It appears that the Holiday Season is now officially upon us. I have my radio turned to KOIT 96.5 FM for my continuous stream of cheer. This has prompted me to take a look around, firm up my Christmas list and just wish instead of presents.. I could convince everyone to meet up in Hawaii on the beach to spend Christmas morning toasting to the waves with a rum mojito. However, I am extremely excited to visit Washington to see my friends and family. Hopefully I can avoid any of those power outages and 100 MPH winds I have been hearing about.

ALSO, a special shout to my little sister who will be celebrating her 20th Birthday the 17th and apparently survived her finals down at USC.

It doesn't look like I will be mailing out any kind of Christmas card this year, things have just been too hectic for me to pay attention to that kind of detail but I sincerely appreciate all of you who had that kind of dedication. JUST KNOW -- I wish you all a wonderful Holiday and anything else that I would have put in a Christmas card to update you.. is thoroughly explained in the past few blog entries!

I would like to take this moment to reflect a bit upon graduating, moving, getting job, blah blah to think about the great time I had at WSU. As I finally received a big compressed package of images from Mr. Kevin I found a few cool ones of the dudes, Miss you both!







These pictures remind me of Kevin's wedding day. We went with him to Pasco to pick up black socks for everyone who had forgotten to bring their own.. and white socks with a tux and black shoes looks really silly. But before we went Jeff and I decided to call around and find an old school barber shop to get professional straight razor shaves. We stood in line, and took turns getting layers of hot towels on our faces etc. Finally when Kevin was up we realized that we had less than 20 minutes to goto an ATM (they were cash only) and then get Kevin home to get ready to get married. Of course the timing didn't quite work out and we made the poor guy late to his own pre-wedding show. When we rolled in everyone was already dressed and ready to goto the wedding place so the three of us ran down stairs and threw our tuxes on as fast as humanly possible. Jeff and Kevin were kind of bleeding from the super close shave on their faces and we were worried it would show in the wedding pictures, but apparently it worked out!

Anywhoo, I have been thinking lately about this touted iPhone that apple is rumored to be releasing. At first I was really into the idea but now that I think about it, I really don't use my iPod all that much. If this phone is simply based on the idea of a really cool combination between phone and ipod I will be disappointed. I will only be satisfied when full on mobile video conferencing, internet browsing and maybe even mini OSX so I can write code on the device. Please Apple, I beg you - blow all of our minds with this iPhone creature.

This week I spent more time watching Professor Crockford clear up the fog of my brain that is JavaScript/DOM.. want to watch?. Going through my AOP/Meta Programming learning curve I finally had a serious "AHA!" moment while talking to Matthew Eernisse about this concept of dynamically re-arranging your javascript objects, methods and variables and its power as a programming tool. It came when I saw the ability to execute a function from within the scope of an object that you are specifying. This is all going to come in very handy when I implement the performance testing code in Cosmo. I will simply prepend a method to call the performance start timer where I want. All who are interested will be able to see it in action ASAP.


I watched this the other day: ALIENS FOR SURE and I cannot wait to meet them, imagine the kind of hardware they probably have - lookout Apple.

If anyone wants to see more of my apartment and pictures of OSAF, feel free to check them out HERE.

Much more to say, but it will have to wait, 3 AM is starting to feel like 100 lbs of books on my eye lids.

SEE:

Many of you have been involved in the drama of the past few weeks. To recap: After 6 months working at OSAF I found myself in the position of deciding between a very cool full time job at GoFish.com, which is a very cool startup with their focus on online media. The position was a good fit and the people were very friendly etc. I also had a contract extension until April at OSAF. I am deeply involved in some very cool projects here, but the position is a contract and leaves some uncertainty. I went through huge amounts of deliberation and talked to many different people about what the best route was for me. Ultimately I was waiting for either place to show me a sign and make the decision for me. This did not happen, and finally it came to the point where a decision needed to be made for the sake of both of these organizations and my personal peace. I decided to stay at OSAF until April and finish what I'm doing here. There are many reasons, but mainly it just felt like the right thing to do. After I had settled on this idea, I emailed everyone who needed to know and went home to recuperate. The next morning OSAF called to let me know that they had found a full time position for me. I am extremely happy about the outcome and am very excited to keep moving forward on my work.

On to the next subject, I MOVED. Yeah, it wasn't easy and UHAUL was a nightmare. We spent the entire day Saturday moving two small apartments into one much bigger one. My cousin and I are sharing the very cool victorian I posted a picture of a few weeks ago. At the end of the exhausting day UHAUL wanted their truck back by 6:42 PM with a full tank of gas. When I left to return it, I felt their was plenty of time.. but somehow I got turned around and wound up on the 24. To get back to the 580 I had to go through Berkeley and found myself in that awful mess Berkeley calls Ashby Ave. This took me up until about 10 minutes before closing. I finally arrived at 7:00 as they were closing the gate to leave, but fortunately after alerting me of his frustration they allowed me to leave it there for the night. However, the tank was not FULL SO to avoid getting massively charged they *LET* me return to Richmond the next morning at 9:00 AM to fill it up. Anyways the thing went well and now after a week of organizing I am ready to show the world some pictures I took with my new Sony Cybershot 10.1 megapixel camera. I finally got tired of wanting to take pictures of all kinds of things, and having to rely on other people to take and send me them in some reasonable amount of time. This means that there will be lots more interesting pictures on here for the world to see, in SUPER HIGH RES!

Here is the livingroom:



Here is the kitchen:



Here is the hall:



and here is the Office:



I know you are all dying to see the bedrooms, but mine wasn't ready to be see by the public till last night when I finally cleaned and did all my laundry, but I will post a few more when I get home tonight!

I am spending the weekend in Chico to help Meg celebrate the finishing of her projects and my new life.. it should be a pretty good time.

I had a dream the other night that I had this small metal tool shaped like a C02 cartridge that had a button on it. I woke up in a hospital bed after being rescued floating in the ocean by an alien space ship. The little item had a button on it that would turn on this interesting beam of light, which I eventually found out that I could use to heal injuries and wounds. After traveling the world helping people the battery died, and since it was an alien device I didn't have a compatible charger.. the frustrations of technology!

Off to lunch.

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.