July 31: OMG features

Man, things at work are crazy lately! We have a ton of features all getting finished at roughly the same time. It's awesome! PBwiki of September 2008 is going to be a completely different, vastly improved product compared to PBwiki of June 2008. I'm really excited. Some changes that I worked on (new and improved RSS feeds) are going out today, which is always a blast. Progress marches onward, and PBwiki continues to be more like the ideal product we all want to be using.

In non-work news, things are going well. Life with a car is great. I'm carefully tracking my gas mileage and managed to get about 26 MPG from my first tank. I was reading up on hypermiling yesterday, but a lot of it is too extreme for my liking. It's stupid to drive dangerously close to 18 wheelers to get in their slipstream, and taking highway on/off ramps at twice the speed limit to save gas is equally moronic. People who care about saving gas should keep these things in mind or else they might accidentally naturally select themselves out of the gene pool and leave behind a culture even worse at energy saving than what we have now.

Anyway, there are features to launch. Until next time, world!

July 25: Sometimes we call him Chuck

Okay, victory: I have successfully bought a car! I have christened it Chuck as the result of a strange series of connections in my brain: “Okay, it's dark grey, sort of charcoal...chaaaarcoal...Chaaarlie! Sometimes we call him Chuck!”. That's right, I've named my car after a prank call on an old Goldfinger album. Go me.

My car!

It's a 2004 Volkswagen Jetta, dark grey, standard transmission (of course). I picked it up on Tuesday, but I haven't really had the chance to enjoy it. My driver's test was today, so until then, me driving it was sort of in a legal grey area. As of about 2 PM this afternoon, I'm all legal'd up and I can drive the bejesus out of it. There's an amazing highway called Skyline Boulevard near my place that runs along the San Andreas Fault and up through some crazy forest-y hills. I'm excited!

So, obviously, I really like it! It's a lot of money to drop on a single object, which is sort of nerve-wracking, but it's in great shape and should hopefully last me quite some time. This is my “til I'm 30, or rich” car. I have no idea what I'm going to do when the time comes to move back home to Canada, but I'll cross that bridge when I come to it. I'm sure I'll get taxed heavily on it...gah.

Anyway, back to work I go. Until we meet again, blog!

July 21: I love the Muppets!

No idea what the source for these things is, but they're fantastic. First, Beaker:


And then a little Chef-Beaker-Animal action:


There are more on YouTube! It's amazing.

July 14: Random

Two random things:
1. Over the weekend, about two minutes after I put my laundry in the washing machine, I realized that my iPhone headset was in one of my shirt pockets. Oops. I dutifully fished it out over the spin cycle and left them out to dry. This is actually the second time that this particular pair has gone through the wash, so I was expecting them to be completely dead. Au contraire! The previous wash had basically killed the left earbud. This wash brought it back! These magical headphones obviously need an even number of wash cycles in order to work properly. (Remember that time my phone got washed?)

2. I came home to letter from the US Department of Transportation. I figured it was something about my driver's license, but when I opened it up, a five dollar bill fell out. It's a “token of appreciation” for a phone survey they'll be inflicting on me sometime in the next few weeks. No wonder this country is in so much debt!

July 08: The Disenchubbining

If I may coin a new word, I'd like to record my current disenchubbening efforts.

Disenchubbening, or the removal of one's chub, is the act of trying to get my stationary butt into slightly better shape. I had this goal in mind pretty much from day one of my California adventure: one of the many perks offered by PBwiki is a membership at Gold's Gym. When I first got here, I had trouble actually getting motivated as well as easy access to all sorts of new fast foods. No good!

About two months ago, Brian finally got me to start going to the gym. It's good that he's dragging me there, but I I hate, hate, hate working out. The whole gym environment is really weird to me — strange evidence of how different our modern environment is from what we evolved for. That being said, exercising fills me with an enormous sense of well-being, so I deal with it.

A huge thread on reddit about the hundred pushups training program led to an office challenge. We're on week three, and things are getting hard. It's sort of funny: the first day of day three was ridiculously difficult. Our wiki has a grid listing who did how many push-ups. Yesterday's entry for Brian? A picture of the fail copter. Chris? Basically fail. Me? “83. Poorly.” It was insane!

Anyway, hopefully I'm getting in shape. I'll post an update if I actually start to notice any benefit, other than feeling less gross about my lifestyle. :)

July 05: Fifth of July

So, I did the whole Fourth of July thing yesterday. I had a pretty good time — I missed the fireworks by the pyramid in Alderney Park, but I did get to see some (foggy) fireworks, nonetheless. We went to a barbecue at Houseku (one of the many geek houses in the Bay Area), where there was (joy of joys) a Star Trek: The Next Generation pinball machine. I spent way too much time playing that, actually, and it has renewed my interest in getting a pinball machine of my own. Unfortunately, all of the awesome things in the world pretty much work to counteract my own wishes for an uncluttered apartment with only the things I really need in it. I am bad at this.

Some of the people at the barbecue had an apartment nearby with roof access, so we ended up watching the fireworks from the rooftop of an apartment building in the Mission District. It was awesome! We couldn't see the official fireworks, due to (a) fog and (b) a building in the way, but lots of random people were launching fireworks around the city. It was quite a few, actually. Plus, there were some delightfully stupid hoodlums setting off firecrackers in the middle of the street, which occasionally set off a particularly sensitive car alarm.

So, yeah, I had a pretty good time. Today, I'm trying to sort out potential car buying issues. Credit here in the states is sort of weird and continues to thwart my attempts at building it. I have to finance through the dealer, not through my bank, because I don't have 3 or more credit cards. Seriously, what the hell? Anyway, I think things will work out, and I've found a car I like, so all that's left is to actually do the buying part.

Speaking of driving, I have my driver's license road test on Tuesday. It's somewhat embarassing that I have to go through this whole process again, but at least I did okay on my written test (oh, how very mortifying would it have been to do poorly). So, this time next week, I could be all set up. Yay!

July 01: Happy Canada Day!

Happy Canada Day, everyone! I'm in exile here in California, but I hope all of you are having a blast. Hopefully, this Friday's Fourth of July (why don't they call it America Day?) celebrations will be a good proxy. I wonder if there are fireworks?