I met up with an old flame of mine yesterday. It's depressing how quickly the strong feelings one has for a loved one can fade away without meaningful contact. We had a really passionate relationship. Our time spent together was always uplifting and energizing when I was down and calming and cooling when things got too hot. Everything seemed so perfect back then. This reunion brought back a lot of fond memories, but the sparks just weren't there anymore. It's kinda sad.

Of course, I'm talking about my first can of Mountain Dew in many months, if not years. I started drinking only diet sodas a while back. Actually, I only drank diet Coke because it had the most caffeine without any sugar. Oh, and I can get as much of it as I want from the kitchen at work. That's until I started drinking diet Pepsi because of that Pepsi girl. But then I came to the conclusion that diet Pepsi tastes like a brown, watered-down Sweet'N Low beverage with natural and artificial caffeine flavoring so I stopped with that madness. Yes, I could taste the brown. To switch sodas over a girl is something I never thought I'd do.

I went back to Mountain Dew yesterday because I went for another 6am bike ride. Vishnu showed up in his annoyingly punctual manner. We took off at 6:15am. The path by the railroad tracks was still somewhat muddy. It wasn't so bad that our bikes got stuck, but it slowed us down. I though it was like driving with your hand brake on. The rode ride up Prospect wasn't as much of a problem. On the way up to Hunter's Point, we were passed by two joggers. Wonderful. I saw one of the guys jogging up Prospect when I did my ride on Wednesday. He made it to Hunter's Point just 3 minutes after I got up there. Man, I'm slow. The trail was muddy in the beginning and really muddy at the top. My tires were so caked in mud that it looked like it was twice as big as it usually is. Going downhill was a pain because chunks of mud would fly off of my tires and into my face and down my shirt. Still, it was a great experience. The tale of my first mud ride will be told until the listeners are bored stiff, and then it'll be told some more.

Well, I better pack for my trip to Sac. I'll be back.

I passed a great opportunity to go out to lunch today because I had a meeting at 1pm. At 12:06pm, it got moved to later in the afternoon. So not only did I miss out on lunch, I missed out on complaining about 1pm meetings. Bah.

In the past, I have said that this Chloe character on 24 was annoying. (I don't think I've said it here, but I've said it before, I certain of that.) My opinion, however, was based on a few episodes of season 4 and after seeing this past Monday's episode, I plan to retract my previous assertion of annoyance. What really changed my mind was when Edgar called her the best hax0r at CTU. (Chloe made a really funny face when he said that, and that was the best moment of the episode.) That's when it dawned on me: Chloe is a geek and therefore shouldn't be subjet to the same annoyance rubric as non-geeks. I had been judging Chloe incorrectly because I thought she was just some CTU drone with a few speaking parts. She's actually a CTU geek with a few speaking parts. In light of this, I can no longer consider her annoying. She annoyed me because she seemed rude and really blunt. She also had a horrible sense of timing, saying the wrong things at the wrong times and then saying, "Oh, I guess this is a bad time." But now that I know she's a geek, this is all normal behavior, so it doesn't bother me nearly as much. In fact, it's very much in character. Thank you Edgar for clearing this up for me.

I've been having some more bike problems. This time it's with my derailer. I can't get into my 3rd chain ring very easily. This happened before, a while ago back when I first got my bike. But that time, it was because the cable was slipping out so I could fix it easily. I might need to take my bike in for tune-up anyway, so I'll get it taken care of then. Yeah, yeah, I can adjust the derailer and I did, so it works OK now, but it could sure use a tune-up. An overhaul is pretty frigging expensive. It's around $200 at all the places I've looked at. Bah.

Hopefully the bike will hold up until next week. On Saturday I'm heading up to Sac to help Phill film somthing. If all goes well, we should be able to get a ride or two in on Sunday. Since I'm taking Monday off, I'll probably come home then.

Hmm, I should record 24 in case I don't get home in time on Monday....

On Friday, I didn't go for a 6am ride. Instead, I slept in. I think it was a smart thing to do because when I went to work, I wasn't zombie-like and I didn't walk funny. Funnier than I usually walk, that is.

To continue my streak of geniousness, I took the bike out at about 7am on Saturday for a few loops around the neighborhood just to see if my back tire was holding air. When I took the tube out, I could see where the slime started oozing out of the tire so it seems like the slime did its job. That stuff is great. Plus it's green, which makes it that much cooler. I wonder if my tire can take another flat? It doesn't seem like there's much slime in there. Usually it oozes out when I let air out of the tire but I didn't see any this time.

In an ultimate stroke of geniousness, I went for another ride yesterday morning with Sri. Vishnu was supposed to come too but he wasn't feeling that great. We rode up Regnart Road to the killer trail head and then pretended to be all hardcore and ride up the trail. After a while, pretending to be hardcore is tiring so we hiked up the rest of the trail. All you people hatin' on posers have no idea how hard it is to actually be a poser. After a trip up to Hunter's Point, we headed over to Coyote Ridge to enjoy the downhill ride home. All was well until Sri's chain snapped. I had a multi-function tool that claimed to have a chain tool also, but I had no idea what part of it was a chain tool or how to use it. We managed to get the chain together but part of it was bent out of shape so the pin wouldn't go back in. We tried to use a small, flat piece of rock to push the chain back into place, but the rocks kept breaking. Sri suddenly evolved past the stone age and suggested using metal! What a great idea. I happened to have a nickel with me so we used that to push the chain back into shape. Tommy J. now has a huge crator for a nose. Oops. But the chain held and we managed to get back in one piece.

I wrote most of this at 4am because I can't sleep. I took a 4-hour nap today so I ran out of sleep. Napping sucks. I think today is going to be pretty fracking crappy.

Yesterday morning I decided to brave the early morning cold and go for a bike ride at 6:45am. Today, I went for a bike ride at 6:15am. But this time, Vishnu was with me so I could count on his warmth to keep me going. I could, but I didn't. He called me last night and wanted to go on a ride but I was still at work. It wasn't even 6pm when he called. Of course I'd still be at work. We agreed to meet at 6am and lo and behold, Vishnu shows up at 6am. Curse you and your punctuality! I was counting on him being late so I could get an extra five seconds of sleep.

The ride up was much faster than normal. We managed to get up to the top in about an hour. Vishnu discovered the joy (a.k.a. pain) of biking uphill in a higher gear. I discovered the joy (a.k.a. pain) of not feeling my ears or fingers. Again. I had gone to REI to buy some earmuffs so I could look extra odd and have warm ears but they didn't have any left. Bah.

On the way back, I realized that my back tire was flat. I thought it was a pinch flat that I got on the trail, but my tire seemed fine all the way down. If it was a puncture flat, the slime should have taken care of it. It was still losing pressure as I rode though, so I'm not sure what went wrong. We stopped twice on the way back so I could inflate my tire. This evening, I left work while it was still light outside (about 6:30pm...wow) to replace my tire. But it seemed like there was still air in the tire so I didn't replace it. I ended up cleaning my bike so that it looks squeaky clean. There's a little sticker on my bike that says "Man's Best Friend" with a picture of a scary thing on it. I'd have taken a picture but I didn't have my camera with me, it was getting hard, the sticker was in a strange place, my hands were dirty and I'm out of excuses. Tomorrow morning, I might do a short road ride to see if the slime is working. If not, it'll let all the air out of the tire so I can replace it more easily.

So not only did I freeze my nose off again this morning, I also lost a tube. Something tells me that this stupidity will happen again. Brilliant.

Today I learned that it's really cold outside at 6:45am. What's up with that? I biked up to Hunter's Point early in the morning to enjoy the great view of Cupertino and the surrounding areas. It looked a lot like my shoes, probably because I was hunched over trying to catch my breath the whole time I was up there. The trip down took a surprisingly long time. I was travelling slowly because if I went too fast, the wind would freeze my ears and thumbs off. There was probably a moment between freezing to death and suffocating where I actually enjoyed the experience. I might do it again.

Netflix recently bestow upon me the movie War Games. It's one of the first l33t hax0r movies ever made and probably led to the current fear of l33tness by legions of technophobic moviegoers. However, like most fears, this is completely irrational. The movie itself is so inaccurate that "learning" anything about geeks from that movie is like learning grammar from Dr. Seuss. Here are some of the gross misrepresentations of organic computer accessories (a.k.a. geeks):

1. Use of telephone - The kid, David Lightman (played by Matthew Broderick) uses a telephone to connect to other computers and ultimately to gain access to the top secret Whopper computer to kick start World War III. Everyone knows that land-line telephones are only used to call up customer support when your cable modem service is down and it's absurd to think that you should get cell phone reception at home. No, I don't know what a modem is.
2. Interaction with a female - Early on in the movie, young David Lightman befriends a female classmate by insulting the biology teacher (a display of wittiness) and then changing her grade from an F to an A (a display of generosity). A geek who is to be feared has neither wit nor generosity and would never be able to even make eye contact with a girl let alone talk to one. To make matters worse, this girl (played by Ally Sheedy) was shown exercising. Girls who exercise and geeks who hack are like mayonnaise and french fries: they only mingle if they're in Europe. This fact alone means that David Lightman is an outlier in the population of geeks as a whole. Bseides, having a girlfriend takes away from precious computer time.
3. Location of bedroom - Everyone knows that a true hax0r lives in his parents' basement. David Lightman got it half right: he lives with his parents, but his bedroom is upstairs. This location is much too high class for a gritty, hardcore, break-into-a-military-supercomputer-to-play-a-game type of hacker. His bedroom also had a window, which lets in sunlight, which leads to certain death for the standard-issue pasty, white geek.
4. Weak password - The password for the school's grade system is pencil. That is an extremely weak password, because passwords should always refer to something embarassing about the account holder. This way, when the account is crax0red, no only is the data compromized, the hacker learns a dirty little secret about the account holder. Otherwise, there is little incentive to hax0r the account. When David Lightman uncovered the password, he didn't seem disappointed. Really, he should have given up right there.

I could go on, but I won't. The one redeeming scene from this movie, which, in my opinion, was much too short, was that the roles of Jim and Malvin, the overweight, swivel-chair potato and the brilliant guy with no people skills respectively, were executed with utter perfection.

I installed Fedora Core 3 on my HP laptop this weekend. It has been a long time since I've used an RPM-based distro. I started off with SuSE, moved on to RedHat, played with Mandrake for a while (I think Mandrake is the best distro for beginners) and then settled with Slackware. I think the last RedHat I used on a personal computer was 6.1. The installers have really come a long way since 6.1. The packages all work great too. I love how Firefox and OpenOffice.org were included on the install CDs. Those are usually packages that I had to install by myself with Slackware. I haven't had a chance to play around with it (too busy complaining about War Games) but I'd like to see if I can configure everything without editing anything in vi. That would be a huge milestone. But I'm still sticking with Slackware as my primary distro. Other distributions are just fun to play with.

I have no idea what's tiring me out so much these days. I think it's all this sunlight. The weather has been summerific this past week and all my chlorophyll have been photosynthesizing like crazy. Oh, you didn't know that I'm 40% plant? I suppose it's something I don't talk about much. See, many years ago I was part of a covert scientific expedition along the Amazon. Four of us (a scientist, an heavily-armed guard, a kid who superglued his ear to his shoulder and myself) were separated from the main party and had to take shelter, as it was quickly becoming dark. With our luck, we managed to set up camp under the giant, mutant, super-fig tree that escaped from an underwater lab off the coast of New Zealand several months ago. All would have been fine, except that this plant was allergic to superglue. The kid got to close and the tree sneezed fig sap all over us. Being a huge fan of fig sap, I proceeded to lick the sap off of myself. Hey, I was hungry. I passed out from all the sappy goodness and when I came to, I was in a black helicopter being flown back to a top-secret lab in the South Pacific. There, nice men in tidy white lab coats performed all sorts of tests on me to see what effect fig sap had on mostly-human life forms. They found nothing. So they let me go and as I was leaving, a venus fly trap bit me. It was to be expected. During the testing, I said some pretty mean things about his mother. Well ever since then, I've started using the sun's energy and growing roots. I smell really good and I water myself a lot. Unfortunately, I don't have any plant superpowers that I know of. I am working on my ability to attract bees, though. Maybe that'll help me learn how to attract women.

I finally watched X2 last week, so I'm currently in an I-wanna-be-a-mutant phase. I'm not actually a plant.

As I type this, I'm watching 2001: A Space Odyssey. There's a scene in the beginning of the movie where a bunch of apes are running around and beating up wild boars. The first time I saw that movie, I thought those were real apes. In fact, the second time I saw the movie (today), I also thought those were real apes. How did they get those apes to take a bunch of bones and beat the crap out of that other ape? After all, only humans kill their own kind with a bunch of bones. Well, a quick check of IMDB shows that those "apes" were actually dudes in ape suits. I had no idea. Never send a monkey to do a man's job. That didn't make any sense. Kind of like the movie itself. Its a beautiful movie though. It had an intermission. And some really strange noises. I should read the book again.

Another movie I saw recently was Logan's Run. It's based some time in the future. Or rather, it's based in the 1975 future, which means everyone wears tunics and slippers. Well, unless you work in the military or law enforcement or something. Then you wear a skin-tight uniform and slippers. Also, in the 1975 future, machines were covered in aluminum foil. If they were humanoids, then their heads are painted with silver paint. And they spout nonsense which makes them highly intelligent. In the 1975 future, people can fly around on these suits, kinda like astronauts do in space. But they're right here on Earth. They also drink their tasty beverages out of test tubes and the drinks tend to have smoke flowing out of the test tubes. The best part about the 1975 future is that there are a lot of meaningless flashing lights. If the 1970's had their way, we'd all be ravers. Even me. Especially me.

In conclusion, I have no idea why I'm so tired these days. Maybe it's because I'm staying up late to watch all these confounded movies.

Things are going pretty well. I'm no longer in unbearable pain anymore although my triceps have gone on strike and my arms have locked them out. (I hear Mayor Newsom might get involved.) I figured out why my triceps are so sore: it's because, while snowboarding, I kept sitting down (read: falling on my ass) and I used my arms both to brace myself and to push myself back up. Standing up might be trivial for normal humans but it usually takes me three or four tries to actually get up. I must have done over a thousand reverse pushups then. A piece of advice: do not rub your eyes while your hands still have BenGay on them.

Work is going pretty well also. I'm getting back into the work mood again. I'm in the work mood so much that I'm at work right now, working. And watching The Day the Earth Stood Still. That movie is a classic. I should get back to work so I can go home. Bah.

I'm going to a TBP BBQ tomorrow. That should be interesting, now that I'm really an old fogie. I might even go there while limping. That should be fun.

Argh, I'm still a bit sore, but getting better. I think my most painful but least spectacular fall on Tuesday did a number on my neck. It sucks that it didn't look as good as it hurt. Bah. I'm still smelling like an exotic blend of Icy Hot and Ben-Gay. It's sad: I'm feeling old now. I can't take as much pain as I could a few years ago. I'd never have run into the fountain today. But I can't say that I'm over the hill. As anyone who has been mountain biking with me, there's no way I could have gotten up that hill so I can't be over the hill. Although I might have cheated and gone around the hill. Hmm....

This could be the coolest gadget I've seen in a while. It could have helped me on the slopes earlier this week. If I had one of these units, I start realizing my ultimate goal of becoming a cyborg. Bionic legs would be a perfect for me because I have an inherent inability to stay upright. The next enhancement I'd like is a bionic eye. Just one eye though. It should feature a 10x optical zoom (like Saito from GitS: SAC), night vision capabilities, and x-ray vision. I'd also need a DVI connector somewhere on my body so that I can take advantage of the multi-monitor functionality on a PC. Imagine coding on one monitor, referring to documentation on another monitor and watching Pirates of the Caribbean in my left eye. Sw33t! When the bionic eye has been installed and configured, I think I'd like a bionic tail, but I'm not sure what I'd use it for.

I watched another Bollywood classic last night. The Instant-Play thing on my Jodie has sound when you're playing at 2x so I was able to watch Dil Chaita Hai in half the time and listen to The Chipmunks sing Hindi. I didn't think much of the movie. It was basically a chick flic with a bunch of romantic dudes instead of romantic chicks. That's not to say it wasn't a good movie, it's just not my type of movie. There were no cyborgs.

If you like green tea ice cream with sugar, high fructose corn syrup and more sugar, try the Matcha Green Tea Blast at Jamba Juice. It tastes like green tea ice cream with sugar, high fructose corn syrup, and more sugar.

Wednesday, April 5, 2005 will go down as the most exciting work day ever. I woke up early in the morning and went to work. There, I met two of my co-workers, Steven and Chris. Then we left for Kirkwood. Yup, we ditched work to go to the mountains. The ride up there was pretty smooth. There was almost no one on the roads because, well, it was Tuesday. The slopes were as empty as the road, which was great. The snow wasn't that great though. It was really sunny (and really hot) so it was sticky. The flat parts of the runs were really crappy.

We stopped at a McDonalds for breakfast on the way up. I had a breakfast burrito. What the heck is that thing?

On the slopes, Steven was on skis, Chris was on a snowboard, and I was on my back, my butt, my stomach or my head. I also had a snowboard, but it wasn't very useful. I went down a black diamond (parts of it while on the snowboard too). Of course, Chief Falling Leaf helped me down the slope. I ran into trouble when I left my faithful guide and tried to do it on my own. Well, at least I got some great reviews for my falls.

Currently, I can't move very well.

To add insult to injury, I had my jacket unzipped the whole time and I didn't put sunscreen on my neck. So someone called me a redneck the morning. That hurt, but only because I tried to stand up and object to that highly accurate remark. For the record, only the front of my neck is burned. The back of my neck is fine.

We finished our productive work day by going to Tahoe. Steph, you were saying that I needed a vacation? Well I went all the way to the Nevada side of the city. There's a vacation. I lost a bunch of money playing a game of pai gow that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern would have been proud of. The dealer can not get so many super duper hands! Actually, I made a lot of it back when a new dealer came in, but I lost it all in roulette. Mais, les jeux sont faits. Que cera, cera. Je suis un ananas.

So now I'm back at work and immobile. I don't think I'll go buttboarding again for a while. Falling, and making it look spectacular, is hard work.

It might be nice if I could post stuff as they happened instead of three days later. If I did, I would have said that me quitting my job and opening a Canadian restaurant in Cupertino was an April foolz joke. I'll bet no one got that.

On Friday, I saw what could possibly be the best movie I've seen all year: Sin City. (I've only seen one movie this year.) It was very much like a comic book. There was a lot of internal dialog, which normally exist as thought bubbles in graphic novels, but it was spoken in the character's voice. Actually hearing the characters speak their mind, literally, added a new dimension to the comic. Of course, I haven't read the comic, so I'm just making this up. But based on other comics I've read, that's how it seems. The filmography was really nice, also just like a comic book. The black and white with a touch of color really brought life to the images. I liked the stories too. They're all about honor and doing the "right thing". And all the noble deeds the heros did for people they hardly know is really touching. Warm fuzzies.

I biked Fremont Older again on Saturday with Vishnu. We went on as many trails as we could and took about 3 hours. There were a couple guys who just powered up those hills like they were nothing. I have no idea how they could have done it. It's crazy. Vishnu believed that they were faster going uphill than we were going downhill. That's sad. But those guys, especially the first dude, are my heroes. One of these days, I'll be that cool. It was great day for a really slow ride, but it started getting overcast towards the end. At least it didn't rain. Warm fuzzies.

I didn't do much on Sunday, but I did get to see Grace who told us all about Italy. Sounds like fun. Oh yeah, warm fuzzies.

Holy sheep. Did they really just do that on 24?

I might to snowboarding tomorrow. Yeah, it's a Tuesday. Oh, geez, I'm really distrubed now. Can't write more. Why does 24 always do this to me? No more warm fuzzies.

It's hard to swallow, but a little margarita helps it go down. I'm still employed. Yay. I think the outcome wasn't all that surprising for us internally, but, apparently, people outside expected about 50 people left. We ended up sacking around 67 people. Four people in PE left. They were really nice people. We lost our most outspoken people. I don't know if that's a good thing or not. In my department as a whole, about 20 people got canned. Now the big question is whether or not we can pull off what we say we're going to pull off. I guess we'll find all that out today.

Last night I watched Metropolis. It's another man-versus-machine movie with some soul-in-the-machine themes. I find this a facinating subject, mostly because I'd like to be an android. Battlestar Galactica (the best science fiction show since B5) explores this too, which is why I'm also facinated by Sharon/Boomer's story in that show. What makes a human a human? And what makes a human better than a machine? A generally accepted difference between Han Solo and C3P0 is that Han Solo isn't shiny and golden. Another difference is that Han Solo has feelings for Leia, but C3P0 could only curse his metal body. Many science fiction works get hung up on feelings as the difference between man and machine. (I'd say human and machine, but everyone knows that all women are aliens from Venus, so it's really just man and machine here.) The problem I have with that is that the result of having these "feelings" just affects the outcome of a decision. Computers really just make decisions. Their actions are deterministic enough to be called deterministic. Humans, really, also just make decisions, but human actions take into account emotional factors. So where a computer will have two choices in a decisions process, a human has an infinite number of choices. Emotions simply make certain choices more likely to happen than others. Based on this convoluted argument, the only difference between me and Number 6 (aside from me not looking good in that skimpy outfit) is a bunch of statistics.

I've started and stopped this post about 5 times now. I'm not going to continue because it's going to become more disjointed than a bowl of spaghetti. I'm on a low carb diet.

One last thing, althought I didn't get sacked yesterday, I'm still leaving. I'm taking my extensive knowledge of Canadian cuisine and opening up a Canadian restaurant in Cupertino, where there is a critical need of authentic Canadian food. Stay tuned.