Linkstew

I've decided that the 4th of July is going to be my holiday for spontaneity. Last year I decided at the last minute to drive to Anaheim to go to Anime Expo for the first time since high school to catch up with some old friends.

This year, I decided at the last minute that I'd join some friends at a cabin near Gualala for the 4th. We took turns doing some cooking, enjoyed some wine (I missed out on the wine tasting thanks to getting a late start after a late night at work), and generally had a pretty good time. On the 4th, we kayaked down a river that ended at the ocean. As we neared the ocean, the wind really picked up and it was a serious workout to get out to the island in the lagoon where we decided to stop.

Here are the pictures of the weekend, but due to some technical difficulties the movies of the rope swing will have to wait. This map is centered on our cabin, and if you scroll just a little bit north you can see where the river ended up at the ocean.

I'm off to Vegas to see an early showing of Serenity tonight at The Palms (San Francisco was sold out, and as an excuse to go to Vegas goes, I'll take it), and I'm staying through the weekend.

I haven't been to Vegas since I was 12. I was there with a friend for his mom's wedding. While Excalibur is moderately kid friendly, we ran out of things to do at some point during the weekend, and decided to run up and down and then back up and again back down the tower's 28 flights of stairs.

I suspect I'll be able to find a little more to entertain myself with this time around...

Dear New York,

Okay, you have a very nice city.

But don't let it go to your head! Besides, I'm already pretty much over the humidity thing, and it's only May.

Love,
Benjy

Rick's free ticket mojo came through again, and I'm leaving for New York Thursday afternoon, and I get back Monday night. I've never been, so I'm very excited; If anyone has any recommendations, drop me an email or give me a call.

Unfortunately, my sleep schedule has been drifting in the wrong direction for the last few weeks, so hopefully I'll be able to get up at a reasonable time to enjoy the days while I'm there.

Boy am I going to be in for a rude awakening when I actually have to start paying for my own vacations...

My flight leaves from SFO at 3:40. The schedule is roughly Amsterdam 4 days, (a stop in Cologne), Paris 4 days, Brussels 2 days (with a side trip to Gent). I get back December 3rd.

I may drop a note along the way, but otherwise I have a good old fashioned pen and paper journal and a brand new Canon PowerShot SD300 (which I would linkify, but powershot.com doesn't seem to be working right now and I'm in a hurry).

The Heavy Drinker's Guide to Iowa City.

Hm, how about I get drunk and pass on the plane on the way to Iowa City, and then I don't have to get off the plane? Yeah, that'd be alright.

It's been a long weekend:

• Still no DSL at home.
• I was in LA all weekend for, among other things, an Eve 6 concert. -- it was good, though too short, but Max was in a weird mood (or on something), and they played too many songs of the new album (which meant I didn't know them, since the album doesn't come out for a month).
• If you're ever in Long Beach and you think taking Pacific Coast Highway is a better idea than taking the 405 to 101, holy christ you're wrong.
• As if it weren't obvious, I want one. The model I speced out for myself (including a 23 inch cinema display) came out to like $7,000. Boy I need a job... ;-)
• Thank god Panther will have Fast User Switching. Not a feature I personally need, but I'd been meaning to write a post for a long time about how important that feature was for homes with one computer. I guess I can cross that article off my todo list. Hopefully it comes out before November (so I can get a free copy under my student developer membership).
• And last but not least, I'm 500 pages into The Order of the Phoenix, and that's where I'm returning now.

Every other year, I've taken Amtrak home for break on the Wednesday evening right before Thanksgiving. But every other year, I've also returned to Berkeley on Monday, missing a class or two in the process (depending on the year).

You probably think that given my goal of perfect attendance this semester, I'm torn about missing those classes on Monday. However, Monday's classes aren't the ones I'm actually worried about missing, because I have to be back before Monday anyway. I'll probably have to return to Berkeley on Saturday, because I've got a project due on Monday.

No, the classes I'm worried about missing are the classes on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. You see, since I'm going to have to return to Berkeley on Saturday, I'd only really get two days at home if I left on Wednesday evening. But if I go home on Tuesday, I'd get an extra day, putting my vacation closer to its normal length. Of course, if I do that, then I also miss 3 classes and break my perfect attendance record.

I'm pretty sure I'll just go home Wednesday, preserving my perfect attendance. I think I've been holding off on buying my tickets in case I accidentally sleep in and miss a class or something, but the longer I wait, the more expensive the tickets will get.

The latest TMBG announce email had some new tour dates for their summer tour to promote No!. Notably, there are some west coast dates:

• 7/19 Portland, OR - Crystal Ballroom
• 7/20 Seattle, WA - Paramount Theater
• 7/26 Los Angeles CA - John Anson Ford Theater
• 7/27 Anaheim CA - House of Blues
• 7/28 SPECIAL KIDS SHOW Los Angeles CA Storyopolis

They better announce an SF show or two in that gap between Seattle and LA, because I already planned two other trips in July, and as much as I want to, I don't really have time to take a third trip to socal to go to a couple of TMBG concerts.

Hm. Though if I didn't go to AX, I'd have the time and the money to go to those socal concerts... And I'd be going to AX more to hang out with my Bakersfield friends than for the anime content... But if I went to the TMBG concerts, I don't know if I'd have anyone to go with me. Blah, I suppose I should figure this out soon.

Blahhh...

Basically, my final didn't go very well at all, and I'm looking for things besides the final to worry about. Let's put it this way: 16/100 points on the final were for being able to recite the details of 2 phase commit, the details of which I did not to commit to memory. It was purely memorization, and didn't test our understanding of it at all! In contrast, last year's final said "Here is how 2 phase commit works. What happens if it fails at this point? This point? This point?" Last year's question actually tested that the students understood the concept, while this year they just tested to see if we could recite the stupid thing from memory. 16 points! And another 4 points were for knowing what caused a particular bug in a particular processor that he only talked about in lecture. And so I'm not a very happy camper. I could have gotten an A in the class if I'd done well on the final, but now I'll be happy if I get a B.

So it's a week late, but here's my Whistler Travel Log anyway. Whew, this was a lot more work to type up than I was expecting. It kind of peters out near the end, because I was just getting tired of typing. And yes, some (lots) of this just isn't going to make sense because I left out details which I assumed were obvious, but oh well. This is probably more for me than it is for you.

• Sunday, March 24
• After a short -- but very uncomfortable -- car ride to Oakland Airport, we boarded our plane with very little incident. Why uncomfortable, you ask? Because I had my head bent at a 90 degree angle because there was a snowboard occupying my headspace.
• Well, boarding the plane wasn't entirely incident free. I was stupid enough not to take off my metal-laced jacket, so I got hand scanned. Of course, my steel toe boots would have been enough to get me hand scanned, but compared to some later incidents, this was nothing.
• We arrived in Seattle a few short hours later, where Rick told us we'd be taking a Limousine to his place. Though it sounded absurd when he told us, it was a pretty reasonable solution in retrospect. It was only $45 for 5 people for a relatively comfortable ride. It would have taken two taxis at about $30 apiece, so it was actually more cost effective to take the limo as well.
• After a brief stop at Rick's, we then went and had lunch at some cafe, and then headed for the University of Washington campus.
• "This is University Way, which everyone calls 'The Ave.,'" Rick told us. "It's like Telegraph." As soon as he compared it to Telegraph, I instantly oriented it as running perpendicular to campus. However, after we walked down it a long ways, Rick finally said "So do you want to see campus now? It's a block over that way..." It was very surreal to realize that I'd been walking parallel to the campus after i assumed that we'd been walking towards it and that we'd dead end into it any second.
• The UW campus was beautiful, with lots of open spaces and trees and green. I liked it a lot.
• The rest of the group decided that we were going to go to a club that evening, so I went along for the ride.
• We took the bus to somewhere in downtown Seattle, found the club pretty quickly, and then walked quite a long ways to find some place to have dinner. Eventually we came across a nice little crepe restaurant that was still open, so there we ate.
• At the club, I didn't know what to drink, so I left myself in the hands of my company. First they ordered me a Mai-Tai, to which Tyler exclaimed "You ordered him a Mai-Tai!?" So naturally, I was a little nervous, but it wasn't bad, just very fruity. After that I had a White Russian, which was also fine. Apparently their goal was to give me drinks that I wouldn't feel while I was drinking but which would hit me later -- only I didn't feel anything from the drinks at all, so I don't know.
• The club was smoky inside. It made me miss California. I also had a headache, I wasn't exactly feeling my drinks, and the smoke didn't help, so I didn't have such a great time.
• And then we went back to Rick's and went to bed.
• Monday, March 25th
• We woke up bright and early and again took a Limo to the Amtrak station.
• We checked in, got our seat assignments, tossed our luggage into the luggage car, and boarded without any incident.
• The scenery along the train was beautiful -- lots of trees and forest with a view of the ocean bay water beyond.
• Getting off of the train in Vancouver went off without a hitch, and there we were in Canada.
• We went and got some funny money and got some lunch, and when we walked back into the train station, Dave (who had stayed beyond to watch our stuff) told us that the bus for Whistler had left.
• We got out the schedule, and sure enough, the bus left at 1pm, and not 1:30 as Rick had thought.
• But not to worry! Another bus left at 3pm, and it was an "express" bus which didn't make any stops along the way, and so took an hour less time to get there.
• So we played Frisbee on lawn of Vancouver's Pacific Central Station for two hours, and then went and got on the express bus, and before we knew it, we were at Whistler.
• We checked in, dumped our bags, and then set out to explore the village for the evening. We mainly went to a bunch of ski shops, because Dave (who had broken his skis a week earlier) needed to find where he wanted to demo skis from. Also, people were looking for helmets.
• We shopped for about 3 hours, went and bought some groceries, got some pizza for dinner, and then went to bed.
• Tuesday, March 26th
• We woke up, had cheerios and bagels for breakfast, and eventually made our way to the mountain.
• We got a late start, and didn't actually get to the lifts until about 9:30am, despite the fact that the lifts opened at 8:30am. A guy at the base of the lift told us that the conditions weren't too good, and that it was going to be very windy on the mountain.
• We took the Whistler Gondola up Whistler Mountain. The visibility was pretty bad at times, it was windy, and there wasn't much powder. All the same, I had fun doing blue runs below the "Roundhouse Lodge."
• Probably the "highlight" of my day was jumping off of a little bumpjump, only to plant the nose of my snowboard into the face of another little bumpjump. I proceeded to carry forward, rotating on an axis around the nose of my snowboard, and finished by slamming my shoulder into the ground. It still hurts a little if I hold my arm above my head. In that fall I also twisted my front knee, and it hurt for the rest of the trip.
• We met back up at the hotel room and then set out into the village looking for something for dinner. Our initial plan was to find some Mexican food, so that we could sample Mexican food "from a place that had no business having mexican food." However, when we asked in a shop, we were told there was no Mexican food in the village, so we decided that we just needed to find Dinner.
• We found that most of the restaurants were a little nicer/more expensive than we wanted to pay, so we were looking for awhile. We found a place named "Caramaba!" which featured mayan decorations, but it wasn't actually Mexican -- it was italian. We almost ate at a Greek restaurant, but then we noticed that they listed Miller as an "Import Beer." Silly Canadians.
• Finally we ended up at "The Brew Haus." Though the wait was quoted at 45 minutes, we decided we'd wait in the bar. Their "Big Wolf Bitter" (which they brewed themselves) was pretty good. The wait turned out to be much shorter than 45 minutes, and after we placed our orders, the food came seemingly in a matter of minutes. The food was also very good. If you're ever in Whistler, I'd recommend this place.
• So after dinner, we went and got some groceries, and then headed back to the hotel, where I went to sleep, while some other people went out to a bar.
• Wednesday, March 27th
• We got a slightly earlier start, and made it to the lifts by 9.
• We went on Blackcomb mountain.
• We went up the Gondola, up the Excelerator chair, down a run, up the Solar Coaster chair, and then across a long traverse to the 7th Heaven chair.
• We went up 7th Heaven, and at the top, the conditions were absolutely miserable. It was practically a white out. Worse, to get to the run we wanted to go down, we had to traverse aways into the wind.
• While going down from 7th Heaven, we got split up.
• While there was powder (which was nice), the powder was govering up icy ungroomed moguls (which was very, very bad for unwitting snowboarders like me).
• While crossing the mountain on my toe edge at one point, my board slipped off of a bump I didn't know was there, and I fell face first onto the bump. My cheek hit the icy bump, which scraped my goggles up off of my face and gave me a black eye. Considering I felt the cold bump push across my eye, I'm just thankful that it wasn't any spikier than it was.
• We finally finished the run and then got the hell away from 7th Heaven.
• Trisha and I did some runs, and on our last run before lunch we swapped snowboards. It was kind of interesting that I could tell the difference between the board and the binding. On the one hand, I liked her bindings much better than mine -- mine feel like they stretch and I was having a lot of trouble turning. Hers, on the other hand, were very secure and I didn't have any trouble turning. Her board, on the other hand, felt a lot more unstable than mine. But then again, that's to be expected when my board is a 156 and hers is a 153.
• After lunch, we went up the Glacier Express, which is almost as high as you can go on Blackcomb. I went down that run a few times, and then I went all the way from the top of the Glacier Express to the bottom of the mountain.
• By the time I finished, my knee (which I'd twisted the day before, you recall) was killing me. The impact of the slightest bump was very painful.
• I dropped by a net cafe and checked my email, and then I headed back to the hotel where I stretched and waited for everyone else to show up, since I was done at about 3:30pm.
• At about 4:45pm Dave showed up, and then Trisha showed up and said that Tyler'd told her that Rick had hit a tree and was at the clinic.
• So we walked over to the clinic, where we were told that Rick wasn't there yet, despite the fact that he'd hit the tree nearly 3 hours earlier. We called the ski patrol and found at that he would be there soon, and that'd he'd broken his femur.
• So we went and bought groceries, and then went back to the hotel room and made Fajitas (did I mention that the hotel rooms had full kitchenettes complete with dishes and silverware?) and had Coronas.
• After dinner, we went back to the clinic. Tyler and Trisha went and visited Rick, and got some instructions from him. He was apparently in a "happy place," so Dave and I didn't bother to go back there. When we saw Rick later, he didn't really remember that we'd stopped by.
• Rick was driven to Vancouver, and then flown to Seattle that night.
• We went back to the internet cafe to get some information we needed, and then went back to the hotel, packed our bags (since it was our last night in Whistler) and then went to bed.
• Thursday, March 28th
• We woke up a little earlier still, since we had to finish packing. We left a lot of food in the room, including a couple of Coronas we left in the fridge. We took our luggage downstairs and put in the back room, where it'd be stored for the day.
• We called Rick's hotel room that morning, but he was in surgery.
• Despite everything we had to do that morning, we made it onto the slopes by about 9:15.
• To account for my sore knee, I put an Ace Bandage on, and it seemed to do the trick well enough.
• We went up Whistler, and it looked like we'd finally have a nice day. It'd snowed overnight and stopped that morning, the sun was shining, it wasn't overly windy, and Whistler's peak was finally open after being closed for the first two days.
• We went up the Whistler Gondola, all the way down the Dave Murry Downhill to Creekside, took the Creekside Gondola back up, got on the Big Red Express, and then got on the Peak Express to to go all the way to the Peak. I did a lot of runs before lunch, including going up to the peak a few more times, and then several runs under the Emerald lift.
• After lunch, I went up Harmony, and then went all the way down the mountain from there, and once again finished kind of early.
• I stopped by the net cafe to check on the train schedules, and then went to the hotel where I changed and stretched and packed my equipment and then lounged around for a couple of hours until our shuttle left at 6:30.
• I was highly amused to note that the two Coronas we'd left in our refrigerator had found their way into the hotel's back room. Nice to know that they'd found a good home.
• We caught our shuttle to the BC Rail train station, and after waiting at the station for awhile our train arrived.
• The four of us got a table, which turned out to have barely enough leg room for two people, let alone four. We then got a complementary dinner of an Orange and a Bagel. The ride wasn't too bad, but we were still sore and cramped.
• At the BC Rail station in Vancouver, we had to wait awhile for a Van taxi to show up, which then took us to our hotel, where we ordered a pizza for dinner and went to bed in short order.
• Friday, March 29th
• We woke up, packed, checked our luggage downstairs, and then enjoyed a very nice buffet breakfast that was part of the hotel package that we had.
• We then took a taxi to the Vancouver Aquarium, which was mostly enjoyable. The highlight of the place was definitely the Sea Otters, though. Sea Otters rock. I think I want to be a Sea Otter.
• Then we took a cab back to the hotel, and from there set out to walk around downtown Vancouver for awhile. Having so amused ourselves, we took another taxi to the train station.
• Getting on the train in Canada was much more complicated than getting on the train in the US. My luggage was run through an X-Ray machine, at which point they pulled aside my backpack and started telling me that something in it was "pointy." I had no idea what he was talking about, and he didn't speak very good English, so I just started digging through my backpack until I found my Screwdriver, which is what he had been talking about. When I asked him what he wanted me to do with it, he told me to "check it" and then waved me through the door.
• Outside the door was the baggage check area, where the Amtrak employees put tags on our luggage. They started to put a bag on my backpack, because the X-Ray machine guy had said "check it," but I stopped them and said "no, I want to carry that on." Since no information about the screwdrivers had been communicated to the baggage check guys, they shrugged and said okay. As I shouldered my backpack, a third security guy came up to me and asked me what the X-Ray guy had wanted checked out in my backpack. So I explained the screwdrivers to him, and he said I needed to put them in a checked bag. So I shrugged and tossed them in my snowboard bag and that was that.
• God it was horribly confusing thanks to the frantic X-Ray guy who wasn't at all clear in telling me or his co-workers what was going on. All he succeeded in doing was confusing me, confusing his co-workers, and saying "pointy thing" and "check it" a lot. Eesh.
• We finally (much to my great relief) got on the train.
• Of course, while sitting on the train I was amused by the irony that I'd carried my backpack -- screwdrivers and all -- onto the plane on Saturday without a problem. I wonder how the Airport security overlooked those screwdrivers despite noticing that I had metal boots?
• On the train, my friends decided that they wanted to get me drunk for my birthday, so they bought me a beer despite my protests. I wasn't going to drink it, but Trisha finally guilt tripped me into drinking it. Of course, I wouldn't have drunk it even with the guilt trip if it hadn't been a beer I liked (Red Hook E.S.B.) They bought me a total of three beers between Vancouver and Seattle, but it didn't actually get me drunk.
• We took a taxi from the Seattle Amtrak station back to Rick's, where we went straight to sleep.
• Saturday, March 30th
• Perhaps foolishly, I slept in the same room as Dave (who'd been sick since Thursday) to avoid Rick's roommate's cat's hair. Of course, when I woke up with a cough which persisted through the day (and for a whole week, as I would late find out), I wished I'd just dealt with the allergies for one night instead. D'oh.
• We wandered out into Seattle, got some breakfast, and then caught a taxi to Rick's hospital.
• Rick told us how he'd hurt himself: He was going towards a jump, and he wanted to slow himself down, so he started carving back and forth. He carved onto his toe, and then onto his heel, but his heel edge slipped and so he went out of control off the jump and slid into the tree with his leg.
• At the hospital, Rick was in the process of checking out, so we sat around and listened to various things he was reminded to do, and then we were off. We picked up his prescription, and then took a taxi back to Rick's.
• Since Trisha had a more transferable plane ticket than Dave and Tyler and I did, Trisha stayed an extra day in Seattle to help Rick out.
• Dave and Tyler and I took the same taxi we'd taken from the hospital from Rick's place to the airport.
• We sat around the airport for awhile, got on our flight, and got home without a hitch. In Oakland, we took a shuttle to Dave's, and then Dave drove Tyler and I home. (It saved $20 to have us go to the same place).
• When I got home that night, I started feeling really sick and feverish, and I proceeded to fall asleep and stay that way for most of the rest of the weekend.

FYI, I'm home, and I meant to write something up sooner, but I started getting sick Saturday morning, and a fever/headache/cough just got worse from there, so I wasn't up to doing anything last night. For that matter, I've still got a massive headache, so I'm going to stick with just lying around for awhile.

More about Whistler, et al, later.

It's my Birthday, I'm currently in Vancouver, and I probably haven't gotten any birthday presents yet if for no other reason than logistics.

There are other reasons I don't get birthday presents, though.

Not only do I not usually ask for presents, but people I know tell me I'm very difficult to buy presents for, because I tend to buy what I want as soon as I want it.

This is generally true.

To make matters worse, I usually tell people who ask me what I want for my birthday that I don't want anything, and that if they insist on giving me something that they should just give me some money. Sure, giving money takes the thoughtfulness out of gift giving, but if they're asking me what I want, then they weren't going to give me a meaningful gift in the first place.

This year, however, between my recent Snowboard purchase and my vacation plans, and the sudden realization that I need to start saving towards a PowerBook G4 if I hope to buy one this fall, I've been making a conscious effort to not make so many arbitrary purchases.

On that note, here are five things I've considered buying in the last month but have decided to hold off on. (In other words, if you're dying to give me something, here are some ideas.)

• Sonic Adventure 2 Battle for the GameCube. I mainly haven't bought this because I've been so incredibly busy that I just wouldn't have time to play it.
• Sonic Advance for the Game Boy Advance. Same as above.
• Super Mario World for the Game Boy Advance. Same.
• The Adobe Design Collection (which includes Illustrator 10, InDesign 2, Acrobat 5, and Photoshop 7 for the fantastic educational price of just $386). I've held off on this because 1. Photoshop 7 isn't actually out yet, so I'd have to wait around for it anyway, and 2. This is the regular academic price, and the bundle isn't going to go away any time soon.
• A PowerMac G4 bundle. ;-)

Despite all that, though, when my parents asked me what I wanted for my birthday this year, I said "money," because I want to subsidize my snowboard purchase and vacation as much as possible.