As many of my friends know, I am an avid tea drinker. In fact, I don’t think there is a type of tea I don’t like. While waiting on the Apple store guys to put RAM in the Mac Mini I bought today, I went walking around the mall. Near the Apple store I was strangely drawn to this shop I had never seen before, a place called Teavana. It was the amazing aroma of teas coming from the store which was dragging me in like a tractor beam. (more…)

In some respects this year has flew by, in other respects it seems like it’s been a long year. It’s definitely been an eventful year, so I decided to do a recap of the year’s events. From jet-setting around the world (literally), to taking on new roles in the company, to diving off the deep end with new hobbies, to picking up a book deal this year has had it’s fair share of excitement. This list definitely isn’t all inclusive, but it should be offer good coverage of the highlights. (more…)

A friend recently made the statement to me “you can learn a lot about a person by what they read”. Not quite believing in that premise, I decided today to round up the books I have read or are currently am reading over the past year. Surprisingly, I have more (at least) partially read books than I can count. Ok, I lied, I know of at least 55 books in the past year alone. That’s averaging like one book a week and mind you, many of these books are 400 pages or more (of course I haven’t finished the majority of them either).

After dividing them up into groups, I’ve found several general “themes” emerge. A big shocker to anyone who knows me I’m sure (hint sarcasm), but the biggest theme this past year was photography. I found 16 books at home alone that I have read in the past year. Interestingly, of all the “themes” this category had the highest percentage of books I actually finished reading cover to cover (roughly 60%). Not sure exactly why photography books I am more likely to finish, but could be the writing style or the fact it’s a fairly new subject for me to be reading. Of the books, about half are Photoshop books (with a lean towards photography and not graphics design) with most of the remaining falling into lighting or composition.

The next largest group (14 books, none of which fully read) is programming and technology related books. These books range from three books on OSX programming, couple ajax books, a handful of compiler theory/design books, to general stuff like Asterisk (a linux PBX software package). Something I found rather odd was the fact I don’t own a single Flex/Actionscript book, despite the fact over the past 6 months that’s been my day job (and something I had minimal experience with previously). I guess that can be attributed to how easy the language is to pickup because I feel I can hold my own against many with what I have learned in such a short amount of time (definitely not an “expert” yet though by any means).

The next group of books (14 books) in line is related to religion, social responsibility, and other thought provoking topics. The religious books cover a wide range of religions, from Christianity to Sufism to Taoism to Hindu. Several books that are also loosely related are around meditation. Other books in this group include a book on dreaming, Bill Clinton’s book “Giving”, “The Omnivore’s Dilemma”, “World Changing: A user’s guide for the 21st century”, “Holy Blood, Holy Grail” (a book I have been reading off and on for several years), and the classic “A Brief History of Time” which I reread in it’s 10th anniversary edition. This group also has the second highest fully read percentage hovering around 20% and the unique distinction of having every book had at least a few pages read.

The last group of books (11 books) are just what was left, a mix of random stuff. These include productivity books like “Getting things done”, to fictional books like the classic “The Time Quartet” (a collection of books from my childhood I wanted to reread), to general fact books like “What are the seven wonders of the world?” (a gift from my mother for Christmas last year). I also have a set of three books by Orson Scott Card, the “Ender’s” series, which a good friend suggested I buy that I haven’t had time to open yet.

So that said, based on the above books (and solely the above books) what do you think that says about “who I am”? I’d be interested in hearing your comments (either publicly on the blog or sent personally to me).

So I guess maybe I should start at the beginning. Beginnings are good and all, right? Well, this evening I was lucky enough to get luxury suite tickets to the San Francisco Giants baseball game. I also happened to get enough tickets for a couple of my friends/coworkers to go (and two of them got tickets of their own from the same source, so they brought more people). All is going well, Dan/Tenni/Addy are carpooling with me into the city in the YodelMobile with it’s recently retrofitted musical yodeling horn when…

BAM!!

I hit a large lip in the road (road construction caused uneven road height) near the 101/280 split in San Francisco. It was a loud hit, so being nervous I quickly find an exit and assess the damage. Checking everything out, almost everything seems ok but the tires (thankfully I guess, could have been worse). The driver side tire has a pronounced knot in the side wall, the passenger side has a less pronounced one, but still noticeable. So, now I have two tires with broken side walls. Not sure what to do at this point, I call my dear father who thankfully knows a bit more about cars than me. After discussing the situation with him, he suggests I put the spare tire on the driver side, but says I could probably drive on it as long as it didn’t get worse (being very cautious in doing so). Since we weren’t far from the stadium, I decided to go ahead and drive to the stadium and change it there if it got worse (maybe not the smartest choice, but it proved to be ok).

As it turns out, it made it there without any sign of worsening, so we went in to enjoy the game (photos to come). Coming back to the car after the game, the tire still seemed to be no worse off, so instead of changing the tire we decided to proceed ahead home and stop periodically to check on it. After pissing off almost every driver on the 101 doing 45mph, we decided to stop and check again. Unfortunately it had gotten worse at this point and the knot on the driver side had gotten a bit bigger than a fist. Fearing the worse, I said we should go ahead and put the spare tire on and everyone agreed with me. So, we then proceed to start unpacking everything from the trunk and pull out the spare. I start working on getting out the jack while Dan goes to loosen the lug nuts.

That’s when we learn of problem #2 of the night. Unfortunately in my infinite amounts of intelligence </sarcasm>, I didn’t leave the lug nut key inside the car (it was at home). So despite having a strong desire to get home (it was getting rather late), unfortunately it wasn’t possible to change the tire. Faced with two options at this point, one to drive slowly on surface roads and check more frequently, or two to wait on AAA (unknown how long that would be), we decided to take El Camino home at a blisteringly fast pace of 25mph. Thankfully we offended far less drivers that route and were able to get everyone to their destinations. I finally made it home about 30 minutes ago (aka 12:30am roughly).

Arriving home I found the knot had grown to cover the entire area from tread to the rim (and about 3-4 inches wide). The tire is starting to separate from the rim, so AAA will probably be hearing from me tomorrow to take my car somewhere. Depends how ambitious I feel about changing to the spare myself (I do pay them yearly for the benefit of towing among other things after all). I guess the bright side as one coworker fondly pointed out after hearing the story over IM, I can now see if anyone sells purple walled tires (as opposed to white walls). Surprisingly I had just enough humor left in me to let out a good chuckle to that. Thanks Mark!

So now I am off to sleep to have sweet dreams of tire blowouts I barely avoided (again, </sarcasm>) and how much I love the California Department of Transportation (DOT) / Division of Maintenance (DOM).

I was surfing Wikipedia today doing a bit of research and stumbled across a reference to the Tower of Babel (amazing how side tracked you can get on Wikipedia from your original topic). Reading that page made me think of Babelfish again (a site I hadn’t visited in a while) and made me curious how the name was thought up (I had several theories, including this one). Again, looking on Wikipedia at this article I learned my guess was probably correct. You have to take most things on Wikipedia with a grain of salt after all, so we can’t be 100% positive. One interesting link on the Wikipedia article led me to this site, Lost in Translation. It’s quite humorous reading how badly repeated translations of phrases can end up. Here are a few examples, be sure and try it out yourself too!

Original Phrase: You can search the internet on Yahoo!
New Phrase: Yahoo! the Internet is probably necessary!

Original Phrase: I live in a white house with a green yard.
New Phrase: Alive creature in a white woman of the short house with a green one.

Original Phrase: There are weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
New Phrase: It has groups of the destruction of the mass in Iraq.

Original Phrase: Babelfish is an amazingly accurate translation service.
New Phrase: Babelfish is a work of the translation that surprises exact.