On Mountain Views

One of the most enjoyable things about working for Microsoft is the fact that if you live in the town of Redmond and take 520 to work, on a clear day you can see Mount Rainier just as you exit the freeway to go to work. It is not just another mountain off in the distance but a enormous ghostly projection in the sky at the end of the exit ramp. It is a sight I never got tired of and definitely something that is missing in the Silicon Valley.

From my old place in Sunnyvale, it is really hard to tell if you even live in a valley. You can never really see the mountains because they are always blocked by someone's house or a tree. In the places it is clear, smog or clouds will often block your view and to be honest the mountains that are viewable look small.

At Stanford, if you hike up to "the Dish", you effectively climb the coastal mountains and can view back across into the East Bay. You get a real sense of the size of this valley and a good deal of exercise. Everyone talks about running up to the Dish, but be careful, its really steep so it cannot be good on your knees.

From Code Green Networks on the 9th floor of the Sun building, we have an almost 360 degree view of the valley. From my cube, you can see the southern part of the Bay on a good day. We work in an observation tower in the middle of the valley and our view is not blocked because there are so few other tall towers in the area. I've never had a window at work before, but it is nice to be able to stare off and watch people go about their lives. There is something very unnatural about being up that high and viewing nature (or Suburbia, depending on your point of view).

One thing that is great about Campbell is that on the drive home from work down San Tomas, you can see the mountains just behind Los Gatos very clearly. I'm close enough that they seem very large and imposing and you get the sense that you are a lot closer to nature then you were in any of the previously mentioned places. Every time I drive home, I tell myself, I should go for a hike in those mountains (and eventually, I will). I'm not going to pretend I don't live in the suburbs, but I'd also like to think that because I live someone near the edge of the valley, I'm not in the core of the concrete.

So alas, if you were hoping the would end with me describing how to see Mt. Rainier from Campbell, you will be sorely disappointed. However, if you've lived here all your life and have never taken the time to see the Valley from anything other than a plane, you really should make an effort to walk to a viewing point and check things out. In spite of all this, the next time I'm in Seattle (and it is not cloudy), I will assuredly enjoy my view of Rainier.

Catching up...

So much has happened since the last time I posted here. I was tempted to just ignore the past few weeks and move on in life, but I have moved South to Campbell, CA and correspondingly have a new ISP, commute, roommate, and set of neighbors.

We'll see how fast AT&T changes my IP address, but if they change it faster than Comcast, I might have a lot of problems keeping my site online. Who knows how that will go. So far, they seem to be about as fast as Comcast, but ask me again in a few months. I also have a new closet to hold my webserver.

This new place has a lot of "character" and by that I mean it has a lot of characters living here. It also has very thin walls, so you really feel like all your neighbors are living in the same place as you without them actually living there. I was informed that the last guy to live in my place lasted 3 months, we'll see if I make it that long.

Baseball season is also more or less over. It is almost time to enter the dark ages and live through life without the only sport where there is a game every day. The plus side we are in football season.

The California weather has taken an abrupt turn towards fall complete with clouds and even a few drops of rain last weekend. September went by very quickly mostly because I spent half of it looking for a new place and half of it moving. I'm happy to only have one set of keys again.

I'm also on the border of another birthday. I have to admit, the previous year didn't go quite as fast as when I was in college.

I had a lot of bloggable thoughts in the gap between ISPs, and maybe some of those thoughts will appear in future blog posts, but for now you are stuck with a quick hit summary post. I hope this Christmas card of a post finds you and your families doing well.

My fridge has a drinking problem and on Moving

It has been suggested to me by my friend Adam that my fridge does in fact have a drinking problem. I can see how he might get this incorrect notion in his head. There is a 3 week old bottle of chardonnay. There is a 6 pack of Smirnoff Ice, 2 ales and 12 pack of Hefeweizen. There are 15 Coors Lights in the vegetable drawer. There is almost a gallon of tonic water on the door. There are two bags of ice in the freezer and 3 limes in the fridge. These are facts, I cannot deny them.

There also is a very limited amount of consumable food in there. In the fruit drawer, I have a weeks worth of Gala apples and a cantelope. There are my left overs for the week, a serving of fried rice and a couple meals of string-bean chicken. Andrew has 5 frozen lasagnas in the fridge.

So maybe he has a point.

I'm going to be moving soon, which caused me to really freak out over the weekend. But today I saw some places that seemed to be reasonable places to live, so that has given me some hope. I now realize how much stuff I have to move. It is going to take several trips and is probably going to be a multi-day thing. I'm going to have to move all that stuff in my fridge, but I'll see what I can do about that.

Related to that is the fact that this blog is going to have to be down for a while because of the fact that it is served off an old PC I hide behind my TV. This probably means about a week where www.makethebestofwhatsaround.com will be off the air. I hope this doesn't cause anyone too much pain :).

On the death of a friend and empty bottles

I always tend to feel sad around this time of year. College football is in full force and the NFL is just around the corner with the bulk of the season starting tomorrow. This of course leads to the demise of my summer love of baseball. For 5 months of the year, I watch a game every single day and follow every move of the Giants. However, when September rolls around, baseball dissolves into a different game.

When teams can expand their rosters beyond 25 guys, the game turns into an American League pitching change fest. Also, by September, a lot of teams are out of the playoff chase including the Giants this year. These two things combined with the rise of football turns my attention away from baseball witout a clean breakup. All of my weekends turn to a violent 11 on 11 game, leaving only the weekdays if anything for baseball.

For me, baseball is a synonym for summer, warm weather, and relaxing times. Because of this, it is always sad to see baseball season go. To make things worse, because of some of the above mentioned issues, baseball doesn't go in a clean way. It just withers away into the playoffs and dies. Baseball playoffs are always entangled in football games and other interests.

All I'm asking for is a more proper burial long before football brings in autumn.

You can't judge a party by the amount of alcohol consumed, but there sure are a lot of empty bottles in my kitchen. I would have to say the Apple Long Island party was a success and it proves there is always room for good old fashioned college parties in spite of trying to act professional and sophisticated.

Apologies for a lack of structure for today's post. I definitely deviated from a good 5 paragraph essay and my thoughts are jumping all over the place. I'm too tired to proofread, so hopefully you can get the point.

Evite UI Issues and basketball

While planning for a recent party, we decided to go with evite as a mechanism for inviting people. Inviting people via a website is quite useful as it provides you with an easy way to monitor and invite people. It also has advantages over closed systems such as facebook in that if your inviteees are not on the closed system, then they can still be invited if they have an email address. It also has the plus of putting social pressure on people when they find out that all of their friends are going to your party.

One of the biggest pains about evite is the fact that entering your friends involves typing each of their names quoted followed by their email address bracketed by <>'s. If you just type email addresses, then your friends names appear as "genepang" or "gary", which is considerably less beautiful. They offer a way to load your friends from your gmail account (or other free email account), but my gmail account has about 600 entries. I think every person I've every sent email too is placed in the address book. That includes people like the former chairman of the UCLA CS department, Sebastian Thrun, members of the clergy, lab partners from UCLA, expired Stanford email accounts of friends. So you have to sort through all 600 of these entries to find the 30 you really care about, which doesn't work. It also appeared they had a bug in the gmail address retrieval code that made it fail after the first page.

Gene and I persevered and added a subset of our friends to the evite. We hacked up a text file and then pasted it into the evite text box. If you aren't on that list and you read this blog, then send me email and I'll add you. If you have already told me you'll be in Vegas that weekend, then don't ask me to add you.

To those of you at companies that run large websites (say something like Google or facebook), you should make open invitation systems that are easy to use and are not limited exclusively to your members.

Tonight was a good and bad night when it came to basketball. The really good part is that when I tape my leg heavily, I can play without many restrictions. The bad part was I played 5 games tonight and lost all of them. We never even had a game point. I came back, iced my ankle and I think I should be good to walk tomorrow and hopefully play again on Thursday.

The Giants have bullpen problems again. As you all should know by now, I'm not terribly confident in Tyler Walker for the 7th. I don't mind Wilson in the 8th or Hennessey in the 9th, but getting to the 8th is going to be tough. I'm very worried about Tim Linsecum's dead arm. They should shut him down for the rest of the year and start one of the callups because it is not worth risking his future by blowing him out at the end of a down year.

Thats enough ranting for one day.

Stanford Football

I'll blog a bit about Stanford football because I doubt that many other people will do that. I was very happy with they way they played against a superior UCLA team today on a very hot September day. They played a much truer West Coast offense complete with lots of passes to tight ends and backs. Their short passing game gave UCLA match up problems and they gained well over 300 years on offense, considerably better than anything I saw last year. The short passing game kept TC Ostrander off his back and it looks like they have some tight ends who can play a bit. Stanford still can't run the ball, which is going to be a problem, but it sure looks like they can throw it.

Defense was another story, but lets focus on the positive here. UCLA looks like they have two legit running backs, which is a good thing for the Bruins. I'll make a bold prediction and say that the SJSU game in 2 weeks should be a lot of fun.

I managed to prevent myself from getting sunburned everywhere except for the front of my neck. Apparently that was the spot on my body I forgot to cover in SPF50 and the sun was able to do a bit of damage there. It was quite warm in the sun but there definitely is something special about being close to the field. The new stadium has a nice area between the two decks where there is a steady breeze and shelter from the sun, so it was nice to be able to leave your seat, get some water and cool off out of the sun. The new stadium is nice, but I think there is something cool about watching sports in huge bowl stadiums. Maybe its all those years in the Rose Bowl at UCLA.

Being out in the sun makes me tired so I think that's about all for this post. Until next time...