Drama surrounding females.

In other news, I’m getting sick, I think. Right before I head home. Awesome. Scratchy throat, sinus pressure, my nose is starting to drip, and sinus drainage, which makes me feel sick to my stomach. :(

Me too. How did I wind up here?

Yeah, so I basically spent the entire day porting TheLucid Typo theme to WordPress. If anybody has an opinion one way or the other on how they like it, be sure to leave a comment. I like the theme a lot, and it wasn’t too hard to port. I wonder if searching is a little hampered with the whole “live search” functionality, but that’s probably up to you guys, not so much me. Also, you can always just search with Goog…

Looks like I’ll be plopping down a good bit of money at the movies here pretty soon. All of these should be worthwhile. :)

Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End
Shrek the Third
Ocean’s Thirteen
Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer
Knocked Up
The Ex

All of the ladies reading this will just have to deal with this post. I usually try not to be too sexist, but damn. There was a young woman at In-n-Out who was drop dead gorgeous. I mean hot. I mean crazy-stupid-hot. CRAZY-STUPID-HOT. In hindsight, I wished I would have told her as much, but I thought about it only as I was leaving. I mean, how long can you sit by yourself with no food left on your plate at a fast food restaurant and not look conspicuous?

Anyway, I got a haircut, too.

(Did I mention she was hot?)

I managed to break my holster for my phone last night getting out of my car. I’m not really sure how I did it, but I managed to break it good. I am in mourning. My phone is rather tall, so it doesn’t fit in my pocket well. So tonight, I went by Fry’s, a Cingular Store, and Best Buy, all to no avail. So, I bought one on EBay and it’ll be shipped to Atlanta. I didn’t think that it would be prudent to get it shipped somewhere here, only to miss it, and have to go through the rigmarole (wow, I didn’t realize that was an actual word) of getting it shipped back across the country. So, I’ll be out of a holster for a week and a half. The trusty old thing will be missed. :( In the same vein, I have considered buying an exact duplicate of my current phone, in case I ever destroy it (like I did the last one on the Batman ride at Six Flags over Georgia — good times, good times).

Also, there are ants on my car. Why are there ants on my rental car?

My actual route through Yosemite.

I still haven’t blogged about my general thoughts on California. Must try to do that.

So Maker Faire was pretty neat. But, I think it’s not quite as interesting in person as it appears from pictures and accounts online. Most things presented have a very hacked together feel, and while well designed, most lacked a general sense of elegance. I guess the older I get, the more I feel compelled to engineer things that are exceptionally elegant and serve a larger, long-term purpose, while still using things not quite in the way they were intended to be used. I took some pictures, but as always, I fee like I didn’t take enough. Looking at some of the other pictures that have been posted online, I’ve come to realize that I should have literally shot everything. I had pondered going back today and taking at least 2 pictures of every exhibit. I would have imagined it would have taken me hours to accomplish, but at the end, I think I would have had a good number of good pictures. And would have been quite a good photography exercise. But, I don’t think I’ll head back up there. It’s already mid-afternoon, and it closes at 5pm, so I would imagine that a lot of people will be starting to pack up soon. I was pretty good about taking more than one picture of just about everything, and I tried to mix each up some, trying something different after a couple of shots. I was pretty acutely aware of the amount of ambient light (or lack thereof), as most of the exhibits were indoors. Hopefully next time when I’m in an exhibition setting like this, I’ll be a little more diligent about making my own pictures, instead of just snapping pics of the obviously interesting stuff.

Maker Faire is this weekend! Nobody told me! And I’m in SF! Must… try… to… swing… by…

So, despite all of the Yosemite nonsense, I did make it back to Mountain View. I played around with Google Maps today to see if I could map out my actual path. It was absurd (my actual route, not Google Maps). I half wish I would have had a GPS with me so I could really easily plot my course. In addition, if my camera would also have been GPS aware, it would make it really easy to make waypoints and make an awesome KML file to share the location data of all of my pictures data with everyone. I’ll try and work on that (sort of). I at the very least need to post the pictures eventually.

Chad called me this weekend while I was driving back. Made me think some. I need to post about it soon, before I forget it all.

Holy shnikees. Yay I didn’t die in the wilderness! Ok, let me back up. I had to check out of my current digs at a posh hotel at noon today. I had been playing around with the idea of driving up to Yosemite some weekend, because, well, I should, and who knows if or when I’ll ever be out here like this again. On Friday over lunch, someone from work suggested I go see Lake Tahoe or Monterey. This fit somewhat into my previous leanings. I printed out my plan, to drive up through Yosemite, then up to Tahoe, then back down through Sacramento (my plan). A sort of long journey, over 600 miles, but doable in a weekend, right?

Ok, so the first leg went well. I managed my first U-y and thought it a good sign (as no trip is complete without one). But the directions got a little hairy. By this time I hadn’t gotten a map of California, so I stopped at a convenience store, bought some dp, a full map of California, and one of those cool easy fold maps of Northern California. These would prove invaluable by the end of the day. So just after I stopped to buy the maps and got back on the road, I had a better idea of where to head, I exited and mostly followed the signs. After a lot of forested and windy driving, I arrived at Yosemite. I paid my $20 entry fee, saw some Sequoias, drove around the park, saw the major sites, took a bunch of pictures, and bought a t-shirt. By the time I had done all this, it was getting dark. I had in my mind that I was going to drive all the way across it, and then stumble upon a place to crash. This is where the flaw in my plans started to show. I drove, by myself, under a moonless night, seeing very few cars. Man it was pitch black. And super windy. It would have been better if I would have had a car to follow or lead, but no real luck. Mile after mile I saw no one. I would see parked cars every once in a while, which was unnerving. I would hope they were camping for the night. So that was pretty hairy in and of itself. I dunno why, but my mind was really racing, and I kept having these irrational fears about having an accident or running into a bear or something, I dunno. I finally made it through the park. Every bit more of civilization I saw I relished. The first town I ran into (Lee Vining) was totally booked up. Plenty of No Vacancy signs in the windows at the several lodges in town. Laurie helped me out a bunch and called around to see if there were any free rooms. I started to head south, not really knowing what I would find. The cities seem to be few and small and far between. And they don’t put up too much signage on how far the next town is. They’ll say that Los Angeles is 350 miles away, but not what the next town is. :( Anyway, Laurie had found out that Mammoth would be a likely target. I saw a sign for Mammoth and took it. Every time ventured out, I felt like I was taking my life in my own hands, veering off the beaten path so it were. By this time I still had a quarter of a tank of gas, which would net me maybe 100 miles, but who knew how far I would have to go to find a place to stay, and if I’d have to drive really far, only to have to turn around. Needless to say, I was freaking out. But, my hunch paid off, and I finally saw a city limit sign for Mammoth Lakes. I took a few good turns, and finally found the hotels Laurie had been picking out online. I figured I wouldn’t cut any corners after my harrowing experience of the night, so I stayed with the known, and am writing this from my hotel room at a Holiday Inn. So, I didn’t die. I didn’t run out of gas. I still haven’t had any more supper than my snickers from the Yosemite general store. :( Plus, now I’ve driven through the park, but I didn’t see it! I’m thinking I should just fore go Lake Tahoe and just retrace my steps. Much more the safe way to go. Plus, I’m tired of driving. I’ve gone over 300 miles today. I just want to be home. I’ve been feeling more and more home-sick for Atlanta. Between the added stress of new and more job responsibility, living out of a hotel, having a rental car, I guess it’s finally getting to me. It’s been nice to have an entire room and bathroom to myself at the hotel, but there’s also something nice about having nice cable and having someone around that makes me feel like I shouldn’t get up at 1pm and should try and see the city and stuff. Anyway, I’m rambling and I need to get some sleep, ’cause I have an 11am checkout time. Yay for not dieing in the wilderness!

I’m probably way overdue for an update. If you couldn’t tell from my last post, I will be staying through June 2. Overall this is a good thing for me. As I was getting to the end of my original 3 weeks, I wasn’t really looking forward to leaving and going back to Atlanta. The opportunity to stay was confirmed and then finalized. At which point I almost had second thoughts — mainly between bills and having to make arrangements (which wound up being a pain in the ass cause I didn’t plan far enough in advance) and the newness of the new job wearing off and the eminent repetition starts to set in. Oh well, them’s the breaks. But now I’m over it and glad I’m still here.

I don’t have any real plans for this weekend. The only things I really had to get done were one to do laundry (man I was scraping the bottom of the barrel) and two, to return/rerent my rental car. Budget has some nonsense about not being able to rent a car for more than a month. So, I had to drive back up to SFO, return the car, then rent another. I suppose all is not lost, though. In the trade, I used my Fastbreak status to quickly get a car without a reservation, so that was cool. And, since I had recently signed up for said Fastbreak-yness, I had a cool double upgrade coupon. So, I’m paying less than I was, and I got upgraded from my stupid PT Cruiser to a new Mustang. How cool is that? Anyway, the Mustang will take some getting used to, but having never driven a sports car (if you can call a new Mustang a sports car), it should be an enlightening several weeks.

In these several new cars, I have already come to some enlightenment regarding car design. One of the first things I noticed different about the PT Cruiser was the automatic locking doors once you got past X mph. That’s cool and all that the manufacturer feels like increasing my safety by locking my doors, but what they should do in addition to this is unlock the damn doors when you the thing in park or whatever. I don’t like having to unlock the doors again when I get out. The other thing is about surfing radio stations. I guess I’m pretty spoiled when it comes to the Yukon. The PT Cruiser didn’t have anything for my hand to rest on while pushing the seek button. My hand rests rather comfortably on my shifter in the Yukon… And then, when I started driving around the Mustang, I realized how it’s a travesty when the designer places the seek button and the volume knob so far apart that you have to move your hand. It should not be this way. In the Yukon, my hand can stay in one place, seek forward and backward, and has easy access to the volume knob for all of those annoyingly loud commercials or stations. Anyway, things to look out for in your next car purchase.

I did watch Hot Fuzz the other weekend and Spiderman 3 on this past Friday. Hot Fuzz was awesome. Highly recommended. Spiderman 3 was decent.