If you have 5 minutes, watch this film – 35.

35 from ARC’TERYX on Vimeo.
Fun side note – the makers of the film have a great company name, “Duct Tape Then Beer”, and are located in Seattle. I tried to reach out to them to locate a copy of the film, but never heard back – luckily I found it eventually on Vimeo.

But this year, THIS YEAR, we conquered the mighty incumbent pigskin-launching Llamas.

The game was not without its usual high-tension drama, from both sides. Tempers went red on both sides. Their quarterback was a slippery catch, and they had some pulse-stopping 70 yard throws. But we ended up winning 19-0 (um….shutout!).

Now, let me clarify one thing. I’m not the type to shove a win in someone’s face. I really enjoy good sportsmanship.

But these folks are mean. One of them even steamrolled me! That’s totally against the rules, and to be true, intentional and very mean. They’ve gloated in their status as the three-time champions.

We, a team of awkward physics (or almost) grad students, who spend our days in basements and in front of computers, doing (awesome) research, beat them. We beat them hard.

I was sad to wash the smell of wings and beer from my champion shirt for fear of fading the smell of victory, but the feeling of teamwork, satisfaction and revenge (har) remain.

To my teammates, I love each and every one of you. Thank you for an awesome (and undefeated) season. And to my biggest fan, Adam, thank you for cheering us on!

Pink Lightning out.

But I had other plans…

A few months ago, I stumbled upon a cool picture of a girl holding a sign. I found that the words had a lot of meaning for me, and it reminded me a lot of what Adam and I hold so dearly: life is simple, enjoy it! Fast forward a month or so and I saw this on facebook.

I knew immediately that I wanted to have this in my house. I also knew that I wanted to do this for Adam, to have a “simple” reminder (which also doubles as a decoration) of our motto. And I had to surprise him (I love love love giving Adam surprises).

I had known for weeks that he was going to be gone from Thursday night until Monday afternoon. So I planned to make this happen while he was gone. I contacted an artist friend of mine for ideas how one goes about making a wall mural out of a poster I found online. She suggested I use an overhead projector. So I did.

I painted the wall behind the words “Roasted Squash” (squee! orange!) and bribed a group of my friends over with beer and wings to help me tape the wall, cut out the letters and paint.

By this time, it was 1am and Adam would be arriving home in 15 hours. We were giddy and a bit delusional, but ready to be done with this project. All we had to do was paint over the tape-mask and peel off the tape to reveal the manifesto.

So we peeled (carefully) all the tape off of the wall and admired our work…

In just over 50 hours and with the help of my AWESOME friends, I transformed our dining/living room wall!

When Adam got home, he was stunned into a long moment of (open-jaw) silence, followed by an exclamation of shock. It got very emotional for us from there and some tears were shed in happiness.

Life is short, so I painted him a surprise. I love this man, and I can’t tell you how awesome it was to see him beam with happiness, joy and love. I definitely surprised him and I’m so happy with how the wall turned out and his reaction. I read it nearly everyday now, and continue to be amazed that it actually worked and looks as awesome as it does. Our home is becoming more “ours” with every fun project!

Both Jeney and I have been rafting in various places before (Washington, Oregon, Colorado) and were looking for a good excuse to do some rafting before the summer was over. Luckily, Jeney came across a great Groupon a month or two ago and alerted us – fast forward several weeks and we had a group of 8 people ready to drive a few hours, camp out, and do some rafting!

Initially the trip out of Ithaca was fairly routine as it took us around Syracuse and in the direction of Utica – roads we had traveled before. However, we turned north near Rome, NY, and continued our slow ascent into the Adirondacks. At first it was a bit underwhelming, but the several hours in the car was worth it. After a conspicuous lack of what we would call “mountains” we came around a bend in the road and were treated to rows of tree covered mountains and lake after lake!

It really is a gorgeous area, we intend to go back up once all of the sight seers are out of the area in the early fall and rent a cabin with some friends for a full weekend. For this trip we headed to Lewey Lake, near Speculator, NY, and set up shop at our two campsites. Jeney prepared her outstanding

In the morning I cooked up some (ok, about 2 pounds) of bacon and a few eggs – everyone tossed their gear into the cars and we were off for the rafting.

Adirondack River Outfitters was a pretty good operation – we showed up, checked in, and had our gear (helmet, vest, and paddle) in about 15 minutes. After everyone had checked in we had a good safety brief that explained the basics (just what exactly we were doing, how to “not panic” if you find yourself outside of the raft) and explained the day. Shortly after that we loaded up into their bus and headed out for the quick drive to the area where we put in.

The river is so low during the summer that they do a planned release from a dammed lake – they leave this open for a few hours and you ride this “bubble” down the river. Without this the river would be too low in some areas to let the rafts pass.

Them morning was fairly tame, with a few small rapid sets – the sun was shining and our guide was really friendly; two very important ingredients for good rafting! We stopped after a couple of hours for a quick bite to eat. After hopping back into the rafts we hit several more rapids and had a lot of fun hopping out and swimming during the slower sections (and tipping the raft, hitting some rocks, and spinning it around to see who could stand up the longest without falling out). After most of the rapids were over we still had a couple hours left and took advantage of the slow time to ditch the safety gear and lay out on the raft. Our guide kept us on a safe path and let us know if there were any bumps coming up – a great way to spend the afternoon!

We wrapped up the trip back at the ARO facility; after pulling the raft out and putting up our safety gear we were treated to some BBQ’d chicken and a lot of good sides and….most importantly….beer!

This was a great first rafting trip in the Adirondacks and we’re looking forward to coming back in the spring when the water levels are a little higher and the rapids a little bumpier. ARO was a great company to go with, I highly recommend them!

First, when planning a business trip, be reasonable about the amount of free time you have. Usually, I overestimate and end up scrambling during the last few days to fit in what I’ve missed. At conferences, I get stuck going to many very interesting talks and then suddenly the day is gone. Take advantage of breaks and early free afternoons, etc.!

Second, try to get to the conference site early enough or stay long enough to have a full day to explore the city.

Third (and the most important), make a prioritized  list of the places you want to visit and get to it!

My lists consisted almost completely of restaurants/bars…I kid you not.

I love me some good food and drink.

I did a little research on a few of my favorite sites (google, yelp, reddit, tripadviser, etc) and compiled a list that seemed manageable for one day and four evenings. For this trip to Boston, I stayed at the Westin Boston Waterfront, and then in Cambridge at a friends’s house (hint: moneysaver). I arrived a day early, and literally walked around most of the city. This was an excellent choice, as Boston is a VERY walkable city.

So…..here’s my “list”:

• Legal Seafood
• Harpoon Brewery
• Freedom Trail (I mean, who wouldn’t want to walk a 3-mile tourist trap? I’ll comment on this later)
• Museum of Contemporary Art
• Union Oyster House
• Publick House
• The Boston Common
• Lord Hobo
• Mike’s Pastry
• Faneuil Hall
• The Bull and Finch
• Giacomos
• Toro
• and basically walk around the North End, Beacon Hill, Cambridge and Downtown areas.

 
Mind you, I made this list in full knowledge that I would likely not do EVERYTHING on the list. And so I was just fine with doing as many as I could, just making sure that I just enjoy my free time! I did a lot on the list, and had a FANTASTIC time.

The day I had “free”, I visited to as many places farther from the conference and where I was staying as I could. I left easy places (around the corner from the hotel, etc) for lunch and “coffee” breaks as well as the “free” evenings (which I found out were infrequent). The next few nights I went to the closer places, and even brought colleagues (they were impressed!).  Simple planning…perfect outcome!

A quick aside…. I like reddit because there are multiple threads guiding you to rather good parts of the city. For the most part, there aren’t trolls in the travel threads, and if there are, they are quickly called out. I find that the food and sights recommended by redditors are in line with my tastes, mostly. Nerdy, yet refined (and centered around good food and great beer!)

I had never been to Philly before, and Jeney had been once before, to visit the same friend. I didn’t have much of a notion in my head for what to expect; I know a little of the history of the area, but to be honest the first thing that comes to mind when I think of Philadelphia is Rocky (the movie) and It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia (the TV show).

We got into town on Friday night at about 9pm after driving down from Ithaca after work. The drive was pretty nice and Jeney drove the whole way down, which made it even nicer for me. Coming into the city after 4 hours on back roads and small highways was pretty cool. Philadelphia was lit up; many of the buildings had lights, the boat houses (crew boats) had lights all around the sides facing the river and highway, and some of the bridges of the Schuylkill river had lights across the bottom arches. It was a good way to come into the city on a Friday night!

We ended up going out to a nice bar and grill type of place near the University of Pennsylvania. It is named “Local 44” and had a decent selection of beers from across the U.S. I was happy, and somewhat surprised to see Racer 5 there – I’ve been noticing it all over the east coast. It must be gaining a following or they are pushing it hard from California! Either way, I’m happy – that is one hell of an IPA. We had a bit to eat, nothing to write home about here; it was good food, we might have been too tired to really do more than shovel it in. After piling a few more beers on we headed back and crashed for the night.

A quick night it was – we woke up around 6am and decided to get a move on for our weekend training run. I was pretty excited about this as I hadn’t been running in a large city in a while and there were several river routes to choose from. We ended up doing our 12 miles along the Schuylkill, only about 1 mile at the beginning and end was through the area around the University of Pennsylvania. The river run was really nice – the path is fairly wide in most places and there were lots of people out running, jogging, and biking. They were setting up for a regatta further down the river, lots of boats and people out for the races. I recommend checking out the path if you are looking for a good run in Philly.

After recovering from the run and drinking an insanely large amount of water we hopped on the subway and went down to Reading Station Market. There was a diner there that was serving breakfast – nothing great, but it helped to get some bacon and potatoes in my stomach!

We wandered around the rest of the market and picked up a bunch of chocolate truffles and somehow, whoops!, found ourselves having a cold beer at 11:30 am. It was a great start to the afternoon! After putting down the beer we walked by a stand selling hot dogs that had been cooked in pretzel dough…it was even more amazing than it sounds. I love those things!

We also managed to make our way over to one of the many meat and cheese counters, along with the bread shop, and left the market with a healthy sampling of salami, swiss cheese, and a baguette for later.

Not too far from the market was Mac’s Tavern (Mac, as in It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia). This turned out to be an interesting stop. We were all in the mood for another beer, and we got what we wanted. Jeney and I also noticed that they had what they advertised as “WTF” hot wings. Not ones to dodge a chance to eat some really hot wings, especially since most places don’t really have that hot of wings, we ordered up 8 of them. And then the sweating began. For real.

After we had put down half of the order we asked the bartender how they were made. He nicely informed us that it depends on how the cooks are feeling that day, but in general they put extra Sriracha (ok, nothing that hot there…) and then use Capcaisin dropped out of a bottle! Thankfully they didn’t put too much on – although these were the hottest wings I think I’ve ever had, the bartender told us that when they really put a lot on the cooks will come out and watch as the people eat them. Thankfully there were no cooks in sight!

After the beer and food we only had the energy to do one thing – take the subway back and nap!

A long nap later and with more food in our stomachs we went to The City Tap House. This place was also close to the U of Penn and was located about two stories up on a large building. It had a nice outdoor area with some benches, tables, lots of standing room. Happily, they lived up to their name – they had a lot of beer on tap, along with a full bar. We sampled several different types and were pretty happy with them all. As an extra bonus we got to see some reallllllly drunk people that reminded us of the Jersey Shore folks doing some crazy dancing (yes, including “the worm”) near the entryway. One of them managed to walk into the plate glass window separating the inside from the outdoor area – all in all, a good place for some great beers. The downside the the City Tap House was the service. It was slow. Really, really slow. There were no waiters out and about to take orders so you had to go to the bar. No problem with that, except that it would take 10 or 15 minutes to get a drink! That seemed a little excessive, but wouldn’t stop me from going back the next time I’m in town.

Last, but certainly not least, we grabbed lunch on the way out of town Sunday. This was the way to end the trip. A good Mexican themed restaurant in the downtown area with really fresh food, awesome guacamole, and great tacos. An added bonus was the selection of tasty drinks. I made the choice to get a gauva mojito, which seriously made me transport to Hawaii momentarily, and Jeney got an awesome margarita. If you’re around the area, stop in at El Vez (I believe there is a “sister” restaurant located somewhere else in the city as well, “El Rey”). Those were the best drinks and pork tacos I’d had in quite some time – I see a return visit when I’m in town next!

What to do next time?

Explore more of the downtown areas and visit some of the historical areas. I apparently ran down the stairs from the Rocky movie while thinking that I had missed them…I’ll need to go for another run by the Art Museum so that I can run UP the stairs properly! Also – it felt good to be back in a city again. It was a little clusterphobic at times, but even writing this post up I feel like I’m leaving so much out; there is just so much to do and see in a big city. I’m really looking forward to going back to Seattle sometime with “fresh” eyes.

I had read on several different blogs and various websites that the optimum recipe was 1 tbsp of unsanded tile grout per 1/2 cup of paint. Easy enough, right?

I went to Lowe’s and picked up a quart (4 cups) of flat black paint and a bag of unsanded tile grout along with a few painting supplies (brush, roller, pan, etc). After calculating it out, we figured we should have more than enough paint for a wall – most painting places recommend a gallon of paint per 350 sq ft. No problem for a single wall (and a quart of paint)! We did think that the grout would soak up some of the paint but with the 350 sq ft rule we had more than enough.

First we taped off the area we wanted to paint – looking back we should have used even wider tape so we could be a bit more clumsy. An inch or two isn’t much when you painting! We also added an old sheet and some more tape along the baseboards in an effort to save our floors and boards.

So, being unsure of how much we would actually need I put about half of the paint in a can for mixing and added 4 or 5 tbsps of tile grout. It immediately became clear that we needed more paint! We kept slowly adding paint until we had the whole quart in the mixer. As this point we were getting a little concerned – it was not mixing very easily and didn’t appear very “paintlike”. However, we kept at it for a few more minutes, hoping that the continuous mixing would result in the mixture becoming more like a slurry and less like congealed oatmeal…

I was about ready to throw in the towel at this point; Jeney had the marvelous idea of fingerpainting – and it worked! When the mixture was rubbed against the wall by hand it became slightly less viscous and actually resembled a thick paint! Our best guess is that it has to do with the volume of paint and tile grout that we were working with – I’m guessing that most people are painting very small areas and not mixing up large containers of this stuff. On went the fingerpainting – it took us probably an hour, but we got a fairly consistent covering of the blackboard paint on the wall. As we went along, Jeney went over the coating with the roller and very little pressure in an attempt to give it a uniform surface. It was the right idea but our consistency was fairly thick – it was tough to roll over without lifting small sections off or causing grout to “streak” through the paint leaving small clusters of lines where you could see the white wall behind it.

After letting it partially dry we made some attempts to cover these streaky areas up with the small amount of remaining black paint and the paintbrush. They really stand out in the pictures but aren’t too bad when viewing with the eye – especially now that we have chalk on it. So, surprise – it worked! It’s not the greatest blackboard ever made, but it is pretty cool looking and works just fine. We have wiped it down with a towel (need to pick up an eraser) and are looking forward to seeing how it holds up. Worst case scenario is that we have to sand it down and repaint; considering the supplies cost about $15 we aren’t too concerned.

Obviously, not everything is going to fit that scale – I’ve got to get the trash out whether I like it or not. I suppose I could let it pile up and avoid the boring task of taking it to the curb but the downside is that my garage would fill up with trash. On the other hand, if it was that big of an issue I could find someone to do it for me (I hardly think that would be worth the cost) or try and bargain with Jeney to trade some chores around (again, not worth it! hehe).

Saying yes to events and things that you are genuinely excited about can really have some good effects on your day to day life. Instead of feeling like you are being dragged into things, you want to have the feeling that you are looking forward to whatever is next. If you were committing yourself to occasions that ranked low on your list, why were you going at all? You would probably be better off with the free time where you could relax, come up with something better to do with your time, or get something done that is on your “hell yes!” list.

I have used this over the past few months to change the way I commit to social events. If I’m tired, not very interested, or just have something I’d rather be doing, I try and say so. It’s usually not a personal jab or anything negative; I just know that I would be happier not being at that particular event at that time – so why be there?!? If you add to that the fact that I’m not a complete extrovert you get a much happier Adam who knows when to say no and when to dive into a project/event/party.

The funny part is that I feel like I’m really going against the grain sometimes. Saying yes and being sociable is such a part of our culture that it can be odd to opt out of social encounters and events sometimes.

Even more fun is implementing this at work! That can take a bit more subtlety, but learning to redirect queries into something that you want to be actively participating in can pay off huge! When I’m asked if I can do something I run it through a quick mental sieve:

• Is this something I want to invest my time in? If not, is there an angle or portion of it that I know I want to do or be in control of? If so, do it and make it known you are better at that specific portion.
• If I want no part of it, think up a better way of doing it or find a legitimate reason as to why this is not worth doing.
• Will this take less than 15 minutes? If so, do it.
• Am I really engaged with something else? If not, do it.

Of course, work is different than other situations in that you will find yourself doing things that you may not always have at the top of your list. However, by making it known what types of things you really enjoy investing your time in and following through you can make a change over time. For myself, I never really thought that I would be allowed to spend time learning to program at work. I now spend some days doing exactly that. As it turns out there is no one else here that can do much computational modeling and they are happy to have me work on it after I mentioned that I thought I could use it to improve our understanding of some of the systems and then did just that.

Now I’m off to go for a walk before lunch because that’s about the only thing I can say “hell yes!” to right now after sitting and doing some paperwork this morning!

The original article can be found here at Derek Sivers blog.

So, I’ve started picking up skills that I know will either come in handy in the future or that I want to learn now, but don’t spend the time on them outside of work. These need to intersect with my job; I’m not against checking email, looking at Facebook, or anything like that, but if I’m being paid for my work I do want to provide something of value.

That said, here’s what I’ve come up with so far:

• Programming – I picked up the basics of Java in college but I think that really did more harm than good. I asked around and eventually checked out Python for some computational modeling I wanted to do this past winter and it turns out that Python is very easy to pick up and fairly robust. Since then I’ve learned to do some modest graphical output in addition to the raw computation.
• Audio lessons – I picked up a pair of headphones just for use at work. Now that I always have them there I will occasionally hop onto YouTube, Khan Academy, The New Boston, iTunes, or somewhere else to listen or watch a lesson on programming, math/physics, business management, or something else that is interesting and pertinent.
• GIMP – It was going to be hard to justify getting a legitimate copy of Photoshop on my work computer, so I downloaded GIMP and have just started checking it out over the past week. This is probably the most tangential of all my “side” work that I am doing; I don’t have a huge need for digital image manipulation but I do really want to have this skill in my “toolkit”.
• Electronics / microprocessor programming – this one might fall under programming as well, but I picked up an Arduino starter kit to make a photometer out of. I just needed something to give a digital output of reflected light versus incident light and this seemed like a good solution. The kit was $74, the spectrophotometer that they are currently using costs about $10,000. That said, I still haven’t gotten around to finishing it up; I did the proof of concept and got busy with other things…hmmm…now I know what I’ll be working on the next time I get bored!

I’m interested in what other people do – I know most people can’t be working solely at exactly what they are supposed to do for 8 or more hours a day. What do you do?

Of course we have a 5ft long caliper! I actually started laughing when I saw these, it made me think of oversized carnival toys. That said, they did they job and are really handy… and incredibly expensive.