still giddy from time to time

I work at Apple. It's good, really good. I still have moments, every so often, where I'm walking across the campus and I smile myself a little smile. It's a mixture of pride, belonging, and disbelief.

10 years ago I set out in my somewhat rusty old Jetta with a dream of working in tech - for Apple in particular. In the spring of '98 they weren't really thinking about hiring people. But now things are good, and I'm where I aimed to be, doing what I love to do. My smile is just a hint at how good this feels.

fortunes

The fortunes I find inside fortune cookies seem to always be somewhat .. forceful. They're never the generic ones that could apply to anyone; instead they seem to apply directly to my situation.

This one is a good example. I got it at Mandalay restaurant, just a few blocks from my house. More important than the location was the timing - I got it the day after my last set of final exams ended this December. After a seemingly endless wait to finish school, and with the utter unknown laid out in front of me, this is what I got out of the cookie.

density

I'm throwing a done-with-school party this friday. It's grown somewhat out of my control: my apartment is about 250 square feet and last count put us at 30 people or so. That's not much space per person.

Luckily I have: 1) a back deck and 2) clement street right nearby ... so that when things get a little crazy we can abort to a more spacious scene. All are welcome.

With Vigor

I'm done with school! And feeling pretty good about it. So now I get to throw myself back at the mercy of HR departments the world over.

Need a programmer? Ideally one to write Mac apps in Cocoa and Objective-C? Take a look at my resume.

There's a text version too, if you prefer.

Update March 17, 2008: Sorry, recruiters - I've taken a job and am off the market.

sung to 'maria' from West Side Story

lasagne
i just bought a plate of lasagne
i'm going to eat it all
3 pounds of it is all for me..

lasagne
i'm so lucky to have lasagne!
it's filled with meat and cheese
a zillion tasty calorieeeees

lasagne
eat it now while it's right there steaming
in an hour I'm comatose and dreaming
lasagne
i'll never stop eating .. lasagne

Triage

It's what happens at the end of the semester. Divide the work into three categories:

1. what can be put off
2. what can be saved from certain doom if you act fast
3. what is a lost cause no matter what you do

.. and don't close your eyes, because next thing you know it'll be all over.

It's like being a medic, except with more typing.

stuck in the city with a cornering machine

A friend of mine also has a motorcycle. It's not a Ducati but a Triumph, all shiny and retro with a nice set of chrome pipes. We both lust over Ducati superbikes, however. Just to mess with our minds, Hattar Motorsports in San Rafael is having an event this weekend to showcase the just-unveiled Ducati 848, Ducati's new middleweight sportbike. As a monster owner and track lover it makes me somewhat weak in the knees.

pg: 848 this weekend?
jp: its gonna torture me
jp: it will hurt to look at
jp: i'm afraid.
pg: of course it will.
pg: but you need to face your fear, and understand your demons
pg: .. for what it's worth i'll be sharing the pain
pg: you should see how i milk every last drop of curves out of various SF streets these days
pg: i've tuned my routes to include the greatest number of right turns with no stop signs and one-way streets that have left turns, ensuring that i have to neither 1) stop or 2) keep the bike straight up very often
pg: also tunnels. mmm, tunnels.
jp: i love tunnels
jp: exhaust
jp: lots of it
pg: yep, i think of them as giant megaphones broadcasting my throaty message across the city
jp: i'm convinced all the other folks in the tunnel love my sound
jp: how could they not?
pg: seriously! it's required listening

Passes for funny

The Fowler family runs a small farm in Cumberland. A few years back they sold some land so they'd have enough money to make the farm self-sufficient for the future. Part of this plan included building a small store where you can buy what they grow - meats, vegetables, and especially dairy products. Chocolate milk so creamy that you swear it was actually a relabeled milkshake.

When I was there over thanksgiving a few weeks ago, I stopped by to pick up a bottle of chocolate milk for my grandmother. I got it from the store, left the money, and got back in the car to head out. As I idled down the driveway, Mr. Fowler crossed in front of the car, walking from the house out to the barn.

"Hi there."
Afternoon, sir. I just picked up a jug of chocolate milk.
"Very good."
I'm bringing it up to my grandmother - she swears by the stuff.
"Well. Better than swearin' at it!"

Syntaxercises

New website! I've wanted to yank metoca.net out of the stone age for some time now, but never seemed to find enough time to do a proper job. I did manage to mock up this design between March and June of this year, and finally decided to code up a lightweight blogging engine to feed the design with words.

(The mockup also includes a picture widget that'll display sets of pictures fed from flickr, but I haven't had time to implement that part yet.)

Anyway. This week, while in the midst of the brain-frying end-of-semester push that is a CS major's life, I decided for some reason that I should write the blogging engine. It took a couple hours but came together nicely, and I'm pleased with it as a product of the thoughts that have been simmering on the back burner for months. But why do it now?

Partly because I'm really creative when finding ways to procrastinate. Partly to get it off the back burner; I need all my neurons in gear as I chug along into the last two weeks of my bachelor's degree. But also to give me the equivalent of a little cross-training. I've been working almost exclusively in Objective-C and Java for the last two months, and I needed a change of pace. Plus, I could see how sharp my Ruby was after not doing much in it since April of this year.

The answer? Not very! I kept on writing bits of code with semicolons and brackets - Ruby doesn't use those in the same way - and with new Object() instead of Object.new. It took a little while before Ruby started to flow naturally. I felt lost and rusty - luckily it's all better now. This came out well and now my mind is clear.

So - enjoy. Commenting and photos will be along eventually, but probably not before I close the books on all this schoolwork.

BART cars have power outlets! Who knew!

Perhaps everyone. But it was news to me as I found myself in a coding groove this afternoon while waiting to take the BART back from the east bay. Why go straight home and spoil it? So from Walnut Creek I went east, to Pittsburg/Bay Point, and then south, to Fremont, and then north to Richmond before heading home to SF. In Fremont I asked the conductor - after my laptop's battery died and I contemplated the long ride back with nothing to do - whether there were power outlets on the train.

"Yep!" he said. "Right underneath the middle seats in each car."
Really?
"Yep. Though you probably don't want to plug anything you love into them. Since we might get a power surge. Fine for charging a cell phone, though."

I gambled that my Macbook Pro's power adapter, which at least has 110/220v capability for world travel, would be a suitable buffer between any surging currents and the precious shiny laptop. And it was. Two more hours of relaxing intercounty travel resulted in a hundred-ish lines of good solid Objective-C.