...and I'm back. I've been in England, Scotland, and Wales since August 24 (I left right after posting about my 50 days of exercise) and between my blog software and a cron job, posts have been rolling out automatically while I've been out. I was writing while I was out...
Since my Samsung died (nearly two months ago? Eesh, I should get on that) I've been using our old HTC Tornado as a local phone. In preparation for my upcoming European vacation, I figured it would be good to get the phone unlocked and just pick up a local SIM...
Layla and I had tremendously good home-made pizza earlier baked by a friend from Chicago. I've got an eight-hour layover on my flight back from my vacation. I'm totally going to have some Chicago pizza while there....
Layla was in eastern and central Europe for the last few weeks. She came home last night and brought me ... this. It's baby food. Made from horse meat. Ingredient #2 (right after "cooking water") is carne di cavallo. Ewwww. Nutritional info on the back....
It turns out I'm right around the corner from the headquarters of Blizzard Entertainment, who have a bunch of big buildings and a film-studio-looking steel gate with their name scrawled across the top. Sortof like this but less old. Anyway, I didn't get a chance to photo their building so...
Yay. I'm in Irvine. It's actually not all that bad here—I'd venture as far as to say that it's probably a decent place to live. The streets are clean, the shops are nice, and people seem to drive with some maginal sense of sanity. But there's also not a lot...
I have to go to Irvine in the not-so-near future for an event. I have no idea what's in Irvine. I've spent a lot of time in the foothills of LA but never made it that far south. Is there anything interesting to do there? At all? P.S. first person...
40 hours in a conference room, 12 hours in dinners, and a few more at the bar. I'm done with the week and it's not even Friday....
This is the dashboard of my Ford Focus rental car. Three things to note:These gauges are unreadable. Seriously, this whole white-with-grey-rim nonsense and the gear motif makes it incredibly difficult to tell what speed you're actually traveling1. I also just realized that I'm old. The radio rings are non-OCD-compatible. The...
So I've got a room at the Cardinal Hotel in Palo Alto while I'm in silicon valley for work. It's actually a bit of a drive from the place I'm working (it's in northern Santa Clara near Alviso) but when I'm spending 10+ hours every day in a conference room,...
I had 90 minutes to burn in San Jose after visiting the Fry's in Sunnyvale (super-secret work business1) so I went to the Winchester Mystery House. The house (mansion, really) is a labyrinthine mass of interconnected rooms scattered across 40 vertical feet (most rooms are not on integer floors) and...
When I'm driving in an unfamiliar far-away city, I prefer driving a rental car instead of own car since the local license plates on the rental don't scream that I'm an outsider. So it's a little obnoxious that my rental Focus—more on that later—happens to be fitted with license plates...
Two notable happenings happened this morning at the security checkpoint at Seatac:The TSA screener running the x-ray machine (or whatever it is now) commented that, "this is the best electronics packing job I've ever seen. Seriously. Thank you for making my job easier." And over the next minute he commented...
I'm headed back to silicon valley before the year ends. This is the second time in four months that I'll be down there, which is somewhat remarkable because prior to my visit in August, I think the last time I was in the bay area was sometime before Y2K. And...
Instead of leaving a car at the airport or trying to mooch a ride off of a friend, I've lately been getting a town car to drive me to and from the airport. It's way more comfortable than being stuffed in the back of a Prius taxi, and is cheaper...
I was originally traveling to Japan on business, and would be staying for a few days of vacation. Now that I've seen this page, I've changed my intentions: I'm now going to Japan solely to see the world's largest spatula. Any work I do there is merely coincidental....
I'm going to Japan later this year on business. For those of you who don't know, Japan is that island right off of Korea, known as a country where everyone eats raw fish with sticks, and where anyone can purchase myriad fetish accessories from vending machines. Also, they invented Pachinko....
I spotted this in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco while I was in the area last weekend. What the hell is it? It's a weird huge orange bus. The first two things that popped into my mind were "firefighters" or maybe "Chinese government group."...
Yesterday's mention of SkyMall may have made you wonder what I'm doing browsing through airline seat stuffers. Well, I'm in San Francisco on family business. And while in San Francisco, I had a chance to visit a handful of interesting parts of the city, one of which was the Sutro...
I spotted this on the way back from Leavenworth. Anyone know what the heck an interpretive trail is? It appears such things exist, but none of the links really help explain what they are....
Layla and I went to Leavenworth for Oktoberfest this weekend. What the heck? Leavenworth is an odd little town. You can read this on the Wikipedia link, but essentially Leavenworth was originally a timber town founded in the early 1900s but lost momentum when the railroad relocated to nearby Wenatchee....
If you're taking two weeks off, where would you go? Hint: not Oregon....
Leaving in a few hours, will be back next week....
