http://www.t0asted.com/blog/index.php http://www.t0asted.com/blog/index.php?entry=entry091228-142257
This year I'm heading to Utah, Montana and Tahoe for some snowboarding action followed by a big move from Oakland into San Francisco at the end of January. I really like the east bay, and I have lived here since I moved to California in 3 different places. The east bay has so many great places to eat, street parking in front of where you live etc. but as I am still working at Slide and the bay bridge continues to get incrementally harder to deal with and soon more expensive Meg and I decided that the city made the most sense.

We found a cottage on Russian Hill, which doesn't seem to be your traditional San Francisco living situation but I feel that it's the best of both worlds. In the city, but without anyone above, next door or below you sharing the wall. Both of my previous places (before the current Oakland place) had people above and below which I think everyone can agree becomes irritating at one point or another. A big concern was dealing with the city laundry places and lugging around big piles of clothes, but that was also alleviated by a washer and dryer in the place!

And so I am sad to see my little family in Oakland head off in different directions, I think it will be a good move for everyone.

The holidays were a blast, so much that today I am sick as a dog and as I am probably going to be laying in bed all day I realized that t0asted.com was pretty dark looking, so I brightened it up, removed the jaiku box (which is a service that I stopped using quite a while ago) and decided to post an update.

This winter is really centered around snowboarding for me, I have updated a bunch of my gear (thanks Santa) and have had three trial days up at Sugar Bowl and Alpine Meadows to get a good feel for my new setup. I found that changing my stance to be a bit more open really helped my balance and alleviate the fatigue in my right quads when riding on cat tracks. Wednesday night we head to Salt Lake City (my first time skiing there) to check out Snowbird and few other SLC ski destinations. We are aware and prepared for the lacking night life (even on new years) but, I hope that we ski so hard each day that by the time midnight rolls around we are ready to crash out.

Jan 7 I will be taking a crew up to the old stomping grounds in Big Sky Montana. I am incredibly excited to get back to that mountain as it boasts some of the most amazing views and terrain I have ever seen. Hopefully I will be fit enough that I don't disappoint myself (It will be hard to compete with the former me that had been boarding everyday for 2 months).

Now I think it is time for some scrambled eggs, and a movie.

Happy Holidays!]]> http://www.t0asted.com/blog/index.php?entry=entry090312-145614
I walk down the street looking for the unmarked front window of my massage place until I find the blue glass and head up the elevator. It opens into a wide marble floored room with a fountain and important looking people mulling around. When I get to the window of where I get my massage there is a line.

A person informs me that only one of the employees showed up today, I remember that had been a problem.

I wait and wait and more people start showing up and cutting my in line, so I pull out my laptop to get some work done.

A guy comes up to me and asks if he can check it out, as its a new one and he hasn't seen one yet. He is looking at it and I am distracted my something and he slowly starts walking over towards this curtain where I see another guy walking towards him and pulling out cash. I am about to get jacked.

I quickly cruise over to the guy without making a scene as as soon as he reaches out for the cash I find myself holding a dead cd rom drive from a computer I had in high school. I smash him over the head and take the laptop, the man with the cash runs.

I decide to leave the place, what a bad taste in my mouth.

As I get in my car and start heading down the street I notice a large basket of green bouncy balls, so I pull over to fill up my pockets, one never knows when they may need one, I also realize that I have a gun in my pocket, this must be a dream I think.

A few minutes later I am parking at a construction site that I am farmilliar with, but not sure why or how. I am unhappy about the state of the construction and start climbing around on the infrastructure. A fight breaks out, and I realize that I am able to jump off the ground as if I am on a giant trampoline, so I jump way up high. The construction workers congregate under me making dares that I can't survive a jump to the ground from where I am.. I don't know if I can or not, I am not yet able to control the bouncing power of mine.

The leader of the crew gets antsy and starts climbing up to get me, others begin to follow.

To stop this from turning into a bad situation, I distract the crew my throwing hundreds of green bouncy balls at them from my pockets, they are really into bouncy balls.

The leader isn't swayed and continues to climb, so I shoot him. He falls and bounces many times before he lands in the back of a dump truck, apparently I can control the bouncing power.

This is my construction site now, I wonder what I will do with it.]]> http://www.t0asted.com/blog/index.php?entry=entry090309-183529
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.
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Saturday we all golfed Lake Chabot (the three above including Mikeal Rogers). One of the nicest golf days I have had since I moved to California EXCEPT for how darn early it gets dark. I really could have forged on for another 3 hours in the perfect temperature. I have some pictures on my phone that I will be uploading to picasaweb.

Sunday we hiked around for Cronkhite, which is one of the most scenic places I know of in the bay area. You are up in the hills on an old army base looking back towards the golden gate and down at the beach. On a nice day, I can't think of a place I would rather be.

Lots of blogging about Windmill and Mozmill going on, currently writing some tests for the Firefox Worker Threads feature which will be released in Firefox 3.1.

Now that I am dilirious and just flat out ranting, life is good, I can't wait for snow boarding season. I am considering the Epic Pass which would allow me to ski some serious pow in Colorado... $89 bucks each way to Denver, is it worth it?

Ahh, now the little duck is bouncing on my dock -- apparently it's time to go blog about some serious stuff over at my grown up blog.

Cheers!]]> http://www.t0asted.com/blog/index.php?entry=entry080918-191914
Anywhoo, the backpack contained my MB Pro, passport, checkbook, keys, and a voter registration form filled out with my address.

Pretty much the most inconvenient thing I have dealt with in a very long time. Since it was the only VW car key I had, we had my car towed to the dealership which took 5 days to get a new key and get the car programmed. I had all the locks changed on the house, and changed every single password.

I ordered a new backpack and lanyard for my keys and am slowly putting my bag back together. Obviously until I get my birth certificate etc I won't be leaving the country without a passport.. so that's on my list.

If you happen to find my stuff in a dumpster in San Francisco, feel free to give me a call - I would appreciate to have it back nonetheless.

This was certainly a reality check, even though our bags were out of view in the trunk.. people are getting desperate out there as the economy gets worse (per my last post). I hope this keeps someone out there from leaving their stuff in their car and having it disappear. The other amazing thing I noticed was that twice in two days I watched a toe person get into a car, and with the right tools it took all of 3 minutes to get the door open without a key. Makes me basically never want to leave anything in my car again.

As a wise sage once said, "A lock is an agreement between two gentlemen." And that is absolutely the truth.]]> http://www.t0asted.com/blog/index.php?entry=entry080918-190334
Before we start this argument, please read the following:
http://www.barackobama.com/issues/econo ... l-business
http://www.johnmccain.com/Images/Issues ... iefing.pdf

Take a moment and think about which one looks nicer, then think over the content and have line numbers ready. It may also help you to go look around on the Internet and collect some real data for each of those points you picked out to support why you think they would actually happen. I would hate to take 6 seconds on Google and make you look silly by bringing up a CNN article about how John Mccain has lied about your specific point 10 times on national TV and voted against it 3 times.

If you are banking on the media to give you good information, you are going to be sorely disappointed when you take the time to go some research.

Did you vote for Bush last time, or the time before that? And you want to have this conversation, really?

I usually hate to talk, blog, or distribute my opinion about Politics on the Internet. However, this is my personal blog now, where I can rant and rave about whatever I want.. and I am yet to see any kind of factual information provided by anyone including John Mccain himself that makes me think he would fix anything broken that I care about in this country. Feel free to rebuttal in the comments.

Cheers.]]> http://www.t0asted.com/blog/index.php?entry=entry080904-154709
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]]> http://www.t0asted.com/blog/index.php?entry=entry080801-142520
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.]]> http://www.t0asted.com/blog/index.php?entry=entry080627-212626
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.]]> http://www.t0asted.com/blog/index.php?entry=entry080621-194711

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.]]>