This is a much belated blog entry, as I was trying to wait until I had solid answers to many of life's questions I must make peace with the fact that life is a constantly changed road... and one consistently finds themselves at a fork. I have a whole bag of worms I would like to spill, but I cannot for professional reasons until next Friday. It turns out that I have a lot more people reading by little "personal" blog, than I was aware of.

This weekend I seriously considered jumping on a plane to Spokane to go skiing at Schweitzer Mountain, carpooling with some co-workers to Tahoe.. and at this point I feel that I should stay and move with Jillian. Mostly this results from the fact that I will be busy the first part of December and gone for the rest and I would like to have my new place squared away for peace of mind.

IMPORTANT: Even if you are just skimming through this, since I will be in Washington from Dec 20 to Jan 4th I am inviting everyone (you know who you are) to come stay at my parents place and spend a few days skiing at Mt Baker and a few evenings conversing over delicious pints at Boundary Bay. Please let me know when people are going to be available and would like to converge. Additionally it would be fun to roll this one thing into the time frame of new years, so we can blow the champagne and shout as a group.

A few minutes ago, I had a meeting:



On to projects, there is a project called Windmill that I am a primary contributor. I think everyone should know that the project is going to change the Web UI testing world. However I cannot put the link up to the project page until it is officially announced, and all political issues are cleared up, what do you think of the logo?




OH YES! I almost forgot Thanksgiving. I missed my family a LOT but, I had a great time over in Marin eating a lovely Turkey dinner, drinking beer and Irish Coffee (thanks Steve), chatting and watching some boring NFL football. However, it was extremely odd to me to not see my breath outside. It was very warm, I wore jeans and a hawaiian t-shirt with my sandals. Thats comfort! Yeah I know I'm a goof, turkey and liquor will do that too you. :) Thats Megan, ain't she cute?



One last thing, and I know most of you are going to turn your brain off at this point but I found it very interesting. Today I learned that you can support http and https on the same box with the same application. This can be done using a reverse proxy, where your app is running on a web server other than apache such as tomcat on a non conflicting port. We are doing that with Osaf.us to allow both types of access on the same box. Below is a whiteboard picture used to explain this concept to me by Jared Rhine at work today.



Actually pretty cool, and I know all you nerds out there appreciate the blurb, I actually have to leave right now to go listen to Guido down at Google talk about some new open source internet stuff hes working on. Should be an interesting talk as I usually read his blog about the wonderland for developers that is GOOGLE. I will be back to write more about the reverse proxy and put some example config files.

ENJOY!

This past weekend I attended a Family Reunion in Pasadena CA. My Grandpa Gordon's 87th birthday marked the first time my moms family has all been in one place since 1995. We had a great Mach thanksgiving dinner and watched some good competitive Pac 10 Football. Since I went to Washington State, who had an unfortunate Apple cup loss. My sister and Grandpa are USC Trojans, my cousin is a UC Berkeley Golden Bear and my uncle is a UCLA bruin. UCLA and USC came out on top this weekend, but it was still fun to watch the games with the fam! I feel it was a success and enjoyed everyones company, hopefully it wont be 11 years before that happens again.

Below is a picture of my cousins and I at the last family reunion located at my Family's beach resort on Marrowstone Island called the Beach Cottages of Marrowstone, AKA. Ecologic Place:



I am currently in the hunt for a new place to live, there are a few things moving me to do this. The first is that I would really like to have more space, the one bedroom with tiny kitchen and bathroom are starting to close in on me. The place isn't bad at all, and is actually very well located. Unfortunately the walls are pretty thin and I am relatively sensitive to noise when trying to sleep. More of an issue however is that I feel bad making noise, loud movies, rocking music when working from home etc. I have been looking all over the Bay Area and it quickly becomes obvious that its a much better deal to partner up to find a place to live, so I have found a roommate (I cannot disclose publicly yet due to possible sensitivity resulting from their current living arrangement.) This has made possible many new possible places.

The one currently at the top of the list appears in the image below:



Lots of space, vaulted ceilings etc. Unfortunately it is kind of far from the areas I am used to, and would require a little more of an adventurous spirit on my part to get to know another area. We shall see as I am going hunting once again tonight.

There are a few more interesting happenings in process, but I don't want to spill the beans until they are fully cooked. However I have finally figured out my Holiday plans which includes a lengthy stay in Washington for anyone interested in meeting up for a brew. I will be landing in Seattle at 12:35 on December 20th, and heading back to the Bay area January 3rd. I would like to do some skiing during this time and will be working from home on the days that people can't keep me entertained. Someone please let me know what is going on for new years, it will be fun to see my Pullman crew again for those of you that will be around.

Happy thanksgiving everyone!

Mom and I at the restraunt in Pasadena:

Weather for Berkeley, CA 54°F Light Rain. I'm starting to feel like the Northwest followed me down to the bay area. I have spent a lot of time on this whole AJAX thing over the last couple weeks. I read a book by fellow OSAFer Matthew Eernisse called "Build your own AJAX Web Applications". This has been a great resource and again I will be plugging my Sticky Notes Online program. As this is a PHP only web server, I did all of this with a very simple PHP/mySQL backend. You can now sign up and go to town, unfortunately I haven't had the time to implement any of the cool customization ideas I have had. Sorry IE folks... Firefox compatibility only.

Tonight I watched a movie called Death of a President, which basically outlines a story that takes place in the future involving President Bush being assassinated. It was a very disturbing movie with amazing realism and now has me fully convinced that the only way these last few years could have been worse, was if Cheney was in fact running the show on his own.

I don't have any entertaining stories for this one except that I bought new sheets and towels, and I slept on the sheets without washing them. This gave me an unfortunate rash on my face for most of today.. and inspired me to go up and do a few loads of laundry. Also for anyone interested in the progress we are making at OSAF, go ahead and check out the latest free online version of Cosmo 0.5.. Please report any issues to me and I will make sure they get into the bug list. Next week I will be in Los Angeles for a family reunion type thing, it will be very nice to see family who live far far away. CHOW.

Oh, and one more thing- My sister came to visit a couple weeks ago and we took a photo.

To start off, I spent a few hours today writing the first stage of a web application I call "Your Stickys". It's basically a way to take all those sticky notes you put on your fridge and put them online. My next step is to add a user login/account creation page in front of it using a Django Project and do the db/xhr calls to store and retrieve each of the events.. which I have commented into the code for when the backend is ready. At that point it will become a public and useful sticky notes program. There are many feature enhancements that I plan to add, such as named multiple tabs for organization etc.

If you would like to view this project its HERE: "Your Sticky Notes".

As you can see I wrote it all from scratch. I have been given the impression that learning theses basics of how DOM and CSS work and the way that JavaScript interacts with them is the first important step. When I feel extremely comfortable with this (almost there) I will tack on some tasks such as doing similar things but using the DOJO framework as a crutch. Any feedback is welcome.

Bart made my list on Monday, and here goes the saga so I can get it off my chest. I arrive at the BART a little earlier than I usually do and relatively quickly hop on a San Francisco/Daly city bound train. This is cool, however as we past West Oakland I start hearing some chatter on the loud speaker then WHAM, in the middle of the Trans Bay Tube we come to a screeching halt. After about an hour of sitting there, we are finally notified that the train in front of us is STUCK, very sorry for the inconvenience, fixing the problem, blah blah blah. Okay so finally they announce, WE CAN'T FIX IT.. so were are taking you back to West Oakland. As we arrive back in West Oakland we see trains heading out towards San Francisco.. odd. ANNOUNCEMENT: We fixed the problem, but you are now on a Pittsburg Bay Point train. Okay.. so I run out of the subway and start going down the stairs with a huge mass of people who are also late, and irritated by the whole situation. As I am going down the stairs I briefly look up or back or something and SLAM into the guy in front of me, who decides that he is feeling rushed and doesn't want to go down the stairs. He literally turns around and starts telling this huge mob of people that they are rushing him... so a large black man in super bag clothes shoves him up against the wall, and lets him know that we don't appreciate his attitude. The rest of the story is really just me finally getting to work and telling everyone in my office that it was a very irritating morning. WOOHOO gotta love that commute. :)

Finally, a glimpse from the weekend in Monteray.

Not everyday, everything can go your way. I have had many, many good days in a row and Thursday decided to break my winning streak. Wednesday I worked from Chico and we successfully released Cosmo 0.5, hooray! Wednesday night I had a wonderful dinner at an Italian place with Miss Megan, followed by a very important meeting which I attended. I then become entrenched in reading and attempting a deployment cycle with the Ruby on Rails Capistrano tool. This took me till about 1:00 am PST. At this point I stood up yawned and considered my options. ONE: to jump in my car, crank up the tunes and drive 2.5 hours to the bay area. TWO: Clim into a warm bed and crash until 6:00 AM and try to drive to Berkeley then. The issue was that I had a staff meeting to attend at OSAF in the city at 10:45 and I certainly did not want to miss that.

I was overcome with my sleepiness and crawled into bed.. (Mistake number one). For some reason I was unable to get any REM, so when 6 am rolled around I was basically still awake from the night before (Don't you hate those nights...) I quickly jumped up said goodbye and threw my stuff in my car and took off. This is when it all began, as I was leaving the Chico city limits an F-150 with some guy in a cowboy hat decided to pass where the two lanes merged to one. As I was much ahead of him and had no room I did not slow or yield and he decided to pass anyways with an on coming train of cars seconds away. As we approached the cars he yanked his wheel and literally came whiskers away from slamming into me, so I veered away. This would have been no problem except for the fact that the road care in Chico leaves something to be desired and this is when my right front tire dropped into the biggest pothole I have ever seen, and the double whammy was that it was cleverly covered in hay so no one could see it! The shoulder has been booby trapped I screamed! I reminded me of the tiger trapping scene is Swiss Family Robinson's right before the attack of the pirates.

This hugely jarring motion kind of smacked my delirious state with shock. As I pulled back on the road to continue I noticed the wheel pulling right and jittering uncontrollably. My stomach sunk, this is the same experience I had the first day I moved to Berkeley when I was run into a concrete divider by an unruly taxi cab on a mission of tourist destruction.

I made my way to a farm driveway and pulled over to take a look. The car looked undamaged, but the tire was flat as a pancake.. sort of reminded me of a inflatable pool floatie that had been sitting on the lawn for days. I stood there in the pouring rain at 6:15 am realizing that I had finally hit the odds. This hand had been lost to the house.

After figuring out how to use the pump jack and going through the whole tire replacing riggamarole for the first time in my entire life, I was back on the road, covered with black goo and not feeling so great. This experience could only be worsened by the fact that when I hit the 80 from 505, the traffic was backed up farther than I had ever seen before. When I finally inched my way to Valleho I saw the sign saying Berkeley - 147 minutes. I DID NOT HAVE 147 MINUTES. Anyways I continued on and finally made it to my house, ran up stairs to shower and change as I didn't want to show up to work as a raggamuffin covered in grease, and headed to the bart.. which I missed as I entered the station. Finally, somehow I managed to roll into my meeting at 10:48am 3 minutes late. Not bad eh?

The way I figure it, I have another few hundred days of goodness ahead of me.. and thats a relatively small price to pay.

Today I am going to goto the Aquarium in Monterey Bay, then I will return to finally send my resume off to OSAF for the Web UI Developer job. Cross the fingers! Being able to work on the Cosmo UI all day with mde would be a dream come true. CHEERS!