Events

« Previous Entries Next Entries »

Prelude: CES

Friday, January 4th, 2008

It’s the Friday before CES starts and I’m finishing up the last details so as to be ready for a flight that leaves frightengly soon. I finished up work yesterday, set my OOF (Out Of Office) and checked out – for the next 11 days I don’t even have to think about work; something that hasn’t happened in a really long time.

So far I’ve actually made good progress. I made it up to Broadway to pick up some Gear Live branded business cards for CES, have done 5 loads of laundry, packed most of my stuff, and cleaned up. I still have a little work to do, but over all I’m feeling much better about leaving – thanks to Traskpro

Amazingly with all the CES stuff I did today I even found time to do a few usability tweaks to Traskpro. Now tags can be entered separated by spaces, commas, or semicolons, and tags can be marked as high or low priority by tagging them ‘high’ or ‘low’. I got some great user feedback from two of my users and hopefully this will make entry more intuitive for new users by sticking to the arching design goal of flexibility.

Not too sure if I’ll be doing much personal blogging from CES – I will be pretty busy this year between doing video production and writing up the sights and sounds of CES. Check out the Gear Live coverage of CES, or you can click to see Gear Live filtered to only my content.

Ringing in the new year

Tuesday, January 1st, 2008

I sit here on the couch on this first glorious day of 2008, TNG blaring in the background, and Traskpro coding and MySQL queries swirling between my brain and laptop in the foreground. Taking a cue from my beloved father I’ve got a 6 shot Hazelnut latte slowly working its ay into my system.

What do I have planned for the rest of my day off? More of the same. Bliss!

Dreaming of a sick Christmas

Wednesday, December 26th, 2007

So here I sit at work, 8:30am on Boxing Day, feeling rather crap. Yesterday’s holiday festivities (a wonderful 12 hour HD-DVD marathon of the first 5 years of Harry Potter) were tempered by the fact that both Brien and I seem to have come down with a flu of some sort. Because Brien is already on massive antibiotics for a case of strep we are pretty sure that it’s viral so there is little that can be done about it short of drinking plenty of fluids and taking it easy.

Taking it easy I said? Not likely with being the only PM in over the holidays and some massive amounts of work to do! Hopefully I can make today short and get home to rest and recuperate.

Congrats Scott!

Tuesday, November 6th, 2007

My friend Scott just welcomed his son into the world. The little tyke is 5lbs 3oz, and perfectly healthy. More info to come.

Life’s little pleasures: Leopard, IMAP, and Puzzle Quest

Saturday, October 27th, 2007

The past 24 hours has brought a number of great things into my life. Yesterday night I went to the Bell Square Apple Store for the Leopard launch with Mike and picked myself up a copy of the shiny new version of OS X.

The launch event itself was an interesting experience. Apple really does know how to work a crowd, and the energy and passion it’s employees (retail and engineering alike) bring to work with them makes for a really positive experience for Apple’s customers.

Leopard itself is a neat little upgrade. The upgrade itself actually works really well – I didn’t lose any of my documents, settings, or preferences. Aside from Quicksilver being stuck in my dock (not the menubar where it really belongs) everything works flawlessly on Lanshark – Photoshop even stayed fully activated. Leopard is nothing revolutionary, but it really does add a lot of polish to OS X and makes for a worthwhile upgrade.

For the first time ever I actually kind of like the Finder. Quicklook (the ability to preview just about any document without the overhead of opening it’s parent application) is handy and makes confirmation that you have the document you are looking for brain dead simple. Spotlight is vastly improved featuring much faster searches, operators, and network search abilities.

Aside from the Leopard launch I was also thrilled to find out my Gmail account finally got IMAP enabled. The IMAP implementation is well done, and it makes Gmail’s iPhone experience as slick as their browser experience. Being able to have Mail.app cache my gmail account is handy as well for having my webmail searchable via the OS just like the rest of my personal knowledge store.

The final great thing to enter my life yesterday was Puzzle Quest for the DS. Puzzle Quest is a fun little RPG/Puzzler game that a couple of friends had suggested and it’s quite fun. It offers quick-in, quick-out gameplay – a fun addition to my go bag.

Funeral for an aunt I never knew

Saturday, October 20th, 2007

Sitting in the crisp cold of an open-air stone mausoleum in Walla Walla lays the ashes of Tami Anderson, the estranged aunt I never knew. I’m a little confused as to how I should feel about the whole experience – I never knew her, talked to her on the phone, or really knew of her aside from knowing that my mother had a sister.

After getting the call nearly a month ago informing me that ‘Tami has died’ I’ve gone through a strange progression from barely knowing of her existence to slowly lifting the shroud of mystery that has long covered my mothers side of the family. I’ve reached to my mothers half-brother (trailer-park loser), searched the internet for her abusive and estranged father (rotting in a California Veterans Center, broke, drunken, and worthless), and sifted through death records looking for other half-siblings and blood relatives.

The more I learn the more I realize how my mother is a shining star – an amazing person who has made a name for herself, becoming a loving wife, mother, and friend. She has propelled her career to lofty heights, is a well-respected pillar of society here in Walla Walla, and has a network of friends that care for her. When I look at the rest of my mothers estranged family and compare it to the family I know and love it’s obvious that the two are night and day.

After attending the funeral today I feel strange about the experience. It’s weird sifting through all the photos of Tami and looking at her lives leftovers I feel like I should feel something, but I still not a spark of emotion or connection stirs.

I know my sister has some desire to reach out to the side of the family we never knew, but my brief brush with them has left me with a sour taste in my mouth. I have no desire to dig deeper into the depths of that particular branch of my family tree, preferring to leave it to slowly age from this earth, myself and my sister it’s only real legacy.

And then all hell broke loose!

Thursday, October 18th, 2007

3:00 PM
Outside the most unique storm I’ve ever witnessed is keeping me from napping and recovering from my sickness. It’s bright, sunny, 61 degrees, and the wind is blowing at 45-55 miles per hour. It’s weird to call such a bright, sunny day a storm, but a storm it is. The storm has raged so hard that my sliding glass door is shaking and the building has lost power, cable, and phone service. The loss of all connectivity (save for my precious iPhone) is a first for me as normally the buildings underground power and communications connections are pretty resilient to storms.

Now that the power is out to much of Seattle I’m hearing the police and fire sirens start. More and more of them keep springing up – what with my computers battery backup beeping in the corner, the rushing wind, and the steadily increasing sirens it really is beginning to sound like the end of the world.

The good news in this stormy weather: I went to see my doctor this afternoon and he thinks I just have a bad cold. He told me the usual: get lots of sleep, drink lots of fluids, and I’ll be fine in a couple of days.

4:00 PM
The sirens have faded into a distant memory. The wind is still there, but it’s died down quite a bit from where it was at earlier. Power and DSL are still out, although I’m getting reports that cable is back on in some parts of the city. I’m avoiding boredom and helping my body heal by napping lightly.

Why can’t I turn off the death beep of my UPS? WHY? I know that the power is out – it’s incessant beeping only serves to anger and frustrate me.

6:00 PM
I feel downright primitive. I think this is the first time in years that I’ve felt this out of touch or bored. Normally I have a cornucopia of things to amuse me around the house, but I’m now realizing that they pretty much all need power to work. Even the few good books and magazines I keep around the house can’t really be read in the dark. If the power is still out in the morning (and it’s out at work) I’ll likely just drive to Walla Walla early – no sense hanging around here staring at blank walls…

6:40 PM
Wow, I’m really bored. The sun is now too low to read even the largest print books, all of my UPS units have run out of juice, and my Macbook Pro only has about an hour of battery left. Time seems to travel much slower when one does not have clocks, amusements, light, or the ability to communicate with the outside world.

7:00 PM
I just realized I have 4 (four) laptops here. I’m an idiot. Watching DVD’s now on laptop 2 of 4.

7:57 PM
Power has returned! The end.

72 hours

Monday, October 8th, 2007

Hump 3

A lot can happen in 72 hours. Since Friday night I’ve:

Busy weekend – I need a few more days to finish it up!

Akiva and Shae get hitched!

Monday, September 24th, 2007

Newlywed glow

Yesterday brought the marriage of Akiva and Shae in a beautiful ceremony. Attending was an interesting experience for me as this is the first Jewish wedding I’ve ever attended. While I didn’t directly understand any of the Hebrew prayers or blessings it was still fun to observe. I was very touched by how emotional Akiva got – he was shaking during the ceremony, and you could tell it really was a bit overwhelming for him.

The photo above is my favorite couples shot. I also really liked this shot of Eric, my capture of Shawna’s back, and this trippy twin-like shot of Troy. For all photos from the wedding check out my Flickr set of their wedding, or check out their Flickr wedding pool where hopefully other guests will also post some of their photos.

Congrats guys – myself and all your friends are wishing you the brightest of futures and the best of lives together!

« Previous Entries Next Entries »