Hot tramp, I love you so

14 miles with a trio of David Bowie songs this morning: Rebel, Rebel, Suffragette City, and Modern Love. Yeah, I know, I usually run with only one song. But I'm auditioning songs for the Austin Marathon that I just signed up for. So if you have some free time Sunday morning, Feb 15th, stop by the marathon party at Eric and Gaby's and cheer me on (or offer me a beer). They're on the marathon route just past mile 22, right before the course turns onto Duval.

Truth be told, I was suppose to run 21 miles today, but my legs were just feeling dead this morning. And when my iPod battery went out at mile 14, I took it as a sign I needed to go home.

Just as well. Dustin is coming over soon to build up his new Litespeed Sportive frameset. Should be fun.

What are the odds?

First, I get an email from Tami. Next, she tells me she's in Ohio with her S.O., and she sees a car with a surprising license plate. Through the magic of Photoshop, I am able to re-create that moment for you all. Spooky shit.

Quattro

I knew it was time to leave work today when they started salting the driveways. Days like this make me miss my A6 sports wagon. Luckily, there aren't too many days like this in Austin. Yeah, the quattro, with 4-wheel drive. Not only did it provide traction for the messy stuff, but in a pinch, it also doubled as a suitable tent for beach camping.

Stay warm and dry out there.

Resilience and a Bountiful Harvest

It's the year of the ox. Happy New Year! I called my folks last night to ask what's the traditional way to celebrate the lunar new year. They said to spend it with family and friends, eat a nice meal, be positive, and don't argue. Seems simple enough to do.

For more on the year of the ox, check out this article in the Tapei Times.

por fin.

Well, I finally finished my electrical sub-panel project this morning. The trench had been dug for over a week, but I've been too tired (or lazy) to run the conduit and wiring. But then I caught this morning's weather forecast which calls for a chance of rain the next 3 days. So unless I wanted to re-dig a trench next week, today was the day to wrap this up. I ran 40 feet of conduit and 50 feet of 10-3 wiring, and was basically finished by lunch time. Overall, I think it looks pretty good, Nothing fancy, but it was clean and it saved me about $1000 over hiring someone else to do it - money I'll probably need for some other house projects that I can't do by myself. Thanks goes to Eric for standing guard while I made the final electrical hook-up. I'm sure he had 9-1 already punched on his mobile phone.

I still need to wire the inside of my shed, but that's pretty simple and is a project for another weekend. Looking forward to having A/C and lighting out there, so I can work in comfort - well, as comfortable as you can be working outside in Austin during the summer.

And yes, when I went to fill in the trench, there wasn't enough dirt. It's a common complaint. Just where does it all go?

phoney beatlemania has bitten the dust

14 miles with The Clash's London Calling (r.i.p. Joe Strummer). Last week was more of a proof of concept. This week was about sustainability.



Speaking of sustainability, looks like 'evolution' lives to fight another day. In case you haven't been following, The Texas State Board of Education voted on language recently to scrap a longtime requirement that students be taught the "weaknesses" in the theory of evolution. You can read a summary article here. Or you can follow the excruciating details here.

Oh, I forgot to mention. On my run today I was almost hit by a blue heron that was flying an intercept pattern off my left side. Stopped me in my tracks. Blue Herons are known to nest in Hyde park, but I had never seen one up close before. Trust me, they're big birds.

Buh Bye

It is with a sad heart that I bid a fond farewell to a couple of treasures this week. Yes, it was announced recently that Chrysler will stop making the PT Cruiser this year. See you later, little buddy. I never really got to know you, although I did drive you as a rental for a day. I will treasure those precious hours for eternity. Hopefully, a billionaire industrialist in Mexico will buy your tooling and re-supply the world with your distinguished sheetmetal for years to come. Until then, we will always have eBay.

This week also marks the departure of my beloved DeSalvo track bike to the great bay in the ether. Yes, the same track bike that was displayed at the North American Handmade Bicycle Show in Portland last year. It's a beauty, but then again, it's also a fixie. And franky, I'm just not hip enough to ride a fixed gear. Nor do I have the proper hat, knickers or requisite facial hair. Alas, it was not meant to be.

Meet the new boss

We streamed the inauguration in a couple of conference rooms this morning - smartest move my company has made all week.

Best response to the grumblings of my conservative teammates: "You know, you guys are screwed if it turns out that he really is the Messiah."

In case you missed it, here's CSPAN's coverage of his speech.


Contrast that to W's version from 8 years prior. Pretty scary.

This is why I went to university...

Finished digging the trench today. 30 feet long, 8 inches deep. The ground is hard, so it took longer than expected. Went by Home Depot earlier to get the conduit, Romex, breaker box and breakers. Need to work on the conduit routing some, but I'm in the home stretch.

Also had breakfast with Pete and Jeremy at Kerbey Lane. Cherry pancakes are back - and I highly recommend them - kinda tart and sweet. Ron left at 6:30 this morning for Houston, so he could cheer folks on at the Houston Marathon. Looks like we had a mini high school reunion last night. Always fun reliving our goofy nerd years. But a little too much Scotch made me logy this morning - even if it was the fancy single malt kind.

Phew!

14 miles with Bob Dylan and "Things have changed". The Austin Marathon and Half is 5 weeks out. I've been running 7 miles at a time on a pretty regular basis. My theory has always been if you can run half the distance comfortably, you can run the entire distance on race day (excerpted from my new training guide due in stores any day now).



14 miles was a little harder than I thought. The weather didn't help. It's hard to drag my ass out when it's cold and overcast. My dreams of negative splits disappeared after mile 9. We'll see if I can keep 14 miles as a regular distance for the next few weeks. If so, I'll sign up for the full. If not, I'll sign up for the half. Glenn has volunteered to run me in, so I got that going for me.

Ron and Jeremy are coming to town today for Pete's birthday dinner tonight. Will be good to see them both again. Jeremy's bringing his daughter. Ron said he'd be in early, so we could go grab a couple of margaritas beforehand - nice.

Blah

Yesterday was a day of bleak news. First, it was reported that Google was closing their Austin office with no intention of reopening it. Later, their blog noted that they were laying off 100 recruiters. Which doesn't sound like much, but when you figure each recruiter is responsible for 20 or more jobs, that 100x starts to look like a big number.

Btw, the forecast for job growth in Austin is 90 percent less than last year. But hey, at least it's not negative. Says the so-called expert, "This is not the time to be changing jobs or making career shifts." "This is the time when people need to be grounded in their jobs and to be saving their money."

Citigroup, Bank of America, US airways, blah, blah, blah...

The city of Austin is trying yet another bike lane project. Let's hope this one is more successful than the many that have come before it. My personal favorite is from a few years ago when the city went back and stenciled helmets on all the bike lane markings. Looked like a giant penis riding a bike.

Thankfully, the day ended with a request to take Eric and Diego to pick up their car from the shop. However, not before I was treated to a home cooked meal from Gaby and a trip to Yogurt Planet.

Diego's studying about the Great Molasses Flood of 1919. He's got a science experiment going to see whether seawater or city water dissolves the sticky stuff faster. Yeah, sometimes it's good to be a third grader.

Money, money, money

Nortel declared bankruptcy today. That's a shocker (not really). Will need to get more info from Jeremy when he's in town this weekend.

Also was forwarded a nice succinct article regarding the change in leadership at Borland. Basically, it says that our former CEO created a mess in the 3 years that he headed the company, and "when a company promotes its CFO to acting CEO, instead of advancing a sales or product executive, that’s a good sign that the company’s going to be sold soon."

And if you're in the market to refinance your home, this article from the WSJ might be helpful.

Tonight's special

I'm happy to announce the return of sweet potato Tuesdays to Casa Peng. This should last me a while.

Reign Over Me

Was watching this Adam Sandler movie while eating dinner tonight. One of his few dramatic roles. It may be his best yet. Ok, not better than Punch-Drunk Love, which I really liked. Don Cheadle co-stars and is spot on, as usual. Anyway, it's got an amazing soundtrack, highlighted by Springsteen's "Drive All Night" and Pearl Jam's rendition of the title song over the closing credits. Brings back memories of high school and midnight showings of Quadrophenia.



In other news - started digging my trench tonight to run a sub-panel to my shed. The weather looks good, so I figure I'll dig the trench during the week and install the panel this weekend.

Body surfing - Part 2

As I noted in a recent post, I'm having some foundation problems. I had my house jacked and leveled in 2005 before I moved in. The contractors guarantee their work for 5 years, so they're coming out Tuesday to do an inspection. I thought I should take some photos for my own documentation before they show up.

As you might imagine, it's not the best air to breathe down there. Not much space either. In most places I had about 12 to 15 inches, but it was down to 8 to 10 in a few places.

Again, here's my immediate problem. The shims were installed at an angle. Over the years the perimeter beam has been sliding down the shims. So much so that there's now a gap between the perimeter beam and the floor joist that's under my couch. In other words, nothing is supporting this joist. The joist no longer reaches the perimeter beam, so no amount of shimming will solve the problem. What they need to install is a sister beam next to the perimeter beam to take the load of the floor. I can't imagine that being a lot of fun to install.

Solsbury Hill

7 miles with Peter Gabriel x 13. Solsbury Hill is a song about him going solo after leaving Genesis and starting over. Easy tempo. Seems appropriate for this cold and windy morning.

I like this live video of a later performance because he rides around on what appears to be a stainless steel folding Moulton space frame bike. I sold mine last year. Very cool engineering. PG apparently got the handlebar-cam option.

I don't care if Monday's blue

It's been a shitty week. Driving to work this morning "Friday I'm in Love" by The Cure came up on my iPod. Nothing like an infectious pop tune to alter your mood. The video is fun also. Played it over and over at work today. It's probably The Cure's happiest song (which really isn't saying much). Besides, I like songs with days of the week in them - Blue Monday, Ruby Tuesday, Sunday Bloody Sunday - you get the idea...

A dog's life

Had lunch with Tracy today. Finishing up my 'Put the x back in xmas' tour.

JK...

She's doing fine. More importantly, I asked how Cabell was doing. Still awesome replied the proud mom. I always liked the way he swam.

Meet the new boss, Same as the old boss...

Had a morning meeting today to go over (again) our restructuring plan. Nothing new to report. I worked from home after that.

Spent most of my lunch hour crawling on my stomach under my house. I'm having some foundation problems, so I thought I'd check it out. As is usually the case, the entry for the crawl space is the furthest point away from where I needed to examine.

Body surfing on the dirt, I looked around to see if there were any relics from the house's past that I could find. You would think a home built in 1920 would have something interesting to offer. Under my similar era bungalow in Houston I found a host of vintage bottles. No such luck here in Austin. Only thing I found was a rifle bullet. So either snipers lived in this house before me, or the opossums weren't planning on leaving without a fight.

Oh, and I found my perimeter beam sliding off its piers, so a couple of the floor joists are now suspended in air. Nice. Definitely need foundation people to come check this out.

The times they are a-changin'

So my company, Borland, announced that our CEO and 3 top SVP's left or are leaving the company today. That on top of a 15% (130 job) reduction in workforce. Needless to say, it was not a productive afternoon at work today.

Pint night at the Draught Horse was the perfect antidote.

"Stubborn but worth it"

I was watching "Mr. Baseball" while eating dinner tonight. I guess the blog title is a fitting sentiment to take away from the film. It's a baseball movie set in Japan - fading American baseball player gets traded to a Japanese team. Misunderstandings and bad karaoke ensue. It's really not as bad as I make it sound. It's actually a decent film. And that got me to thinking - in a Rob Gordon kind of way - what my top ten films set in Japan are.

• Lost in Translation
• Shall We Dansu?
• Tampopo
• You Only Live Twice
• Seven Samurai
• Ran
• Yojimbo
• Rashomon
• Tokyo Pop
• Black Rain

Check them out if you've never seen them.

Reflection '08

Apologies for the tardiness. I'm sitting here drinking Shiners and watching "Four Weddings and a Funeral" while writing my holiday letter. Yikes! - Sounds distressing. Back to work tomorrow after a 2 week break, so I'm trying to finish one last thing. Like the song says, "It's been a long December..."

I'm working at Borland Software as a senior software engineer. Been there a year and a half now and have finally seen the release of our 1.0 product. Mostly working on the web UI using Java and Javascript. Now, let's just hope our salespeople sell the snot out of it. The office recently moved to 360 and Spicewood Springs. We're implementing the whole Agile development experience (read - everyone in a small dev room), which can be a bit challenging at times. Luckily, I get to work from home one day a week.

My family is healthy, which is the most important thing. My Dad asked me to write a book on pipe stress engineering with him. Due to his reputation, it was picked up by ASME Press last year. We turned in the manuscript late in the year and are currently going over their edits. With any luck, the book will be published in early 2009. "Pipe Stress Engineering" - look for us on the book tour. I understand Def Leppard and Howie Mandel are opening for us.

I've managed to meet some new and wonderful people this year and am still working on that relationship thing. I find that as I get older, the more I get set in my ways (read - frustrated when things don't go as expected). Not always good at communicating that, but like I said, I'm working on it.

Thankfully, I can retreat to running again, now that the weather has gotten cooler. I had been riding a couple 2, 3 times to work a week, but this winter weather has me wimping out lately. My goal is still to run the Austin Half Marathon in Feb - but just for fun, so don't be expecting a PR or anything like that.

I hope your holidays were good and you all have an excellent 2009. Keep in touch.

-AP

Good acting hunting

Ben Affleck is a terrible actor. I was watching "Bounce" while cleaning out the spare bedroom today. It was actually a very watchable film, mostly due to Gwyneth Paltrow, but Mr. Jenny Garner gave it his best effort. I did notice that the t-shirt he was wearing in the water park was dripping wet in one scene and completely dry in the next (it could be because he's so hot). I'm sure the incontinuity queen (not to be confused with the incontinent queen) would have easily caught that one and more, but I'm just a rank amateur.

I also happened to catch "Alvin and the Chipmunks" earlier in the day. Kinda scary what they can do with live action/animation these days. I watched it mostly because I was serenaded on the phone with the Chipmunk's Christmas song 10 years or so ago. Best line from the film: (by Alvin after being told to stop it by Dave) "Stop what? Stop being awesome?"

And finally, the best definition that sounds dirty but isn't: "honey traps: boxes that smell of females." Rest of the article can be found here.

A simple prop to occupy my time

7 mile loop with REM's "The One I Love" this morning. Probably ranks right up there with "Every Breath You Take" as one of the most misinterpreted love songs of the 80's. A good listen to the lyrics tells you how mean-spirited it is. Anyway, it has a few good Peter Buck Rickenbacker riffs, which is mostly what I need when I run. An aside, the video was directed by Robert Longo, an artist I remember for his "Men in the Cities" series of larger than life size drawings of professionally dressed men and women writhing, falling and dancing in the street. Sounds odd, but pretty impressive when seen in person. Unlike the video for the song, which plays like a grad student film. A bad grad student film.