Photo Booths & Origami Books

So it’s our ‘Paper’ anniversary and in classic Garcia-style, everything was a little thrown together at the last minute. 

Our original intentions was to make our anniversary weekend a little more memorable than most of our other weekends.  We were going to celebrate our ‘Paper’ anniversary by getting an origami book and making each other … ‘origami’s (I suppose that’s what they’re called??).  Also, we were gonna find a photo booth and take a few sets of pictures of ourselves every year.

Do you know how difficult it is to find an origami book and a working photo booth in the city of Austin?

Sunday afternoon, we discovered the photo booth at Phil’s didn’t have a curtain, and we didn’t wanna pose for pictures kissing with her sitting in my lap in a cramped photo booth being watched by people chomping down cheeseburgers.  On the way home, we stopped by the Amy’s close to our place on S. Congress, and it _had_ a curtain, but the thing was unplugged. “We had to unplug it when it started smoking. We called someone, but they haven’t come out to fix it yet...” We snagged a small cup of ‘Anniversary Cake’ which was a tasty mix of mexican vanilla ice cream with chocolate and vanilla cake…with Strawberry Crush’ns. 

Later in the afternoon, we’re getting groceries for our celebratory meal and made a quick detour only to discover the photo booth at the Amy’s by Central Market at WestGate had a sign over the dollar slot that had ‘Out of Order’ scribbled on it in highlighter. :-(  “What’re we gonna do even if we _do_ manage to find a photo booth that works and takes some good pictures… How’re we gonna find a working one next year!??”

Our origami book search wasn’t as exhaustive, and we started that on Friday, but even that took us in a completely different direction.  We decided our paper gift to each other was gonna be some really cool books we found at Domy.  We also squeezed in a trip to the Hey Cupcake! airstream trailer on S. Congress.  We live just down the road from all that stuff, but we so seldom make the time to just go run around that whole fun SoCo strip.

The evening of our anniversary, we stayed in, put on some music and cooked dinner at home.  This may not sound like much, but since we’re always eating at restaurants, cooking at home has become more special.

“What are you up to in Austin?” “Uhm…”

Short Answer: Nothing much.

Long Answer: Funny coincidence happened recently. I added Brandy on Facebook and I was looking through her wedding photos and some of the backgrounds looked somewhat familiar. After digging around more, I found another photo that … just happened to look like one of my recent wedding photos. What the?!? Oh neat! Brandy had her wedding at the same place that Erin & I got married.  So I wrote her about this neat little coincidence.  Erin & I got married on Nov. 8th; Brandy and her husband on Dec. 20th.

So she poses the question, “What are you up to in Austin?” …and after typing and deleting and typing some more and deleting some more, I realized that the answers I was giving weren’t any secret and it was most likely a question which I’d be asked repeatedly, so I might as well put a little time into it and give everyone more than a quick answer and provide a little update on the state of things in The Garcia Household.  (That’s so weird to type, especially after Erin & I have had discussions on women changing their last names and effects it has on identity and…)

Hrm, so the best way for me to answer is probably in reverse chronological order.

Erin got a new job.  She started this past Monday at St. Edward’s as the International Student Advisor.  This may be surprising to some who knew it was just at the beginning of ‘09 when she started working at UT as an International Student Advisor.  While she loved working at UT with inbound international undergrad students, I don’t think she could’ve passed up the larger responsibilities involved in going from being an advisor at UT to the primary advisor at St. Ed’s.

For two evenings a week for the past year, Erin’s been working on her Masters at St. Ed’s in College Student Development. Erin and I had been batting around the idea of buying a home, but when we heard that she got the job at St. Ed’s, we figured it would be pretty beneficial to be closer to her school and work. 

So at the end of August, Erin & I are going to be moving from our apartment up in NW Austin to an apartment in S. Austin. We’ll be moving from an apartment conveniently located within walking distance to my office, to an apartment which is conveniently located in walking distance to her office.  Erin’s on a much more traditional schedule than I, so I’m hoping this’ll shave a lot of time off her previous loop of: Up early in the morning to drive to work at UT, brave the 5 o’clock traffic to get down to St. Ed’s for class, drive all the way from St. Ed’s to NW Austin, straight to bed, rinse and repeat.

So we’re finally at the part of the story where I come into play.  I’m still working as a software developer up in NW Austin.  I’m fortunate enough to be in a position where I don’t have set hours in the day, they just urge us to be there from 9:30/10:00-ish till about 3:30-4:00ish primarily for any meetings we might have and interfacing with other people and all the things in work that requires collaboration.  Other than that, we’re given project schedules and try our darnedest to hit milestone and release dates.  I _love_ the challenges involved in creating software.

Our move is going to make a bunch of sense for both of us because Erin’s office is going to open to students, regardless of whether she’s there on-time or not. …and her graduate classes are going to start at their set time in the evenings, regardless of whether she’s there or not.  I, on the other hand, have the luxury of thinking about and carrying around my work stresses in my head 24/7, and as such, my employer is cool with me rolling in after all the traffic has died down, and staying late until I get frustrated with the cleaning crews vacuuming at 7pm.  :-)

So I guess if I had to sum up the long answer, I’m thinking a lot about moving.  I think we’ve got a moving crew lined up. We’ve gotta go sign the lease for our new apartment in the next couple of weeks. We have tons of stuff to pack up. Our new apartment already comes with a washer/dryer installed, so we have to figure out what to do with our washer & dryer. 

One that note, I’m gonna go play me some video games.  I’m exhausted from playing Diplomacy last night until 4am over at Justin’s house.

on Deprecating MySpace

This isn’t some lengthy diatribe on how social networks are going to become extinct or… well, maybe it will turn out that way but that’s not the original intention.

So here’s how I stay active and on top of things like facebook, twitter, my gmail account, etc.  I’ve got my browsing/online experience optimized to pack in as much desired content while paring down the superfluous fluff.  Digsby’s been my current tool of choice to manage a lot of that stuff in the background.  One of my favorite features and one of my biggest problems with Digsby is that it notifies you for everything.  While I’m not a full out Inbox Zero guy, I try to keep my unread count down to zero. 

So what happens when you couple my ‘Unread Zero’ style with regular spammy friend requests on MySpace… I’ve given up on MySpace.  All the friends I’ve got there are also on Facebook and Twitter or on IM, so why am I bothering with something that’s not adding valuable content while adding to the daily noise level.

MySpace… I’d like to say it’s not you, it’s me… but it is you… you can’t stop me from getting spammed with friend requests fast enough so you’ve been demoted.  You’re no longer on the main stage, go take a seat in between Friendster and Plurk.

on newer versions of Windows Installer

There’s all sorts of new bells and whistles in the newer versions of Windows Installer but I think the overall cost is a bit high to require users install it with a product.

If someone recognizes that updating system-level components via Windows Update is important enough for them, then they’ll jump through any (mandatory on VersionNT>=600) reboot hoops.  Hell, if they’re running Vista or Server 2008, they’re used to the occasional pain points that come along with running the OS.

I just don’t think it’s fair to ask for customers who don’t (or for Group Policy reasons can’t) update system level components to reboot just to install an app.  Yes, I realize there are many advantages to be gained, but part of this whole method of only relying on the lowest common denominator, excluding all you crazy DTF people (an unfortunate acronym as explained to me by Urban Dictionary, which in this case means Deployment Tools Foundation). 

Don’t rely on anything already being installed and available on the target system.  You typically write your Custom Actions in C and package the .dll which shouldn’t have any outrageous dependencies if you’re targeting systems which may not have the .NET framework installed.

Carting along the latest version of Windows Installer in my mind is laziness.  You’d rather make each and every customer suffer through a potential reboot than do extra work to avoid a dependency on a new feature.  Until you see the same sort of widespread enterprise adoption of Windows 7, I’m sticking to Windows Installer 2.0/3.1 compliance.

on Tipping??

Man, I felt like a jerk yesterday when I was getting the car back from the valet but didn’t have any cash on me.  Poor dude stood there expectantly but I just hopped in the car and zoomed off.  No high five, not even a nice thanks.  Luckily, I was able to find the guy and drop a five-spot on him.

What’s the standard amount you should tip concierge and valets at a nice hotel?  A buck feels too little, and a twenty feels like a bit much… but I never know what to tip someone who does a minute of jogging and loads a single suitcase.  I generally tip a buck for someone who steams milk for my coffee or pulls me pint, but I got no idea what the going rate for a jog, popping the trunk, lifting a suitcase and closing my car door for me is… If he lays his coat down over a puddle for me, do I have to go on a second date with this dude or something??

Houston, Part 2

Streaming media like Netflix Watch Instantly and Skype rely on one thing that’s not always available. Bandwidth. Crazy Hotel Zaza’s got throughput caps of .5 Mbps down and .25 up. Just enough to get browsing done, but not enough to stream media. At least I can still stream radio… barely. *sigh*

Back in Houston, but I brought Erin this time. She’s here for a NAFSA conference and I’m here because I couldn’t be without my wife on her birthday weekend.

This is part deux of Houston because Scott & I came up last week for Dan’s 30th Birthday. I’ve got the cutest videos of Gabe that I’ll post somewhere. Last time I saw him, blah blah blah. This time though, talking sentences blah blah bigger. It’s the same story of how quickly children develop in their first few years. Go find that Louis CK joke ‘Daddy, I don’t like chicken’.

Sad I missed the gumbo cook-off at work

Installing TeXmacs under Cygwin (FSF GNU project)

Just finished building TeXmacs 1.0.7 on cygwin. I tried building 1.0.7.1, but hit a snag so I decided to go back and try the stable version.

netpbm 10.26.60 worked as for me as well.

So I spent my Friday babysitting compiles while watching the end of Season 2 of Weeds, catching up the backlog of shows on our DVR and then catching up on BSG. I'd complain about staying in or being domestic or some junk like that, but I caught something awful Wednesday night, came home early on Thursday, and worked from home all day today so staying in and being a hermit with my wife was actually pretty nice.