September 29, 2006
Third Day in Cabo
In our last full day in Cabo (9/26) we maximized our use of the Jeep by driving to San Jose Del Cabo and checking out Mega, the Mexican Walmart. Timber wanted to get some pens and paper which is crazy because we had to drive 30 km each way to do it. But while we were in there we heard the employees doing the Mega chant, which sounded strangely like the Walmart chant that you hear in stores sometimes. On our way back to Cabo we hit Costco and got some Bailey's filled chocolates. When we got back to the hotel we dropped off the Jeep. Our crazy taxi episode was over. After relaxing for a while we caught the water taxi out to Medano Beach. Once we were dropped off at the beach (literally jumped out of the boat onto the beach) we got some chairs at the Baja Cantina. The beach was really nice, but it was crowded with people and boats. While we were lounging about vendors came around offering everything from t-shirts to jewelry to food. Also while lounging around the cantina we had some beer, coca-cola, and a quesadilla. When we swam the water was warm and comfortable. I think the water at Cabo Pumo was slightly warmer and the beach was better because it was deserted. After catching the water taxi back to the hotel we got cleaned up and headed to Quesadilla's for dinner. My dish (lobster, garlic shrimp, garlic quesadilla) was very good. After dinner we strolled around the waterfront and then called it a night.
September 28, 2006
Second Full Day in Cabo
In our second full day in Cabo (9/25) we did quite a bit. First we rented a Jeep Wrangler ($100 a day). It seemed to take a long time for the rental company to bring the Jeep, but once we got it we headed out of town crazy taxi style. I say crazy taxi style because driving in Mexico is very much like driving in the video game Crazy Taxi. All in all it is fun and exciting, but it can be scary at times when you have to bob and weave through traffic and pedestrians. We drove toward San Jose Del Cabo, and along the way we stopped at Costco. The Mexican Costco had just about everything that the American version has, and they even had the same churros. :-) We got a few snacks at the snack bar and then continued on our way out of town. On our way east out of San Jose Del Cabo we stopped at a rental car place to ask for directions, and the guy there recommended that we not drive straight out to the East Cape from there, and instead go north through Santiago. We heeded the advice, and stopped in Santiago on our way north. Unfortunately his advice was incorrect and there was no route to the East Cape from Santiago, so we got a quick tour of town before continuing our drive north. Santiago was the first town that we visited where I really felt that tourism had not changed and that it had kept its original character. It also made me understand why some people would want to come to the US. We had to cross a wash to get to Santiago, and we had to cross a river that was pretty shallow. It was fun to go driving through the mud and river to get to the town. Once we got there we saw lots of delapitated houses along the one road in town along with lots of people hanging out along the street. There was a gas station, a plaza (again decorated for Mexican Independence Day), and a market. The women were hanging out in front of the houses while the men were hanging out in front of the market. We did a loop around the plaza and then headed back out toward highway 1. On our way north on highway 1 we took a right at Las Cuevas and headed east toward the coast. We stopped in La Ribera for gas and a coke. Unfortunately there was nowhere to get a soda since most of the gas stations in Mexico are run by the government and don't have mini-marts (dangit!). After gassing up and looking at all the cows taking cover in the shade we kept heading east and south along the cost. The water was a beautiful bluish green color and the sandy beaches looked inviting. Most of the beaches were inaccessible, however, because they were fenced in due to people building houses on the beach. We stopped in Cabo Pulmo, an exceedingly small fishing and diving village. There was no one around, and we drove right down to the beach. We jumped out of the jeep and walked past the diving boats to get a view of a reef right off shore. After looking around for a few minutes I jumped in the water. It was warm yet still refreshing. We eventually got back in the jeep and headed back toward highway 1. Once we got back to the main highway we high tailed it to La Paz. We had heard that La Paz, being the capital of Baja California Sur was historic and beautiful. What we found was that it was clogged with traffic and fairly dirty for the most part. We drove past the mission and governor's mansion and made it down to the waterfront. Once on the waterfront we found a place to eat and watch the sun set. After dinner we found a place for La Michoacana (mexican ice cream) and enjoyed it by the water. After the ice cream we left town and got back on highway 1 going south and west. We stopped briefly in Todos Santos to take a look at the mission, but since it was late there was no shopping to be had. The last leg of the drive saw a dog, cat, goats, and a donkey on the side of the road. Talk about variety. But we made it back to our hotel without incident, and that is saying a lot.
First Full Day In Cabo
In our first day in Cabo (9/24) Timber and I spent the day walking around shopping and seeing the sights. We also spent some time checking out our hotel. For dinner we ate at a place called the Shrimp Factory. I got the coconut prawns while Timber got their bacon wrapped, cheese stuffed prawns. Both were pretty good. While we were eating a small group of musicians came over and asked if we wanted them to play anything for us. Since this trip was for Timber's birthday I had them sing her happy birthday in Spanish and in English. It was pretty cool. After dinner we roamed the streets and found a plaza that had been decorated for the Mexican Independence Day celebration that occurred on September 16th. We got tired and went back to the hotel for a few drinks before turning in for the evening.
Plane Ride To Cabo
On 9/23 Timber and I caught our flight from SFO to Los Cabos. We had to wake up really early in order to be dropped off at SFO @ 6 AM by Timber's dad. We were thinking that we needed to dropped off at the international terminal since it was a flight to Mexico, but after thinking about it for a minute we went to the domestic terminal (change planes in LA) and found out that we had picked correctly. Our flight to LA left at 8 AM, and once we got there we were happy to find out that we didn't need to go anywhere to catch our next leg. The unfortunate part was that the Alaska Airlines terminal at LAX is totally lame (no wifi, no power outlets, lame shops & food, etc...) so we spent a few hours lounging around until our flight to Los Cabos departed. Once we landed at the Los Cabos Airport we went through immigration, showed them our papers, had our bags searched a few times, and then went in search of our shuttle to the hotel. On the way to the outside there were a ton of timeshare people along with cab drivers. There were all trying to get our attention and have us go with them. I actually listened to one guy who got a little ways through his spiel of trying to sell us a ride to our hotel for $75 before simply walking away and out of the airport. It didn't take us long to find our pre-arranged transportation and then we loaded up and headed for our hotel. Once we got to the hotel we got checked in and then went and had dinner in the hotel. The food was alright for being a buffet. After dinner we spent some time exploring the marina and thinking about what we wanted to do the next day.
September 23, 2006
September 22, 2006
Heading South (Vamos Mexico)
Well the bug bites from the Alaska trip are not healed yet, but that won't stop Timber and I from heading down to Cabo tomorrow. This is her birthday present. We'll be down there soaking up the sun and relaxing until late next week. She really needs a vacation right about now.
September 21, 2006
Google Video Of Skilak Lake Slideshow
I uploaded my slideshow of highlights from the Skilak Lake fishing trip. You should be able to view it from within my blog. I don't think the soundtrack made it through (Damn you Google!) but that's ok. Enjoy the Cliff Notes version of my trip.
New Yahoo! Mail
I wasn't aware of this, but according to this article, Yahoo! launched their new Microsoft Outlook style web mail last week. I've been using it for roughly a year and wasn't aware that it was only available to a small audience while they were testing it out. One thing I don't like about it is the fact that the ads appear long before my mail loads and the performance lacks somewhat. But I guess that is to be expected when using Yahoo!'s mail service. But overall I like the ability to do everything with the keyboard and destroy most of my spam in a few keystrokes. Too bad they couldn't make their online mail service more like Lotus Notes. :-)
Back To San Jose
On Wednesday, 9/20, I worked on getting things packed and had lunch with Bob and Ava, and then I got dropped off at the Anchorage airport. Since they did the renovation the Anchorage Airport has got to be one of the nicest ones out there. I'd put it right up with Portland as the nicest ones that I've been to. I've never been to SFO, but I'll check it out when I'm there later this week. The bag check in and security lines were pretty long, but luckily (I guess), my flight was delayed so it wasn't a problem. Now I get to wait and then board my flight to Seattle where I'll have a 7 hour layover before getting back to San Jose and hitting the grindstone on Thursday.
Last Day At Skilak
On Tuesday, 9/19, we had our last day of Dolly Varden fishing. Dave's Dad did not come over with us, so we did only one trip over to the Kenai River. For me it was my best day of fishing. I caught somewhere between 25 and 30 dollies in the half day of fishing that we did. That brought my 4 day total up to roughly 65 Dollies. that is significantly lower than my target of 100, but it is still a heck of a lot of big fish. My arms and back are going to be sore for the rest of the week while I recover from the trip. We ended up leaving our fishing spot around noon and then got back, cleaned up camp, took the boat out of the water, and headed back to Anchorage. We got back to Bob's house around 5 PM. All in all it was a very enjoyable trip and I'm really glad that I came.
Third Day At Skilak
On Monday, 9/18, we went back for even more Dolly Varden fishing. I wasn't feeling to well, so I ended up catching roughly 15 Dollies. Darren decided that he was too warm, and decided to swim across the Kenai River. For those of you out there that aren't familiar with the Kenai River, it is a glacially fed river that runs pretty swiftly for the most part. Once he got over to the other side he hunched down into the fetal position for a little while before jumping back in the water and swimming back to our side of the river. After he got out of the water he dried off and warmed up. We were all in shock by the whole thing, and I'm sure other people fishing on the river were wondering what a crazy guy was doing swimming across the Kenai River. So from now on Darren will be known as "Kenai Man". We planned on keeping some Dollies for dinner, but they had to be 18 inches or smaller to keep. We had a very difficult time catching fish that small. :-) By the end of the day we had kept three Dollies and had them with a caesar salad for dinner. We cooked them by butterflying them, then putting butter and a host of different spices in them and then wrapping them up on foil and cooking them on the grill. The Dolly that I ate was delicious. After we had gotten back to the boat launch Dub and I carried some of the gear from the boat launch up to the camp and found a small black bear grazing on clovers next to Dave's parents' Airstream. I put my gear down and ran over to take a photo, but by that time the bear had left. We talked to Dave's Mom right after that and she said that she had seen the bear sniffing around the vent on the outside of the airstream from the fridge. When we looked around the airstream we saw smudge marks from the bear's nose.
Second Day At Skilak
On Sunday, 9/17, we went back for more Dolly Varden fishing. The rain from the past few days stopped, and the sun actually came out. I was finally starting to warm up and caught roughly 20 Dollies for the day. Bob continued his onslaught and caught fish after fish after fish. After we were done fishing for the day we came back to camp and made moose burgers. They were delicious. On our way back the clear weather gave us a great view of Mount Redoubt.
First Day At Skilak
On Friday, 9/15, we drove down to Skilak Lake in the evening and set up camp. On Saturday morning we took the boat over to where the Kenai River runs into Skilak Lake and did some fishing for Dolly Varden. Darren and I were the first ones dropped off and got started fishing first. Darren warmed up pretty quickly and started catching Dollies and even caught a Rainbow Trout. It took me a little while to get the feel for catching Dollies and by the end of the day I had caught roughly 5 Dollies. We even saw a young, slightly ragged looking brown bear appear across the river that got interested in the fish we were catching, and it decided to swim over to our side of the river to get in on the action. It wasn't a very smart bear because the current swept it out into the lake where it it hung out munching on salmon until it swam over to where our boat was and disappeared into the tall grass.
Seattle Airport Stop
I had a short layover in Seattle on my way up to Anchorage. While I was stopped I found out how much an upgrade to first class would cost. It used to be $50 a long time ago which is a pretty good deal if you are flying between Seattle and Anchorage. Nowadays it will cost you $100 assuming they have room. They had room, but I decided that $100 would be better spent somewhere else. One cool thing I did in the morning was to check in for my flight via the web. When I did that I was able to change my seat to one that had the entire row free. So in my leg between Seattle and Anchorage I can stretch out a bit. :-) I also did a prelim check of the Seatac wifi. It is run by AT&T and costs $7.95 for 24 hours of service. I'll probably get that on my way back to San Jose when I have a 7 hour layover at Seatac.
New Stuff From Apple
As many of you may have heard, Apple came out with some new stuff this past week. Among the "new stuff" you'll find new ipods (including pink iPod Nanos) and an updated version of the iTunes Store which now sells movies. I went ahead and downloaded the new version of the iTunes store and decided to give the movie buying a go. I looked through the collection of movies to find that there were not all that many good movies, and out of the good movies there were very few that I had not seen yet. I settled on buying "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" since I haven't seen it yet and have an interested in watching it. I downloaded it while at work (1.22 Gb in size) with a pretty slow wifi connection, and it took roughly 3 hours to download. I've watched 17 minutes of it thus far and and the picture quality is pretty good. It also allows you to choose chapters. The only thing I haven't found yet are the subtitles. But thus far I have no complaints. At this point I'm still going to keep my netflix membership, but the iTunes movie idea is a pretty good one and I expect it to do for the movie industry what the iTunes music store did for the music industry.
September 11, 2006
Santa In September
I went to a 10 AM meeting this morning, and when I got back to my office I saw that all my stuff (2 chairs, 5 boxes, 1 desktop computer, and 2 monitors) was sitting nicely in my office waiting for me. It was like Santa had paid me a visit. I spent a few minutes unpacking my boxes, checking carefully to see that my important cargo (Yoda, Chewbacca, Rubik's Cube, juggling balls, and juggling cows) all made it, and then I turned to getting my computers setup. I got my desktop up and running and then I took my spare laptop out of the box and promptly put Ubuntu on it. I got the basics up and running within a few minutes of the install. I'll have to expand on that as time allows. Now my office is starting to feel like home.
September 10, 2006
Persian Market
Every time we go to the Mountain View Art and Wine Festival we always stop off at Rose Gourmet Food Market for some good Persian food. I don't quite remember the food ordering process being quite as confusing last time, but here's how we did it:
1. We walked in and gravitated toward the deli counter, after all, that's where the food was. We tried to order our food with the guy at the deli counter but he told us that we needed to order our food at the checkout. Granted this is also a grocery store, so we didn't really expect to order our deli food at the checkout.
2. Stand in line for the checkout (they had two lines) and put in our order. We ordered 1 Kobideh (ground beef kabob), 1 Chicken Kabob, 1 mixed vegtable Kabob, 1 Polo Khoresh (chicken and rice dish), and some dish with lentils and lamb with rice. We paid at the checkout and were ushered out of line. They gave us our recpiept and a yellow piece of paper with Farsi (Persian) writing on it.
3. We waited by the deli counter for our food to be ready and the guy called us over and gave us the styrofoam containers of food (since we ordered it to go). We asked where the kabobs were and he told us to go outside and take a left. That sounded kind of strange but we went along with it.
4. We went outside and looked around for and finally found a table. Then I walked to where he told me to go and found a window. It was rather odd, but again I went along with it. I asked them what number they had called and they told me 4 or 5. I showed them my yellow piece of paper and they told me there was no number on there and that they couldn't give me food until I got a number.
5. So I went back to the checkout, waited in line again, and asked the guy to put a number on my yellow piece of paper. He looked at my paper and then looked at my receipt, then matched it up with an order that he had written down and then wrote a number 4 on my yellow piece of paper.
6. Then I went back to the window near the back on the outside of the building and showed them my number. Then they promptly handed me my food and I was done.
All in all if was a bad customer experience. It was not intuitive at all, and there was no explanation anywhere as to how you should order and pick up your food. I'll try to remember all of this when I go back next year. I had wanted to go to Iran at some point (assuming we improve our relations with them), but if this market is any indication I would run into lots of problems there since my Farsi is pretty bad and there probably wouldn't many people there that speak English to help me. But still it would be cool to go somewhere and see gas cost 10 cents a liter.
Mountain View Art & Wine Festival
Timber did some volunteer work at the Mountain View Art & Wine festival today and I thought it would be a good excuse to drive the Vespa up there and also check out the free wifi in Mountain View courtesy of Google. The disadvantage of bringing the Vespa is that I can't take the highway, so the going is a little slower. But the real advantage is that it slices through traffic like a hot knife through butter and it was extremely easy to find parking while cars were searching in frustration. The festival itself was the same as always, lots of hand painted light bulbs and toe rings (Woohoo!). After Timber finished her work we walked around and then picked up some Persian food. The food was great but the service could use some work, I'll devote an entire posting to that later. After we parted ways I stopped for a few moments to check out the free wifi. It was pretty easy to get connected, but where I was sitting my connection speed was extremely slow. The combination of that and my computer slowing down periodically made me give up my hopes of posting to my blog from there, so I hopped on the Vespa and motored home.
September 09, 2006
Dolly Varden Fishing
I found this article about Dolly Varden fishing on the Kenai Peninsula to be pretty good. When I'm in Alaska next week and the week after my brother, some of his friends, and me are going to head to Skilak Lake to catch some of the largest Dollies in the world. The Dollies will be hanging around waiting for the salmon (in this case mostly slivers/cohos and possibly some reds/sockeys) to lay their eggs. The Dollies will then proceed to have an all you can eat salmon egg buffet. We will catch them by using beads to impersonate the eggs, present them correctly, and set the hook correctly. There are a lot of fish, and they are big, but if you do any of those things incorrectly you won't catch a thing. Our nickname for the spawning salmon is "uncle stinky" because the whole area stinks to high heaven, and in this case you DON'T want to catch the salmon. My nickname for the particular area where we will fish is funkytown because it smells funky. I'm sure while we are there I'll get to see some pretty large bears, and because of that I'm bringing my Canon 20D with the Paparazzi 70 - 200 mm lens. Hopefully I'll end some with lots of fish (my goal is at least 100, all will be released) and lots of good photos.
Happy Birthday Ava
I was in Alaska last year for Ava's first birthday. This time, for her second birthday I'll be there a little late. Happy birthday Ava!
End Of First Week
This was my first week at the new job, and I ended it by taking crappy pictures with my cameraphone. The pictures include a look at my office, a look out some of the windows in my building, a hallway and a set of stairs. Exciting, yes! Woohoo!
Digital Divide Solutions
According to this article, 67 % of white students use the internet while only 44 % of hispanics and 47 % of blacks use the internet. Not only is there a digital divide, between the white kids and the other kids but I'd say even 67 % is a low number. We should get the numbers above 90 %. But how do you do it, especially when those numbers are affected by poverty, culture, language, etc...? Here are my recommendations along with reasons why.
1. Start the kids early. Not every kid goes to day care or pre-school, but all kids are supposed to go to kindergarten. Start them out there by showing them how to use a mouse and control programs on the screen. Use the computer to do learning exercises like learning letters and learning how to read an analog clock. I think at this point you just want them to start getting comfortable with a computer (be able to turn it on and launch their favorite program).
2. Incorporate computers and the internet into most classes. If you are teaching an elementary school history lesson do a presentation on how to find information relevant to your class on the internet. And let each kid give it a try. Also steer them toward kid learning sites. Someone could even come up with a kid specific search engine (if it hasn't been done already).
3. $100 or less laptops. As the kids grow up and go through school have either the schools supply the laptops (along with wifi) or make them sufficiently affordable so that each kid can have their own laptop. For the kids whose parents can't affort the $100, have a fund raising drive by doing a bake sale, washing cars, selling $1 crappy chocolate bars or whaever. If people know what the cause is for they will give money so a kid can have a $100 laptop for learning and school work.
4. City wide free wifi. This isn't just for the kids, but also for the entire population. Mountain View just did it, and it sounds like San Jose will be doing it soon. If you make it free or dirt cheap, people will use it. And this is a great way to level the playing field.
5. Encourage using the internet at school, and understand that kids will test their boundaries. When I in high school we had a computer lab with access to the internet. Since the computer lab administrators didn't know how to block sites, some of the kids went to questionable sites and got caught. This resulted in the computer lab being shut down completely. By the way, this is close to what the Yahoo! site looked like back then. If the administrators had done some work and figure out how to block questionable sites we could have all continued to use the internet. But they were either ignorant or lazy, and as a result all the kids suffered.
6. Play good defense. You'll probably get people who object to student internet and computer usage for [insert belief here] reasons. That's fine, they can home school their kid or make them wear a blind fold when it is time to use technology, but under no circumstances should you allow them to take control of the school district and cut off the rest of the kids from using computers and the internet. It is too important. In 20 years, if you are not computer savy enough to do a search or check the weather you will most likely be earning minimum wage. Explain that as one of the reasons the kids need to have access. This kind of sounds like a self fullfilling prophesy doesn't it?
September 07, 2006
New Commute Stats
With my new job at SVL comes a new commute. I haven't ticked off the exact mileage yet, but my commute to work (on the Vespa) is 9 minutes, 30 seconds while my drive home is 8 minutes flat. That leaves me with 17:30 a day for a 5 day weekly total of 87:30 or 1 hour, 27 minutes, 30 seconds. Not bad when considering a lot of people in the Bay Area spend that much or more time in their car every day.
September 05, 2006
New Digs
Today was my first day at my new job. I left IBM Global Services and the work I was doing at the Almaden Research Center to take a job in IBM's software group at Silicon Valley Labs (SVL). I don't know how much I can say about my new project, so I won't say anything about it for now, but my first day there was interesting. It was a lot like being the new kid at school. I went to the meetings (classes) and was introduced to everyone, and as is the norm for me, remembered about 2 or 3 names out of maybe 20. But I got most of the basic stuff out of the way and got started reading up on my project, and should get all the privs I need tomorrow to starting building things and playing around with them. I also got an office which I don't have to share, and it has a window. Interestingly enough the window looks out at a hallway and on the other side of the hallway is a window to the outside world. I'll try to post some pictures later this week. One cool thing about the location is that it is very close to home, just as Almaden was, and I don't have to go up any hill to get there, so my gas mileage should be a little better. The work seems very interesting and I have a clear mandate. So here I go...
Ruby In The Rough
A few weeks ago I was thumbing through books in the library and I came across a Ruby book that peaked my interest. So I checked it out and have been reading through it in my copius free time. I have to say that from the examples I've seen the claims of "Ten times faster development" and "It let's you solve problems, without worrying about programming language" seem to be true. I'll have to write a real application to see if that is the case for me, but I like what I see thus far.
My Own Private SVN
A while back I was catching up on one of my favorite blogs, lifehacker, and I saw a few articles about SVN, along with links to everything you need to run it on your windows machine. I decided to give it a try and really like using it thus far. Basically SVN is a source code management system, but you can use it to manage more than just code. Say you want to keep different versions of your resume, or you are continually tweaking a favorite recipe, or you have to write proposals or other documentation where it may be beneficial to roll back to a previous version at some point. SVN can version those files for you, and using Tortoise SVN on your windows machine is pretty easy to do. The two lifehacker articles about it are here and here. Get cracking!
Downtown Library
On Friday, since I had to box up all my cubely possesions (more on that later), and the fact that pretty much everyone was out of the office, I left work a little bit early (Gasp!). It was the Friday before Labor Day Weekend afterall. Instead of going somewhere cool, and fighting traffic to do it, I decided to do something I've always wanted to do. That's right, hit the downtown branch of the San Jose Library. It is actually called the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Library, and it is a partnership between the library system of the city of San Jose and San Jose State University. I walked through it quickly right after it first opened a few years ago because I was on my way to one of Mary's art shows, but this time I thought I would give it a good once over. I was not dissapointed. It had 5 levels, tons of books (as you might expect), lots of quiet study areas, tons of desks with 100 Mbit ethernet connections, and wifi throughout. The wifi only works if you're a student, faculty, or staff of SJSU, but the good old ethernet works for everyone. I hung out there finishing up a few things for work and doing some research while I waited for Timber to finish up work. I highly recommend going to check it out as it has got to be one of the nicest libraries I've ever gone to. It's good to see that my tax dollars didn't completely go to waste.
September 04, 2006
Maternity Bike Shorts
OK, there are many things in this world that I don't understand. This is but one of them.
Logan 100 Days
Today Timber and I went to Logan's 100 day party today. Congrats Mike and Claudia for making it this far. We're looking forward to his first birthday party.
Tom Tom
On Saturday Timber and I went up to Berkeley to check out a road bike she was interested in buying and to hit The North Face Outlet. The North Face Outlet was having an extra 30 to 50 percent off sale. Woohoo! Before we went up there we stopped by Circuit City and bought a TomTom to help us find where we were going. I'm really getting it for when my brother and sister-in-law are here in October so they can find their way around easily. But Timber and I should be able to use it when we travel or need to find a place to eat on the way to Tahoe in the winter. Now we have Tom Tom Tom.
Time Bandits
On Friday Timber and I finished watching one of her all time favorite movies, Time Bandits. As the IMDB states for the plot line "A young boy accidently joins a band of dwarves as they jump from time-period to time-period looking for treasure to steal." This movie was made back in 1981 and involved a lot of the people the did Monty Python. It was pretty entertaining and acting was decent, even for the dwarves. Overall I'd say it was pretty well done and recommend it.