The last month or so, as seen from my phone...

Ok, so as you might have noticed, I have not updated my blog in a while. June was a busy month. Partially due to the fact that at the beginning of the month I moved from Santa Cruz to Mountain View for various reasons I will not bother getting into here, and partially due to the fact that it was right before Apple' Developer Conference and we were showing off a sneak preview of Panther, the next version of Mac OS X, so I was busy w/ "converging" on that, plus various other random things. So while I have not been blogging, due to the convenient nature of the phone I recently acquired, I have been building up a backlog of pictures taken with it that somewhat tell the story of the past month. Without further ado, here it is:

My last full weekend in Santa Cruz was great, a typical Santa Cruz weekend. On Sunday May 25th, I went down to the boardwalk to play volleyball with my friend Tim and his girlfriend Melissa, as well as the usual SC beach vball crowd. I had played there for at least half a year, but never seen the train come by - must be a summer tourist thing.

After vball I went to a BBQ @ the house I am now living. The BBQ was a going away party of sorts for the housemate I replaced, Jason. He has since moved to NY. Hope he is having a good time there.

Since it was Memorial Day weekend and I knew it might be my last weekend in SC, I organized another BBQ @ our house, so that Sunday, some of my friends came over and hung out - Ammon here literally getting into the swing of it on the hammock. I think Erik could take some lessons in relaxing - swords and BBQing and alcohol do not mix :) Since it was a more than typical Apple / geek party, it was mostly my male coworker friends, so for lack of women to talk to, most people ended up getting very drunk and lounging in hot tub for hours on end. Later that nite my friend Tim & Melissa introduced me to a co-worker of hers who was cool and surfs, and I ended up going surfing with her once later that week. Alas, due to the same reasons I have not updated this blog, that is the last time I have been surfing. :(

At the last minute, I heard from Jason' housemates that they were cool w/ me moving in, so I moved on the 1st of June to Mt. View. The place were I am living now is not as fancy as the house in SC, but it is a hell of a lot shorter commute (more about house later). I do not know if it was to celebrate my leaving SC or what, but Erik decided to have another BBQ on this Sunday, so I went again and made skewers, though Jon's last week were better (I need to learn to cook better;-), and this time he made honey whiskey glazed pineapple slices on the grill - YUM! (he is a much better cook than me!).

Next Friday I went to see the band Tim sings w/, FlipSide, play @ Fanny&Alexander w/ John & his housemate Aaron & another friend of his housemate. If the previous pictures were not obvious that camera phones suck and are only neat for the random quick shot, these should make the point: here is a picture of the guitarist Matt and Tim singing. I guess a flash would have helped a lot. Oh well, they have plenty of better pix on their website, you should check them out, or better yet, go see a live show (info also on their website).

Then Saturday I went to see Ben who is a friend from Apple QuickTime who quit about 1/2 year ago and is currently living in a coastal Northern CA town with some nice scenery, even if it was a bit foggy like I have known even SC to be during summer. Quite odd the weather along the N. CA coast I tell you. While there, I met Greg Gorman at a small dinner party I somewhat accidentally crashed at his cottage for a few hours as Ben ended up getting sick (mental note, do not eat fish [on top of drinking and smoking] after months of being vegetarian;) . The drive there and back was really nice.

The following Saturday nite I went to see BTat a club called Ruby Skye in SF which I had previously never been too. The show was billed as a "Laptop Symphony", which made it sound more interesting than the previous times I had seen BT. Greg introduced me to BT and the first show of his I saw in Jacksonville was friggin kick-ass, it was shortly after his release of his album "Movement In Still Life", and the show was a live performance of songs w/ supporting artists including attractive female singers, the whole bit. The last few times I've seen him, he's just mixed random music w/ one hand while waving his other hand in the air trying to motivate people to dance... weak. I was hoping this show would be different, but no, it wasn"t - the only difference was that now instead of records on turntables or CDs being mixed it was all done on a laptop - hey at least he"s still a mac user, as you can see from the glowing apple coming through the back of the laptop (next to his hand waving in the air like Arsenio Hall [no offense, the music was good, but the entire production was lacking ; seeing him really play live makes this pale in comparison] ).

The whole nite overall was great IMHO, since I randomly met a girl exactly one month older than me and we kinda hit it off, alleviated by alcohol of course, although it is a bummer she lives 4+ hours north and goes to school even further north and was only in town visiting. Oh well, hopefully we will hang out again and see what happens. I took a picture of her w/ the phone, but w/o a flash, it is not worth posting here. (the determined clever reader will be able to find it ). Danced a shit load to the music, admired the eye candy and dancers on pedestals.

Seeing as how I worked both Saturday and Sunday over 8 hours each day in the final push for the Panther preview, I figured going to the city twice in one weekend was fair reward. Sunday nite I went up again and met up with Ben to see Toby Marks, the DJ/artist behind the very cool Banco De Gaia. Granted it was a Sunday nite, the club was amazingly uncrowded for the city. I guess it is partially due to the unpopular nature of this excellent artist, but perhaps the fact that the club was in a somewhat sketchy part of the city did not help. I did not mind - we got to listen to him play a great set w/ plenty of dancing room! I did feel a bit bad though - I wonder if artists get bummed out by having small audiences/crowds...

Next Thursday nite (19th) we declared the current build of Panther good enough for the beta/preview, so finally the hecticness could subside for a bit, so I joined some friends Victor (not my brother Victor, a different Vic!) and Steve for some ritual / habitual drinking @ St. Stephen&s Green (bad pic) in Mt. View. Later, I went shopping w/ my 2 housemates Karl and Dave ; we were buying a lot of beer and drinks for the first party w/ me and Dave in the house. Both of them are Googlers, so they invited a bunch of people for the party, and it was a huge success ; even one of the founders of Google stopped by after some Tuxedo event they were attending earlier in the evening. Here's Victor playing darts.

Saturday some friends of Dave's had crashed because of a small snafu w/ their car causing their road trip to end a bit short, so we spent most of Saturday outside sitting under the sun and reading lost in headspace. In the evening we went to the grocery store to buy preparations for grilling, and this was one of the events when it was convenient to have a camera handy that under normal circumstances I would otherwise not have had one - how many times do you get to see someone pose w/ the Incredible Hulk ;-) Oh, and then after dinner, John & friends came over sat. nite because he was mistaken about Travis's party next week, and I was confused thinking _he_ was confused about our party the previous nite. (more about this party later... it is all John's fault for being one week early!-)

Sunday I got up way too early and went up to the newly opened Moscone West in the city with Louis to volunteer helping student Apple developers. Apple fans are remarkably loyal, often seen sporting the older multi-color rainbow or more recent solid white Apple sticker on their cars, but some just do amazingly fanatic things. After this, we went to the Thirsty Bear bar to meet up w/ Ars Technica forum people to geek out & chat about the upcoming WWDC.

Monday was probably the best keynote w/ most anticipated & rumored announcements in recent history. The G5 was announced, iChat AV, a webcam w/ build in microphone called iSight, and oodles more. At work, our group received our first EVT prototype G5. Some people do not like it, I think it is not that bad.

Some random pics from Tuesday at the conference/WWDC:

The PPC970 is lovely. If it was only smaller, it could be the ultimate geek birthday/anniversary/wedding present. Ok, maybe not. It is still pretty though.

Brains, Body, Personality (PPC 970, PowerMac G5, Panther)

VLC (VideoLan Client) winning runner up Apple Design Award for best Mac OS X Use of Open Source. Congrats VLC!

Wednesday nite during WWDC Eddy(blond haired guy leaning over just left of middle), a co-worker friend in our group, had a party at his place in SF since he needed to get rid of all of his alcohol since he is leaving the group & Apple to go back to grad school to get a PhD.

Thursday nite during WWDC is Apple' Campus (Beer) Bash. This is similar to the bi-weekly bashes, except all of the developers attending WWDC are invited, so it is freaking insanely huge, and the food is much better. A tradition started at least as of last year by the student developers and friends of theirs is to go to Molly Magee' in Mt. View afterwards to party/continue drinking, and that was a blast as well. Having friends who live just down the road where you can crash is quite fortunate/key. Here's Ben and myself after partying all nite (yes, that is prototype iMac shell in the top left).

Finally, this weekend was yet another blur. All through the week my sleep schedule was completely disrupted by WWDC and all the events surrounding it, (it did not help that WWDC this year was in SF, instead of SJ ; more to do, further commute...) so Friday nite I stayed in and for the first time watched episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, as well as episodes of a damn funny BBC show called "Coupling" with housemates. It was the first large dose of TV I have watched in a while. Saturday I slept in until late and worked on my blog some, and then Sat. nite there where 2 house parties I knew off, as well as a Friends N Family rave in the city. During the day I could barely stay awake (possibly from the heat), so since I was fairly well rested, I ended up going to all three events and staying out til 4:30 - and the sunlight was already coming up over the horizon - gotta love long summer days. The bad thing about staying up late was that Sunday morning a friend was getting up early to go hiking in Big Basin, so I ended up going to sleep @ 5:15 only to wake up @ 7:00 (ok, I snoozed until 7:45;-). We did a 10 mile round trip hike to Berry Creek falls... the place is gorgeous... 53 54 55 56