Another year has passed, and I’m now 27 years old. Because of the date of my wedding being my birthday, I’ve also been married for two years now. Neither event was that big of a deal this year with the busy life I/we lead. Jenn and I were not blessed with a week in Cali this time around (Last year we went to Disneyland for our anniversary), but rather a stressful week of study and homework.

This year my father came in to send the day with us on my birthday. We spent the day talking, and playing Wii. Dad seemed to take a shine to the Wii, and had a good time. I also spoke with my brother for an hour or so, and got a chance to catch up with my sister and my mother. Later in the evening we went out for dinner before my father left to head back.

School

School is going the same as it ever was. I’m taking summer session classes, which means that I’m cramming sixteen weeks of class into six short weeks. It’s not exactly something I’m loving. Currently I’m taking Intro to East Asian Culture, which is interesting, but not enjoyable at this speed.

With regard to my general academic progress, I’m still fairly tired of school. I’m still not convinced that it’s worth the time and potential professional sacrifices. I’m going to keep at it until there’s an avenue to the bay area open to me, but this bullshit is getting so taxing. I can’t take two more years of insipid undergrads. The other day I actually overheard some girl on her phone say: “.. and like, then I noticed that, like, I didn’t have underwear on! … I know!” /sigh

I still haven’t decided for sure what I’m planning to do, but… yea… I’m pretty done with this part of the country.

Photography

The photography is going well, I think. I’ve gotten a lot of great feedback, and Jenn stopped complaining about me wasting my money on the camera a while ago. It’s annoying that I’ve not had a lot of spare time to go hunting interesting pictures, but a lot of my initiative is eaten up by school and work. I’m looking forward to going on my trip to Japan and getting a lot of good photos. I’m planning on getting a Nikon 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6 G ED-IF AF-S VR DX Zoom lens before the trip, which is a compact and versatile, albeit slow, zoom lens. Should prove useful, and with that purchase I will have officially spent more on lenses than I did on my camera.

I’m planning on trying to take a photography trip this weekend if the weather isn’t crappy, maybe I’ll get some pics at the cascades or something. Last weekend we went to the Exotic Feline Rescue Center, and I got some nice shots. The cats are amazing, and the trip is well worth it.

Here’s one of the cats, a really sweet white tiger that they have there:

Video Games

I’ve quit wow fairly cold turkey. It just wasn’t worth the time investment to play with a bunch of folks I didn’t know, and working on content I’ve already beaten. I felt bad about flaking out of my guild, who were about to make me a class leader and an officer, but I think it’s for the best.

I’ve taken up playing GH3 and Smash Brothers with a couple friends every week, and I’ve been playing a lot of Team Fortress 2 with Tim. I wish I could play more varied games, but with my Warcraft singularity it was easy to slack off on hardware upgrades. RIght now I’m looking at about $1200 or so to get my computers to the place I want them, and I won’t have that scratch till after Japan. Once I upgrade I have a list of games I hope to play; Bioshock, C&C3, Age of Conan, Supream Commander, crysis, the list goes on and on…

I’ve also been playing a lot with Rupture, which is a kind of cross platform gaming aggregation platform thing I’ve talked about before. THey’ve made some big strides, and it’s starting to shape up really nice. They also got picked up by EA this week, so congrats to the team on that one, you guys deserve it!

Japan

As I mentioned a couple times in this post, I’m heading to Japan this summer finally! Brett (old roommate, good friend) and I are heading to Japan for two weeks in August. We’ve not set things hard in stone yet, so if you have any strong suggestions on places we should plan on making a priority (that aren’t on my Japan List ) let me know!

I’m really excited for the trip to Japan, it’s going to be the first trip I’ve made outside the country that wasn’t contained within the sterile walls of some sort of resort. We’re planning on getting train passes, and seeing a lot of varied places.

So the rest of the summer should be very taxing, but will end in a large amount of awesome. I can deal with that.

I had gotten pretty heavy into Warcraft again, but this last week due to a combination of falling behind in my school work, and a sense of futility based on my participation in the current content I’ve had to reexamine a few things.

So to review:

• I’m taking summer classes, and as a result I don’t have ample time to raid anymore. (My guild’s raiding times are 4 hours M-Th).
• The next expansion will make the majority of the work I’m doing now meaningless, and that expansion is due in a few months.
• The guild I’m in doesn’t seem to have the chops to show me anything that I’ve not seen already in the game, and even though they are nice guys, I can’t see wasting my time in that way as a good thing.

So, since there’s no real use to my playing right now, I’m going to call it quits. I’ve taken up TF2 and various indie games in the meantime… oh and yea… doing my homework! :)

I may still play a bit on the weekends, but I’m done raiding for several hours a night for sure.

I know I missed last week’s Indie game of the week, I’m working on a two game article for this week! I was far too busy last week playing Super Smash Brothers Brawl (SSBB) to do much in the way of writing.

Speaking of which, my Nintendo Friend Code for SSBB is 0044-2462-1847. If you add me, let me know in the comments or in an email.

Meanwhile, in the life of Brian, things have been fairly sedate. Last week my wife left me alone for a few days, while she traveled down to her mother’s place in Texas. I spent most of the time playing games, most notably SSBB. The week was a wonderful, momentary reprieve from school as it was spring break.

<rant>

This break sort of helped crystallize my contempt for the state of my education. I’m 40 credits (34 after this semester) away from a degree in Informatics. At this point I’ve pretty much given up on that ever being considered even remotely close to a “real” computing degree. At one point it was sold to me as such. However, more and more as I take the classes and get A’s without study or having to read material, I have come to decide that, for someone like me, that it’s become a form of academic masturbation. I go to class, get taught something over the course of a semester that would have taken me a week to learn on my own. Get a decent grade. Learn nothing of consequence. Lather, rinse, repeat.

I ‘should’ be done in Christmas of 2009, assuming that they decide to teach the classes that I need to take (another sore spot) to graduate. Then I’ll finally have a degree that feels like it will be about as useful for getting a job as a philosophy degree.

So, right now I have about two years of classwork at the tune of about $10k-$14k. For a degree that I’m not convinced will be that useful (I know that any degree has a level of intrinsic usefulness), and during the interim the majority of my motivation (to work on learning things that are useful, like Ruby or Python) and free time get sucked into worrying about classes, and completing inane projects or tests.

I think the catalyst for this rant was yet another ping from friends about interest in a really cool job, but I’m stuck here so it’s not even remotely an option. Don’t misread, I’m happy at Socialtext and have no plans on going anywhere anytime soon, it’s just an example of doors being closed before I even have a chance to really consider them because of my commitment to getting this inane degree.

I’m going to keep plugging away at this for now, but man it’s really starting to wear on my nerves…. and, the 19 year old undergrads are not helping.

</rant>

I’ve started playing Warcraft a bit again. I’m not enjoying the parts that I used to. I transfered to the Blackrock server to raid with a guild that raids late night, and was at the same progression level (Read: they had killed all the same bosses) that I was at with my old guild that broke up. However, about 3 days after I transfered the guild died, and became a different guild. I’m fairly pissed off about the whole situation. I was sold a guild raiding at a certain level, and got a guild learning content I’m used to sleeping through. It’s very frustrating, and I find the only reason I play is to kill time, which is a bad sign. I’m going to try and figure something out, for the current time I’m happy with working on collecting gold so I can get my druid’s Epic Flight Form.

I have been working at ways to keep me plugged in at work, without getting distracted by the mundane distractions of working at home. I’ve found music to be a great hook into staying focused, however for it to properly mask the distractions, it has to be at a level where Jenn can no longer study. So either I sit in silence constantly distracted and getting nothing done, or Jenn hates me and gets nothing done. I have some portable Sony MDR-066s that I use when I’m out and about but they fail for serious listening as their small size make them convenient, but their sound reproduction is fairly lame. So, I decided to look into some really nice isolating headphones. I decided on some Sennheiser HD 280 Pros and I look forward to having a pair of really nice headphones that I can crank up without driving Jenn insane.

Rupture is a company that runs a gaming aggregation site. I’ve been beta testing the service since it debuted, mostly because the mash-up of social software and video games makes me giddy.

The company was started by Shawn Fanning of Napster and SnoCap fame. Their first incarnation was simply a Worldof Warcraft social networking site. However, with the advent of the Armory their web 2.0 societal niche was co-opted! Never one to give up on an idea, they revamped the service, made it game agnostic and relaunched the site as less of a social network, and more of a front end for displaying all the gaming data event points in your online life.

Currently, the site is still in heavy beta, but they currently support:

• Steam Accounts
• World of Warcraft Characters
• XBL Accounts
• Halo3 Accounts

If anyone is interested in getting in on the beta, let me know. I have the hookup. I’m people who know people!

Today I went into Roberts intent on striking some sort of bargain for a D80. I’d gotten tired of waiting patiently for my dammed camera.

I’ve been waiting on D80 body, but they have been in short supply. Sounds like Nikon is hoarding them in order to repackage them with the new VR lens at some point in the future, or something. I talked with the owners and we struck a deal for D80 kit, and they bought the kit lens back for the difference between the kit price and the body only price, effectively selling me a body for the retail price. So, rock on Roberts++, I’m glad I was able to give them my business, even if it took forever.

I spent some time playing with the camera for a few hours today and upped some photos I took around the house. The weather was pretty overcast and boring, so there wasn’t much outside to test shoot. But the cats were good enough. After Jenn went to bed I figured out some more controls, and look forward to poking at things more tomorrow.

For some reason this is my favorite shot of the day:

The following are plans for this Year, I don’t know that any of them will actually succeed, but I always try.

Learning

• Finish Rails Introductory Learning.
• Create something useful, not work related in Rails.
• Learn at least some Python
• Learn how to deal with Managed Code better (svn,svk,etc)

School

• +20 Credits by the end of the year.
• 4.00 average for the year.

Hobbies

• Pick a DSLR camera and start taking pictures again.
• Beat the games that I own that I have gotten near the end of and then stopped playing.

Personal Care

• Bike once a week at minimum.
• Lose some weight.
• Start climbing again.
• Start cooking again.

Other

• Make it to Japan this year.
• Make plans to travel to Ireland (and maybe other countries) in ‘09

I’m in ur Mephisto, hackin ur pluginz

I spent several hours tonight correcting and fixing the way I was pulling a lot of data from various places like twitter, last.fm and flickr for my dynamic sidebar. A lot of the old stuff was lame javascript stuff and flash applets, and it was making the page load pretty craptastic.

I tracked down some simple plugins for twitter and last.fm that pull data from the rest apis and display it as simple text. And, I think they worked pretty good, with a little hacking. Since Mephisto is a rails app I was able to dive in and correct a few things, like the fact that the last.fm plugin caches for 24 hours, and I wanted it to display my recent tracks, as well as that the twitter plugin was way out of whack and needed some updates from when twitter phased out the relative_time from it’s API etc.

As a result of my work my page looks better (in my opinion) and the load time has dropped from ~10s to ~1s given a cache of the page. So that makes me happy.

Rails.

On the subject of rails learning, I’m moving right along. Things seem to be coming a little more naturally. I’m far from being able to realistically code something complex on my own, but little by little. I’m still working through Agile Rails Dev, albeit slower than I would have liked. I took a lot of Resting time over break.

Home work

We spent a few days tearing down Jenn’s bathroom so we could paint it quick the other day. Jenn did most of the work when it came to tearing down and painting, but I sure hand stuff to painters well!

During the tear down, we noticed that in lieu of electrical boxes (those metal boxes that you can mount switches and lights upon) they had just punched a hole in the wall and pulled an electrical line through the wall. Then they attached the fixture with some random screws into the wall (studs are for wusses), wired that shit up and called it a day.

So when we went to replace them with something that’s not ugly as sin, we were kind of SOL. as we have nothing to actually mount it to. My bathroom is even better, in Jenn’s the random hole is in the center of the wall, but in mine they punched a hole off center, and then cut a hole in the back of the fixture to jury rig that shit right up.

So painful. I’ll post pics later. We’re having a guy come give an estimate on some electrical boxes for mounting this weekend.

Camera.

So the saga of the camera continues.

I put in an order for my lenses (AF-S DX NIKKOR 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6G VR and AF NIKKOR 50mm f/1.8D ) last month because when I went to buy them the first time they didn’t have any. So I put in the order and asked if I needed to worry about the camera, “Oh no, we always have D80s” was the response to that. So, I ordered my lenses and I moved on, not worrying about the camera itself.

However, last week I went in since one of the lenses had come in, and found that both had been in for a week+ which kind of annoyed me, but whatever. So, I ask for a D80 (body only) (I’m after a body only because the lens that comes with the camera ( AF-S DX Zoom-NIKKOR 18-135mm f/3.5-5.6G IF-ED is not Vibration Reduction, and so is not really worth the $300+ it tacks onto the price of the camera, IMO. The lens I ordered is VR, but it doesn’t work w/o a camera! :P) and they don’t have one. Ok, that’s fine, when will you get one? Should be Saturday. Ok, fine, I can wait 3 days or so.

Saturday comes and goes, and no camera. I call today three times (so far) trying to get an answer from someone, with no luck. And, no call back, how rude (they did call back before now)! It’s beginning to get really frustrating. It should not be this hard to give business to local merchants! :(

Lots of things going on, nothing of much substance, so I won’t pretend this is that interesting.

• I have a few days left to finish my Neural Network for Intro AI. It is mostly done, aside from some obnoxious behavior in the learning, but I think I have tracked down the cause.
• My AI Final Will start 12am Thursday and end at 7pm on Friday. Fun stuff.
• I think that while mildly interesting when used in conjunction to game playing and puzzle solving; I generally find AI boring and tedious most of the time, and will not be pursuing it. Just my opinion.
• This coming weekend Tim will be coming down for video games and other chicanery. I’m looking forward to a weekend of drunken relaxing and amusing gaming.
• Joe finished his last paper today, and barring some insane twist, he should be a bona fide graduate now. What a sellout.
• I will have my D80 in a week or two. It will be good times.
• I dove in to Rails and Ruby hardcore for a few days, much to the detriment of my neural network’s progress, but that’s not important. I like Ruby/Rails so far and hope to continue my learning once this stupid week is done.

In more somber news, I’ll be staying here this Christmas season because Jenn’s oldest (13+ years) cat Cleo has an overactive thyroid. This means she has to undergo a procedure in Indy next week where she’ll be injected in Radio-Iodine, and isolated for about a week in Indy. Jenn’s taking it pretty hard, but we found out today that the cancer (overactive thyroid = cancer in cats I guess?) hasn’t spread at all, so the treatment should save her. If you have any interest in this stuff you can read about what’s going on at http://radiocat.com Needless to say we aren’t going to leave while the cats in recovery, but Jenn’s mother is planning on coming to visit, so that will be cool.

My holiday plans are pretty much completely up in the air right now, as I really haven’t had the mental energy to figure out where and how available I’ll be… but I’ll figure it out next week.

Seems like seven years at UITS sort of killed my will to live learn.

I’ve been out of UITS for about four months, and it’s been one of the most humbling experiences of my life. Right now, I work at a wiki company directly interacting with clients like Symantec and SAP. I work alongside a lot of very brilliant development people who inspire. But, I’m almost at the bottom of the ladder.

I used to work in a cubicle answering the questions of John Q Student. Fixing his Linux problems, or showing him how to make the VPN work, for some reason it made me feel like I had a clue. I tricked myself into feeling like I was a programmer because I was the guy on the team who stepped up to hacking perl when the need arose.

Boy… ignorance sure is bliss. Because I sure as hell don’t feel like anything close to a programmer around the people I work with now. My grand programming feats at IU can and should be dismissed as minuscule acts hackery in the same way a web designer dismisses the childish attempts of MySpace users at dressing up their profiles.

I’m waking up to the fact that I didn’t really want to deal with… and that is that I’m fairly clueless. And while it’s understandable being that I’ve never worked with anyone on any kind of coding project, or had an official part of my job to actually code on a daily basis, that doesn’t make it any less intellectually crippling.

I’ve decided that unless I want to answer emails and do support for the rest of my life, I should wake my ass up and do something useful. I’m attaching a rapid drip of motivation to my vein and I’m going to get some shit done… or fail miserably.. but I’ll worry about that when and if it happens.

I bounced a random crazy idea off a friend of mine and he loved it. We’re going to work on developing it into Something Cool (tm), but first I need to get up to speed. I spent that last few days launching myself at ruby and rails. I read most of “Learning Ruby”, “Why’s (poignant) Guide to Ruby”, finished “Ruby on Rails: Up and Running” (not recommended) and I’ve started reading “Agile Dev in Rails”. I’m learning a lot, and it’s nice to have a goal… it was far too easy to put this stuff off when I didn’t have someone who knew it all essentially making fun of me while I take strides to catch my noobish self back up to speed.

Lets throw some learning at my brain and see what sticks.

One of the very few traditional hobbies I’ve ever enjoyed has been photography.

When i was a kid, my Dad got me this crappy point and shoot Kodak camera. It was all manual with no options or features. I used the hell out of it for a long time, and took some really shitty photos. One day a friend tossed me his old Samsung zoom film camera, and I was so excited. I mean this baby had 2x ZOOM! And, sweet merciful christ, it advanced and loaded film with a motor… very high tech shit right here, let me tell you.

I took a decent amount of photography in High School, and while I loved it and kicked ass at it (well, enough to get As every semester with little work), the hassle, and materials and the general overwhelming cost of actually getting into doing real photography was enough to chase me off… Hated film, hated developing film, hated the developing chemicals. And I wasn’t even doing color prints, this was fairly painless B&W stuff.

So, I gave it up and instead picked up… well… I guess video games and staring at the internet to keep my mind busy for the next few years.

I was working at UITS and I rounded up enough spare cash to purchase a Kodak DX3900. A crappy little point and shoot camera that worked well enough. It had a lousy range, and wasn’t very flexible. But, I got a few good shots off like this, this, or this. But nothing I ever felt too impressed with… I got good feedback, and general encouragement to learn more and get better. But, my camera started limping, the battery stopped holding a charge, and the viewfinder is about 20% off center of the final photo.. so I stopped using it.

I was considering getting a new Point and Shoot like Jenn’s Canon PowerShot A710 that I’ve been borrowing, but every time I borrow it I feel frustrated. It’s like I have to fight the camera to take any real pictures. I see friends taking photos in the same settings with the same light, with amazing differences in the outcome.

I’m not saying that I don’t get a few good shots, I pulled a few decent shots out of my ass, but comparing to pictures a friend/coworker took there’s really no comparison, especially at lower light levels.

I tend to take pictures candidly with no flash, which leads to a lot of blurring and frustration for me. It’s obnoxious to take close to 200 pictures and having only like 5-10 clear enough for me to post process them at all.

So, camera envy, coupled with feeling like I wanted a non computer centric hobby lead me to start looking into getting a nicerany camera. I decided that I wanted a DSLR, because the pictures I was seeing from those cameras were just generally on a higher level. The larger sensor, combined with better ranges, lenses and features make these the only really attractive cameras to me. Plus DSLRs excel in rapid burst shooting and instant on, the prospect of a camera going from cold to ready to shoot in less than a second is very intriguing.

So I figured I’d take the easy route and just see what people on Flickr used. Flickr has a neat chart of camera usage and I took the first few camers off the list, and looked into them.

First up was the Canon Digital Rebel XTi. The XTi is Canon’s entry level DSLR camera. It’s small, uncomplicated, self cleaning, and a really decent camera. It runs about 600-700 and is a pretty popular camera. I was pretty set on getting one until I got my hands on one. I have rather big hands, and the XTi is a tiny camera. Well, it’s not that tiny, it’s just too small for me to get a comfortable grip while holding it. I have to really pinch it to keep a grip on the body. I wish my hands were smaller, but what can you do.

I took a look at the D80 that had been recommended to me by a friend, it’s a lot more expensive, breaching the 900 mark, but not quite passing into the 1k territory. The difference was apparent immediately. The D80 was larger, more solid, fit in my hand better, and had a much more usable interface. Top mounted Status LCD, a hud in the viewfinder, higher ISO/ranges.

So I’ve been leaning towards the D80, but I’m a little gun shy. On the one hand, I can afford it without that much trouble. But on the other hand it’s hard to justify getting a Camera on this level when all I’ve ever owned were shitty Point and Shooters. Plus, whenever I buy anything this expensive that’s not a computer I always worry that I’m just going to not use it either out of fear of breaking it, or out of indifference. There’s also the nagging fear that I may just suck, and I don’t want to pay 1k just to find out I suck.

Although, I guess that if I decide to get rid of it I’ll be able to get a decent price for it around town or on eBay to some journalism student or something. I also worry about whether I’m going to like the fact that it’s noisy, unlike P&S cameras, and I also worry about how much more it weighs. If I think it’s too big I fear I might just leave it home all the time.

I’ve still got a lot of reading to do, and I plan to go handle the cameras a few more times before I make a decision. But, I wanted to brain dump a little. Found a good comparison between the XTi and the D80 I need to read in detail.

Oh! Before I forget, Roberts, the camera store down on Kirkwood, is amazing. Their prices are excellent, their staff is polite and knowledgeable, and I look forward to giving them more business. LocalBusinesses++

I’ve noticed that there are a few things that I stopped doing in my life that made me very happy. I like to blame other people for the stopping, but I have no one to blame but myself for the not starting, if that makes sense.

The Stuff:

• Photography
• Video Games other than Warcaft
• Biking
• Climbing

Photography

I used to do a lot of amature photography. However, I stopped when I started to hate my piece of shit camera. I have a 5 year old Kodak 2.1 megapixel camera that eats batteries and is just bad all around. I contemplated getting a new camera but decided that the idea was not feasible due to monetary constraints.

Now a days I steal Jenn’s camera when I want to take pictures, but her camera is not really what I’m looking for… I’m looking for a camera that is a little less “turn the dial to the scene you want” and more hands on, I don’t want the camera to think for me… well a little help wouldn’t be bad, obviously, but include me on the decisions.

I would like an SLR camera, I was thinking that Jenn’s camera is a great little camera for general use, but it doesn’t seem to fare well in low level situations without a flash, and I hate having to flash all the time, it makes people edgy and I like candid shots.

Since Jenn has a nice general camera, I’m looking for a more high end deal that’s not as portable, but will produce higher quality pics. Looking at flickr, the two nice options are the Canon EOS Digital Rebel XTi and the Nikon D80 I’ve not spent any real time looking in to this at all… I imagine this will be a lengthy search.

I also upgraded my flickr account to Pro, I hate gallery now. Stupid slow PHP piece of crap.

Video games other than Warcraft.

Money stopped me from playing video games other than Warcraft sometime around the time I met Jenn. I don’t really blame Jenn for the whole thing, but I blame Warcraft for being such a wonderful entertainment source for the buck.

I’ve been picking up a few games to get me more up to date.

First off was Bioshock which is an art-deco steam-punk anti-Utopian FPS-RPG set in Rapture, a city at the bottom of the pacific ocean, in the 1960’s. The game is great, and I normally shun these kinds of omg-whats-lurking-around-the-corner games, but I made an exception for this wonderful narrative. I’ve not finished it yet, so a real review isn’t really something I can do yet.

Then I snagged The Orange Box a compilation of all the HL2 games, Team Fortress 2, and Portal. I’ve never played Hl2, so this was a cool opportunity to catch up on the series (yes, there is one wanker who never picked the game up, so shoot me, I was poor and uninterested as I never finished Halflife (cue further shocked gasps)) I just finished Halflife 2 and I was impressed, the gameplay while very linear shakes things up a bit and wanders between pseudo zombie horror and sci-fi gun battles. The story is compelling and the acting well done. Highly recommended if, like me, you’re stupid and never picked it up.

On to Team fortress 2, I can’t think of a time I’ve played a game like TF2 (Class based, online, territory control, FPS) that was so well balanced. Every class has a niche, and a fight between any two classes could honestly go either way, it’s quite refreshing. No more, “Oh, I’m a medic so I’m a bitch when it comes to virtually every other class” or ”oh look I’m an engineer, which means I’m a free kill to everyone who looks at me funny!”. Now I play an engineer, and I’ll fuck you up if you’re not paying attention, ph34r my level three turret! I’ve been playing an inordinate amount of TF2 over the past few weeks, and encourage people to pick it up, if you’re in to that sort of thing.

Last but certainly not least, is Portal. Portal is quite simply one of the best games I’ve played in quite some time. You should feel bad if you’re a gamer and have not traveled down this veritable physics acid trip coupled with some of the best macabre humor I’ve seen in a game. While it’s quite short (3 hours or so) and not too hard, until you start beating the ancillary challenges, it’s well worth the $20 to buy it off steam. Besides, you totally get cake at the end. Trust me.

So I’m well on my way to getting back in to video games, and it’s really nice. I hope to keep the pace up. I got a lot of games to beat.

Biking

So Biking mainly stopped because I moved in with Jenn, and we live on the top of a hill. Biking around the neighborhood is fucking obnoxious, I coast downhill for like 15 minutes, and then wear myself pumping uphill for 10 minutes trying to get home, and end up walking my bike… lame. I quickly decided I hated biking in this area. However, Jenn bought me a bike rack, and so I will take my bike to campus and I will ride it around, and it will be good. The bike is in the shop right now getting tuned, should be able to ride it once things dry up around town.

Climbing

Climbing was something I used to do fairly religiously with Joe and Anami. I stopped when Melissa started acting like I shot her puppy every time I went out to hang out with anyone for any reason. I tried a few times to get back in to the swing of things, but trying to get a regiment going without a committed partner is kind of like running around in a circle, it’s exercise, sure, but it gets old and boring after a while. I’m going to start up again with Jenn, and we’ll see how that goes. She won’t be able to go very often so I might get in touch with a friend whose in my AI class and see if we can’t start going… might be able to make a go of things.

Here’s hoping I can get these things going, I think if I can start back up these four things and keep them going I’ll be much more happy in general, and that’s always good.

For now though, I’m sick, and this entry was a monumental effort … and I’m sure it’s nonsensical. But, who cares, I’m going to bed.

I’m writing (most of) this in the Cincy airport… I would be online, but all the airports have tmobile ‘pay to use’ wifi … bastards. I spent the past week in San Fran, hanging with coworkers at the most recent Socialtext F2F. A lot of went on is confidential and off the record, but I’m going over everything else.

I left Bloomington on Monday after having lunch with Jenn at Qdoba. (Sidenote: We both got fairly sick after eating there, and I don’t plan on ever eating there again) After I said goodbye I sped up to Indy barely making my flight.

I arrived in SFO around 7pm, and freaked out a little as I had forgotten to figure out how I was going to get from SFO to the hotel in Palo Alto. I ended up calling Ross, Brandon, Matthew’s old cell that belongs to a lady who doesn’t like me much, Jenn to get more phone numbers, Matthew (the real number this time), and John trying to find out what was the right way to get there. I was tempted to just expense a cab, but I decided I was smart enough to make it there on the CalTrain… so I wandered over to the BART, and hoped over to the connection to the CalTrain. I ended up very narrowly missing the CT, and since it was ~8pm at that point, I had to wait an hour for the train.

I settled in for the wait and I struck up conversation with my fellow platform companions. Talked with a German RFID Engineer and a German Industrial Designer. Talked art, UI design, wikis, travel, cool places to live, and other randomness… it was very cool. But, the train eventually came, and we piled in.

I got off at Palo Alto, and I tried finding a wireless cloud to get some Google Maps action going. No immediate luck, but I recall that I printed out the hotel’s (The Cardinal in PA) wiki page from work, and so I give them a ring. After committing some sketchy directions to memory I find the hotel a few blocks away, I check in and go unpack. After I get unpacked I go downstairs to sign up for teh internets, and I discover employees downstairs hanging out. I sit down and meet Shawn Scantland, Shawn Delvin, Kirsten Jones, and Bill Odem. We shoot the shit for a bit, and then Ingy, Luke, Melissa, Kevin, Marc and Rick came in and introduced themselves. Ingy informs me of impending debauchery, and I find out that I have the room next to his, which proves to have a detrimental effect on my sleep for the rest of the trip, but gave me motivation to be social.

After the people in the lobby all head off to sleep I go head up to my room and then to Ingys, a lot of people were in and out all night, and there was a lot of alcohol and enjoyment. Good times were had by all. But, eventually it was time to head to bed for the coming day ahead.

Woke up fairly early, headed downstairs and wandered across the street to the canonical breakfast establishment. I get some French toast but remember quickly that a) I don’t eat breakfast for a reason, and b) the Qdoba poison has not left me entirely. We wander down the street to the office 2.0 were people have started to congregate. We get settled in for the morning’s presentation.

(Time Passes)

We break for lunch and Ross starts the planning for open sessions for tues and wed. We use a open format, barcampesque scheduling format for most of the sessions.

I head off first to an hour session where we discuss what we need to do to make the appliance bad ass for our customers. We discuss UI changes, implementing a full time dev team for the appliance, and a few other pressing issues. I think I may try to get into working on some dev work for the appliance, but we’ll see how things unfold.

After that session I head over to Office 1.0 where we discuss the retirement of our main wiki workspace because it would be an easy way to get a fresh start and eliminate a lot of the bad blood and past drama. I feel that it would help to purge it if we want to work more as a team. Ross is still in mourning over the loss, and I can understand how it’s hard for him to let a wikispace that was a major archival space for the past 5 years vanish in a puff of bits.

I go join the discussion Luke is giving on hacktastic tricks after I get done arguing for the wikispace execution. Luke is showing off a lot of neat little tools like Wikrad, REST, and some firefox tricks. I should start using wikrad, it’s pretty bad ass.

We wrap up and head to dinner at an Italian place across the way from the office. We fill up 6 full tables. The food starts coming and doesn’t stop, my poor addled intestinal tract can’t take it and I have to eat very minor amounts… but that’s probably for the better. There was waves and waves of Italian food that was all fairly good. Fried Calamari, Garlic Bread, Salad, Chicken Fettucini Alfredo, Sausage Penne something or other, Chicken Parmesan, Meatballs, and more gallon bottles of Cianti than I could count.

After dinner we all migrate back to office 2.0 were we split into groups and play werewolf). I get killed off early the first game, but I got my revenge in the second game; I was a werewolf and we killed everyone. We moved on to a big group game to finish off the evening, and things started getting crazy. Ross was leading the game, and fairly inebriated, and was getting into the game hardcore. It was pretty excellent, and I ended up winning that one as a villager so that was cool.

We hang around and shot the shit for a while, and then I head off to procure liquor with Lyssa, Melissa, George and Brandon. We walk a few blocks to find the store closed, so we stopped by some random sports bar to have a few rounds before we head back to start drinking proper.

Get back to Ingy’s room and had a great night. Good energy and wonderful people. Very incriminating photos. Luke tore a phone book in half and Zac shattered a glass.

Up at 9:50 the next morning, shower and run to the office and sit down (out of breath) right at 10:00am. We start the days general presentation.

(Time Passes)

I head to my first open session for the day, Sales 101. I listen to our lead sales guy answer questions and explain the processes behind sales. It was fairly enlightening to see some of the internal mechanics of how the sales team functions.

After this we had reheated Italian while discussing Support Team problems and solutions. It was nice to rant about the simple breakdowns that support faces.

Then I headed over with Paul and talked with a few people about how to make the first 90 days of a new customer’s experience more smooth.

After that, I attended Ingy’s UI - Sales team face off where the UI team polled the sales team for what felt like the most important UI problems of late. It was kind of interesting to hear what the customers want the most.

I headed over to hear about skins from Lyssa last, but the session kind of broke down, and we all kind of wandered off. I socialized for the next few hours with a multitude of people while waiting for our dinner group to finish up their loose ends. Ingy and Zac vanish on a quest for liquors to drunken, and no one seems to know where they actually went. We head to a vegetarian Thai place for dinner, and wander around a bit before someone decided to call someone who knows where the fuck the place is actually located.

We sit down across the way from the other group (we came in shifts to be less mean), and we sit down to order. I’m immediately accosted by ShawnD who informs me of an impending switch to bugzilla that the devs are going to engage in tonight while drunk. I’m mildly concerned, but I don’t care that much.

Someone checks twitter. Sees this post I get concerned for the state of my chocolate.

We eat, it’s yummy, we head back to the hotel. Sure enough, my room has been invaded, Matthew, Luke, Kevin, Liz and ShawnD are camped out installing bugzilla. Matthew evidently climbed into my window thinking it was Ingy’s. I dump my stuff sigh at them, and head to ingy”s room. We drink a lot, and start watching the life Aquatic. I don’t think anyone cares except Ingy and I… philistines.

I fall asleep in my chair, and wake up around 5 to see most everyone has either passed out or left. I gather my crap and go back to my room and head to sleep. I wake up the next morning and head down to the office.

I meet up with Matthew, and after I wake up we head back to SF to hang out for the day. We hop on the CalTrain right as it leaves, sans tickets (no time to buy them). We get harassed by the conductor about hopping on at the last second. And he wanders off w/o asking for tickets… he comes back in like 15m asking for everyone’s tickets and gives us an eye roll when we tell him we don’t have them, but doesn’t give us a ticket. Whew!

We transfer to the BART and drop Kevin off at the airport. Matthew and I head back to his place and relax for a bit. Beth’s home and we talk a bit before heading to grab some food from a nice little place called Toast. It was very tasty. We head back and talk for a while about what I want to see in SF, and I decide that relaxing sounds better than being a tourist, so we chill and I show Matthew portal, which he seems to dig. We futz around with some games for a few hours and then We go grab some excellent Vegan Japanese at this place called Cha-Ya. It was excellent!

We drop Beth off to hang out with a friend and Matthew and I drive around and talk a bit about city life, and work, and other randomness. We drive up to the highest point in the city for a nice view of the bay and the Goldengate Bridge.

Head back to Matthew’s place to grab the bags, and we head to the airport.

I had a great stay in PA/SF, even if I didn’t get to see much of the Bay area.

Maybe next time I visit.

So it’s been a week since I started working for the fine folks at Socialtext. It’s been an interesting, if humbling, few days.Going to repost some of my blogging that I’ve been doing internally. I might move my ST blog to an externally readable location at some point.

Expect more posting here in the new future as I figure this Markdown crap out.

08.02.07

Second day here.

Yesterday I was a little damp from sucking the fire hose that is the information flow around here to really put together anything resembling a coherent thought, much less a blog post.

So here I am, working from home at a startup in an industry I love. Thrown screaming (from joy? terror? we shall see!) from the comfortable and atrophic confines of academia. Surrounded by people who intimidate me immensely, but also inspire.

Intimidation factor is high. But I shall persevere!

Alright, enough of that. Today was a good day, working with Brandon and Lyssa these past couple days has been a welcome departure from the past year or so working in isolation alongside my coworkers instead of with them. Later, I worked with Lyssa and dealt with a few tickets. Then, I paired with Brandon and played with some scripts and poked at some of the ST APIs. We also spawned a dev environment so I can start to prod at things and start learning the code and developing scripts.

Then I dove headfirst into /corp and quickly found myself with 40 or so tabs open in firefox, and didn’t emerge until several hours after I was supposed to be ‘clocked out’. I suspect this trend will continue unabated for several days at the least.

I’m unsure how the effect of working alone at home is going to affect me long term. I tend to be rather hermit-like when I work, donning headphones and only emerging when I’m in need of sustenance. So, I can’t expect the effect will be large. I should work on finding people the real world to meet for lunch so I don’t go stir crazy eventually.

Random things I’ve learned.

• My… “inclination to forget” about my bloging, will not be tolerated.
• No one knows what my official title is, and that doesn’t really matter.
• People in support (so far) all have many pets, and the fact that I have three cats is relatively sane.
• Google Reader is probably not going to cut it… even though I wish it could.

Thoughts on communications.

• VoIP/Skype makes me far happier than landlines or cellphones.
• Three years (almost) of living on “Ventrilo”http://ventrilo.com/ for WoW has left me extremely comfortable shooting the shit (aka BSing) in skype and VoIP calls.
• Ventrilo’s default state is muted, VoIP’s default state is unmuted. Mixing these up is bad.
• I enjoy tacking on time to calls in order to BS; other people will/may find this obnoxious. I must watch myself.
• When I BS on voice I tend to be able to work with more fluidity on multiple tasks.

08.03.07

Continued Learning

Today i continued to work on picking up stuff around here. Worked on more tickets. Ran off mid-day to pick up my car from the dealer. I have A/C for the first time in over a year… it’s pretty amazing. Lurked in on Brandon working with zbir working on an LDAP problem with a client, and got my laptop ordered finally. I chose a Dell XPS M1330.

Shiny.

Deep Thoughts

I’m shocked at the volume of tickets that seem to languish around here. Recent St-Dev list traffic suggests that this is not something that I’m alone in noticing. Once I get going here I might have to watch myself that I don’t work on tickets all night. My last position got it fairly well ingrained in my brain that the RT queue needs to be empty. If a ticket sat for more than 24h my manager, cool as he was, would start breathing down my neck. Quite literally. Several times I would turn around to find him standing there. We’ll see how things go as I merge into the flow here. (Edit: this has gotten way better in the last week)

Started [brianhabererthingsthatannoy]. Figured that if nothing else I’m a fresh, critical eye. I also assume that when I find problems, I should write them down even if they are things people have been dealing with for months. We’ll see how useful it proves.

Thoughts on increasing random communication.

Read [cdent]’s [recreating_lunch] (however old it may be). I think that recreating an atmosphere of office social interaction is a good idea, but VoIP and Skype feel like bad avenues for casual communication. I’m tempted to suggest some form of groupvoip like Ventrilo for that level of social interaction.

Vent servers are poor traditional voip servers, there is no way to engage someone in pure one on one chat, nor is there a real way to not be on a call (other than being disconnected). However they make great casual social interaction space. You have a clear view of who is in which virtual space, who they are talking with, and who is actually talking. People are announced by name as they enter and leave spaces/channels, which is something I find frustratingly absent in voip sessions. (The bings and dings don’t cut it)

The main problem with that is that the Mac support is lackluster (or used to be, it might be better now) and the Linux client is nonexistent. There’s also the point that introducing yet another voice client for people to install is a bad thing. I also feel that people don’t like to talk, only type. Which is a deathblow to this kind of thing.

That’s all for today’s brain dump…

So, it's been a while since I've had a chance to update. A lot's been going on, and I've not been able to keep everyone up-to-date with everything going on in my silly little life. So here goes an attempt to relate what's been going on.

Socialtext

So my emo-hair-tossing entry a week or so ago was in response to some events that occurred that caused me to retract my acceptance of the Socialtext job, and retract my resignation at UITS. Let me tell you how much that made me want to kick puppies.

Thankfully, things got sorted out ( For now; if you want the obnoxious details get in touch with me), and I'll be starting my new job on the first of August. A lot of the stuff that's going on is in the realm of "sketchily confidential company information", and since I just signed an NDA, I'll refrain from spewing it all here for now. Once I work for them I'll probably have a better idea where the line is for what I can (and should) disclose on a public blog such as this. I will say things are good now, and I'm optimistic that they will stay good.

I'm pretty nervous about starting work at Socialtext. This is the first real (non-educational) company I've worked for in seven years, and the first full time job I've ever had outside of the time I've spent at UITS. It's going to be weird transitioning from getting up and heading in to an office, to getting up and heading to my own office. It's going to be a weird transition period, but I have high hopes. I like the people I'm working for and with, and I enjoy the industry. So I guess I'm not all that worried.

Speaking of my office, Jenn and I spent last weekend swapping the contents of our rooms. I now have an office to my very own. It looks like a sty right now, so pictures will have to wait till I've at least attained some level of sanity. I like having my own space, and I look forward to using some money to eventually make it a nice work/play space for myself. I need to get some nice shelves, I forgot how many books I have accumulated. I got rid of approximately 7 trash bags worth of crap I no longer needed during the move. A lot of it was really old debris from life before I met Jenn and it had no real significance anymore. I found the experience cathartic.

Random thought; I need to figure out what I'm going to do about a new laptop for work. I've been rocking my Dell D620 for a year, and I love the line. I'm debating between keeping a similar machine in a similar form or moving to a Dell M1330. Socialtext sent me an email that strongly urged me to get a Macbook, but I'm not feeling much like drinking the kool-aid. I'm really leaning towards the M1330, it's stunning and is sporting LED back light, slot loading cdrom and other niceties. Only problem is that I might not be able to get one till a month or so down the line.

UITS

I've been going through a four week resignation notice at UITS, it's been a little uncomfortable and tedious. I feel bad that I quit, came back, and that I am now quitting again. I wish this had gotten handled better. I think that these events introduced a lot more friction than I was hoping to create in my leaving. So far my old manager has been a great sport about the whole thing, and my new manager hasn't said a word to me in weeks. So there's that.

I have my last EdCert class next week, and I'm not looking forward to driving up to Indy three times, and then having to go up there on Friday as well for some LSP appreciation event they are throwing. Should be a mind numbingly good time. However, I'm kind of looking forward to teaching the class. I always enjoyed the class, I just hate driving for an hour and getting up at 5:30am.

As I clean out my cubicle here at uits, I feel sad that I'm leaving. I had a lot of fun times here (and, yes, a lot of horrible times). I've grown up a lot while working within these walls, and so I tend to wax sentimental about my time here. I think it's a good thing I'm leaving, even if I ultimately come back for some reason.

Jenn wanted me to keep a list of the stuff I found in my cube, and I'm keeping an informal list of the randomness on the wiki at http://wiki.weirdo513.org/?title=CubeContents.

So a few weeks ago I applied for a position at Socialtext, a company that deals primarily in social software. I've been interviewing with them for a couple weeks now, and on Thursday Ross Mayfield called me during lunch and offered me the position. As of Monday afternoon, I have officially accepted their offer and given my notice at IU. My last day is July 13th.

This is an amazing, and fairly daunting opportunity. Indiana University has become my little safe haven, and I'm comfortable here. I finally realize how dangerous of a situation that can be at a place like Indiana University. While there are some amazingly intelligent and compassionate people working here, there are also many people just wasting away until they can retire. I don't want to end up like that, even if it's a low likelihood. I like the people here, but I feel that I need to move on and get some different experiences. So this is going to be a good thing.

So the new gig is Senior Technical Support Engineer. I'm not completely sure what that means in the grand scheme of the company yet, but I stand to learn a lot in a very short period of time. Since I've also been getting into wikis and social software, and I'm loving this stuff. So, I can't wait to sink my teeth into Socialtext.

One of the nicer things about the Palo Alto based company is that a large portion of the employees telecommute. This means that I don't have to leave Bloomington anytime soon, but it also means that I will be working from home for the foreseeable future. This means I will be needing to set up an office in my house post haste. I've been looking at finding a desk that's more conducive to work, but I can't find one I like yet. I also have a whole host of items to replicate so that I can have a conducive work environment. But overall I'm looking forward to having a real office at home.

As for my current work? Well the LSPS stuff was looking a little bleak, even if the people were looking pretty amusing. Being the Linux poster boy in a room of windows support guys? Not really what I need to advance my career.

However, I will miss that A pass come time to take classes.