Last weekend Martin, Jacob an I cruised up to Santa Rosa for the yearly Cigar BQ. Now some of you may think that this is a ridiculous idea, to pay $150 dollars to spend the weekend drinking all the wine you can get your hands on, and try some of the highest quality cigars around. However, I went out of the goodness of my heart. This event is a charitable fund raiser for the Boys and Girls Clubs of America.

As usual, we lacked the foresight to book any kind of accommodations. This always makes things just that much more interesting, because your lodgings have to find you and can be the most unlikely places you never would have foreseen. Unfortunately after a few hours of hanging out in the suite of Cigar BQ master himself (Hans Dippel) we wound up back at the good ol Sandman model for a wrestles night of incoherent banter. Fortunately, by the time we reached the Sandman we had experienced hours of free top shelf Sanoma wines, cigars and copious amounts of delicious foods.

The event was held at Saralee's Vineyard about 10 minutes out of downtown Santa Rosa. The venue is amazing, and as you walk in you are greeted by a tent of people handing you cool trinkets and filling your glass with champagne. You proceed to an area with around 16 tents each side of each tent spots a different vineyard serving their wines, brandy's, ports and sparkling wines OR a cigar representative for their respective company handing out free cigars. They give you a book of tickets in the hopes that it will limit your visits to each tent, however that didn't stop me from returning to chat and collect more and more cigars.

Honestly it was pretty hot out there, but it was a good time. I did learn my lesson though, my body really dislikes the idea of more than a couple cigars a week. I have no idea how many I puffed on over the weekend, but it lead to three days of being sick and feeling fatigued... I wonder why? :)

However, as taxing as the whole experience was I had a great time hanging out with the guys and it forced me to take some time and not be staring at a computer. My body thanked me for that part of it all so all in all I probably came out about even except for my massive SCORE on cigars. Someone please tell me how I could have scored more cigars for 150 bucks?




For those who are wondering, OSAF is cranking down as we get closer to preview. Windmill trunk is in progress and I should be done with the new UI this week. Cosmo is really shaping up, should be a very exciting release. I will keep everyone up to date as we get closer to preview.

Before I forget, I posted a TON of new pictures that had been sitting on my camera on my google picasa account which you can access here: Pictures of stuff!

So the last month has been very crazy, Meg graduated and moved back to the bay area.. yahoo! We had all kinds of fun up in Chico, but my car is happy to not have to do that commute anymore..

We moved her down to the bay area, and then I promptly took off to go celebrate weddings in Washington. This was great because I also had the chance to go see my family, which was way overdue.

When I was a kid, I made a small totem pole, that I thought had disappeared forever. Wondering out through the woods near my moms new place it caught my eye, sweet huh?



We are in super speed mode at work trying to get Chandler and Cosmo ready for a big release at OSCON at the end of July. We are also cranking out some polish for the Windmill project as it's needed to verify the latest Cosmo releases and hopefully change the world of UI automation when it's presented next month.

As usual I have all kinds of interesting projects going on in my free time which you all will have a chance to see as soon as I see them fit. This weekend a few of us are heading up to Santa Rosa to the CigarBBQ that I expect to be an exceptional time trying out new cigars, drinking California wines and eating tasty BBQ. I know you are all jealous, but I will get all kinds of awesome pictures up as soon as we get back.

Thanks for reading everyone, summer is a wild time but I will certainly try to update more for your reading pleasure!

Hi Mom, I hope you had a wonderful breakfast. Birds chirping, morning dew still making the air smell clean and fresh. Today you are my only BLOG reader that I care to entertain.

All of my life you have put up with all of my strangeness, blocking all the light from my bay window, building computers on ply wood, eating burritos at 3 AM. Most would expect you to "crack down" and "keep me in check" but you very gracefully encouraged all of the things I found interesting, or exciting. Instead of saying "what's wrong with you?", you asked "are you happy?".. sometimes it was probably hard to tell with me hiding in my room spending all day and night on the computer. Well, I have always been happy! You have always been such a great Mom and I would like to thank you for that.

Every day I find more parts of my personality that I can attribute to you, and they are all such positive pieces to who I am. I can only expect that I will continue to see these appearing forever. I am so glad you love you little house, and can imagine what a cozy little place you have made it. I will always appreciate your encouragement, understanding and insight. You fill a warm and fuzzy part of my heart that always makes me feel assured and confident in the world.

By the way, the whole US Mail process is so painfully slow.. you probably won't get my card for a few days, SORRY. I keep forgetting that rest of the world isn't instantaneous. However I did especially pick the card out for you and I hope you enjoy it, as I wrote you another little note inside. Again I apologize for the hand writing, it doesn't get much practice these days... :)

So for today, you can enjoy this very pretty image I found.. and a call, if your not too busy in the dirt to pick up.

I love you!

The Windmill project has taken on a following I hadn't expected. However I am really pleased and excited about the whole process. OSAF is now going to be supporting Windmill as an official project, every day we are adding more cool features simplifying the process for setting it up and using it. Currently a cross browser DOM explorer is functional, as well as full on development of a cross browser functioning test recording IDE. The interfaces are still a little rough around the edges, but once the functionality is all there we will get some design input and beautify it.

We will be presenting the project at OSCON on Thursday July 26 at 10:45am.. yall should be there! It's going to be super neato. By then we will have a neato website up with all of the source infos, binaries and the doco laid out in an easily accessible way.

We will be starting the #windmill channel on freenode tomorrow so anyone who wants to get into a BADASS rough around the edges open source project please come by and get involved. Since the inspiration for the project is to test and insure super duper quality of OSAF's Cosmo project we are currently building up all of our needed features for full cross browser support before we go and start adding features for the rest of the world.. but if you have needs or interests feel free to come make requests and we will fit them in when we have extra cycles.

In other OSAF news, we are in the process of smoothing out any issues with Cosmo 0.6.1 before we open it up to the world. The focus of this release is to add the ability for speedy sharing between the Chandler desktop and the Chandler Hub (server) internally called Cosmo.

The man nation out there is super sensitive about hair loss, and you can read yourself to death about what people are saying, these new products that do this and that and I always wondered... what really controls the hair loss problem and I have done an experiment on myself that I think I have finally found some interesting results.

From what I have read, hair loss is a huge part genetic and I have many friends that can treat them selves like garbage without loosing a hair, and I also have friends that live very healthy life styles and loosing at a super accelerated rate and there isn't really a whole lot that one can do to affect or control that. However I do think there is a piece of it that is up to us and here goes my rant.

In college I would drink frequently, averaging probably 6 beers per session thurs, fri, sat and sometimes 2 dollar micros on weds down at "My Office" in Pullman. I was also a Computer Science and Business double major which meant that when I wasn't writing up 30 page papers about marketing and balancing spread sheets for finance an accounting, I was writing code till 4, 5 maybe 6 am with class at 9:10 every morning. A 9:10am until 5:00pm class schedule, combined with a 6-9pm drinking schedule then a 10pm - 4am coding schedule makes for a pretty busy life. Since school is all about dead lines, projects and STRESS with 7 classes things became pretty ridiculous. And naturally when you have essentially no time.. you don't think much about what your eating or exercise so about once a month I would go run on the track and feel like my heart was going to explode from my steady pizza for lunch and canned boston clam chowder with white bread for dinner routine. As awful as this sounds I was having a great time and finished school without any lasting physical damage (I think! ). However my body wasn't in the greatest condition and the poisons by body was excreting were even worse for my hair line. The week I moved to San Francisco I took a picture of my scalp with the built in MacBook Pro iSight so satisfy my research curiosities at a later date.



For a 22 year old guy.. thats a little discouraging, but wasn't a bit surprising when I really thought about it.

In the last 8 months even eating out a lot, I was eating much higher quality foods and drinking less beer and when I was drinking beer it was well made micro brews that really take pride in their beers. Don't get me wrong, Busch light will always have a soft spot in my heart, but the chemicals involved in drinking a case of that stuff is overwhelming. Since I no longer had 7 classes demanding equally with professors who think their class is the only thing that should be important in your world, my stress level has dropped considerably. When people have reasonable expectations and you like a large portion of what you do all day.. the world just feels that much better. In the last month I have started eating by a variation of the Paleolithic diet which entails eating lean foods that humans could have eaten before mass agriculture and we started poisoning ourselves with foods our body doesn't really know how to process. I also have been forcing myself to walk 1 mile and back a couple days a week to whole foods, and hiking on the weekends. I did an experiment on cutting down my beer consumption and have lost 15 pounds in 6 weeks.

Check out this picture I took today, after I was reminded of this whole thing by my episode last night.. that I have documented in my last blog entry.



As a result, it's clear that we cannot control genetics.. but we can control what we put into our bodies and putting some effort towards, trying to feel good. I still have a lot of unhealthy habits like writing code till 3 am, smoking cigars and a martini or a beer occasionally... but moderation really is the key.

There is on other thing, and I don't want to sound like a rogaine commercial but I use a pretty good quality shampoo and conditioner that I have been using for about 6 years that is supposed to be better than your average shampoo. It's called Nioxin but as you can see.. it couldn't compete with pepperoni and beer.

Good luck!