Fire

Wednesday I left my car's top down when I parked at work and when I left that night I noticed some white flakes on the seats and figured it was from the trees I parked next to. Then on the drive back there was a sign about the 118 being closed because of brush fire.

Thursday I was driving in to work and about 25 miles north-west of where I work I noticed that the sky had become a whitish-reddish color and that part of the ocean was reflecting this color. As I got closer it became clear that this was smoke rising from a giant fire a bit north-east of where I work. I went into work and didn't really think about it until 11:30 when someone came around telling everyone that we were going to be evacuated in an hour so if we wanted something from the cafeteria we should go now. (I still don't understand why getting food seemed to be the key message rather than the evacuating part, but maybe it is just that people who live around here are not surprised when they have to evacuate for a fire). Well due to recent events in the world and the fact that I had to drive north to get home as soon as I heard the word evacuate I walked to my car and started driving. Once I was well past the fire I stopped by some stores to do some needed shopping (it is a long drive - I go by a lot of stores). And each time when I went into the store the sky was blue and when I came out the sky was white and bits of ash were falling. Luckily by time I got about 15 miles south of Carpinteria the sky was nice and blue. Then I headed up to Santa Barbara to pick up my Grandma who was visiting my Aunt and Uncle. We headed back to Carp and walked around the town and got some dinner. At one point we got some candy and ice cream and sat down outside and I noticed that every once in a while I would see a bit of ash falling, but the sky stayed nice and blue.

Friday I called Teradyne to see if people were going back to work and they said the buildings would open at 12:00 but it was up to individual discretion if you wanted to come in. Well my individual discretion says 3.5 day weekend!

Opera

Opera is a web browser that until recently many people have avoided because you had to pay them to get a version without extra ads on it. But they have decided to make it free with no ads. I am not sure I'd recomend it over firefox, but it is fairly slick and should be much more secure than IE. You will need to go through the menus a bit to get it to block pop ups and such but once you do it has a nice system for handling them.

If trying out new browsers is something you are interested in this could be a fun one to check out.
If you are using firefox and are happy then probably no reason to bother with opera.
If you have been having trouble with firefox (or g-d forbid, are using IE) then Opera could be worth trying out.

If you do try it out and want some advice on the menu settings just let me know or post a comment.

Weekend

Friday night I headed to the hot tub with a book and some wine in a cup given to me by the company (cadence) that makes the software (the circuit design and layout tools I use at work) that makes me want a glass of wine on Friday night.

Saturday I got some laundry done and then baby sat for Zach and Zoe. It was fun to see them and I was quite impressed by how well they behaved and remembered all the things they needed to do better than I did.

Sunday I got to the beach for a couple of hours - it has gotten a bit colder so just went with a chair and a book (no heading into the ocean this weekend). I tried out Mi Fiesta which is a convenience store that also sells some Mexican food that was mentioned in the New York Times. It was good but not quite sure what made it any more special than any of the other restaurants in town. Also started to play with the idea of taking night classes to get an MBA. Not really sure if it will go anywhere but I'm starting to see what the possibilities are.

A note on information missing from my blog. Occasionally you might notice something missing from my blog entries or notice they are a bit light on detail. There are two reasons for this. The first is I just kind of post when I feel like it so sometimes I just don't get around to saying much. The other is that this is all publicly available (and as my posts on expose for windows proves, random people do sometimes read it). So there is a certain amount of person information I am willing to share but especially when it comes to information about other people I like to play it safe since I am not sure how others feel about information about their life being posted for all the world to see. You can always contact me personally and ask about what's going on other than what goes up on the blog if you are curious.

Is It Better to Buy or Rent? - New York Times

Another interesting article for those of us who do not own homes... Is It Better to Buy or Rent? - New York Times

Thanks Susanna for pointing this one out.

Inspiration

Nice... Inspiration

The first four despair posters of the new calendar are up on their website.

Firefox Update

A firefox update was just released. If you made the previous security fix then probably nothing too urgent, but if you did not get around to that - then definitely time to head over to mozilla.

Oh so that's who in those little planes flying over the beach

Had a fairly fast paced weekend. Started off with a gathering of grad students from Susanna's lab Friday night.

Then Saturday Susanna and I went to Zach's birthday party. Spent a lot of time helping kids put on skates and such. But still had a good time. Happy Birthday Zach! It was actually quite a party with several rounds of food, a little gymnastics course, little model planes, a climbing wall and rollerblading instructions.

Saturday night met some UCSB physics grad students Susanna knows.

Sunday went with Susanna and a Post Doc in her lab who knows how to fly small airplanes to the Santa Barbara airport where we got in a tiny plane that seats 3 people and took off. There are controls for two people and after he handled the take off, he standing handing the controls over to us. We circled around one of the islands and then landed in the Oxnard airport so Susanna and I could switch seats and then flew over the beach and found our house and then took it back into the Santa Barbara Airport. It was a cool experience. It wasn't really scary, but after doing a few rocking the plane back and forth maneuvers to get a feel for steering I realized I probably wouldn't be looking to make it a regular event.

Things I learned this weekend

The first thing I learned this weekend is that Carpinteria has a little salt marsh nature preserve with a nature trail through it. It is honestly not that impressive, but there were several humming birds and I really like watching them when they do that fly in place thing where it looks like they are floating.

The next thing I learned is that if you go in the opposite direction to the second closest beach entrance to the apartment and you go left instead of right there's a nice little bit of beach that is separated from the rest and is less populated. There were also some surfers out there unlike in the main beach area.

Susanna and I watched the 25 year anniversary episode of SNL and found out that Dr. Evil from Austin Powers is Lorne Michaels - who knew... If you ever listen to him talk it will become very obvious.

The final thing requires a bit of background. Last year I had an invention idea which Susanna and I both thought was actually a decent product idea. When we occasionally kick around the idea of quitting work and grad school and starting our own company I am usually thinking we would implement this idea. The other bit of background is two years ago (all of these years are school years) Max gave me a stack of old wired magazines he had and did not want to take to Israel. Recently I have been reading through them. Of course as I am reading through one from 2004 I read the description of something very similar to the idea described above and then they talked about possible extensions to their invention and basically described the idea. Garrr!

Firefox security issue

If you use firefox you should go do this: Firefox and Mozilla security issue.

A few days ago a security issue was discovered in firefox. As of now I believe that no one has found a way to make the security issue do anything other than crash the browser if you click on a strange link, but it is possible that someone has figured out how to make it do something nastier so it is worth following the instructions on the page linked to above.

NetMeeting

NetMeeting - I hate you - you are evil - I wish you did not exist!

Rather than conference calling and using netmeeting I think less time would be wasted if we all just faxed each document to each other!

zucchini

We are going to eat zucchini because we are zucchini eaters.

Oh Onion...

Onion Editorial

But David you only know a little java, you're not a java programmer...
True, but I did once dream about java because my two roommates, another good friend, and my ex-girlfriend picked my room for where they were going to stay up all night to finish 6.170. Their finishing touch was adding a lightening effect to the pinball like game they made. I dreamed of a pinball game with lightening flashing across the screen and the next morning I really thought I had seen the game. That affect did win them an award so I guess I can't be too mad about them disrupting my sleep.

So...yeah... I can laugh at java programer jokes I guess was the point of that little story.

Labor Day Weekend

Saturday I walked around town taking care of some errands (and finally got a hair cut) and then that night saw the aristocrats in Santa Barbara.

Sunday Eric and his roommate Evan headed up to Carp and Susanna and I went with them to the beach. Played some Frisbee, laid around, went back to the hot tub, got some dinner in town.

Monday did some cleaning and enjoyed part of the law and order marathon.

The Aristocrats

Last night I saw The Aristocrats and wow, as their subtitle says, there is unspeakable obscenity. The movie is comedians telling about talking about a joke whose punch line is the aristocrates. If you are a south park fan - this is a movie for you! (in fact they even have Eric Cartman tell the joke). The south park telling may have been the best, but hearing it from Bob Saget was also up there.

It is also cool because they have some scenes with the writers of the onion which is interesting because they look like they should be in the sipb (MIT computer club) room.