Category Archives: General

Things so normal as to not fit neatly into any other area.

Nuggets of Strange Wisdom

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I have been flying around quite a bit recently for the job and found that if I sit quietly in the cab or bus to and from the airport I can pick up on some remarkable gems from the local population. On tap from this weeks trip is this little nugget:

Don’t marry an American woman. They expect too much and are just too hard to deal with. I’m 56, retired, and moving to Thailand. Those are the women to have. My girlfriend is 26 and she’s thankful for the little things. That’s how a woman is supposed to be. And boy does it get the blood rushing again, if you know what I mean, even for an old guy like me.

This really isn’t my type of advice, but someone out there might find it useful.  Feel free to discuss it with your significant other and let me know how that goes.

Commercial Flight Suckage

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Again today I had to take a flight somewhere for just the day, then return home.  And again the wonderful TSA had to find a way to make it miserable.  In San Jose they have so few checkpoints that the line to get into the waiting area was out the door.  They also had only small paper signs telling people what could or couldn’t be taken on planes, so of course many people missed those signs and then got combatitive at the checkpoints.

On the way back, in Burbank’s airport, for an unknown reason all TSA checkpoints were shut down for at least 30 mins.  The national guard was on hand to randomly pick people for extra searches.  No explanation was given, but eventually the lines moved again, but not soon enough for a group of people to completly miss their flights to Phoenix, then get angry at the gate agent.

Thanks again TSA!  You’re the reason why we’ll all be traveling by bus in the not so distant future.

Birthday Day Stress and Lesson 5

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The day started off a little rough, with an early awakening for a conference call, and didn’t really get much better from then on out. Yes, its my birthday, and my mother’s birthday, and now Steve and April’s newest born’s birthday. And sadly, it is also Ben Affleck’s birthday too. That was a real downer to learn about.

I did manage to sneak out of the office a little bit early and get in another flying lesson. This time it was all about not paying attention to the gauges and just “feeling” the plane. Good thing too, as the sky was busy with all sorts of other planes. In the end, I got a bit frazzled and really mucked up the landing, and made errors on the radio so that the tower people were confused, I’m sure.

Why is it that we celebrate birthday’s again? I think I’ll go sleep, then fly to LA in the morning, and think about it.

Full Scale Flight

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After three tries at it I believe I’m now committed enough create a new category for my newest activity: learning to fly.

This Saturday I flew with an instructor in a Citbabria trainer around the Western SF bay area. According to the instructor, I’m “a natural” and he kept asking me “have you done this before?” These are his words, not mine. Evidently I don’t suck, is what he is saying.

That’s good, because learning to fly takes time and money. And I’d hate to suck at it and not know that until a good chunk of my savings were gone. Luckily, it looks like I can just concentrate on not sucking and leave the rest of my worries til a later date.

Wish me luck.

Citabria

Friendly Reminder: I'm A White Guy

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It seems that I keep forgetting that I am a lanky white guy.  This week I decided to go to lunch with some of the old NVIDIA co-workers at a local Indian food restaurant.  The food was good and I was careful to pick things I knew I could handle.  Or so I thought. When

I got back to work things seemed to be heating up just a bit in my stomach.  Then, of the course of a few hours, that spicy chicken got into a shouting match with my breakfast and things just went downhill from there.  Two days later I was still feeling the burn. I

I guess I’m not curry compatible.  Which is a shame, because that’s some good food.

Fruit Bar Goodness

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I’ll admit it, I’m finicky when it comes to food items.  But this week I discovered Dreyer’s Grape Fruit Bars and I’m hooked.  They taste great and seem to be somewhat healthy.  At least more healthy than ice cream or other sweets.  I don’t see how you could pass up such goodness if you encountered it in your local supermarket frozen foods section.  It really is that good.

But now I’ve finished off the box and I want more.  There is none to be had in the local store, so I guess I’ll have to wait a bit.  But no!  I can be notified whenever my local store gets more of the grape flavor.  Is this really what I need, yet another email notification?

Using Google for Dating

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I saw this story and just had to laugh all the way through it. Literally, its a tongue-in-cheek take on the average geek (that’s me) using virtually all the Google services (still me) to get a girl. Besides being entertaining, it makes me wonder just how much of that stuff will work. I think I’ll have to look into the AdWords idea, though.

Flying Over the North Part of the South Bay

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Yesterday I took a short flight in a Robinson R22 helicopter over part of the Bay. It was pretty nifty to be flying again, this time courtesy of Mark P (thanks!). At around 800 feet above the ground and around 80 knots airspeed, the flight took me from San Carlos to Fremont and back again.

It was a cool way to see part of the area I thought I knew and get some photos in the process. You can see a selection of those photo’s in this album. Hopefully there will be more of these flights with interesting pictures in the future.

Oh How the Google Has Fallen

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In a pre-apocalyptic notice to the technology industry, I found this interesting article of how the product cycle must work inside of Google.
It is funny to be sure, but I’m not entirely convinced its that made up. I know a little something about product ideas, launches, back room feature quarterbacking, and the like. And this story smells so familiar it’s scary.

I use a lot of Google products and I like using them. But to think that things might actually be this way on the inside of their world kind of frightens me. Oh well, back to my Gcal/Gmail/Gmaps/GDS/Google Earth trapped existence.