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.

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.

This is more of a side note, but since I did find our logo while I was looking through my backups today I figured I might as well do a short post.

UpNorth Web Design took many of the ideas from my previous small ventures about doing contract web design/development and made them a little bit more realistic. At this point I was working with a guy who was pretty decent with graphic design, and another guy who was a really solid perl/cgi programmer.

We did a hand full of contracts for sites in the Bellingham area, and contracted to a few companies that did web development and had more work than they could handle. This small business also faded over time, as the three of us went off in different directions, however again I learned a few things.

1. Resume's are really important to get any big contracts (people want to see examples, and recognize names).
2. Working from home with a small team is a very realistic way to do this kind of work. The lower the overhead the better.
3. Be persistent, build a portfolio.. and keep your domain alive and up to date - you never know when you are going to want to jump back into picking up more web design work to generate some spending money for your upcoming trip to Europe. :)

I have actually come up with another Business idea I worked on while I was still in high school, but it has a bit of a twist -- so stay tuned.

Two years ago new years we attended a great party in Bellingham, WA. I had a great time -- can you tell?



Liquify is the coolest photoshop filter ever made.