shipping info on a blog, probably not...). Kathy and I started working on a game which is still in the early stages in Gliffy, but that'll be fun.

Besides coding things up, I've been working with Google's free toolsets. Man they have some cool stuff. Besides the obvious Mail, Maps, Calendar, and Search, I've also gotten into Docs(awesome), Analytics, Adwords, Adsense, Dodgeball, Groups, Picasa, Reader(super awesome) and of special note is Notebook (which is super awesome because of the FF plugin supplied), and a few more.

The latest tool I started using is GWT which I think is so sweet I can't even imagine it. I've used a few frameworks in the past 2 years and I've found mostly frustrating results with them. Possibly it is because most of the tools use languages that I am not too familiar with. GWT seems to be built for Eclipse, or at least Eclipse is built to allow tools like GWT to be seamlessly integrated within. The fact that I'm back in the Java swing (nice choice of words eh?) of things is also very, not to sound cliche, refreshing (lol if you knew how java came to be).

The point of GWT is that you can write Java code and have it translated into Javascript. To me, this is a sweet gap between quasi compiled code (Java) and entirely interpreted code (Javascript). For me, development in JS is just so unstructured and difficult to deal with. I really enjoy my eclipse IDE which tells me when I do stupid things in Java, but I want to be able to do the flashy things you can do in JS. GWT feeds my hunger, and I love it.

I started working on a fun little app which so far looks a hella lot better than my Athletic Tracker. The forced organization of Java allows simpler css(ing). So I'm pleased.

In conclusion, Google has some really fun, time-saving tools.

In other news: I've been to San Diego 2x this year and I can't wait to go back, see the link for my Picasa above for pictures. We went swimming/surfing/boogie-boarding in like 50 degree water. Wet suits rule.

And I've been eating somewhat healthy again. Thats about it.

Europe and Biking

Couple things to mention here:

Drumcorps
Only 3 more Bushwacker shows for me. I kinda can't wait till that ends. Although, I am surprisingly learning A TON about how different people work. It's actually sort of exciting. Not exciting enough to be valuable, but definitely something to reflect on.

Biking
So I rode my bike home
from work(approximate map) 2 times this week. That was sweet. I've been sitting here watching my bike at work but the weather was too hot to take a trail I've never done. I'll post the gps data when I get around to it. I'm stoked about that. It was a great ride. The way I see it, I'm essentially combining the commute and my ride time. So in the time it takes me to do a 1.5 hour ride AND get home, I've done a 2.5 hour ride. Plus there is no downtime like when I get home for changing into bike stuff and all that. Its a pretty good system. I'd like to do morning and evening but that is a whole new set of challenges. Plus, 70 miles in 2 straight days on a bike makes me feel like I just got out of prison. I'm not up to 60 a day like some people . So that was fun.

Europe
I bought a ticket to Iceland yesterday. That's fun. So Kathy and I will be flying to Iceland on Friday Oct 13 (scary date). We'll hang there for awhile. I guess hiking is big there. So that, and whatever else you can do there. I'm stoked to get some gps run data from other countries.

So anyway, then we head to London a few days later to hang with Kathy's rents on her Mom's Bday. That'll rule. Check out Big Ben and traffic circles and what not. Then its off to France and Spain for some (very) short backpacking/hostel living. So I'm stoked. Hopefully I can run at least 1 time in each country we visit. Then I'll have maps from cool places. That'll be fun.

Ipod
I've been using my Ipod like woah. Apparently I can have it at work as long as I don't have the cables. So that rules. I'm beginning to like that thing. I got some accessories for it. I got a Car Charger and an FM Transmitter. I got the charger but not the transmitter. I guess I"m stoked about never having to have cd's in my car ever again. But I guess that is the whole point of these things. SON!

Speed reading
One other thing. I went to a Bday happy hour and was talking to some dude from TSS. He was talking about books he read. He listed off a few recent ones. I was like "So what you have like a summer reading quota". He was like, "Nah, I did that all this weekend". I was like "". So he got this book and he said it worked. So I got it too. He said there are drills and things you need to do. He also said that retention was through the roof.

So I'm stoked. I'll do my drills on the metro in the morning. I'll be a superhero before long.


I think that is all.

Long ride home in the hot weather

So tomorrow in the 100 degree weather, I'm gonna try a long ride home from work. I hope it doesn't suck to have stuff on my back in that weather. My bag might be kinda full with work clothes...Or I could just leave some at work. I dunno. I'll figure it out.

So here it is. I hope I don't die.

Exciting times

It's crazy. has quit his job to move out to Cali. Damn, he's only been here like 8 months. Unbelieveable. He leaves today for his interview trip. He lands in San Jose :( in about 12 hours. Crazy. I wish I were that spontaneous (not that he did it on a whim or anything).

It's just crazy.

I've been getting busy doing interviews and stuff for new "rotations". Got a few cool ones coming down the pipe. The most interesting one I would say would have to be Japan. Yeah...Japan. Sweet. I don't have much detail on that one though, they haven't given much. What I do know is that it'd be a year and the customer is in Japan (that makes sense). More details will definitely be coming later.

Running/Biking is awesome. I've got a little running schedule that I've been keeping up with. It is 3 runs a week. There are 2 shorts and 1 long. So far my long is 4 miles and my short is 3miles . My next long however will be 5 miles. And that is on Saturday. That should be fun.

Once I get the server up and running I will be able to post my runs like I did in the last post. That is a ton of fun to do, again, I need to get my server up.


Ok....I guess times aren't THAT exciting. At least they are for Cory.

Check that, times are exciting. As soon as I leave work(at least yesterday), I feel like I have a whole lot to look forward to in terms of potential happenings in the form of phone calls. I'm being vague but I think you probably get the point. If you don't, it will be apparent when something crystalizes.

Bush:
So everyweeks starts at Bush this weekend. That should be fun. Although the last time we all got together was a bit of a stretch in terms of productivity or awesomeness.
1) They all basically told me that they weren't going to memorize their shit. That sux for me alot. I'm not happy.
2) The shorts took about forever. Luckily they made them for me so I didn't have to do anything.
1') It was fun though cuz they all came to my place. We drank and had a good time

GPS Biking and Running:
So I've been running and biking some. Now that the weather is basically consistently 60's and 70's I figure I gotta utilize it. I found a few trails in Gaithersburg that supposedly go down to DC. I haven't found that path yet. I always get stopped right around Rockville somewhere.

Each of the last two times I rode I popped a tire. That sucked. Don't know why that happened. Gotta figure that out. It sucks cuz that tire had about 14 miles on it. What a waste. Oh well.

I ran a 5k a few weeks ago. That was pretty cool. I pretty much got pwned though. I miscalculated my pace. I thought I was running an 8 minute mile. To my surprise, I was only running a 9. That suxor.

Well, in order to get a better handle on how fast I am going, I have purchased a little device that I am very very very excited about. Just ask anyone I work with. They are all sick of hearing about it. Its the Garmin Forerunner 201. I'm pretty stoked about this thing. You can track your runs on this badboy and it spits em out in XML format. I'm stoked. The first link there is one that I did using the Gmaps API. That was a fun little project that Kathy helped me out with. I dig it. Side note: I really want to learn more about AJAX and different ways I can use that.

Anyway, I think this device is gonna get me even more motivated to run and stuff. I'm gonna use it up in Jersey this weekend and I'll do some running up there. I figure it'll be another good way to track all the place I go. Plus it will keep me fit. Good times.

Cory:
Damnit. Cory is moving. This makes me livid. But it also got me to get in touch with my manager and ask him to get me out there. I think this could be a pretty good deal for me if I can get some TDY pay.

Speaking of TDY...

Roommate:
We got a new roommate. Don't know if I posted since then. But he is still working out to be a stellar roommie. He is mad easy going, pays ontime, helps with tech stuff, shares the same interests, and is totally successful at our company. Its great.

He helped me with...


New Server:
...getting the new server up. Well, tonight we are gonna finish it. But we had to get the data off of my old hard drive which I feared was hosed. Turns out I think it was just the boot partition. So we got everything off. Only took about 9 hours to xfer to a windows share. Weak...NTFS and its utilities are garbage. That is all I'm gonna say.

Anyway, so I am going with a Knoppix system. I was thinking Mandriva but I figure it'd help me out since Sen (roommate) is a Knoppix fan. That way I can just ping him for help.

Settlers of Catan:
Got into a board game which we call "Settlers" that is pretty sweet. Long story short, you can play it online for free at AsoBrain games and its fun.

It got Kathy and I back in the mode of doing something productive with our free time. We are gonna prolly make some web games in the near future. That'll rule.