home of the-chu

so i’ve been working away at updating my computers after a couple of recent releases.  first up was gmail’s shift to IMAP, finally.  this means i’ve been able to properly clean out a bunch of old email and have everything synchronized.

the other major update was the apple’s release of leopard.  this as been relatively painless, other than the time it is taking to backup as a safety precaution.  just as most of the reviews state, there’s some big items that are catching most everyone’s attention like time machine and the new look of the interface, but there are lots of little things underneath as well.  i was really excited that i can input my password with my dvorak layout and not have to know where the qwerty layout was.  like the title states…my dorkdom knows few bounds.

p.s. plus i actually wanted to post just to check if the new safari properly deals with carriage returns in wordpress, the beta was broken

jon and alisa came up this weekend to celebrate their anniversary and we spent some time checking out some new places.  we had dinner at a seafood place i had found online, which worked out pretty well.  the food was pretty good and we were all pretty stuffed after dinner.  jordan and tiff joined us before their weekend bike ride for a MS cause, but had to leave to get to bed early.  so the remaining three of went over to north beach and wandered around for a while stopping in at rosewood.  we also tried to find a deck of cards, but the only place we could think of finding them was at big al’s except that the decks were about $11 so we skipped that idea.

the next day we went to a place over in the middle of muir woods which was pretty cool.  it’s supposedly similar to a german beer garden, and they did have a number of imported beers available.  there wasn’t as much of a view as i was expecting but the open deck and benches were still enjoyable.  there was also a larger number of kids and family than i thought, and lastly it was quite a hike back out to the parking lot.

all in all it was good to see them while they were up here and i guess i’m going to have to schedule another trip down there at some point.  hopefully i’ll have a job by then and we’ll have something more to celebrate.

so in the last couple of weeks i decided that i wanted to get out and see some shows in the area and started to look up venues in the city.  i came across mezzanine which has some pretty good shows lined up.  i bought tickets to go see diplo & switch as well as !!! on another night.  diplo & switch was a good night, the place was pretty full and people were dancing all night.  if you haven’t heard anything by diplo, he does a fair amount of mash-ups, and that night he even managed to pull out “you can call me al” by paul simon.  now that was interesting….in a good way.

a few nights later i went back to see !!!, and that was amazing.  i thought they sounded good on record, well they’re so so so much better live.  i wish i still had my bootlegging gear for the show last night.  in any case, mezzanine is a good venue with an even better line up.  too bad justice is sold out, that would be another show i’d like to go to.

so i’ve transferred to a new host, actually it’s back to a hosting company i used a few years back. the recent one that i was using had some serious issues like databases and directories going missing, and the service was really slow. unfortunately i lost my last post about san diego unless my old host can get their database problem fixed and i can get the data backed-up.

well, the job search continues slowly… it’s been about a month and a half now so i’m opening up to some other possible companies and areas so i guess we’ll see what happens.

i recently bought a used road bike to start riding again. i tried to go on a ride with jordan and some of his friends but that didn’t go so well, i was not in a good enough condition to make it very far. turns out that was probably for the best as jordan told me they went about 60-70 miles, i think. i’ll get there eventually.

i was reminded recently by a friendly email with no subject and three words: “update your website” that it had been quite a while since i’ve put anything up and in fact a great deal has changed since then.

i think i’ll recount what has happened backwards rather than figuring out what it was i did back in may. i’m back in the bay area which has been good, plenty of sun and good food. staying at home has kept me busy fixing thing around the house which has also been entertaining, certainly better than when i was sitting around in my room in cranfield. so far i installed a new garage door opener, setup a speaker system for my mom, and repaired an apple desktop for myself. while i’ve been back i have also been out to a couple of sites with jordan checking out some of the solar installations, and the bigger ones are pretty cool to check out. in the mean time i’ll also be looking around for a full time job in case the solar thing doesn’t fit.

before getting back here i stopped off in new york and boston to see family on my way back from england. the time spent there was a bit on the short side but luckily i did manage to see everyone while i was around. my sister and i took the train up to boston from new york and then drove back in her newly acquired a4 wagon from my aunt.

moving further back would put me back in england where the weather still sounds like it was in the fall even though it should be summer. the last few months that i spent there were thoroughly uneventful except for a brief couple days at the british grand prix and even then they were not that great. it’s not nearly as glamorous as it may sound but some of the students in my program volunteered to chauffeur some of the exclusive members around the racetrack in golf carts. the hours were long, we were not getting paid, so overall it was still rather crappy.

well that about sums up all that was of any interest. hopefully i’ll get back in the habit of posting, or i might need some more friendly emails to remind me

i haven’t posted anything in a while but then again there hasn’t been a whole lot going on. it’s memorial day weekend back at home which happens to conincide with england’s spring holiday, but the problem is that it is 6ºC (~40ºF) and rainy…not exactly spring like weather. oh well it’s been like this all year so why should i expect anything different.

a couple of friends have packed up and left school for their projects in different locations. one of them went to denver, but just before he left we had a couple of dinners and a gigantic water fight. it was like being back in grade school and the thing was that most people weren’t even all that drunk. cooking pots, tea kettles, garbage cans, fire extinguishers, just about anything that would hold water was used both indoors and out on the front lawn. another friend just left yesterday for spain, but she’s been away for quite a while already so for me it wasn’t so much as she was leaving more that she was in town to visit. it’ll be interesting to see what happens at the end of this year, how many people plan on staying in touch even though we’ve only been together here for a year…