Creeping slowly southwards

Looks like things are starting to move along for me to go down to Palm again this summer, working on the kernel this year.

Woot.

Another summer of hard work pays off

This will sell like hotcakes, which is rather appropriate seeing as it's thin and flat.

It's party time!

Mark your calendars!

Day Three

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Also to be known as "the eventful day". I've arrived safe and sound in Sunnyvale.

The day started off boring enough. Some rain fell (no different from previous days, and yes, it rained in Minot too), and some miles passed. I made the mistake of not stopping at Elko for lunch and instead had to make do in Battle Mountain (a stupid little one-horse town). Mental note for next year: don't do that.

The first real excitement came when I arrived in California proper, at Truckee in particular. I have no idea what was going on, but the signs said something about a 10 mile traffic jam. I took a look at the map and said "fuck that with a grass rake" and slipped off at the next exit and took the highway down through Lake Tahoe instead (well, it didn't go through the lake itself, more around it). It made for quite a splendid mountain drive.

The next excitement came as I discovered that, as the 90 billionth customer on I680, I'd won a free prize consisting of a nail, specially delivered in my right rear tire. Luckily it's just in the tread and only a slow leak, so no harm done. I didn't even find it until I had stopped at the hotel in Sunnyvale.

The third and final bit of excitement was, right on cue as I started to unwind in the hotel room, the realization that I'd left my american ATM card at home. It's no big deal as I'll just go get a replacement tomorrow, but all the same...

Day Two

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Glendive to Twin Falls. Took a bit longer for lunch than I planned, as I got lost trying to find the IHOP in Billings. Mmm, pancakes.

Staying in the Super 8 here, and I'm not sure I like it much more than the Motel 6. They don't seem to have free internet here either, though I can get a decent signal from the car dealership across the road (thanks, Middlekauff Honda of Twin Falls, ID!).

Actually, double-checking their website (Super-8's, not Middlekauff Honda's), they say they have free high-speed internet so maybe I just need to call the front desk to get the wireless password or something. Meh, mooching the neighbour's wifi works just as well.

Day One

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Winnipeg to Glendive. Made good time. I quite like this route, I think I may prefer it over taking the interstates through ND.

The home stretch

I'm finally at the DS7002 stage with my visa application, so that means that in the next day or two I should get my DS2019 soon and be on the road. Woot!

I'll be staying in Apartment 55 at the Thomas Jefferson Apts this year. It's a one bedroom cottage, and should be quite a bit nicer than having to live with people (even nice people). I just hope it doesn't spoil me too much, since I still have a few winters with Father to endure.

Visa Undelays

Looks like the paperwork for my visa was finally submitted. Hooray! They've got a 10 business day turnaround time, so it looks like I'll be on the road hopefully by May 1st.

Visa Delays

Well, it seems that my visa won't be processed in time to keep to my original schedule of leaving on the 24th, as it takes 10 days to process and I just confirmed today that it hasn't yet been submitted.

I cancelled the application for the apartment I was going to rent (no expense incurred), and will now wait for word that the papers have been submitted before attempting to rent another. It's a good thing I don't need to buy plane tickets to fly down.

I'm annoyed.

I am full of money

Today marks a very special day for my stock portfolio. I made a bunch of stock shuffles back in August, just before the market really went pear-shaped, and today marks the first day since the bottom that one of my stocks has gone back into the black.

As I type this, my Palm stock is at $8.53, which is just over the buy price of $8.44. Meanwhile the rest of my portfolio is still down 20-60%, which should mean very, very good things for my Palm shares once things start to really bounce back.

It's good to be rich.

What a nice looking phone

I'm quite happy today for some reason. :)

Palm New-ness

What an interesting article.

All good things must come to an end

And yesterday was my last day working at Palm this summer. Thankfully I had managed to finish up my work on Wednesday and Thursday so I didn't have much to do but chill out and wait to see if anything huge blew up that would need my attention (and luckily not).

Lunch was of course provided. We were originally going to go to Tied House, but when we got there we discovered they had a sewer backup and wouldn't be open for another hour, so we all walked over to Temptations instead for some chinese/indian fusion cuisine. Good times were had by all.

At the end of the day I was sad to leave and everyone there was sad to see me go, but on the whole it was a really great experience, and one I plan to repeat next year.

Big wheel keep on turnin'

Rode my unicycle in to work today (the 29). Got kind of sweaty from the effort so it was a good thing I packed a clean change of clothes in my bag.

Folks around the office were very entertained, and Johan even gave it a test-spin. He has a 24" KH unicycle back in Sweden, so he managed to make a fairly good show of it.

As for the commute itself, I managed to make fairly good time (though much slower than biking) and I only fell off once; on the way home.

Lots of fun.

The countdown begins

In less than a week I'll be hitting the road like a man on a mission, and thus the final countdown begins.

I've really had an awesome time being here in California and I'm really looking forward to coming here again next year. What I'm not looking forward to is spending another few winters in Winnipeg, but this is the cross I bear.

I should also take the time to mention that I have successfully passed on the torch^Wunicycle to Candy and Ryan, though they couldn't give it a try right away as Candy was having some trouble with her foot and Ryan had sprained something the week previous. That said, I do have confidence that by the time I return next year at least one of them should be able to ride it, or at least have made a good effort.

The miracles of technology

So this evening I was playing around with my Centro, mostly checking what part of the world is in shadow in the nifty world clock app, when suddenly my computer made this bizarre noise and an icon popped up in the task bar saying "A computer is near by, would you like to transfer files?".

This came as a bit of a shock to me, to say the least. I wondered if I had fallen victim to some form of malware or trojan, so I quickly googled the error code and discovered that it was windows itself popping up the message, in response to a successful connection via IRDA.

It then occured to me that both my laptop and my phone have IR ports on them, a fact that I had up until this point completely and utterly ignored (and/or forgotten).

After a little bit of fiddling around, I managed to get the palm hotsync to sync my Centro over the IRDA connection. I've never done that before.

It's funny to think about IR port: a barely noticed flash in the pan of technology that had come and gone almost ten years ago, nowadays completely and utterly replaced by bluetooth and other RF technologies. Now, all these years later, almost entirely forgotten and on the eve of its final demise, the dusty corpse reanimates like a silicon zombie to wirelessly fling my bits of contact information back and forth over an invisible link.

I wonder: if technologies were really alive, what they would think of their passing... For me, it just makes me feel old.

E.T. Phone Home

Yesterday marks the arrival of two new toys to my ever-growing collection of stuff. The first is a Palm Centro that I got free from work, and the second is a data cable for my Samsung Stripe.

I have combined the joy of these two devices into one magical experience: a photo of my centro taken with my stripe, and copied over the data cable.

I still need to unlock my Centro so I can actually use it with T-Mobile or Rogers/Fido, but it's still neat to have, as useless as it is. I hardly need one cellphone, god only knows what I'm going to do with two of them.

I am Iron Man

So today I had a very important meeting with the entire development team, from 11:00am to 2:30pm. We all got together and met at the local theatre to watch Iron Man, on the company's dime.

Good way to round out the week, I think. I'm feeling fairly good with my progress in settling in; I think on Monday I should actually be starting to chew on some code.

Tyler should be magically appearing sometime next week for a visit. Good times will be in store I'm sure.

First Day

Went well, was a slice, not much to say about it.

I'm in ur country, stealing ur jobs!

So, I'm in Glendive, MT for the evening. Customs went very smoothly, the border official that issued my Visa seemed more concerned about filling out the forms correctly than figuring out if I was a terrorist or not.

Some things of note:

1. I passed someone riding a bike down Pembina Highway that looked an awful lot like Tyler. I'm not sure why Tyler would be riding his bike down Pembina on a Saturday morning, so I'll just assume it was his evil twin.
2. The Hardees Jalapeno Thickburger is divine bliss, though not quite as good as the chili cheeseburgers I had with Bob on Friday.
3. The curbs at gas station entrances have a sneaky way of hiding in shadows when you're tired from driving. No damage done, thankfuly.
4. Someone west of here is making a whole lot of money selling boom lifts to someone east of here.
5. The Theodore Roosevelt park looks like it would be really pretty at sunset. Sadly it was mostly cloudy by the time I got there.
6. Strong tailwinds make for awesome gas mileage.

Today's journey:


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I think tomorrow I'll try for Twin Falls, Idaho. It's a few more hours driving than I did today, but I'll be on the road earlier and I won't have to spend an hour waiting at the border.