final odds and ends

Today is not 1/1/2010 and project 365 is not over. But today is the last Tuesday of the year and thus the last "Tuesdays with Todd." Of course it's possible I'll jump in as a guest at some point next year. Never count a spry blonde out!

But for now, we're going our separate ways...in the blogosphere at least. I've toyed with starting my own blog in the past and this guest stint on listgirl.com has pushed me over the edge. So in 2010, you can read my particular flavor of crazy at Finding Fun. Set your RSS readers to stun.

I was reading eweek the other day - I'm sure none of you miss an issue - and I almost choked when I read this bit in the "Stupid Tech Tricks" article.



...I wanted to post a Facebook status update while attending this year's Cal versus Stanford game...I punched in the note on my iPhone then waited several minutes to confirm what I suspected would happen - the connection failed.

I had the exact same experience. I had to wait until after the game to upload my post. (Must be my FB friend for that link to work.)

We'll finish out this post with a few odds and ends.

---

Do you ever wonder what happens when geeks in Japan decide to get creative with their food? Wonder no more.

---

If you hate cute things, don't click this link.

---

A set of satellite photos like you've never seen.

---

If you like wacky stuff like the above, that's the kind of things I'll have on my blog...along with some philosophy, religion, and the latest on my efforts in songwriting and Toastmaster-ing. Have a great 2010!

Read More »

Finally starting to relax

Most of you read here that Listgirl and I took a trip last week. Vacationing in early-mid December is an interesting experience. We've done it a few times now. It forces us to get any holiday gift shopping done before everyone else. Well, I suppose we could have waited until this week but we don't want that kind of stress. So we had the different kind of stress of getting it all done early. Now that Christmas week has arrived, we're seeing the fruits of all our labors. As Listgirl said yesterday, we can't show the gifts we've started to give out (to coworkers and such) quite yet. But they were very pleasing I have to say. The giving is so fun but receiving isn't so bad either. I got the popcorn pictured from my coworker and blog reader, Julie. She knows me so well, LOL. The low-tech wrapping job was humorously her. Like Listgirl, my parking lot is very empty and my bosses are all out of the office. It makes for peaceful days - especially knowing all my shopping is done. Of course, family will be arriving soon so that will break the routines a bit but we are ready for it. I spoke one more time at Toastmasters today - finishing up my Advanced Communicator - Silver manuals. I managed 11 speeches this year. (I still have to give two more speeches to achieve that level but not from my manuals). The speech was on the fascinating mideaval alchemist and physician Paracelsus. Read up on him if you like. Most of the material for my speech came from this great book by Joe Schwarcz.

Read More »

Day 4 - a comedy of errors

Today started off inauspiciously. Listgirl was awake by 5:30am (boo).


She still missed the beginning of the sunrise though

When I finally got up we had a quick cereal and went out for another run. It had become pretty hot just like on Monday. We got in our 3 1/2-ish miles but it was hot! Not sure we're going to try it again while we're here. But we got it done which was a victory, right? Surely the rest of the day would pick up now that the tough part of the day was done!

We headed out for lunch at Zelo's Beach House in Hanalei. (Note the lack of hyperlink.) As always, I had called ahead to make sure the place still exists since our guidebook is a few years old. They are still there. But we couldn't find it...and Hanalei is a very small town - basically a few blocks. Another call and we knew to look for the large blow-up Santa. We saw two but they weren't too far apart so we walked between the two of them. Still no sign of Zelo's.

Hey, wait, down the street...there's another Santa! Next to that was a place called Kalypso but no Zelo's. By now we were suspicious. Turns out Zelo's is now Kalypso. And the place was pretty good! We're back on track.


A member of the Santa posse



We forgot to bring our multivitamins on our trip. I like to take a calcium pill since I don't drink milk. Without that pill, I figured I'd best eat either pizza or shave ice (with ice cream) every day here. It's only logical, don't you think? Well one of Kauai's top shave ice places happens to be in Hanalei. What luck! Oops, it was closed for the day. Why? Well, the sign says closed Mondays and days with bad weather. I guess 80 and sunny counts as bad weather! So we picked up our shave ice at a random spot down the street. Perseverance is our middle name.



Onwards to Ke'e and the Kalalau trail. Ke'e Beach is at the "end of the road" in Kauai. Going north and then west, that's as far as one can drive. If you go the other way (south, then west) you can only drive a bit past Waimea which is what we did on Monday. Anyway, there we were at the end of the road ready to head down the trail to whatever sights it would lead us to.


Driving to Ke'e


The Ke'e beach




The mountain on the other side of the beach

Uh oh, problem #4 (is that right?)... The trail was quite steep and rocky. After 10 minutes or so we gave up and headed back. Whatever was over there was not worth 2 miles of that each way. Not to mention Listgirl added a couple more bug bites to her collection. That's 14 by my count.


When we still thought the trail would be fun



I have no bites so far by the way. Why do bugs like her better than me? Her theory is her hairless legs seem an easier target than my furry ones to the critters. My idea is that she smells sweeter.

OK, that too was a bust. So we'll head back and catch a couple of sights we had skipped on the way out (too hungry). Perhaps we'll enjoy walking through the ritzy hotels of Princeville. The buildings over there are tres fancy (and sell $10 hotdogs - more than the Hotel Del Coronado!). So we drove in... and suddenly found a gate. Turns out we were welcome to visit but we had to park via valet. I'm not sure how much that costs because we passed.

One more thing to try before heading back and eating dinner. The sun was still shining (rain is in the forecast) and the Kilauea lighthouse beckoned. We had gone there 6 years ago and enjoyed the views.

Today was a bit different. Now it's a wildlife preserve (read: lots of birds and bird poop) and it costs $5/person to enter. Maybe it's always been so but we didn't remember that. And...it closes at 4PM even though the sun does not set here until 6. Seeing that it was 3:55, we did not enter. We did take a few shots from the best view we could get from the street.



Finally, we stopped by the Hanalei lookout.





For dinner, we just wanted something pretty quick and close to our resort, so we went to Pacific Island Bistro in the Safeway shopping center.  We had eggplant with black bean sauce, and mushu chicken wraps.  It wasn't too bad, but definitely not the best Chinese we've ever had.  And we forgot to take photos.

Well, what can I tell ya...sometimes things go wrong, even in paradise. But at least I was able to relax, enjoy the views and time with Listgirl. There are worse situations to be in.

Read More »

Day 3 - Water Fun

We got up at 7:30 this morning which meant 9 hours of sleep! The most Listgirl has slept in some time. I, on the other hand, manage to immobilize for 9 hours at least every other weekend. We decided to go back to Java Kai for breakfast. This time, we shared a macadamia nut waffle. Listgirl got the Kona coffee again and I had a soy chai latte. Is there a more effeminate drink that I could have ordered? Eh, I'm secure in who I am. And then, the highlight of the decade, the reason for living, the best of all possible worlds... I went waterskiing!! It's been over 20 years since I last did this and I was so excited when I realized I could hire a boat and a driver and go do it here. I'm not quite sure why it's been so long since I made this happen. Getting ready in front of Kauai Water Ski & Surf Getting in the water Reaching for flower - I missed. With our driver, Kenny After thoroughly tiring myself out on the ski, I had to replenish with some lunch. Scotty's Beachside BBQ had caught my eye the last couple of runs up the trail. So we gave it a try. The view was fantastic and the sun was out today. But the food was merely ok. Brett's is still the BBQ king! But I was filled and that was the goal. View from restaurant Chowing down Fed and happy, it was time to go back in the water. We grabbed our rented snorkel gear and headed south to Poipu to the acclaimed Poipu State Beach. Luckily it lived up to its billing because I was all ready to poo-poo Poipu. Our waterproof camera really paid off as we took lots of tropical fish photos. Looking ridiculous Still managing to look cute. From there, we headed over to a blowhole and watched the water shoot up and listened to the groaning sounds. Local legend holds that a giant lizard was trapped in there and the noises are its moans. Primitive beliefs are so cute! Finally, it was back to our area... As always, the views while driving are great. ...and dinner at Caffe Coco. On the upside, this spot has an ever changing menu that's hand-written white board. Also live music - but all we heard was the sound check. On the other hand, the seating was all outside and thus the mosquitos were a bit of a problemo. I think Listgirl added 9 new bites to her vacation collection. Boo on that! The food was very good though. We decided to balance our all-meat lunch with a meatless dinner. We had tofu Pacific rim platter, a vegetable samosa, and obviously banana spice cake. The most important food group! Back home to clean up and blog and call it a day!

Read More »

What a relief!

Have you looked at your phone? Do you realize it's Toastmaster Tuesdays with Todd? Yes, I am going to the Toastmaster well one more time. But for good reason today I think. I have been working on a manual called Technical Presentations. I could have done the projects in there on my field (programming) or one of my esoteric interests such as epistemology or astrophysics. But instead, I decided to do something more accessible to everyone. So I decided to do all five of them on music. For three of the five I selected music theory-related topics. Those three topics were harmony, rhythm, and melody. Harmony in this case is not referring to 2 or 3 people singing together but the chord progression that make up the structure of a song. I came up with this anatomical analogy to describe what those three things are:

• Harmony is like a song's skeleton. It provides the structure that everything else hangs off of.
• Rhythm is like a song's muscles. It makes the song move.
• And melody is like a song's eyes or better yet, its soul. It is through the melody that we connect with the song.

Today I completed the fifth and final project from the manual by (trying to) explain what goes in to writing a melody. In 15 minutes. I also wrote some preparatory material that you can read here if you like. It was a difficult project but I'm pretty happy with what I came up with. I brought my keyboard in and played (and sang!) because it's pretty hard to talk about music, melody in particular, without some demonstrations. Have you ever noticed that everything is better with cake? Well guess what, we had cake at our meeting! Chocolate with raspberry filling and carrot with cream cheese frosting. Pretty and delicious from VG Bakery. For the last several days I have been cooking every meal at home. But after completing my speech, I decided tonight was a good night to take a break and eat out. So Listgirl met me after work and we headed out to Pacifica in Del Mar and enjoyed the lovely food there. We had purchased a gift certificate so our meal was discounted. (We paid $2 for the certificate, its value was $25.) That's the ocean behind me but I bet you can't see it. The cutest girl in the restaurant and her Muppet pelt sweater. And now I am done with the Technical Presentations manual! Three more speeches and I will achieve Advanced Communicator Gold. I won't have another project that takes this much preparation for a while. Now I can start looking forward to holiday vacations and relax. What a relief!

Read More »

Ornamental Strategery

Back in October, Listgirl and I had already seen some stores bring out their Christmas decorations. Retailers are desperate and are looking for ways to make more money during the holiday gift season. But that desperation manifests in other ways. Yesterday I went to the UTC mall in La Jolla to pick up a gift. I noticed that there were barely any decorations up. Today I picked up lunch at the Highlands in the posh Del Mar neighborhood and noticed the same thing. Though some would argue that having palm trees, blue skies and 70-degree (21 C) weather makes every day a holiday. The extent of the decorations at Del Mar Highlands. Selling Christmas flowers does not count as decorating. Whether they went with ridiculously early decorations or none, good news may be on the horizon for retailers. The term Frugal Fatigue is starting to make the rounds in news outlets. Apparently some folks are just getting fed up with searching for deals all the time and starting to splurge again. Heh. I never believed that talk about America becoming less consumerist and more savings-oriented. It's going to take more than a bad recession to change such an ingrained way of life. As always, Listgirl and I recommend giving experiences rather than stuff whenever possible. Several of our gifts this year will be just that. Of course I can't reveal them now - check back in about a month. Finally... I think it's funny that the tree lot near my work is "Wayne's World."

Read More »

The Road Warrior

In her recent posts, Listgirl told her side of the story of meeting up with me at the conclusion of my conference in San Francisco. But I was there a few days before she arrived. Shall we look back? Dreamforce at the Moscone center. I was there for Dreamforce which is the annual convention for Salesforce.com. I spend more and more of my time with their technology so in terms of work this was a very fruitful trip for me. 19,000 of my closest friends wait for the keynote to begin. They love their cloud imagery at salesforce I was able to catch up with my buddy Joe from North Carolina who was also in attendance. Of course every business trip should have some quality food and this one was no exception. We three admins prepare to chow down. Every day should have a canoli or two. Not being much of a wine drinker I said give me half as much as his. Guess which one is mine!? And now I'm home again. It's nice to be in my own bed and use my own shower. And though the food was generally great I have to give a big thumbs down to the breakfasts at the conference. So I'm happy to be back to my usual...

Read More »