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My dad’s angioplasty has been scheduled for Oct 12th. I’ll be in NJ from the 10th until the 18th. I’m hopeful that all will go well. If not, I’ll extend my stay.

Wavexpress has upped my hours. There’s a big release coming up and they want it to go well. So my life of leisure will be severely curtailed as I work full time instead of just a couple hours a day.

(from my last post ;-) I don’t know if this makes me into the slaving proletariat or the despised bourgeois.

Here they are! Behind these links are are selected photos and videos from my 2005 Burning Man trip.

The videos don’t display correctly in Firefox but you can get them (with a yucky interface) from here. Just look for the .avi files at the bottom of the list.

And here is my special small contribution to the spirit of the burn… *These beautiful panorama images* were stiched together with Hugin, a terrific photo panorama tool. Each image is composed of 5 to 14 or so photos. I might recommend that you right-click download these images and then view them in their fantastic high-res detail at your lesuire.

Catch my Burning Man 2004 pix too.

I sat on these pictures for WAAAAY too long. I just never got around to putting them together in a coherent pile.

Well, here are my Burning Man 2004 images!

Just like for my 2005 Burning Man pictures, I stiched together a precious few into fabulous panorama images. Here are the panoramas!

Last night I had a great meal with an old new friend Barry and his wife. in February I had sent out an email request, asking for people to help me consider if I should move to San Francisco. He responded but I never ended up having time to meet him. Well now I did! The both of them are pretty great. And the meal was wonderful as well!

When we were at dinner I asked, as I do most of the time if the bartender has any drinks that have umbrellas of them. In all the time that I had lived in New Jersey, not a single bar or restaurant had umbrellas. Well, the very first time that I asked for one in San Francisco, I got one! I’m in the right place.

I told you that I wasn’t going to be welding because I didn’t have enough experience. Corbett just gave me a call and I’m going to be doing some only slightly less glamorous grinding of metal tonight and tomorrow at NIMBY.

The job is going well.

Things are going well!

update 1:33pm The company is springing for a snazzy laptop for me. They love me. They really love me.

I’m sure the joy will wear off when I go somewhere on vacation and then get/have to log in and do some work in the evening. But no matter, I’m giddy with happiness. I’ve never had a good laptop.

update 11pm Grinding went very well. Great space. Great project. Great people. I’m learning too. I saw and met some good people… I’m just terrible with names… there’s the guy who happily bought me a beer from the sodabeer machine, Daniel, a couple other guys, the 2 folks building a 20′ Ganesh, Zack and Corbett and some nice guy named Larry.. we talked for a while…

I’m well.

Home is nice. Housemates are nice. It seems that every time I get home, I’m offered a beer. The place itself is ‘ok’; not the nicest, not the worst but it’s got a very good location (see next line-item) in The Mission, it’s near stuff, near busses, and near highways :-) And nice housemates go a long way. Rent is a cheap $650/month.

It’s almost always sunny in my neighborhood :-)

I went to a Fire Arts Open House at The Crucible last week. It was way cool. Giant Tesla coils, lots of crazy flaming things including The Hand of God a sculpture that shoots burning gasoline(!!) 200 feet in the air. Gasoline is much more dangerous to use than the usual propane or LNG. When they were getting it ready to fire the thing, all the fire fighters suited up and they pushed the crowd back about 200 feet, yipe!. They also had all manner of beautiful flaming structures… a super-powerful wood stove that shot amazing sparks 30 feet in the air, a propane heated metal sphere that glowed white hot, and other flaming structures. There was flaming Simon Says game: you stood inside a 10′ ring and 4 buttons were positioned around you; flames shot up from each station and you had to push the buttons to mimic Simon’s flames. :-) Favorite concept of the evening was Dance Dance Incineration. Start with Dance Dance Revolution and go from there. The player puts on a shiny silver fire-proof suit with respirator and plays DDI in front of a projection screen TV. When you do well, it shoots timed jets of flame into the air; when you do poorly, it shoots jets of flame IN YOUR FACE! And yes, the video game title bar reads “Dance Dance Incineration” with a cute icon of a dancer on fire.

I took a welding course this weekend.. 10-6 Sat & Sun. It helped to get me going in ARC welding and Oxyfuel cutting but to be honest it wasn’t the best class in the world. I might have done better to just buy an ARC welder, watch some videos and practice in the back yard all weekend.

My part-time job has just about started. I signed the contract but it’s taking a little while to get going. My boss/co-worker was out for a few days with his brand spanking new daughter.

I really like that a couple days ago, I was able to walk out of the house to a good restaurant. I went to Herbivore on Valencia. I’m not veggie but I like trying different foods. Their (veggie) ceviche was excellent! :-)

I still need a bicycle and I’m still thinking about the idea of getting a motorcycle. Still looking…

I bought a used desk from this couple in Palo Alto. It’s an Ikea Jerker computer desk. I liked it so much I went to Ikea and bought an extra shelf for it.

I’m having trouble with the idea of buying food for the house. You see, there is this place down the street that sells gargantuan (and yummy) burritos, including chips and salsa for four bucks. I’m not sure but I think it’s cheaper to eat there than it is to eat at home. And burritos are rich in many vital nutrients!

I’m figuring out the tight parking around here. I got my first parking ticket just a few days after I moved in but I think I’m doing well. I see a lot of cars with boots on them. You get a boot by having 10 unpaid tickets. One of my housemates decided to let the city keep his car when it got towed away; the tickets cost more than the car was worth. Well, since it’s going to take a while to get a CA drivers licence, I got a 6 week visitor parking permit for $30. What is the deal with cities sweeping their residential streets every week? I’m thinking that it’s just a money making venture. When I lived in Jersey City, there was a brand new street that didn’t have cleaning yet; I watched the dirt and garbage pile up for 6 months. I would say that it took 3 months before the street needed to be swept. So of course the city put in 2x per week sweeping. I’m sure the tickets issued paid for the street-Zamboni in no time. I just noticed today that on some of the really steep streets in the area, there is no street sweeping. I’m planning on using that to my advantage now!

I miss Vickie and the kids, Julia, Melis, Noni and Bamph!

My UPS Ground boxes arrived on Friday. It was a pain in the neck to wait around for the UPS guy all day but it’s done. My 2nd day air computer boxes computer arrived too. Some of my stuff was damaged a little. Maybe I’ll follow up with UPS… grrr.

It’s all coming along!

I just took a part-time gig with Wavexpress! I’ll be (tele-)commuting to New York City every day. It’s currently a part-time thing. The hours might grow, or the hours might shrink. It depends on how well things pan out with me and the business.

Woot!

I just found a sublet room from now until around November 15th. The plan is that I find a temporary place so I can get my bearings in this city.

There’s three other folks in the apartment, the second and third floor of a three floor house. It’s just a few blocks from the hubub of the Mission District, a few convenient blocks from the highway, and about 2 miles from the financial district downtown.

There was another place I considered… the housemates were really good and the place was neater and more spacious but it was in Richmond. Richmond is a neighborhood just 2 or 3 miles from where I am now but the weather there is much cloudier. And darnit, I wanted to live in SunnyCalifornia! As I’m typing this, the sun shining down through a skylight onto the desk. I can look out the window and see that it’s mostly cloudy in Richmond. Krazy.

Next steps: set up my home, find a job, find whatever it was I was looking for out here.

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I spent two hours this morning getting a visitor parking pass. I figure it’s easier to get a temporary pass and then do the auto registration stuff by mail. We’ll see how it goes. Gosh darn it was awful standing in that line. For one, there was no air. I noticed that cool air was blowing out from behind the glass but there was NO AIR in the room we were made to stand in. It was a cool sunny day, no A/C needed, just a freaking window. But I digress.

I’m going to have photos and audio blogs from my 10 day cross country trip online in due course.

PS. Will everyone PLEASE stop moaning to me about how expensive it is to live here. I’m paying $650 including utilities and internet. That’s only marginally more than what I’d have to pay in Hackettstown, which is, as everyone knows, the center of the universe.

Find out more about the move.

As you can guess, I’ve postponed my drive out west just slightly. It might seem odd but I’m going around the house and scanning all of the photos in the house into my computer. I should have started doing this a while ago so I’d be ready to go when I said I’d be ready (on the 9th) but… I don’t know… I think it’s that just after my parents arrived and we started looking over the photos in this box I had this realization.

Every time, my dad would say, “Oh, I don’t want to look at all those old pictures,” or, “Oh, I didn’t know there were pictures in there ” (even though it’s a stack of open shoeboxes completely stuffed with thousands of photos sitting in a prominent corner of the room). Then I’d pick up some photos, “ooh” and “ahh” at them for a moment and he’d start look over my shoulder. We’d then share 15 minutes of history together. This has happened a couple times.

I have this fear that the photos and the memories that back them are going to disappear somehow. Maybe accidentally get thrown out, or burned in a fire, or just forgotten in the back of a 150 degree attic for 10 years.

So I’m taking things into my own hands.

In the last few days, I’ve scanned 700 out of about 2,000 photos.

So, I’ll make it out of here soon!! Of course, if I don’t leave by Friday, there’s a cousin’s graduation party I’ll have to go to on Saturday.. And then Father’s Day is Sunday…. Argh!

I told you earlier that I had a job interview today in NYC for a job in the Bay Area. The interview went very well and there’s a very good chance I’ll have a job by the time I get out there. A few caviats: it’s only a part-time job for now. And (for better or worse) it’s a total telecommuting job. All I need is a phone, high speed internet and a computer. I won’t even have a desk in Cali.

After the money-people at the company give the thumbs-up, I’ll be employed.

When that happens, I’ll even tell you the name of the company. :-)