Life, Photo Firsts (Austin, Max, Yubin, Michael), KoL, wedding

Posted on September 1, 2014 by Alan V

As it’s the end of yet another 4-month interval, life‘s photo journal and photo stats pages have been updated. The stats update includes stats for Pittsburgh people as well, so here’s some photo firsts:

First photo of both Austin and Max:

April 26, 2012 at Yubin’s apartment after Greg and I were invited to their weekly games night.

First photo of Yubin:

Also April 26, 2012. Same place. Same event.

First photo of Michael:

August 9, 2012, also at Yubin’s apartment at a games night.

KoL has been going. I’ve been ascending more and feel like I’ve gotten better at runs (thanks in no small part to the terrible overpoweredness of the Smiths tome). I fell short of a 3 day Heavy Rains run today by less than 20 turns (hit the hedge maze). The run will definitely be under 800 turns. That’s a rather large improvement from what my runs used to be like.

I’m also really enjoying the new path. The path itself isn’t actually that hard… the extra ML granted by the water is actually super beneficial (at least to me, with like 150+ permed skills), and the path-specific skills granted mean turncount goes way, way down by granting an infinite-use fax machine, a banish, a stunner, a deleveller, item drop, a yellow rain, summonable equipment, and more. Crazy.

As far as weddings go, Susannah’s was last weekend. It was a fairly nice wedding and reception… photos of it are up at photos. This means we’re halfway done with weddings now, at least for this summer. I hear that there will another one early next year. So whee for that?

KoL, Boston, wedding, and San Francisco

Posted on August 17, 2014 by Alan V

It’s been an interesting couple of weeks.

I started ascending again in KoL (abandoning my level 52 character). Did a couple Slow and Steady runs while it was in season, and I have to say, I really didn’t dislike its concept as much as I thought it would. The old item restrictions I didn’t really notice (even though like 90% of my “premium” things were unusable since I haven’t bought very much recently), and the 100-adventure-per-day restriction worked really well with my hectic travel schedule…

Two weeekends ago was rlambert’s wedding in Boston. Greg and I flew out Thursday to save on airfare (and to have some time to explore Boston), and had a nice time at the wedding on Saturday. Then, on Sunday, it was home for him and to San Francisco for work for me.

Just got back from San Francisco yesterday, and I’m already gearing up to head to Toronto this week for yet another wedding. A little after that there will be another wedding in Ohio, followed by another wedding in Chicago. It’s going to be an interesting summer. (Well, end of summer, I guess.)

Work had recently moved to a new building, so I got to experience the awesomeness that is sufficient conference room space and awesomely-stocked kitchens (including a Coke freestyle machine). Also the kitchen has Its Its ice cream sandwiches. I had some for breakfast every day. I am so bad. D:

Anyway, as much as I hate travelling, I had a good time in both Boston and San Francisco. Explored some new things around Boston, got to see a lot of people again (in both cities), had a bunch of tasty food, and attended some fun work events.

More photos of the stuffage can be found at http://photos2.alanv.org/.

Life, Washington, Kickstarter

Posted on May 5, 2014 by Alan V

life has been updated. The photo journal is now current to today, and the stats page includes updated photos from the last 4 months. I feel like I should probably add more Pittsburgh people into stats (like Austin, Michael, Yubin, and Max), since I’ve known them for long enough now that stats will actually be somewhat interesting.

In any case, we got back yesterday from our trip to Washington, D.C. Photos are here.

The trip was primarily because Greg wanted to see Eddie Izzard, and the closest place he was performing was Washington. (The tour later added Pittsburgh and Cleveland locations, so we probably didn’t have to make the trip out… but hey, D.C. trip!) Headed out on the Megabus Thursday evening and came back Sunday afternoon.

We stayed with Mark, Greg’s friend from undergrad, and his wife Christine. They had cats. The cats were adorable.

The Eddie Izzard performance itself was pretty awesome. This was my first time seeing him perform, but he was a lot better than previous comedians I’ve seen.

Interesting thing I learned: Apparently the place is not “Washington D.C.” but rather “Washington, D.C.” as it’s the city of Washington in the District of Columbia. For some reason I’d always assumed that the entire place was just the district, whose proper name was “Washington.” (Apparently D.C. was supposed to have had some other cities it in, that either were returned to Virginia or gobbled up by Washington itself? So the entire district is one city, so I’m not entirely off in thinking that.)
Whee.

In any case, we weren’t there too long, so we didn’t really get to see very much. But we did take up a lot of time (most of Saturday afternoon and all of Sunday) seeing the Newseum, which was quite interesting and awesome to visit. Greg and I lamented over the lack of exhibits for editing and layout, but what was there (covering all forms of reporting and media) was well done. I particularly enjoyed the exhibition of Pulitzer-winning photographs. It was also interesting to see front pages from papers from all 50 states. On Friday, the most popular front-page news item seemed to be Spiderman 2 (followed up by Obamacare enrollment articles).

There was also, of course, time spent photographing… in particular, we wandered around the Tidal Basin at night photographing the Washington Monument (unfortunately still closed) and the Jefferson memorial (which apparently has a museum in its base O_o).

The low photo trend continues, with only 644 photos from the trip (representing 911 shutter releases).

In other, totally-unrelated-to-anything stuff, there is a new Kickstarter for art. Because art is awesome. (Also my friend David has art in this anthology.) So you should back it.

Yay for life.

San Francisco, again

Posted on February 22, 2014 by Alan V

I spent the past week in SF for work, and it seems I still can’t get a good travel experience. Last time, I got stuck in Vegas for 12 hours. Having learned that SF arrivals can be at the whim of the weather, I booked my flight into Oakland instead.

The flight itself was fine, and I got in at the expected 9:05 PM. I had booked a Supershuttle because I figured it would be more convenient, and that’s where the trouble started. Called for my shuttle, went to the curb, and waited. 15 minutes later, with no shuttle in sight, I called again and waited on hold for another 10 minutes. Turns out my shuttle had developed a flat tire and the expected pickup time was another 30-60 minutes.

This, obviously, was not good, so I decided to take AirBART and BART into the city instead. Unfortunately, I just missed one while I was on the phone, so I waited another 10 minutes for the next one to leave. Got to the Oakland BART station and found that one of the tracks was out of service, so they were running trains in both directions on a single track, resulting in slower service than usual. I finally made it to the hotel at 10:45 and barely caught the restaurant before the kitchen closed. Sigh.

The trip otherwise was really good. Since the four devs on my team are all in different cities, we’d synced up our visits to meet up. It was the first time the entire team (minus the doc writer, who is in Seattle) was in the same place. Woo.

Monday was a holiday, that none of us had realized before we booked, so we all spent the day individually wandering. I’d tried to sync up with South Bay folks, but no one responded, so I made arrangements to meet up with SF friends for food and karaoke instead. Unfortunately, I was called in for a P0 around 5, so I missed karaoke and instead met up with Zeke and Ian at a bar for food around 8:30.

Wednesday evening was a team happy hour. Over a period of 5 hours, I had four small sangria pitchers (about 6-7 drinks), a couple of glasses of wine, and about 5 cocktails at a beautiful high-up bar called The View. Was fine afterward, and didn’t have a hangover the next morning. I think this might be a new record for myself as far as alcohol goes. Let’s not do this again for a long time, but it’s good to know I still have my tolerance.

The rest of the week was work and usual group dinners, except for Friday when we had a team trip to Napa and Sonoma for wine tasting. That was tasty.

More photos will be added to photos at some point.

I’m currently in Lake Havasu with my parents. The most interesting part of the city is that they purchased, moved, and rebuilt one of the London Bridges. Unfortunately the city itself isn’t all that interesting, especially given that pretty much everything closes down after 6 PM. But we’re enjoying the weather and change of scenery, at least.

Whee things.