Category: Everyday Life

We did some hiking yesterday and took some more cool photos of waterfalls, bamboo forests, pools, etc. This photo here reminded me of the Indiana Jones ride at Disneyland except there wasn't a ride at the end, there weren't any snakes, and no theme music.

The sounds of the bamboo clicking and clacking as the wind hit 'em was very neat. It was also cool to see the laws of survival as all the bamboo trees are competing for light and have to grow really tall to get to that light. There's practically zero small trees growing in the bamboo forest.

Anyway, we go through this bamboo forest on our way to Waimoa falls. It's a 2 mile hike up to it and it's pretty long. We have to cross through a couple of small streams and there's lots of guava trees on the way up too.

Apparently guava trees grow like weeds. It's cool to pick the guava fruit though, I had a bunch on the way up. I looked up the nutritional value for guava and one cup of guava (probably 2 or 3 of the fruits) is like 624% of your daily allowance for vitamin C. I was somewhat getting sick which happens after Ironman. I had been taking airborne but it all really kind of went away after I went all gluttony-like on those guavas.

I have one more cool post and then one a little more recommendation/tip related on the overall trip to Maui. I'm very disappointed with the Web as far as it helping us out on planning this trip (where to go, places to visit/stay, etc). There were some highlights where the Web was extremely useful but more or less it could've been better especially since it's 2006 and not 1996.

Blogging while "on" vacation (versus blogging about it when you get back) is pretty lame and fairly sad. But I'm not on vacation since I'm really checking out the Maui tech industry and possible office space…right.

Anyway, I've got some photos up and will post up more as I go along. Above is a black "sand" beach, it's over at Waianapanapa State Park. It's more like a black lava rock beach with lots and lots of stones, s|m|large and it's not the most comfortable to walk in, but laying out on the beach isn't bad. Apparently there aren't too many black sand beaches. This is the first one I've been to and it's pretty cool.

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Oh, so yeah, I've got wicked wireless high speed internet access in Maui. It's pretty cool considering I don't get cell phone coverage here in Hana.

We got an email from our friend Christine today. She's the one on the right. She's an old roommate from back in the day and she's freaking really cool. As part of that performance, she was painted on a mural (Harrison and 14th Street in San Francisco). Her performance w/ Streb was also on the Dave Letterman show. That was cool. Modern dance is still hard for me to grok but whatever. I have a friend who dances and it's fun watching her perform.

From Christine…

On the Web
For all you "youtube" aficionados, check out our promo videos on the web — they are a great compilation of our 2 touring shows (and are also available for viewing on our website www.strebusa.org):
Wild Blue Yonder Promo: http://youtube.com/watch?v=2kImJ4k9Zzk
Streb vs. Gravity Promo: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2GhW-5I6d64

On TV
PBS is airing an excellent documentary on Elizabeth Streb and the company. The program is called "In the Life". Check out their website to see the promo and to find out when the program will play in your area: www.inthelifetv.org

On Stage…
Sept 13 Easton, PA: http://ww2.lafayette.edu/~artscntr/williams/wms_events.php
Oct 7-8 City Center, NY "Fall for Dance": http://www.nycitycenter.org/ffd/index.cfm
Oct 14 Providence, RI: http://www.ppacri.org/specialinfo/streb.cfm
Nov 1 Burlington, VT: http://www.flynncenter.org/show_pages/FLN07W.shtml
Nov 4 Great Barrington, MA: http://www.mahaiwe.org/dance.html
Nov 10-11 Fayetteville, AR: http://waltonartscenter.org/event.php?eid=177
Dec 1-17 Brooklyn, NY: SLAM Show 8! www.strebusa.org
Dec 29-31 Park City, UT

There are two web problems I'd like to see solved or solved in a better way:

a) Discovering new web sites. In the early days it was What's New | What's Cool from Mosaic and then Netscape. Yahoo still has a pretty cool What's New web site, and modern day What's New/Cool sites include Wikipedia front page, Digg.com, and Del.icio.us. Another method of discovering new sites is through blogs, bloggers put up links they find interesting. People don't really "discover" or look to discover new sites through search engines, they're more looking for information. And finally, people discover web sites offline through advertising, word of mouth through friends and family, and television.

b) Filtering of web sites/information. The other problem (and I believe fairly major) with the Web is too much information in general, and too much information within a given site. It's certainly hard to control what a site gives you, I have a hard time filtering and finding the information on my own site. With the explosion of blogs, attempts to consume all that content has come in the form of blog readers. Other tools in the past include bookmark managers, alerts (like CNN or Google alerts), "My" pages, and blog sites themselves. Tabbed browsing helps users consume more sites and popup blocking helps to filter out bad content.

More on these topics later.

My last update was on 6/16. Since then, I've done the following:

• Getting back into "work mode". I've ordered a Mac Book, went to Apple HQ in Cupertino to have lunch w/ a friend and he scored me his 15% employee discount. Nice! My other buddy let me use his discount for our 23" Apple Display and Mac Mini. I have an IBM Thinkpad X31 too and I'm going to use it now mostly for testing purposes. The X31 was starting to give me carpal tunnel because the keyboard is really tight.
• I went to Disneyland. Attended a wedding in Sausalito, a wedding barbecue in Tilden Park, several barbecues for 4th of July. Went to an A's vs. Giants game.
• I've been training a bunch e.g. today a 6 mile run in the morning and 3600+ yards of swimming in the afternoon. I have 20 mile run on Sunday and I've been averaging over 100+ miles a week on the bike. I think last week we did an 80 mile bike ride followed by a 10 mile run. That was fun and fairly silly.
• Gave an interview to the Mozilla Memory Bank project.

What's on tap:

• I'm starting to snoop around Mozilla land again and looking to start contributing. Firefox 3.0 planning is underway and it looks like Firefox 2.0 is slated to launch late September. Nice. I like the Mozilla Developer Calendar too which is accessible via Google Calendar.
• I have a trip scheduled for Canada for Ironman Canada, London right afterwards for a week, and also a 13 day trip to Maui for one last hurrah.

Still need to:

• Finish up house projects. Get landscaping started, stain fence.
• I need to wrap up fundraising for IronTeam this season. I'm about $400 short, raised $4,100. I'll see if I can finagle the blogosphere to help out.

I drove to Disneyland w/ wifey last Tuesday and picked up Grandma, our nephew (8), and cousin (10) from LAX and then headed off to the Sheraton Anaheim near Disneyland. We got some dinner at Downtown Disney (which is just way overpriced) and then took the kids to the hotel pool and hung out for a bit. We went to bed early and wifey and I put our Disneyland plan together.

Wednesday

We woke up early, about 6:30am, had breakfast in the hotel, got ready and took the first shuttle at 7:30 to get to the gates of Disneyland. We rushed over to Tomorrowland to ride Space Mountain but for some reason it was closed early. So we went to Star Tours (still lame) and then went and did Space Mountain which was now opened. After Space Mountain, we rode Buzz LightYear Astroblaster.

After Tomorrowland, we hopped over to Fantasy Land and did some combination of the Matterhorn, Mr Toad's Wild Ride, Pinochhio, Snow White, Alice in Wonderland, Dumbo, Tea Cups, King's Carousel, and some train ride.

It's about 11:30 or so and we headed back on the shuttle to the hotel to grab lunch. We went to Subway and just got sandwiches and after lunch, I took a power nap while the kids watched tv and ate their lunch.

It's July in Anaheim, it's blistering hot, easily 90+ degrees outside. We successfully avoided the heat. After lunch and the power nap, we brought the kids down to the pool for 20 minutes or so to cool off and then we headed back to Disneyland about 3:30 or so.

When we got back to Disneyland, we watched some of the parade that was going on, hopped on the train that goes around the park and got off at the Toon Town station. We headed over to Adventure Land and rode the Jungle Cruise and then went to Frontier Land and hung out at Tom Sawyer's island until 5:30 or so. We went and took a steam boat ride afterwards and then headed over to Fantasy Land and rode Peter Pan. Peter Pan was about a 30 minute wait and the longest ride we waited for the whole trip.

We left the park again to grab dinner at Denny's across the way and came back to watch Fantasmic and the fireworks.

Then we went home and watched as the kids raced from the elevator to the hotel room. That's right. They still had a lot of energy. It was 11:00pm.

Thursday

We woke up at 6:30am again and kids this time weren't yet ready but we still made it on the first shuttle and got into the park at 8am. We headed quickly over to Adventure Land and rode Indiana Jones. We then hoofed it over to Splash Mountain and rode on that (great ride) and then also got a Fast Pass for it. We then rode Pirates of the Caribbean (recently upgraded, still lame), and then went and did the Haunted Mansion ride.

We went over to Tomorrowland and I took the kids to ride the Astro Glider thing while wifey went and got Fast Pass for Space Mountain. We went and did the car thingie ride and drove some cars around. It was hot and time for lunch but before we went and grabbed lunch, we went back and rode Splash Mountain.

Now Splash Mountain the first time was ok, it was just the kids and wifey and me. The second time was cool because we used FastPass and cut in front of a ton of people, the wait was 75 minutes (our wait time was 5 minutes). And! this time, there were two dudes that were 300lbs a piece that joined us on the ride. We actually got stopped at the top of the big drop because our car was so heavy and when we did go down, we freaking flew and got soaked and even went off the track. It was cool.

Before we left the park, we went and got FastPass for Indiana Jones to do it again for later. We left the park, went and did the Subway thing again, and while wifey took the kids to the pool I watched some TV and then took another power nap.

We got back to park around 3:30-4pm and we did the Tom Sawyer canoes. We went and did Indiana Jones after that and then took the monorail to Downtown Disney to do some shopping.

After Downtown Disney, we went back into the park and got some dinner in the park (El Rancho Zocalo) and took the kids over to Mickey's Toon Town and went and got pictures w/ Mickey Mouse. Notice, we did NOT ride It's a Small World. How awesome is that? After a visit w/ Mickey we went home and called it a trip.

Friday we drove and home and it's going to take a little while to recover. This Disneyland trip was very cool, very little waiting in line and any Disneyland trip over two days that let's you ride Magic Mountain, Indiana Jones, and Splash Mountain twice, is a pretty good trip in my book.

This is the plant list of what we're supposed to have in our front/side/backyard. I have it here for reference to print out when we get out to East Bay nursery to grab 'em and for me to reference them again when we have to actually take care of these plants.

On paper, the plant list looks pretty good.

ID#	Botanical Name	Common Name
2	Rhododendron10 x $45 – $50 (?)	Rhododendron
3	Anigozanthos2 x $13	Kangaroo Paw
4	Agapanthus "Tinker Bell"33 x $8 – $10	Lily of the Nile
5	Calibrachoa4 x $8	Million Bells
6	Eigeron karvinskianus1 x ?	Santa Barbara Daisy
7	Cornus florida "Cherokee Princess"2 x $150	Flowering Dogwood
8	Herbs	Herbs
9	Citrus "Improved Meyer"1 x $35	Improved Meyer Lemon
10	Sarcococca ruscifolia3 x $13	Sweet Box
11	Pittosporum "Silver Sheen"10 x $29 (?)	Pittosporum
12	Camellia japonica "Debutante"8 x ?	Camellia
13	Geranium incanum "Philippe Vapelle"21 x $10	Cranesbill
14	Lobelia tailing1 x ?	Lobelia
15	Distictis buccinatoria6 x $40	Trumpet Vine
16	Galium odoratum5 x $5	Sweet Woodruff
17	Hydrangea "Endless Summer"4 x $13 – $35	Hydrangea
18	Acer palmatum "Bloodgood"1 x $400	Bloodgold Japanese Maple
20	Heuchera sanguinea3 x $11	Coral Bells
21	Astilbe arendsii "Amethyst"3 x $11	False Spiraea

It's been a month since I left MozCorp and so far was able to do the following:

• vacation for a week in Hawaii
• weekend training trips to Clear Lake and Lake Berryessa, trained a bunch
• get out to the Berkeley's farmer's market during the week
• catch up w/ a few folks for lunch (jen, john, jag)
• caught an Oakland A's game sect 112, row 6!, 1st base line (Joe Blanton pitched 5 hit shut out)
• "supervised" the contractors who rebuilt our front porch, added a gate, extended the back fence, cleaned up the house/garage
• painted master bedroom, hung and frame wall pictures/posters
• shaved my legs
• voted

I still need to:

• pull up the weeds, prep land for landscaping
• stain/seal the back porch and fence
• catch up w/ more folks
• Disneyland trip, London trip
• clean up this blog, maybe update the design, post some more content like recipes, other stuff
• train even more

I'm not getting one until I get back (and unfortunately my Apple employee friends don't get discounts on them yet so I may wait a little longer, not sure yet).

But here are the specs for $1,717:

• 2.0GHz Intel Core Duo
• 1GB 667 DDR2 SDRAM – 2×512
• 80GB Serial ATA drive
• SuperDrive (DVD±RW/CD-RW)
• Keyboard/Mac OS – U.S. English
• Apple Mini-DVI to DVI Adapter
• AppleCare Protection Plan for MacBook/iBook – Auto-enroll
• AirPort Extreme Card & Bluetooth

This is going to be my new work/play computer. Our home computer is Mac Mini w/ a 23" display. We have a pretty phat computer set-up, w/ AT&T DSL Pro, wireless network (wireless printing)…happy, happy.

Not much more you can ask for. As far as software is concerned I use:

• Firefox daily builds
• Thunderbird for email/addressbook
• Seamonkey for Composer
• iPhoto, iTunes, iChat
• Flickr uploader
• Not often: Word, Excel, Keynote

And that's it. All the other apps I use are through Firefox.