Category Archives: Life

San Francisco, again

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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.

Adventures in house hunting

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We signed a contract on Friday and spent most of Saturday afternoon going to see houses with our now-official agent.

The first one we saw needed a *lot* of work. The bathrooms were rather old and hideous (and had tile coming off the ceiling), the front porch was having problems and was cracking and sagging, the kitchen needed updating, and the carpet was kind of sketchy. Cheap-ish, but definitely easy to pass over.

The second one we saw was huge and had a super-modern kitchen with granite, stainless steel, and the nicest fridge I’ve ever seen. The bedrooms were all large and one of the bathrooms had been renovated and looked really nice. The biggest surprise, however, was when we went down the stairs to the basement, opened the door that wasn’t to the garage, and found a full two-room apartment, complete with its own kitchen, shower, toilet, and entrance on the side of the house. It was cheap for what it was (especially given the complete apartment with the house), but the location (and lack of a back yard thanks to the hill) made it reasonably easy to pass over as well.

The last one we saw I had been excited about from the listing online, and the house did not disappoint. The bathrooms were fully renovated and so amazingly nice. The house itself had central air and forced air heating, really good quality hardwood floors, and updated wiring throughout the house. It also had a huge backyard, really nice bedrooms, and space for me to have an office on the third floor (which was also really nicely done). Its only real downsides were the lack of covered parking (but it had off-street parking) and distance from things we care about.
I spent the rest of the evening and this morning worrying about the house and wondering if we should make an offer on it or risk losing it. It had been on the market already for 2 months with no offers, so it seemed fairly safe to wait on, but I was concerned that we could lose it and not find anything remote comparable again (given that all the other houses we’ve seen so far have needed significantly more work than this one). Still, given that we’d only seen 8 houses total and were therefore at the beginning of our search in a slow market, it didn’t really make sense to jump on it. But it still didn’t stop me from worrying.

In the end, the problem was solved for us, as our agent called this evening and told us someone else had put an offer on the house, to see what we wanted to do. The result was a rather strong, “Don’t do anything now, and wait and see what happens” sentiment, and made the decision to potentially pass up this house much easier. (Neither of us was willing to jump on the house tonight, which is what would have had to happen if we didn’t want to risk losing it. So fate kind of forced our hand.)
Our agent also sent us examples of comparable listings sold in the last 6 months that did a lot to assuage my concerns, since there were many well-priced houses on the list that were also nicely updated and had many of the important features of this house.

So it’s been an interesting hunt so far. Things will continue more in earnest after I return from my San Francisco trip, and we will hopefully find something awesome.

Life, games, TV shows

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Life goes. Rather busily, in fact. It hadn’t occurred to me how busily until Chloe asked about dinner plans last Sunday and I had to stop before automatically responding that I was free “any evening”. My schedule now consists of climbing two evenings a week, board games one evening a week, and Tartan on Monday afternoons and all day Sunday, in addition to other random things that come up (like dinner plans, impromptu board gaming, or parties).

The benefit of all of this, at least, is that I now am guaranteed to leave the house at least once every 48 hour period. It’s a big change from a few months ago where I would often not even change out of pajamas most days, but really nice. (Yeah, yeah… working from home makes you lazy. :P)

For Christmas, we acquired the new board games Ticket to Ride, Yspahan, Hey That’s My Fish, Bananagrams, and Word-A-Round. Euphoria also arrived recently. Each of these (except for the new Euphoria) have been played many, many times. Yay for new board games.
(There was a mishap with The Agents where I both entered the wrong shipping address, and the package also didn’t arrive at the wrong address… so I need to figure out whether it’s worth my time and money to hunt down a new copy of the game. Le sigh.)

I received the first three seasons of The Walking Dead for Christmas and have watched through the first season and half of the second. It’s a really, really well done show, and I can see why it gets all of the acclaim it does. It provides a really character-centric focus on the zombie apocalypse (much like World War Z [the book] provides a global view of the disaster). I’ve also finished through season 4 of Supernatural and should start season 5 at some point. At least all of these DVDs are getting some use. :)

The hunt for houses has begun. It’s looking like houses with our constraints in the neighborhoods we want are going to run between $350,000 and $450,000… a bit more than I had expected. It’s not like we can’t afford that, but it just feels weird to be spending so much on a house. We went to two open houses last weekend on the opposite ends of the spectrum (a modern 4-bedroom house by CMU at ~$470k and a townhouse in Squirrel Hill at ~$280k), so we’re getting a better idea of what we can get for the money, at least. At some point we should figure out financing and find an actual agent to work with. Argh I wish buying a house was easier.

Work… has been work. In general, I tend to come back from breaks feeling like I want to quit my job and just travel, rather than feeling refreshed. This was particularly true coming back from this Christmas break, and it feels like I still haven’t gotten back into the swing of things three weeks in. I’m stressing out about really minor things, irrationally irritated at bugs, and generally feel like I’m getting less done than I should be doing. Sigh.

Life, Christmas, New Year’s

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Well, we’re back. It was a fun break with trips to Ohio and Toronto. Life has been updated, with both stats and photo journal updates.

Haven’t done a photo dump in a while.









Toronto photos can be found at photos.

Happy new year, everyone! :D

Philadelphia!

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My photo journal has gotten an update to bring it current. Not too much has happened in the past month, except for a trip!

Greg and I went to Philadelphia on the Amtrak last weekend. It was an excellent trip and we saw both the old city and historic sites, as well as the Western part of the city with parks and the university. Philadelphia is a rather beautiful city, and is very walkable too, which is nice.

We took the Amtrak last Thursday starting early in the morning, and it was uneventful. It’s funny how “reasonable” the Amtrak cafe car prices are to me now… $7.25 for a wrap is actually not an unfair price to pay. Maybe it means I’m used to eating better food, or am less concerned about food expenditures in general, now?

We spent the first full day in Philly (Friday) visiting the historic sites with the assumption that Saturday would be busier due to being a weekend. But apparently some schools were in town Friday for a trip (I guess Veteran’s Day weekend is a good time for those?), so everything ended up being super busy anyway, and it was fortunate that we got Independence Hall tour tickets before 9:30. (Literally right after we got ours, a huge swarm of students and teachers descended upon the ticket counter.)

Unfortunately, we didn’t get to take the city hall tour, because they sold out of tickets by the time we got there, so we instead wandered around and had cheesesteak for dinner. Apparently there are two “competing” places for cheesesteak in the city: Pat’s and Geno’s. Pat’s is the “original” cheesesteak, while Geno’s advertises itself as the “best”.


But, really, there was no competition. Geno’s meat tasted fatty and greasy while Pat’s was nice and meaty and flavorful. Pat’s fries were deliciously crisp and potato-y, while Geno’s tasted like eating crispy bits of nothing. Even the peppers were significantly better at Pat’s… their peppers were nice and flavorful and gave just right when you bit into them, while Geno’s seemed under-ripe and under-marinated. Geno’s wins barely for their bread, which doesn’t get as soggy with the meat juices, but it wasn’t enough to really matter. I didn’t dislike the bread at Pat’s anyway.


Still, at $9.50/sandwich and $4.50 for fries, it’s extremely unlikely that I’ll be back to either place, even if I visit Philly again. Pat’s had a good sandwich, sure, but not $14 good.
Afterward, we got to do some nice night photography of the Eastern river.

On Saturday we wandered West from our hotel and explored the museum district and library and park and the river and UPenn. The library (at least the central branch) gives library tours as well as tours of its rare books section, and both are worth going to.

The leaves were also changing color, so it was an excellent time to wander the park and museum district.

The train back was on Sunday, and that was mostly uneventful as well (minus some signal trouble that took 40 minutes to resolve). We went to the Reading Terminal Market in the morning for breakfast (which was at a nice, but kind of overpriced, diner in the building), and I also had the unfortunate experience of wanting to buy food from a vendor, being offered a free sample from them, and deciding to walk away instead. Seriously, how do you manage to make such flavorless jambalaya? I was really looking forward to it too. :\

More photos are here.

In other things, work has been full of super stress lately. I guess in a lot of ways I’m the most senior person on the team now, and so a lot of stuff falls to me, and I kind of wish we had a more experienced or senior person directing everything. I don’t know. I’m kind of a terrible leader. :\ Bah.

I guess I’m doing reasonably at my job from a technical and productivity aspect, but I wish I was better at big picture and organizational things.

(I also wish people would stop filing us huge bugs and issues the week of feature freeze when we’re already scrambling to finish up everything for the release, but that’s not something I have control over.)

Also, as far as followup for CrashPlan seeding goes, it ended in great success. I sent back the drive, they received it and uploaded the data, I left my computer to sync up with the servers overnight, and voilà. My 1 TB of data is now online and able to be restored at my leisure. I’ve been syncing my photos and general updates since then every evening (since my personal laptop is not usually connected to the internet), and it seems to be working fine. Yay for online backups!