Last Thursday Slide took the whole company (or those that were interested) on a day of skiing goodness at Northstar resort in North Lake Tahoe. The morning started at 4AM with a pint of good Jamaican rum, a flask halfway filled with top notch mescal and all my gear loaded in the back of the Golf. I arrived at work with a co-worker to see the crew of zombies wandering around the office who decided that it was a better idea to stay up all night, instead of go home and get half a nights sleep. Usually I would be one of these people -- but I guess I have fallen to the curse of moderately good sense.

Feeling well rested, I cruised by all the refrigerators in the office filling my pockets with various treats as I knew at some point in this 5 hour bus ride I would become excruciatingly hungry but I still wasn't hungry for anything at that point. At roughly 4:10AM, all 50 barely conscious people loaded the bus with staggering energy that faded to a silent slumber after about 30 minutes on the dark bus. I plugged into my phone to listen to Joe Satriani and try to catch some Z's. Two pulls of mezcal and some mellow electric guitar knocked me out cold. I awoke to the begging of a Warren Miller hi-lights real to get everyone pumped up for the day. The resident hostess was passing out various beverages and snacks for breakfast (why did I bring all this extra food, I thought).

As we cruised up the snow surrounded highway people started to get excited for the day. Upon exiting the bus we were told that anything left on the bus would be locked away until 3:30 in the afternoon, which made me start sorting through a day of skiing in my head to figure out what was absolutely necessary to bring with me.

I changed quickly behind a van and threw all my extras back under the bus. One step in my ski preperation routine is to put my iphone in a ziplock freezer bag as I know I will fall on it, and also the moisture in my jacked always somehow finds a way to wreck the screen.

Off to the powder! I have this really brief almost day dreamy memory of seeing something fall between my legs out of my jacket, but looking around I spotted nothing, however after a few really amazing runs we inevitably lost one of our crew. Sitting on the lift I went to find my phone to give them a call and see where they were, and I realized OH NO! My snow white iphone in it's zip lock was gone, the pocket was unzipped and the headphones were still there. You can imagine the sinking feeling of knowing that your 600 dollar phone jam packed with all the details about your life is now at the mercy of randomness.

My first thought was, "I should have protected my phone with a code, forcing someone to format it to get to my data". However, this turns out to have been a saving grace. Somehow I didn't let the lost phone ruin my day by convincing myself that I somehow left it in my jeans that are in my bag under the bus. Oddly enough, calling the phone went straight to voicemail meaning that it either somewhere that has no service or has been turned off. I still have no idea which of those was the case.

Towards the end of the day I headed to lost and found to no available, and then back to the bus to tap the keg and forget about my terrible mis fortune. Leaving the mountain I felt as if I was leaving a soldier behind, and that I was missing a major part of my body.

As we neared Vallejo Jacob ran up to the front of the bus where I was sitting saying that Megan needed to talk to me urgently. Apparently "Some Kid" found my phone but she was concerned that I had a concussion. Not having any idea where this concept of a concussion came from I quickly called my sister Diana to make sure there was no family catastrophe, then Jeff Olds who Megan mentioned had received this persons contact information. Upon calling this foreign number I was informed that a work acquaintance had received a pretty gnarly concussion and was in the hospital. I then received the story of how my phone was found by a 14yr old boy skipping school to go skiing but in order to appease karma they decided to make sure it got back to me.

At this point I am excruciatingly sore from hard powder snowboarding, then sitting in the same position for 5+ hours and want nothing more than to get off the bus and go home for some major sleep. The next morning I went back and forth with fedex and my good Samaritans in Tahoe City to ensure the return of my phone. I set them up with some meals out to thank them for their rare honesty.

I have to be totally honest, it was kind of nice to not receive a phone call for 2.5 days. It was actually pretty peaceful not feeling the need to compulsively check email.. but I did seriously miss the Google Maps feature. I have no idea where anything is without that sucker!

Monday morning I woke up to find the fedex arrival containing my phone that still had 60% battery and many, many missed calls. I feel extremely fortunate, and certainly have my faith in human nature restored. The minute I knew the phone was gone I instantly jumped to the assumption that some dishonest soul had adopted it and that I would never see it again.

It's always nice to get a little positive reinforcement from the powers that be, reminding me that sometimes people just do the right thing.

This week, off to SXSW -- hopefully I fill my boots with some more t0asted content.

So yes, I have been working my ass off for the last couple months.. but I have also been having some fun.

Most notably we spent the long labor day weekend up at beautiful Lake Tahoe which was absolutely a blast. Saturday and Sunday were nice and sunny and warm, and somehow Monday decided to be freezing ass cold. Meg and I spent hours playing the penny slots and even though we didn't leave with more money than we arrived with, somehow I still feel like I won a lot. Cheap entertainment!

We made a day trip down near Kirkwood ski resort to a hot spring, which was very cool but the water in the pools looked pretty gross to me so I only dipped my feet in. That area is very scenic, I wouldn't mind spending a few days camping out there.

The traffic coming back was pretty bad so we went highway 88, which turned out to be one insanely long drive through some of the less impressive parts of California. We did get to see a forest fire up close and personal before we came down out of the mountains and were about 300 yards from a helicopter sucking water straight out of a stream along the highway and dumping it on the burning trees. That country side certainly looks like a bonfire waiting to happen, I hope now that the summer is coming to a close that those fires can stop happening for another year.

On our way out of Tahoe we stopped at a ski sale, and being the impulse outdoor sporting goods fiend that I am had to purchase some 2007 Atomic Nomad skii's and some 5 dollar poles... I'm pretty sure I was the only car driving around tahoe in August with skiis on the rack. Can't wait for the snow season!

Yesterday I basically forced Meg to get rid of T-Mobile, my old nemesis. I have had a hatred for T-Mobile ever since I switched to them in Pullman WA where one step in any direction could possibly move you to a new tower and whether you would get charged for roaming or not was like flipping a coin. After 3 years of arguing about roaming and late fees, I gave them one last chance by trying out the Sidekick phone. I have to tell you the interface was kind of cool, but man did Danger make it impossible to access anything. I wanted to write a bunch of my own apps, and by the time I got code running on the thing I was so frustrated with all their special keys for this and that so I finally gave up and with the hopes of the iPhone in the future switched over to cingular/att. My slvr was kind of a piece of crap, but now I am on the iphone and am a happy camper. To get to the point, Meg was about to get some 30 dollar piece of junk with AT&T and having my old 4gb iphone sitting at hope I convinced her to switch over... so welcome Meg to the iphone club!

Well I am currently watching firefox trunk compile, improving Windmill/Mozmill XPath support and tweaking the Slide continuous integration setup while listening to the Allman Brothers. Time to get back to work!

I'll post the pictures from the weekend when I get home and update with a link.

A

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.