Rain #1

Waking up to rain, an hour before your alarm clock goes off, is always nice. Waking up an hour later and seeing it's not done raining yet... that tends to be a problem.

One of those very rare days today, when I can't bike to work because it's just raining at 7 AM. And I don't mean a drop here or a drop there, or maybe an overcast sky... I mean really raining. True, it rains almost the whole year here, but it has a very clear schedule, which doesn't normally include commute hours.

In fact it was so bad this morning I actually had to turn around when I got to the office and head for the nearest supermarket to get an umbrella. I really didn't want to be walking a block from my parking spot to the building under that kind of rain. As luck would have it, the supermarket was closed. I finally decided to brave it, and as I was parking, the rain let up a bit, which left me wet to a point where I air dried about 15 minutes later.

Brownies

A couple years back Shell used to have some awesome brownies at their convenience stores. Every time I'd gas up, there was no question: just had to go get one at the convenience store.

Eventually they stopped selling those brownies, but not before I found out they were made by this place called Mom's Bakery. A few months later I found one of those bakeries near the University, but they had stopped making brownies =(

Today I decided to try my luck again and stop by... and sure enough, they had like 6 of them sitting in the shelves. If I hadn't eaten lunch something like 10 minutes before, I probably would have emptied the shelf =)

Made for a good late afternoon snack, although the popular vote at the office ruled that they still couldn't shake a stick at a chocolate cake from Spoon, another local bakery. I'll have to stop by eventually and get a picture of one of those too =D

Photo is geotagged BTW, in case anyone wants to stop by for one...

The City... finally done...

Finally done with The City Alone. Finished polishing up the last photo this afternoon. They should be up and available on my other site around the middle of this week.

... has a bit of mileage on it...

Ok, you can quit whining about your car having a lot of miles on it... see what I got to drive?

It's a Frontier pickup, one of the old ones that had the extra long cargo space. And it's got 505.216 Km (around 314.000 Mi) on it.

But the most surprising part is, it still runs like new. Most cars I've seen start to drag their feet around 100.000 Km, and start to have all kinds of weird hiccups and noises. Not this one. The engine was a bit loud, sure, and it had a loose screw here and there, but aside from that it ran like any other pickup you might drive.

Had to take it all the way across the ranges on the Atlantic, which was a pretty good test drive.

From what the guy who normally drives it tells me, the secret to getting 500.000 Km out of a car is maintenance. Oil, tuning, spark plugs, all that stuff... change it when the manufacturer says to, on the dot, and you'll never hear your car complain. This one in particular was like that: it´s had a maintenance schedule that almost borders on obsessive-compulsive.

End of story, almost

Finally. Exactly one month after I send the defective one out, I got my replacement drive from Western Digital.

I do have to give them credit, that month in the mail was mostly the local post and my package forwarding service. WD's did a pretty good job, and their part was just 4 days long: 2 to process the return, and 2 more to ship a replacement.

But my forwarder forgot to notify their address change, the package got stuck when UPS couldn't find them, and it sat there for a week while everything got cleared up. Which in turn made it miss the weekly flight. It finally flew this week and the package was released today.

Only thing left to do now is open the bag, and pop the replacement into the Mybook World II. And wait to see if it does its magic and syncs up. I'll do that before bed, otherwise I'll be up all night looking at the sync progress every 5 minutes.

Clear skies at dawn

Now it's looking a lot more like December. A drizzle here and there during the night clears the pollution out of the air and makes for a clear morning, so clear you can see all the way to the top of the local mountain ranges and even make out the trees and patches of grass.

If time permits and the weather cooperates, I'll stop by again on the weekend and get a better shot of the ranges =)

Night Rider 2

After last week's test ride downtown, this week it was time to pull off the real thing. We joined the local downtown nightly art tour, to see what would happen. And it went pretty well. The city at night, all the museums you might want to look at, and some stops along the way for necessary food and drink. 3 hours of good fun downtown, not something you get to do every day here.

From what I hear, around 70 people RSVP'd online... only about 8 of us showed up. Guess that's to be expected when you take reservations via the Internet for a free event. Reminds me of that joke on Saturday Night Live: "the Department of Homeland Security would like to thank the multiple anonymous college students who made calls to our hotline reporting the names of dangerous terrorists..."

But on the flip side, seems word of the bike tour is getting around. The organizers tell me there's a lot of embassies that have people that want to join the ride next time, and one of the local TV stations wants to try a "celebrity night ride" stunt in a couple of weeks. If you make it, they will come?

Old stuff

Getting rid of old stuff is always fun, especially when you manage to make something off of it.

Had a Linksys wireless card sitting in a desk drawer. I bought it a couple of years ago, used it for a while, and then stashed it when I came to realize 802.11b was no good for transferring large volumes of data. I found it again a while back, put it up for sale... and off it went today.

One less thing hanging around in my desk drawers =)

A cookie for your thoughts

So I get this email this afternoon in my inbox. "Dear customer: please give us your feedback, and we´ll give you a cookie"

Come on Subway, what do I look like, Scooby Doo or something? xD

Toyscon, Day 2

Day 2 of Toyscon 2010. Got in early, earlier than most would have imagined for a Sunday. Lots more people today at the convention, and 10 more hours standing up to add to my record.

The convention was a local museum, the building itself used to house a prison until the 1980s. Of course, there´s stories about ghosts and noises and things moving at night... we didn't see any. And this morning nothing had moved on the tables, so I guess whatever ghosts there are, they aren't precisely into model cars and Star Trek figures xD

Darth Potter

Seems everyone's getting into the Harry Potter spirit these days.

Bigger than I thought

Almost done with the trailer office idea. I have to say it got way bigger than I imagined. In the end, aside from the trailer office, it ended up having a roof on top of it large enough to house a basketball court. And the best part is, it all comes apart and packs up so you can take it anywhere... no crane required.

Though looking at it, I wouldn't be surprised if one of the neighbors wants to buy it from us when we're done with it. It's just turning out to be too neat an idea...

Night Rider

For those who are horrified at the thought of riding downtown, after dark, and on the streets where all the seedy bars are. Yeah, I went riding downtown, after dark, near the seedy bars. So did 5 more people. Then we all rode home... at 10 PM. So get over it.

It's all organized by a group of people, who you probably couldn't call anything but visionaries (given the apparent insanity of the idea). And it's actually not a bad experience. You see the lights, the parks, and you can even learn a bit about the history of the buildings you see along the way.

They tell me this particular city tour was small, since they wanted to make it short. But the last full-scale city night tour, they tell me, had over 1.000 people, some on foot, some on buses, some on bikes.

Next city tour is Wednesday night, and this one's an all-bike tour. If anyone's curious to go, check out the Tour's web page and sign up.

This one's for Wilford

It's all Wilford Brimley's fault really. When I was in school, he came out with a whole mess of Quaker Oats commercials. "A bowl in the morning keeps me going all day long... it's the right thing to do" or something of the sort. I saw them so many times I got hooked on the stuff.

Sure I had my share of lucky charms, frosted flakes, count chocula, bread and butter, bacon and eggs, pancakes... but in the end Brimley won out and I went back to Quaker oatmeal. The little instant packets, because "They tell us we can have Quaker Oats 11 times in a row and never have the same flavor twice" xD

And it didn't stop there. After I was done with all 11 flavors I went hardcore: straight up with no artificial flavors, dried fruits, nothing. And I haven't been back since. I figure it's been a year and a half now of quaker oats, every morning.

And well, no, I don't really have any miracle stories about how it changed my life, about how it made me win a marathon, or about how I lost more pounds than you could ever lose on a Jenny Craig and Slim Fast binge. A year and a half later it's the same old me, my Quaker Oats diet didn't do a damn thing.

But, it tastes good and it's fun. So I'm not switching. Damn you Brimley =D

Staircase #fail

Next time you design a house, don't forget to add a staircase to those second floor gates... xD

To and from

On the way to work... on the way from work...

Getting up in the morning, you'd never expect it to rain. Unless of course, you lived here =)

The city alone

Most of your life you see the city in the same light: full of people, full of cars, full of noise. When I was at the University, several long nights finishing projects showed me there was a completely different side of the city most people never see: the one that comes out only at sunrise, and lasts only for about an hour.

What's there to see at sunrise? Nothing. The city alone. Deserted. No people, no cars, no noise. It's like you're the only one there, you and maybe a couple of people waiting for the bus or walking to the shift change.

And the most interesting part is, the city becomes your playground. You can park anywhere, explore the view from the middle of the street, stop at a green light to take a look at something... and nobody's there to care about it.

Yesterday I canned my urge to go out at night, and today at 4:30 AM I was out walking the streets. 4:30 AM, downtown, on a Sunday. And not a soul to be seen. I'm still looking over the photos and adjusting stuff, hoping to have the set up on Flickr by the end of this week.

Cybershopping Saturday

Today was cybershopping day. A friend needed me to help buy a cell phone off of Ebay, and some stuff off Amazon. So we went shopping. The Ebay purchase got a bit complicated, but it went through in the end.

Problem is, now I'm seriously thinking about going shopping for some stuff I had seen on Amazon. Must.... control... credit card....

My new scanner

I've got a bunch of papers from who knows how long ago stored in drawers, boxes, you name it. Those kind of papers you figure might eventually be necessary for something. What exactly I don't know, but eventually you could need them.

For a while now I've been thinking about getting one of those scanners with a built in feeder. Problem is, most of the half decent ones I've seen run about $800.

But a couple of months ago I found a neat solution. There´s this software called Snapter which lets you take a photo of a document, and then straighten and crop it automatically. And you end up with a scan that's pretty good. It's not the exact document, but for most cases where what you need is the information and not so much the document, it works.

So today I made myself a scanner. Took an keyboard drawer that was pretty beat up and painted it black, and set my P&S up to scan documents. And it worked nice. Out of almost 100 pages, there´s only a couple of documents I'll have to redo on the flatbed. Total time invested? About an hour.

Truss

This whole container office project just keeps getting bigger and bigger

History... developing...

There it is, silent, in a corner. Right now it's just another thing. But someday people will look at it and wonder how something like that could have actually become a part of modern history.

Right on time

The trains serve as my timekeeper on the way to work in the mornings. I know as long as I watch them go by, I'm on time.

Crossing the intersection, if all is silent, I figure I better get moving.

How to break a habit

Bad habits are hard to break. Here's the latest trick someone passed on. Put a rubber band around your wrist and when you catch yourself, snap it.

Don't know if it works, at least it sounds fun.

Just don't let anyone at work get word of it... or it'll turn into one big rubber band snapping match, your own private version of Jackass xD

Under cover

No luck with the sun yet. A little bit yesterday, but the clouds are still hanging around. There's been no rain though, which is an improvement.

It's also started getting cold. You know, that kind of dry, kind of wet cold that lets you know that the year is coming to a close and the holidays are drawing near.

You ever notice there's a smell to it too? It's like that smell when it rains, only much less intense, and mixed in with the dry smell of the cold air. It's one of those smells you can't really place your finger on, but you know it when you get there. The end of autumn, that's what it smells like.

We don't really have autumn or spring here. We just go from no rain, to more rain, to less rain. But you still get that cold and that end of autumn smell nevertheless.

Sometimes I miss the four seasons. And everything that came with them.

Don't get stuck on the past, and don't worry too much about the future. And if you succeed in doing that, let me know how it's done.

Charm

A little charm can go a long way

Remember, remember

Just another day for a geeky celebration...

Today's escape

Well, the rain did get worse, and worse. Half the Pacific is flooded, a good part of the capital is without running water, and on the south end of town a huge landslide buried an entire neighboorhood. Truly not the best of weeks for us.

But you have to make the best of it and go on as best you can. The rain and the entire mess sure didn't stop today's photo expo, organized by one of the local photo academies. It was fun, got to see some very interesting work by beginers, and not-so-beginners. Can't wait to see what they'll all be producing in a year or so if they keep shooting.

It's raining again

It's raining again. It started on Tuesday, and it hasn't stopped yet. No bike to work this week, so far.

Aside from the annoying fact that it's raining, the rain seems to have made everyone drive worse than their usual below par driving. Which normally means more accidents on the way to work. Had to wait in line to pass at least 2 accidents this morning, which is way above the norm.. especially since I take back roads to work.

Downtown

Went downtown today, hadn't been there in a while. Same old downtown, same old buildings, same streets with endless traffic jams...

Thermal fan control

Note to self...

"Thermal fan control" has two parts to it... too much "thermal" and not enough "control" doesn't really work too well xD