The stretch of vitality

I have it! Imogen Heap’s new album is out and I own a physical copy. However, I’m exercising delayed gratification and won’t listen to it until I’m on a nice long stretch of highway on the drive out to Burning Man on Sunday. Speaking of which, I bought a funny BMX dirt bike for the burn that is probably going to be a lot of fun to ride around on and do wheelies. It has pegs!

In more serious cycling news, tonight I biked Betasso Pass with Erin. That thing is pretty much God’s gift to the intermediate mountain bike rider. Really fun. It’s a short loop, so we did it twice.

Today is a great day. I got up early hoping to catch my parents before they drove to the airport but they had already left. But this meant I was up early and ready to start my day. I started laying out all of my Burning Man gear on the garage floor. I hope to complete 90% of the preparation and packing today. I thoroughly washed my poor little Kelty tent that is still wimpering in fear from last year. However, it’s about as clean as a tent that has already been to Burning Man can be and the Colorado sun dried it out in about an hour. I’m hoping to buy a small BMX bike for the burn today as well if Craigslist comes through (and it always does).

I am listening to Taproot, which I haven’t in a long time and it is blending great with my energy today. I made a yummy breakfast of scrambled eggs, many slices of watermelon, and some peach pie leftover from the BBQ Friday night. It was delicious. Plus there are chocolate chip cookies available. Oh, and I’m totally excited since my parents brought my tenor sax out with them. I don’t think I’ve played my tenor saxophone since probably early 2007 sometime. In October 2007 when I left for Romania and started this blog, I lent it to my friend Alex, who took good care of it and played it for two years. But now I have it back and I can try to play some Joe Henderson and some Joshua Redman on it. I’m excited to do that.

I’m just full of good feelings today. I have social outings planed after work with interesting and fun women for the next three days. Summer is coming to a very pleasant close here.

My parents are in town for their first visit. We ate at the Old Louisville Inn on Thursday and did some shopping for miscellaneous things I didn’t have yet that Mom considers essential. This whole week was pretty busy at work and I had some handymen working on the sprinkler and a bunch of other projects, so it was a bit hectic. By the time I got done working Friday my folks had already cooked most of the food for the BBQ. I had some friends and family over for a housewarming BBQ Friday night, which was a lot of fun. We had perfect weather for relaxing on the deck and eating outdoors.

Today we did more shopping like crazy and got some other great stuff. Mom helped me pick out interior paint colors and curtains to match. We had yummy sandwiches for lunch at Dish Gourmet in Boulder. Tonight we’re off to Bill’s for dinner.

Well, I’m just about to enter the tail end of summer stretch of busyness. This weekend I for the most part took it easy. I met my Burning Man ride share buddy and we planned our logistics. We were sitting at a large table at The Cup coffee shop in downtown Boulder. By chance there were about three other burners within ear shot, one of whom has camped with my camp Astral Headwash in previous years, so I got a few good insider tidbits. I stopped by Listen Up in Boulder to shop for a home theater system. I’ve been planning this for a while and I have somewhat elaborate requirements, so I was anticipating lots of components and complexity and don’t-work-so-well-togetherness but it turns out a decent receiver these days does most of everything and you basically strap your inputs and outputs to that and you’re done. So that’s a nice surprise. Hopefully I can get that thing going soon. Mostly I have to decide on in-ceiling speakers verses just leaving them on the floor or just mounting them on the wall up high with a bracket.

Oh gosh I had to come back and edit this in. I got up so goddamn early on Saturday I suffered memory failure. I awoke at 5am to drive to Gray’s Peak, an easy 14er (kind of an oxymoron, I know) with a buddy from my hiking group. When we arrived around 7am or so the four mile road between I-70 and the trail head already had cars reversing back down because the lot was full. So we had to park and change our planned 8 mile round trip hike into a 16 miler. So we hiked up to the trail head, started out on the trail, got maybe 1/8th mile in and it started rainy steadily with no signs of letting up. So we donned rain gear and hiked back down to the car in defeat. So much for my first 14er. Too risky to be up that high if there’s any chance of lightning.

I also tried the new climbing gym in Boulder, Movement Climbing + Fitness. Pretty nice and very big. We’re now up to four indoor climbing gyms and they are all pretty busy.

Then I spent some time planning a crude shade structure and buying parts at Lowes. I have it assembled in the back yard now. I think it should hold. Probably. Maybe. We’ll see.

So the rest of the summer is going to go like this: today I switched projects at work to a major overhaul of my primary feature, so I’m digging in to that with both hands. I’ve been wanting to do this for over a year, so I’m going gangbusters. My parents arrive Thursday for a long weekend visit. Friday I am having a house warming BBQ and then hanging with the rents over the weekend. That leaves only one more full weekend for final Burning Man packing and preparation, then it’s off for a week in the desert and by the time I get back on Labor Day we’ll be knee deep in September. Thus ends my first summer in Colorado.

This past week at work was fun and exciting. I got to see a lot of old coworkers that I haven’t seen in over a year. I also finally met in person some people I have been working with for almost a year as well. There were lots of fun and yummy lunches and dinners. Monday I went for a jog with Bernie and Matt at Baylands Park in Sunnyvale. They call it a park, but where we ran was really just dikes surrounding reservoirs next to a water treatment plant. It was without a doubt the least appealing place I have gone jogging. The air was stagnant and reeked of numerous nauseating stenches. There were tons of flies in the air. At points I needed to cover my mouth with my hat to filter them out. Even so I’m sure I inadvertently swallowed at least a dozen flies. I still haven’t received a satisfactory explanation as to why Bernie chose that spot other than they always used to run there. Tuesday I went climbing with Tedo and now I can pretty much keep up with him, which isn’t saying much, but I’ve made clear progress. Wednesday night we had a reunion of four early Opsware black belt consultants and it was fun to be all together again and catch up. Thursday there was a reunion of old Loud Cloud and Opsware folk (many of whom had already left by the time I joined) at Blue Chalk in Palo Alto, which was also a good time. Memorable quotes included the following:

• Give me kinky over beautiful every time. — Antonio
• I used to snap my fingers and women appeared. Now I snap my fingers and women are like “shut up”. — Pat
• Turn off the lights and pet me. — Pat expressing the sentiments of a lonely cat that had been embarrassingly shaved

Work wise the week was very busy with lots of meetings and trying to take care of my normal job responsibilities in the small cracks between meetings both scheduled and informal. However, the really fun and exciting part was Bernard and I were secretly cooking up a prototype of migrating my main feature (bare metal OS provisioning) from our current architecture to our newer architecture. I generally worked from 8:30 to 6:30 or so, went out and socialized until 9:30 or 10:00, then came back to the office and coded until 2:00am. We got the whole feature working end to end including a fancy flex based GUI and the back end in one week and ready for a demo to an eager audience at 8:30 am Friday. The demo went great and the audience, who didn’t know exactly what they were coming to see, is now (mostly) supportive of giving us the team we need to fully productize it. It’s pretty cool since I have been working on this feature for about three years now and this will be by far the biggest change to happen under my watch.

Thursday there was another, bigger Opsware reunion attended by a bunch of folks who left Opsware before I joined as well as some folks I worked with that have since left HP. It was good to hang out and chat with them for a while. Friday I picked up Ed at Google HQ in Mountain View and we dropped off my rental car at the airport and took the BART back into the city. Sara joined us for dinner. After much uncertainty we decided on a sushi place that is highly regarded. Sara is vegetarian and Ed was unwilling to try the fish, but I ordered two pieces of the special they had and found it pretty good. Not amazing but I can see the potential and will try some more in the future.

Saturday morning I wondered out of the apartment and found the panhandle and Golden Gate Park. I did a 4.6 mile run around there and was feeling quite good. I’m not sure if the sea level altitude still makes a difference after a week, but my cardio was able to do it effortlessly. It was a cool feeling to pass some flatlanders huffing and puffing while I’m breathing like I am taking a nap. I think that run or the one Sunday morning were probably the furthest I have jogged since I usually quit after 3.5 miles or so. It feels like without too much training I could work up to a half marathon, so I may do that at some point, but probably not soon.

Saturday afternoon I hung out with Ed and Sara and Pat in The Haight. Ed and I had some delicious brunch and then we hit a record store, the Bound Together anarchist book store, and the People’s Cafe. Pat and I went over to join up with Marcia and the rest of the crew for dinner at Marcia’s. It was fun to hang out. Marcia’s crew is pretty darned enthusiastic about their lifestyle, and it’s amusing to be around them in their element. After dinner I washed dishes and the girls went to get into costume for their night out clubbing (panties, mouse ears, big purple boots, etc). One of Marcia’s roommies Ivan came down into the kitchen to eat his dinner so it was just me, Pat, and him there. So we started talking and he had is laptop with him and was lamenting that it was broken and wouldn’t boot. We asked what was wrong and he explained that he had been messing around with dual booting Windows Vista and Ubuntu Linux and had deleted some partitions and left his machine unbootable with a grub error 22. Pat and I exchanged an amused glance. The coincidence here is pretty funny. I explained to Ivan that Pat and I were each high level Linux sysadmin gurus and we probably had about 10,000 hours of linux administration expertise between us. It’s just funny. He wondered down into his kitchen for dinner and two strangers who had the precise obscure skills needed to fix his laptop are just standing there. So we made pretty short work of his problem, re-installing his grub boot loader using the GNU parted recovery CD he had used to cause the damage in the first place. This left me amused for the remainder of the night. This is probably second in line of my all-time tech rescue stories after the time I talked Cody at The Kitchen through brining his entire network back up after a power failure over the phone.

Then Pat and I went back to the Mission district and found a Mexican place still open. Pat didn’t eat much at Marcia’s because, as he described it, the food they cook consists primarily of “nuts and berries”. So he had some nachos and felt satiated. Then I got a map from him and walked the 3.2 miles from there back to Ed’s place in The Haight. It took precisely one hour. It was a nice night and I got to walk through some interesting neighborhoods.

This morning I did another run in Golden Gate Park. I saw disco roller skating, which I absolutely adore, as well as people setting up a sound system for outdoor swing dancing. Then Ed and I went back to the People’s Cafe for food and on to a quick driving tour of Pacific Heights and wandering around Fisherman’s Warf briefly. Then off to the airport for the short and pleasant flight back home.

The rest of the photos are here.

So after a 48 hour medical delay today I flew out to San Francisco. My tolerance for air travel grows increasingly low, but I managed to get through it. I got the rental car and made my way to Pat’s apartment in the Mission district without any trouble. We chatted a bit there, admired his fetching neighbor across the way who was hanging out on her balcony, and then headed out in search of yummy food. We found a tiny El Salvadorian restaurant that had delicious tamales and popusas. Pat thought it was so good that as we got up to leave he wanted to come right back. Then we hung out in Dolores Park, listened to Michael Jackson blaring on a boom box, and watched cute skinny girls play Frisbee.

We headed on over to the Pirate Supply store just before it closed, which I found to be not particularly entertaining. The we wondered into a new shop in the neighborhood specializing in just honey. The proprietress was a very chatty woman with bright red hair who fed us lots of delicious honey samples, including some fennel honey, eucalyptus, cactus and local honeys. Pat and Rebecca each bought a jar. Then it was back to Pat’s where we hooked up with Marcia and Rebekah and Rebekah drove us around on a local’s guided tour of “Significant and Insignificant” things. It was quite fantastic. She showed us the big hippie grocery co-op, where all the best night clubs were for any given sexual orientation, all the various strip joints, famous restaurants, the best taco cart, chinatown, little italy, etc. She drove us up and down some really insane hills including the famous Lombard street.

After that we hit Urban Burger for fuel and went back to Pat’s to eat and chat and comment on his lack of furniture and attempt to sit comfortably on his partially inflated air mattress. I drove Rebekah and Marcia home and then made my way down to my swanky hotel in Sunnyvale where I will stay this week. It was a very fun and enjoyable time. Pat’s crew is a bit obsessed with some random internet video of some dude tripping on acid and ranting about random things that come on TV, which is where the title of this post comes from. I think it’s this one.

OK, it is promising to be a very fun and productive week out here. A few reunions are also planned. Further bulletins as events warrant. I took some good and funny photos, too, but on a borrowed SD card since I (again, sigh) left mine at home in the laptop, so I’ll have to post those later.

More photos are here.

Tuesday night I ate something evil. I think it was some carrots that had gone bad. I’m not sure. But in any case, I must have gotten some bad food parasite because I was up all night puking and in bad shape most of the day Wednesday. So I called in sick Wednesday and slept most of the day. I thought I was mostly better Thursday so I worked a full day and went to the climbing gym, but after a few 5.10+ routes I could tell I was still not quite right so I went home. Friday it seemed to resurge so I called in sick again. I had a flight booked to San Francisco Friday afternoon but I declared myself unfit to travel and moved it to Sunday morning. I slept most of the day Friday as well and then ten hours Friday night, so when I awoke today I was pretty much as well rested as I can ever remember being. I also hadn’t eaten much of anything since Tuesday but finally felt up to it so in the morning I had a nice omelet.

I was a bit bummed because I have been looking forward to a reunion with my ex-NYC friends in San Francisco for a while, but I’ll see them about twelve hours from now. However I had a free day that I wasn’t planning on having so I asked Erin if she wanted to go wind surfing, but she had already made plans to go to the Spruce Pool in Boulder. I had enough time before that to run some quick errands on my bike. Now I have a respectable set of mountain bike repair parts and tools such that if my bike brakes down in some obvious-how-to-repair-way there’s a certain chance of me fixing it independently, albeit a small chance. Then I packed up my pool gear, slurped down a quick smoothie, and drove to Erin’s house. We biked through town, stopping at Feather Thy Nest to look at second hand furniture. We then met up with Heidi at the pool and lounged around a while. Then we all went and swam laps. The pool felt fantastic. It was warm and sunny and I hadn’t exercised much this week but I was feeling good so I swam forty laps and enjoyed every one. My recent swimming has been indoors at 24 Hour Fitness usually at 9 or 10 pm, and swimming outside on a sunny afternoon just felt great.

After the pool we rode over to Lark Burger which is supposed to have some yummy burgers. We giggled as a goofy looking, stuck-in-2001 dude with spiky gel hair, saggy jeans with a big white belt, and a gaudy necklace made some fairly lame passes (including forcing an unwarranted high five) at the cashier who was totally not impressed. Then we enjoyed our meal. My burger was pretty good although my taste for burgers is rapidly fading away. The home made lemonade was quite refreshing though. I’ve tried several places in recent years that are reputed to have good hamburgers but my expectations are never really met. Erin had a greasy turkey burger that made her totally over-greased and yucked out. Of course this is just a few minutes before her pick-up soccer game. She has a tendency to be somehow ill prepared for the soccer games every time it seems.

So Erin went and played in a huge pick-up soccer game which eventually got so big and confusing that they broke into two games. I watched amusedly and spoke to Matt on the phone briefly. We headed back to her house so she could shower and delegate her chore of exercising her two golden retrievers by riding around the block with them chasing me. So I took the dogs around the block and they chased cats and birds and ran into peoples’ yards so I called their names and they ignored me.

Then we headed to Boulder Outdoor Cinema for a screening of The Princess Bride. We got a miracle parking spot and decent seats for the theater. The screen looked quite good outside and everybody loves this movie. I was particularly amused that this entire day I spent in my sandals, board shorts, and sun shirt which gives it that extra summer bathing-suit-all-day flare that I do so enjoy.

Tomorrow it’s off to San Francisco first thing in the morning. Hoping to be chilling in the park with Pat and Marcia and Rebecca by lunch time.