San Francisco, Day 2g: The end is in sight!

I know, I know - how long was this day?

We met in the hotel lobby for dinner but found some sweet cars waiting outside in the bellhop area. The silver one is a Jaguar XK, possibly an XKR (I can't remember). The black one is a Bentley Continental GT. Both awesome looking cars.





We walked a few blocks from the hotel to what amounted to a line of restaurants with outdoor seating in an alley between the inside seating/kitchen/bar and another building. Based on the concierge's recommendation, we chose Cafe Tiramisu.




Actual Italians manning an Italian restaurant? I call that a good sign. We had to wait about ten minutes for an outdoor table, so out comes the wine list. I asked the waitress to surprise me with a good red wine. She did, and it was good, but I can't remember what it was!

We're seated...appetizer time! I wrote down my food selections for the trip on an old orthodontic appointment reminder I had in my wallet, but now I can't find it, so we'll have to go by memory. I started with garlic (I think) stuffed calamari on Italian bread. Another glass of wine? Sounds good to me!



One of the marketing guys had steamed clams (I think) for an appetizer, and a mountain of them came on the plate.



For dinner I had the tuna, which was excellent, and requested to be surprised again with a wine that would complement my entree. I get a chardonnay, and even though I'm not so much a white wine fan, it made a great pair. Delicate balance, magnificent bouquet, charming interaction between the wine and the tuna...all that jibber jabber.



How could we go to a place called Cafe Tiramisu and not try their tiramisu? I know! It's great, but I don't know why I don't have any coffee with it.



We walked back to the hotel, and it was a brisk walk with a cold breeze, but felt really nice.

San Francisco, Day 2f: Cream Puffs!

One of the Marketing ladies had lived in San Francisco before, and she was raving about this place for cream puffs. This place, Beard Papa's, happened to be across the street from the Metreon, so we checked them out.




So basically they have all these pastries with some cream injectors. Word on the street is that the vanilla is their signature (and best) flavor of cream, but they also have chocolate and green tea. I chose vanilla so they stab the pastry with this big metal syringe emplacement and fill it up.

Here is before and after (actually closer to before and during):





It was good, but I don't think I'll be heading back to SF just to check out this place. I meant to go back and taste the chocolate, but forgot.

San Francisco, Day 2e

The St. Regis Hotel is very close (a block away) from the Metreon and Yerba Buena Gardens. I walked to a Japanese restaurant in the Metreon, Sanraku, and had California Rolls and Unagi (eel), one of my favorites, with miso soup.




I hung out in the YB Gardens, which is a park/plaza/gathering place and took a few more pictures. The fountain was part of an MLK memorial.

San Francisco, Day 2d: In case of fire, or rappers...

I happened to read this sign by the elevators as I was checking out the gym.




I think I see a problem - what if I'm at the hotel attending a rap album release party and a fire breaks out?

San Francisco, Day 2c

I made it to my hotel, the St. Regis, and it was nice! At almost $500 a night, what would you expect, right?




Here is the web album with the rest of the pics, and I found the Edit Captions button this time!

San Francisco, Day 2b

After breakfast I needed to get to my hotel, but I wasn't sure if I wanted to go via taxi or walk. Google maps said it was a little over three miles, and it was cool weather, so I figured I'd start walking. Unfortunately I also had my suitcase and backpack full of stuff. Anyway, I set off.



My start was in the upper left, and hotel destination is in the circle at the lower right. It wasn't that bad, but it started to get a little hilly. I couldn't see an open cab though! Finally I caught one unloading at Broadway, so I had walked about 1.3 miles, according to Google maps.

I noticed that the gas prices were "only" $2.99 for unleaded! That's only $0.20 - $0.25 more than Austin. I thought gas was more expensive out here. I remember when I visited San Jose for previous ELSA job gas was at least 2x the TX price.

San Francisco trip, Day 1, Day 2a

Sunday I flew out to San Francisco, CA, duh, to provide engineering support for a press tour for some of our upcoming products.



I LOVE San Francisco. The awesome weather is awesomely awesome enough, but there is a lot of stuff to do and a lot of great food.

I got a chance to see my friend Spaghetti, and I'll be seeing more of him later! When in Rome...! Wait - I mean What happens in San Francisco...uh, that doesn't work either. May the Force be with us?

I had breakfast the next day in his neck of the woods, and initially I had a hard time deciding on a place. Believe me, there were plenty of places for coffee and food. I finally ended up going to The Grove (link doesn't correspond to the same location I visited).



I ordered a mocha, which had some nice creme decoration, and huevos rancheros. The eggs were good, as was the rice, and the beans were real, but the guacamole was a little off to me, but I'm from Texas where we have the luxury of critiquing Mexican food rather than just having it. The mocha was very good in a great wide-mouthed mug. A very good balance of the grainy-bitter-sweet trifecta, closer to a Seattle's Best Mocha than Starbucks.





I chose to sit outside (see earlier reference to awesome weather) as it was roughly 9:30am and about mid 60-something degrees. Practically perfect.



Man, I really have my game face on!

Red Bull Flugtag 2007

I had an idea to go to the Red Bull Flugtag (German for "flight day") as it was in Austin this year at Auditorium Shores (near Town Lake...whoops! I mean Lady Bird Lake).



It's called a flying contest, but it should be called a falling contest. Participants create these elaborate contraptions, perform skits and then push their creation, with a pilot, over a cliff to the roaring approval of the crowd.

My idea was to have a nice family outing with something cool, interesting and Austiny. It was definitely interesting, and totally Austiny, but waaaaay too many people. A lot of people were smoking, as well as smoking, if you catch my drift.

We only managed to stay for a few entries...Team Chupacabra had the...pilot...dressed as a, wait for it, chupacabra, and "he" attacked the rest of the group, who had rigged some sort of gushing blood apparatus around their necks. I mean these were arterial spouts a few feet higher than their heads. How was their craft going to get pushed off the cliff when only the pilot remained alive? Well, he resurrected his teammates to the sound of Van Halen's Jump and off they went. Some other team pushed a giant vacuum over the cliff. Good times? There was a giant video screen set up showing the teams, but we couldn't get very close. We never were able to see the water until we went back to the parking garage (no on-street parking, of course) and waited at the top level.

See more photos at my first Googletastic Picasa Web Album!

De Leon Peach and Melon Festival 2007

Mid-August we travelled up to De Leon, TX, for the annual Peach and Melon Festival.

Wow - I didn't even know they had a website until now, and I've been going for years (we have family in De Leon).

There is a carnival and a parade, but what I like is the watermelon slicing. They have crates of watermelons that have been refrigerated and put onto trailers. The main drag is cordoned off and everyone gathers on the sidewalks. Trucks pull up and they start slicing and handing out halves and quarters of red and yellow watermelons.




I'm a red melon fan. Unsalted, naturally.



After everyone has had their fill they start handing out whole watermelons to anyone that wants them.

I prefer a fork, but at last year's festival I saw someone using their credit card to slice the watermelon and shovel it in their mouth. Whatever works!

We were eating some at our friends' house and noticed a visitor coming up to the back door to finish off our rinds.




Here is the truck of the family that had a pony-ride set up at the festival. Ingenious! The only downside is that it requires a very long extension cord.

New carpet

We're finally getting our new carpet all over the house today.

I'm taking today off of work because the process may take all day. We had to move everything off the floors and out of the closets. Neither of us realized how much stuff we were storing (hoarding). This is giving us a great opportunity to collect items for a garage sale, as, literally, almost everything that used to be in carpeted rooms is now in our kitchen and garage.

So I like spicy stuff

Friday nights we have pizza night, and we also happen to have a large bottle of jalapenos. It just doesn't get any prettier than this.



I would call this a medium load. For some reason we have found that the sliced jalapenos labeled "Nacho slices" seem to be slightly hotter than the ones marked as sliced jalapenos.

Model Fight: Maison de Roulement 005

I finally got around to messing with the rolling house for a few minutes today, but most of the stuff was housekeeping and minor updates.



I've come to the conclusion that this project is over in its current incarnation. Why? Multiple reasons (for multiple stories (oh, delicious puns)):

1. Scale: I started out eyeballing the scale of all the objects and not using anywhere close to accurate measurements. If I ever try to do something with another prop or model I would be asking for some work getting everything scaled correctly. I'd like to start over using actual scale.

2. Organization: Currently my model is made up of groups of components of components of groups...you get the picture. This isn't exactly SketchUp's fault, as the grouping/componentization can be very useful, but as I started grouping halfway into the project, I didn't plan very well, and SketchUp isn't letting me back out of my decisions gracefully.

3. Rendering: I happen to like the SketchUp output, but there are times when I want more, or at least different, styles. What I have to do is export from SketchUp and import into some rendering package, assign/modify any textures I need and render. If I were working in another package, I could save a few steps. Granted, for my model at this stage, it isn't unbearable.

I'm planning on starting from scratch in either Modo or 3D Studio MAX, both of which we have at work. I'm torn about which package to use, so I might experiment with both and post the results.

Behold the mind...of a Mad Dog!

My buddy Mike has caught TEH BLOGGING FEVER - check him out.

Katamari Damacy

Another game (for the PS2) that I love is Katamari Damacy. It's very simplistic, very stylized, and definitely not a typical American game. I'll just cut and paste from the wikipedia article to describe the story:

The game's plot concerns a tiny prince on a mission to rebuild the stars, constellations and Moon, which his father, the King of All Cosmos, has playfully destroyed. This is achieved by rolling a magical, highly adhesive ball called a katamari around various locations, collecting increasingly larger objects, ranging from thumbtacks to schoolchildren to mountains, until the ball has grown large enough to become a star. The game falls under both the puzzle and action game genres, since strategy as well as dexterity are needed to complete a mission.

You just use both the analog sticks to move the prince around collecting the objects. It's a great nonviolent game for kids, but it falls into the Japanese-absurdist-LSD-inspired categories, and some of the cutscenes and intros need some explaining.

I have not played any of the sequels, but hopefully they don't stray too far from what made the original so unique.

200 Posts!

Wow - this is my 200th post! Here is my first post, for that trip down Memory Lane.

I started this blog because I was going to Singapore for business, and we finally decided that it would be too much trouble to bring my wife and kids with me. I wanted to document the trip for anyone that wanted to see.

Naturally, it's morphed into "my blog," where I document stuff that I think is interesting...for posterity? Kicks? Who knows, but I like it.

Hamilton Pool

We recently went to Hamilton Pool, which I expected to be more of a pool like Deep Eddy, but I was happily surprised.





It is actually Hamilton Pool Preserve, which is basically a collapsed grotto with a waterfall about an hour or so south of our house. Here you can read more facts, such as the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department noting it as Travis County's most significant natural area.






After a .25 mile (!) hike down some pretty rugged terrain you see a small beach and the pool stretches out from that. I'm not sure how deep it gets, but it is over my head at less than halfway across. Directly across from the beach is a waterfall that apparently never stops flowing, even in times of drought. What enchantment is this?

If you want to take a break from swimming, you can walk around the pool in the rock caverns, and there is a walkway that circles the pool. Pictures can't really do it justice - it's pretty amazing.




Be warned though - I wouldn't advise carrying a bunch of umbrellas, coolers or other stuff. It's quiet a hike down. A tired three-year-old was a pretty good workout!

Gaming table

A while ago I posted about getting some wargaming miniatures for a game my friends and I play. Well, to say that I "play" it is stretching the truth, as my miniatures are still languishing in an unpainted, unassembled state. But I have watched some games!

Anyway, these games are usually played on a 4'x4', 4'x6' or 4'x8' table with various pieces of terrain/scenery for strategery. I've started making such a table, as I'm more interested in the terrain aspect of the game than the actual playing.

My table is 4'x6' with a plywood top and 1"x4" bracing for stability.





One can stop at this point, drop a cloth over the board or paint it whatever color you want and badda-bing, you have a gaming table. You want a forest? Green felt or paint. Desert? Light brown.

I'd like to go a little farther than this, though. I want to play multiple games on multiple types of boards but limit my storage concerns. My plan is to leave the plywood as is except for some holes cut in it. Around the edge I will have some sort of molding (I already have .25"x2" strips) that will extend up from the plywood about .25" or so. This will form an outer shell.

Next, I will get 4'x6' sheets of that pegboard material (thin MDF or hardboard) but without the holes, and paint each side different colors, appropriate to the terrain on which I would like to game. That board goes into the shell and appropriately based terrain gets placed on that board. Alternatively, I could actually model terrain onto the board (hills, sand dunes, lava cracks, whatever) and the shell would hold that as well. The holes in the plywood will allow me to push up a corner of the MDF board to exchange it.



We'll see how far I get with this project, but it's faster than de-sprueing miniatures! I think my only concern at this point is weight - the plywood made it a little heavier than I expected - and possibly scratching the surface of wherever I rest the table. In a move sure to cause my gaming friends (with armies ready to go) to roll their eyes, I am thinking about getting felt and stapling it to the bottom of the 1"x4" boards so it won't damage our kitchen table.

Guitar Hero 2

I got Guitar Hero 2 for my birthday, and I love it.

We have Dance Dance Revolution, which we all think is great, and I still really like Parappa the Rapper. Guitar Hero's basis is still the tried and true rhythm game, but the controller sets it off. It is a lot of fun.

I was going back and forth on wireless versus wired controllers. There was a guitar controller that I liked, but it was wired. I eventually decided on the wireless guitar, and it was the right choice. With kids, cords are a no-no, and with the wireless you can move around more and even sit back on the couch and play.



We had some friends over and at the end of the night we fired up Guitar Hero, and it was even more fun. I borrowed another wireless guitar from work (for, uh, testing), and we had some guitar/bass faceoffs. What's funny is if the TV volume is down far enough, all you hear is the clicking and clacking of the keys and the picks.

I have the actual Red Octane Guitar Hero branded semi-Stratocaster-style guitar, but you can pick up a generic guitar (in semi-Explorer-style) for about half the price, and I'll be picking up a second guitar pretty quickly.

I've heard a lot of jibber-jabber of how playing Guitar Hero can help your ability playing real guitar. As someone that's taking lessons playing real guitar, I don't see it. The closest I think one could get to Guitar Hero/real guitar synergy is maybe practicing with a metronome. Or light pattern recognition, but translating buttons to notes and chords? I don't think so.

Harry Potter and the License to Print Money

I picked up the latest Harry Potter book Sunday. I was worried that everyplace would be sold out, but our local grocery store had stacks for the cover price of $35.99. Even for a hardback, that's a lotta lettuce. Sunday's newspaper had a Target ad that had the same hardback for $17.99. How could I afford not to get it? I've been careful to avoid spoilers, but I had my own theories on certain plot points.

I read about 120 (out of ~780) pages Sunday night and went to a doctor's appointment Monday morning. The receptionist and one of the nurses were all atwitter about my book (which I took with me, naturally), checking my progress and wishing they could have stayed home to read all day. I agreed, and regaled them with my tale of saving half the cover price. The nurse told me that The Beast had a similar deal for a similar price.

Later that day I was picking up some lunch at another grocery store...again with the book in tow as I was using every spare moment to read it. A lady behind me asked if I had skipped ahead to the end to read it. I had to resist rolling my eyes - who would do something that ridiculous? I told her no, and that I was trying to avoid hearing any details before I finished the book. Internally I was preparing my "na na na na IDON'THEARYOU" defense in case she dropped a spoiler-bomb, but she just looked off in the distance wistfully and said that she kept hoping someone on the news would reveal the end. I was like, "Okay...." and checked out.

I finished it Wednesday, and I liked it. I'll avoid any kind of review and won't reveal anything.

My high def woes

So I really want to jump on the high definition movie race, but I have a small problem.

Our main TV is downstairs in the living room. We have another TV in the master bedroom. We watch movies on both of these, and have been known to start a movie downstairs and continue/finish it upstairs. We also have a portable DVD player for the car to keep some sanity (ours as well as our kids) on long trips.

Let's say I get a high def disc...I'll need to get at least two players! Limiting ourselves to only watching some movies downstairs won't score very highly on the WAF.

If it's a kid movie? Fuhgeddaboudit! I'll need some way of watching it in the car. You try disappointing your kids and see how that goes.

Even though, personally, I think Blu-Ray will eventually win the format war, I want to hedge my bets right now. I could always get a combo player, but right now I only see the LG BH100 as being able to play both HD DVD and Blu-Ray discs, as well as conventional DVDs. Bad news - Google Product Search shows those bad boys almost hitting $1000...and don't forget I would need two!

Still not too many details on the rumored Samsung Duo HD BD-UP5000.

Right now there is no compelling reason to drop that amount of cash when normal DVDs in progressive scan mode look just fine.

Death by...Home Depot

We just spent over nine hours across two or three days in Home Depot (with some excellent customer service from Bruce, Daniel and Kent) agonizing over carpet choices. Believe me - our kids thought the agony was much worse than we did. I can make only so many laps around the store with them in the cart waving DANGER flags before they get bored.

Our current carpet is getting a little threadbare in a few places, and kids running around with juice usually isn't good for carpet. We knew we wanted a speckly carpet, as the mixture of colors hides spots very nicely, but it doesn't change the overall color too much. At first we were gung ho for Berber, which can take a lot of wear and doesn't get frazzled, but everything we saw looked like either industrial or indoor/outdoor carpet. Not what you want in the bedroom, much less the living room.

Then we looked at Frieze (free-zay, naturally). This was a good combination of long and short loops that gave a good texture to barefeet, and it looked like we could get one that held up well. The problem was that the Frieze we wanted was coming out to over $1000 more than another one we wanted.

We settled on some light-colored speckly carpet from the Plush family. Now we have to wait some amount of days before the measuring people arrive, and then a few weeks before we move all our furniture out of the house, have them install the carpet and we move everything back.

This was a grueling exercise, and hopefully we won't have to make any more decisions like this until our next house. I know more about carpet now than I thought I ever would.

Taco Meat

Not on this last vacation, but a few weeks ago we went to my parents' house and visited our family farm.



We have a small herd of Longhorns, and they are delicious! Here is my Uncle Jay being the Bull Whisperer.



We were able to get pretty close, and we drove up in trucks and got out and walked around a little, with the kids on the back/roof of the truck. Not all the Longhorns are agressive, but they can inadvertently cause some damage just turning their heads around.




Here's the origin of the post title, if you haven't seen it yet.

Back from vacation

Wow, I'm finally back online. Taking a vacation for us can be tricky. Sometimes we have "working vacations," where I take time off of work and we work around the house on projects. Even with the best of intentions we seem to have less time for projects than we expect.

My time off has also let me experience purchasing my first box of wine.




All in all, not that bad - I think we may just have it too cold. Great for cooking, though, and the no-mess...spigot?...is great. I agree that a lot of the "wine experience" is the presentation, uncorking, and pouring from a glass bottle. Cardboard storage may be a buzzkill for purists, but for my special spaghetti sauce, box wine is fine by me! At least there are games built in to your purchase....

We also started Phase 2 of our playscape, watched a few movies and are preparing for our youngest's third birthday, which will be Toy Story-tastic!

If I'm so "rested" from being off, why haven't I been getting up so early? Unfortunately we found a Jackass marathon just about every night this week.