Zibblog

It’s been awhile, so I figured I’d do one long post as to what’s been going on lately. To start with the most important news, Leslie and I are now engaged. We got engaged on Leap Day at Post Ranch Inn in Big Sur. Leslie didn’t find out that we were going until that day at lunch, and I surprised her with the ring and proposal at dinner. It took a lot of doing, but Leslie was actually shocked speechless. We highly recommend Post Ranch if you want the kind of trip where you don’t mind paying a premium for full service and an impressive location. (Thanks goes out to Scott for the suggestion.) Everything else kind of pales in comparison, but here are some other highlights:

Last November, Leslie and I went to Hong Kong and Tokyo for a couple of weeks. It was the first time I’d been to asia and the whole trip was a great experience. In Hong Kong, we got to meet up with my friend Helen who is currently working there for Ebay. It was really easy to get around Hong Kong on just English, which made it a nice way to ease into the trip, but the value of the US dollar really hurt sometimes. The Hong After 5 nights in Hong Kong, we stayed for 6 nights in Tokyo. It took some convincing to get Leslie to trust my subway navigation, but we got to see a lot of the city. If we did it again, the only thing that we’d do differently would be to see a lot more of the sights outside of Tokyo.

Lately, I’ve had a couple of different projects going. One of them was to build a hackintosh (a PC with mac os installed). I did a variation on the Ars Technica Hot Rod build from here, after a friend had good luck with it. The goal was to save money, so I got an older video card from the same friend and used some drives that I already had. After doing a bunch of reading on the insanely mac forums, I got virtually everything working. I still need to really decide if I want to keep using mac os full time, but I did go out and buy a copy of leopard.

The home office has also undergone a lot of renovations. In order to get Leslie moved in, I took out my old desk, pulled the closet out of the office, and finished the repainting of all of the walls. We now have a couple of ikea desks that fit a lot better together and I’m putting together some more ikea furniture for storage in the room. Its been a long project, but I think that it’ll look and work a lot better when it’s done.