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.

I’ve been crazy busy with work and traveling (Hong Kong & Tokyo post coming soon), but I wanted to throw up a quick Happy Holidays post. For anyone interested, my holidays involved a few fun little items. On Sunday, Leslie, her roommate, and I went to The Village Pub for a holiday dinner. I will say that after watching a lot of episodes of Kitchen Nightmares (mostly, the BBC version), you see restaurants in a different way, but that just makes the restaurants that pull off a great experience that much better.

On Monday night, we opened presents and Leslie helped me finish up my xmas tree cupcake experiment. It has been awhile since I’ve done any interesting desserts, so it was fun to play around in the kitchen. For Christmas, we went to visit Leslie’s mom in the east bay. Thankfully, the family drama was kept to a minimum. The funniest event of the day was when shortly after we arrived, her mom started doing really really laud karaoke.

This was my day today

• I confirmed with my manager that I was quiting my job
• My surviving grandmother had a (mild) heart attack
• My mother had an unrelated heart procedure done
• My mother got scheduled for open heart surgery tomorrow
• I heard from a cousin that I hadn’t seen in years from a comment on this blog.

All in all, the day was definitely net negative. The first was probably the toughest decision to quit that I’ve ever made, the last was pretty cool, and the other three made me remember the kind of things that are important in life and remind me how much of a difference Leslie makes.

For those of you involved in some way in my finding, getting, or agonizing about the new job, thank you very much. For anyone else interested, the company is pretty stealth at the moment, but expect some kind of blog post in the next couple of months.

About a week ago now, my parents were out visiting, so my dad and I were doing numerous home improvements. One of the home improvements was to fix my dripping shower head. Unfortunately, we got the knob about half off and weren’t quite sure how to finish disconnecting it all. After a little searching, I realized that there wasn’t any good way that I could think of to figure out what shower handles I have. At that point, I decided to try a different tactic. I found a plumbing web forum that had similar topics, posted the picture above and had an answer in about 8 hours. Sometimes, the web is nice.

As you may or may not know, the Friday after Thanksgiving is known in the shopping world as Black Friday.  I realized the other day that is rapidly approaching when I saw that a couple of websites already had the black friday ad for Best Buy.  If you’re interested, here’s a pretty good site for getting ready for black friday (bfads.net).  As the event gets closer, there will of course be a rundown of all the best deals on techbargains.  There was also a rumor on techcrunch that Amazon will be selling a $100 XBox 360 soon.