So while I wait for WordPress to upgrade, so that I can blog on AdamChristian.com I decided that I would drop by t0asted and throw out an update. This last weekend Matt Eernisse and Jeff Olds were both in town and it was Jacob Robinsons birthday so we all ate some delicious Persian food and wandered from bar to bar in Berkeley.

Saturday we all golfed Lake Chabot (the three above including Mikeal Rogers). One of the nicest golf days I have had since I moved to California EXCEPT for how darn early it gets dark. I really could have forged on for another 3 hours in the perfect temperature. I have some pictures on my phone that I will be uploading to picasaweb.

Sunday we hiked around for Cronkhite, which is one of the most scenic places I know of in the bay area. You are up in the hills on an old army base looking back towards the golden gate and down at the beach. On a nice day, I can't think of a place I would rather be.

Lots of blogging about Windmill and Mozmill going on, currently writing some tests for the Firefox Worker Threads feature which will be released in Firefox 3.1.

Now that I am dilirious and just flat out ranting, life is good, I can't wait for snow boarding season. I am considering the Epic Pass which would allow me to ski some serious pow in Colorado... $89 bucks each way to Denver, is it worth it?

Ahh, now the little duck is bouncing on my dock -- apparently it's time to go blog about some serious stuff over at my grown up blog.

Cheers!

At the moment, I am sitting in the lobby of the Westin Hotel & Spa in Whistler BC. I first must preface this entry by saying that I have had an amazing week, and a great time here. I thank Mozilla for putting on a really cool experience, and I do not regret coming up here one bit. Also in between each of the following paragraphs I was attending some really cool sessions, eating great food and hot tubbing.

Monday we took a flight from Seattle to Vancouver, minus the screaming kids it was relatively painless flight. Meg was planning to meet me up here, and crash in my room... somehow she left SF that morning and still beat me here. I have no idea how that happened. Anyways she was here waiting when I arrived, and I quickly had to check in and get to dinner. Huge buffet with all kinds of delish foods, a pretty impressive spread with a solid bar.

Tuesday was a good day.

Wednesday morning I wake up and turn on the news and find out that the only reasonable road between Vancouver and Whistler (highway 99) has been closed due to a rock slide. Not only was it a rock slide, IT WAS A FREAKING HUGE ROCK SLIDE: http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/s ... VNewsAt11. Apparently it wrecked the entire road, and the train tracks and to remove it they will have to BLAST the van size boulders with dynamite. I didn't panic until they told us that it would take a bare minimum of 5 days to start getting the road back open. As you can imagine, poor Mozilla crew organizing all this must be pretty stressed. Two funny things happened as a result of this incident, during the "Travel Update", Mike Schroepfer yell out "Have we determined if Microsoft is responsible for the rock slide?" which under the circumstances broke the intensity in the air. The second was that a bug was logged in the Mozilla Bugzilla which marked the messed up road with severity:blocker, and that we may want to look into convincing Google to "Come pick us up".

Thursday, we woke up to silence, no lights, TV's, dead laptops and the quick realization that the power was out for the whole hotel. As you can imagine, this is a slight problem for a "Tech Conference". I actually slept in a bit later in the nice quiet darkness and caught up in probably a month of lost sleep. In the lobby they had posted that the hotel transformer had been "hit by a laundry truck"... UHM, are you kidding me? The giant green metal box sitting in the woods next to the hotel was "hit by a laundry truck". This HAS to be Micorosoft's doing, I can't image any other way something insane like this could possibly happen. We got to spend half the day without computers or A/V doing presentations off of notepads and then discussing in the dark. This did make for an interesting dynamic, and in a lot of ways was still pretty productive albeit very strange. Fortunately right before our 5:45 presentation of GristMill, our firefox automation framework "Talk" the power came back on so that I could give my sweet demo. I really like doing talks at conferences because people immediately have ideas, and uses for whatever it is you are doing. It's very gratifying to know that people are going to go home and start playing with your stuff.

Thursday night dinner we jumped on the gondola and headed up to the top of the mountain for a pretty rockin shin dig. A beattles/elton john/other cover band was playing, it was snowing outside, and they put on a huge spread. John Lilly talked, Mitchell Baker talked and after many toasts and rounds of applause Shrep went up and clearly fighting his emotions, thanked everyone for the last few years.

A wise sage told me, that when you go to a conference/event it's always a good idea to make a list of the people you want to worm your way into a conversation with. So this time around, I made my list. During the day people have been crazy running around all over, but last night people were a bit more relaxed and in a social mood so I had the chance to introduce myself to some folks and have a couple conversations I had been waiting to have all week.

Today is friday, its 11:58 AM, my float plane was supposed to take off at 11:45 AM... clearly this is a problem. The word I was given was that the planes couldn't fly because of the high tide and that the planes weren't able to land safely at the moment. Well, the way I feel about this is that we basically have tides mapped out like clock work... someone booked a flight to leave at a time when they would be landing during an unsafe high tide? I don't think so. There is a massive cloud cover, but mostly I think it just makes sense that the trend of insanity would continue.

I am feeling a little bit burned out, pretty tired, sick of eating, drinking, and talking frankly. Please someone send your private jet and get me the hell out of this beautiful, tree covered resort town before I do something insane like deciding to go backcountry snowboarding on the glacier in the middle of the summer!

Please leave your base.

Today was an interesting day, I resigned from Rearden Commerce.. and now I am announcing a new blog.

For the last few years t0asted has been my only blog, so anything I wanted to write about -- be it professional, silly, etc. all came here. However I have seen a growing need recently to separate the two different kinds of content.

T0asted.com is now going to return to being my personal blog, for fun blog and all around whatever comes to mind place to rant. If you want to read my career/professional ideas about business, technology and all things 'more' serious, feel free to go check out my new website at Adam Christian on Life, Business and Technology.

The full story on my career changes and new projects can be found in the latest post: http://adamchristian.com/archives/20.

I thank you all for keeping up on me, I hope this makes it easier to find what you think is interesting.

It has been a few years since I gave GIMP another chance, but today since my laptop was dead I needed to do some simple image work. I jumped on http://wilber-loves-apple.org/ and grabbed their GIMP dmg, extracted it and fortunately I had the X Server installed so GIMP popped right up.

I remember the interface being frustrating and unintuitive, and after you get over the fact that the menus are on each of the windows open in the application it's actually become very easy to use for image resizing, scaling, cropping, exporting in the various formats and all of the rotating and other day to day image work you need to do. I didn't get a chance to fool around with the filters and layering but I did get a feeling that for a large piece of the web image work, mockups for the web etc. GIMP may be ready for me to try again as a potential candidate to become one of my day to day tools.

Speed wise GIMP loaded significantly faster than photoshop did when it was on this machine before my 10.5 upgrade. The UI was much more responsive than I remember it being, and downloading that binary worked much better than installing from Mac Ports.

I will BLOG again at a later date after I try using it for a web project, but I think those of you who wrote GIMP off a few years ago when I did will be surprised at the progress they have made so give it another chance! And boy am I glad there is an Open Source alternative to Photoshop or all of my image dependent tasks would have been suspended until a much later date.

Go Open Source!