work moved offices. i am sitting at my new desk now. my commute is about 20 minutes shorter each direction now, which is lovely. i'm also working about 4 blocks from my sister now, which is also excellent, though i am unsure when we are having lunch.

my new space is nice, even if it's a little too open. the 'cubes' are only waist-high and everyone is in a single room. noise carries. this will be the biggest problem. but at least i have desk drawers now. and i can the sky through the windows on one side of the room.

the weekend ended on an up note — fri and sat were wonderful (thanks to everyone in la who i got to spend what seemed like 5 minutes with). when i woke up on sunday, i felt tired and cranky and weepy. then i realized that friday and saturday had consisted of a single meal each day and staying up too late. so i ate and felt better.

i had to take my mac mini back in. it broke, i took it in. 5-7 days. which turned out to be 9. my motherboard failed. and then the replacement they got me was also bad. and then when i did get it home, there was no audio device recognized. luckily, it was a loose cable and only had to leave my hands for about 5 minutes.

so my sunday was spent setting it up again and playing more lego star wars 2. oh and watching movies:

so i saw 'i'll believe you' on friday night. i was impressed with how simple, clever and cute this movie was. it felt a little unfinished though. if you need a family friendly movie that works, you could do a lot worse. b-.

saturday night, i wastched 'vacancy.' no one i know would have wanted to see this, but the beckinsale and the wilson in a horror movie was right up my alley. the opening credits* are awesome and i actually found the movie mildly frightening/suspenseful. the ending was a bit…silly. but otherwise, an enjoyable way to be worked up. bonus points for seeming a little hitchockian, even that was because of the credits and the fact that it takes place in a creepy motel. b+.

last night, r and i watched 'breach.' [gah, i posted this without finishing the review. and no one called me on it. anyway.] we watched 'breach' and i was a little disappointed. this is almost always what happens when you watch a movie 'based on a true story.' unless the story is extraordinary or deviated from seriously, the story is just going to be boring. and this was 'breach' — there was no character study of the man who committed treason. there was no huge cat-and-mouse game. and the movie opens by telling you the ending. the problem with that, of course, is that the viewer then demands an amazing journey to reach that (already spoiled) ending. and this movie didn't do that. not bad, but could have been much more. c.

it's been days since i last wrote. anything other than emails.

every day for the past 5 or 6, i have composed no less than 2 posts in my head. yesterday, i was going to use lunch to do some creative writing. none of this happened.

work is still tough for me to find a regular schedule, one i can marginally stick to and be productive with my own projects. it's frustrating and it is going to take some effort to make it happen. but it will, because the alternative isn't pretty.

this past weekend, roxy and i flew out to minnesota to see her uncle and then drive down to mason city for the service for my uncle soph. i had not met her uncle, she had not met this part of my family, so it was nice all around. (to be fair, i hadn't seen this part of my family in years and years — the photo of my uncle in the above link also has my cousin in it. except, this weekend, he turned out to be 18 and about to start college. time moves, my friends. faster than we all think.)

we flew out friday — i went from work in sf directly to sfo to catch the flight. we spent the night at r's uncle's house and then drove on sat afternoon down south. saturday night and sunday were spent in mason city, before climbing back in the car around 5pm and hightailing it back to the minneapolis airport. to get in at 1am.

monday was rushed — work and then drinks with the crew. we didn't stay long because we were still fairly tired. last night was more calm, but we both worked late, so it threw the evening off a bit.

there are plenty of stories, mostly good ones from the weekend. many of the memorable quotes came from my cousins, the young ones who i don't know still. the service was good, if a little sad. i was pleased — most of the weekend was spent with laughter and remembrance — i only saw a couple of tears and those were brief during the service.

i am happy we spent time together talking and being a family — i don't see any of them often enough and to spend the time being closer is time well spent.

there is more to say (isn't there always?) but i'll try to throw it into some other posts. i'm just having one of those 'isn't life weird and wonderful and totally strange?' days.

i move that the long weekend doesn't count. i worked straight through it, using free moments to finish up the redesign of the mog. im coming down a particular stretch at work, the one where you have finished writing the code, you have tested said code and you feel ready to deploy something somewhere. and you do. and then you realize that this place where you are deploying is a completely new and different system configuration and a bunch of system stuff has to be tweaked.

so it involves a lot of opening tickets with the people helping with sys admin and waiting. a lot of fun, i highly recommend it.

it's honestly not too bad; i was just enjoying being snarky about it. an old friend asked me yesterday if i enjoyed my work. the question surprised me a bit. why would i be working in a field that i didn't enjoy? i have the knowledge, the experience, the skills. but i wouldn't be doing what i do if i didn't love it.

and i'm sorry for the state mog has been in the last 6 months or so. we moved to wordpress back in august and i spent a good deal of time trying to get the green version of the site (v5) working with wordpress. it wasn't smooth and sometime in oct, i switched the look out for a pre-built template. this was the yellow and blue crap that has been on the site since. i switched it, thinking it would last a week or two, thinking to myself 'i wonder how easy it is to switch the look and feel of the site?'

and then work consumed my life and the design overstayed its welcome. the new design was on my radar for thanksgiving. then christmas. finally, i worked on the look on my train rides the last week or two and i built it this weekend. i showed it to carter last week when she was here and she seemed to like it. i hope you do too.

i wondered last night if the previous designs was a reason that some people had slacked on posting. if so, i hope this helps bring you back to life. if not, well, like flavor flav said, 'i can't do nuthin' for you man.'

may i highly recommend the stanton warriors 'fabric live 30′ mix cd to you? it might not be your cup of tea (and in fact, probably isn't). but it's a damn fine mix cd of chunky breaks and some nice bouncy bass. and if you just read that and thought 'ug', i would like to point you to 'the trip' curated by jarvis cocker. (aubrey, i believe this one might have your name written all over it.)

we went to ugly's last night for drinks. it was kurt, rachael, myself and then later, aparna and brian. and let's not forget the crazy random guy who accosted us. here is a short version:

we get there. we have a couple of sips of our drinks and kurt points out that 'back to the future' is on the tv. we talk about zemekis for about 3 sentences and the man next to us interjects himself into our conversation by asking who we are discussing. from this point, he takes over the conversation, steering us away from movies into a realm of 'self-awareness' and talking about how 'back to the future' really makes you think about identity. that and how 'meta' the movie is. right. sure.

kurt goes to play pool. the man keeps talking. he talks to us about evolution. about the space shuttles blowing up. about women raising babies, with and without help from mothers. then wikipedia comes up and he launches into a 20 minute story about a plastic surgeon. this person is someone who he has followed and has written up on wikipedia. there is a lot to it, obviously.

the key is that for close to an hour, rachael and i said nothing to this man. he just kept talking. and talking.

then brian and aparna show up and we begin to regroup and wrestle ourselves away from him. it takes 15 minutes or so to get away and the 5 of us (kurt lost pool by this point) start talking. but the man insists on standing behind and singing. not lyrics, mind you, but some sort of humming the tune of what is on the jukebox. but he clearly doesn't know the song on the jukebox and what he is humming has nothing to do with the song.

we are there until about 9.30 and he tries several more times to engage us. now, im all for being nice to strangers. i'm all for chatting up strangers. but this was something else. i was nice to this guy for an hour and let him have those minutes of my life. i let him talk about whatever he wanted, i let him drive. and he failed to actually have a conversation and failed to actually say anything to me that showed any interest in me. he just wanted to hear himself talk and mistook our passiveness as some kind of interest.

the bartender warned us early on, but we couldn't escape. i went to the bathroom and, on my way back, stopped on the other side of the bar and asked how often he was around. both she and the man i was standing next to offered to throw him out. i declined. this time.

when we left the bar, he actually followed us out. and then tried to engage aparna again in a religious conversation by asking a completely random question about hindu, before he stumbled off.

annoying? you bet. but entertaining in a train-wreck way.

winter wonderlands meet sunny afternoons. black labs meet yappy dogs. hamburgers meet late-night thai and spaghetti dinners meet scorching woodstoves. iced steps, broken-down cars, biggie smalls. dreams of exes meet dreams of dads. sun-drenched mornings meet empty coffee shops and high-speed interstates meet random playlists. left brain meets right brain and cartwheels meet skipping. you meet me and life goes on.

on the train. my weekend was marred by a nice case of some kind of stomach flu/food poisoning. this was offset by the purchase of a new tv, scant hours before i was struck down. so i was miserable for 36 hours or so, but got to bask in the glow of new hd tv set.

the new tv is fah-bu-lous. it isn't huge, it isn't super nice. but considering we had been watching tv on a 17″ crt with the tube going (transforming everyone on the screen into wimpier versions of the incredible hulk), seeing colors again is a nice change.

so perhaps this explains my absence in posting the last couple of days.

i wish there were other, more exciting things to discuss. conversations on here i tried to spark have not sparked…no one wants to discuss parents' responsibilities in influencing their childrens beliefs? fine, let's talk about britney spears recent behavior. did you see the dress she wore to her mom's party? class-ee. (see? i can roll from high brow to low brow in the same paragraph.)

work, for me, has become a time-bomb. remember that feeling in college, in that one class, where you had a final that was 50% of your grade? the one where you knew you could study for weeks and still get thrown curveballs on the test? (i think, for me, the easiest example here is art history. though i can also think of several computer science classes that felt this way as well.)

anyway, work has become like that. i see the deadline looming. i see the work. but no matter how much work i do, the work does not decrease. but the deadline does.

i believe, now, this is normal with any type of software product launch. this is how projects turn out. this is also bad and what i have been trying to avoid for months. but things happen — scope changes, focus changes, people change their minds, bad decisions are made. this is natural; i'm cool with all of this. i just wish that deadlines were as flexible as everything else seems to be.

that or i wish that i didn't get so stressed out. i take my work, my product, very seriously. very personally. and when faced with a decision of missing a deadline and turning out inferior code, well, it's a decision i can't make easily. it's like having to decide which of two people you pull from a burning wreck. yuck.

so i am alternating now between stressing and thinking, all about work.

so let's move on.

i've been trying to catch up on music i missed out on the last couple of years. stuff like the walkmen, the shins, the killers…and really, none of it does anything for me. a pity. so i'm back to digging through the crates — and wanting to hear the ti album. and the new clipse album. so if britney spears isn't your bag — what have you listened to recently that really got you going? i'm not asking about year-end lists (though those are fine too)…i'm asking about recent stuff, the last month or two…

i've been wearing out the game's 'its ok' (both the original (sorry, this one is a youtube, i couldn't find an mp3…but its still dope — the rest are actual mp3s. whee!) and the epic 11 minute remix), mia's 'xr 2′, nas' 'hip hop is dead' and green velvet's 'genedefekt' (an oldie but goodie that i somehow missed out on the first time).

a very long weekend, all good. i would wager that the last two weekends have been the most satisfying, in their own ways, that i have lived in a while.

thursday was hima's last day at 'the find', where i was once employed. the finale drinks were at ugly's, which has quickly evolved into our watering hole, after not so stiff competition from ron's farmhouse.

friday during the day was sadly miserable. there are days you work and everything falls into place. days where your t-do- checklist is complete by 11am. those days make you feel good. friday, for me, was the opposite — every item on my to-do list was complicated by some unforseen, external dependency. by 3pm, i found myself ahead of schedule and actually accomplishing something. this was due not to my genius, but to the fact that the previous 2 or 3 items on my list had been skipped over for the time being. a miserable feeling, frankly.

the weekend was spent mostly moving all of my music into itunes. this sounds overdue and basic. it is. but my music collection was woefully disorganized, spread across 4 drives on my desktop. i had a nice organization. once. about two years ago. so this time around, i decided to let itunes organize it all for me and i spent the majority of the weekend making sure everything was imported correctly. learned a bit about how itunes 7 is firing. i vastly underestimated the amount of music i own and what i thought would be complete in one day has stretched into many. the upside is that i will have all my tunes in one place, on one drive where i can actually find things.

for instance: i had forgotten how good dj andy smith's mix cd is. composed of a few hiphop tracks and a ton of old funk, its wonderful. i was happy to refind it on saturday. right now, as i type this, tom jones' 'lookin out my window' is keeping me company. this might signal a kick of old funk and groove tracks. but there might not be better music for overcast fall days. barry white, james brown, the james gang? bring it on.

tripp is in san diego so i'm alone this weekend. very strange.

it is so bloody hot here. last night i slept in pj shorts and a bikini top- it was the least i could wear while still being modest enough to have my window wide open. unfortunately it never cooled off that much, and it is already getting hot again and its only 8:30.

i saw karen (not keren) yesterday- it took us long enough. neither of us wanted to drive so we met in san francisco. it was good to catch up.

i was stupid enough to not look up what bus to take back to the train station after we were done visiting (the one i took went up a one way street and i wasn't sure what street the return line went on). rather than investigate, i decided to walk. the walk wasn't that bad, probably a mile or so. i took the train back and, paying little to no attention, managed to get off a stop too soon. this meant a walk of at least 45 minutes in three digit heat. my face was so red. i drank a lot of water after getting home.

i didn't realize it had been so long since my last post. work things are crazy. last week was spent playing catch up, the week before i logged 22 hours of overtime. despite being worn out from not having much of a weekend (most of those hours were on saturday and sunday) i still love my job.

what else? karen noted that there's a possibility a mutual friend will end up in mountain view. that would be rad. also, i've been totally depressed by the news recently. this, however, doesn't seem the proper forum to delve at the moment.