Spaz.ca

“John” asked in a comment earlier how much revenue those google adsense ads bring in. About $1/day on average. This more than pays for the costs of running the website, so I’m keeping them up for now. It currently costs me about $150 / year for the DNS and hosting services, so it’s nice to have the site generate enough revenue to cover the costs. Currently, spaz.ca gets about 4000 hits/day, or roughly 1000 unique visitors.

That was fun….I just delted about 100 comment spams. Asshats. I’ve been back in Los Angeles for the past two weeks. This time Christine came with me and we’ve been doing all sorts of fun stuff. Unfortunately, that’s left me with no time to blog about it. I promise I will when I get some downtime. And I’ll post lots of pictures. For the super-curious Aaron-Groupies out there, you can read all about the trip so far on Christine’s Blog.

I’m just finishing up my work week and then Christine & I are hopping in the car and starting the 9 hour drive to Kamloops (we’ll probably stop around midnight somehwere and find a motel or sleep in the car….

Tomorrow is my 10-year High School reunion. Wowzahs! I have not kept in touch with my high-school friends at all, so I’m actually very curious to meet some of them again and find out what the hell happened to them after leaving my unwavering force-field of influence. On Sunday we get to drive allll the way back and then Monday afternoon we fly back down to Los Angeles. My head is spinning from all this travel.

Time to hit the road!

Just a rainy weekend here in Edmonton (finally). Yesterday I got up early and met J for breakfast at Smitty’s (a ubiquitous diner chain in Canada). I had eggs, bacon, sausage, and fruit. Afterwards we wandered into the Future Shop next door to browse. I accidentally sort of bought The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion. Oops. Stupid computer games. Sooooo addictive.

Then Christine & I drove out to Drayton Valley for a family BBQ. We had some decent sunshine and it started to rain again just as we were leaving.

Today I slept in and I’ve just been packing and sorting stuff out in the basement (what to bring to Ireland, what to put in storage, and what to get rid of). We’re getting rid of a lot. It’s a good opportunity to de-accumulate all the crud that builds up in one’s material encumbrances.

Besides all that, we’ve squeezed in several episodes from season two of both Lost and Carnivale. Yep, pretty much your typical lazy rainy sunday in the burbs.

I concocted up a big jar of super-mega trail-mix for nibbling on as a mid-afternoon snack. It’s a mix of high quality raw nuts (Almonds, Walnuts, and Sunflower seeds), granola, and organic dried blueberries, cranberries, and raisins. It packs a hefty 150 calories per ounce, but it is filling and delicious, with a good dose of healthy fats.

With the exception of yesterday (a diner-style breakfast, and a BBQ), I’ve been just nailing my nutrition. It’s just so easy when you eat at home for every meal. At home, the kitchen is a cornucopia of great nutritionally dense foodstuffs. Fresh berries galore! A freezer full of veggies! Megamuffins everywhere! A fast lunch today was brussels sprouts and frozen veggies topped with canned tuna and some olive oil and sun-dried tomatoes & basil.

Word-up to my BRO, who just hammered the last nail in the coffin that is his Bachelor of Music at UBC. Wow, I’m not sure if that was a brilliant or terrible metaphor. Anyhow, congratulations Samuel. That’s a big marathon to finish. I’m glad you made it, and with style.

Well, I’ve been back in Edmonton for since Saturday. I’m still working, but from my home office for now. In the news — UofA poker group swept all matches to win both events at the AAAI Poker Competition. I’ve been working hard and eating well. Not much else to report at this juncture.

Well, the e-mails are piling up, so I’d better blog something so y’all know I’m still here. This weekend I went to the Universal City theme park with Rob, a fellow new tilter from Dublin. It was a scorching hot day (over 30 degrees Celsius) and the lineups were huge. We had the option to pay double the entry fee and skip to the front of the lines. We opted not too — that was a mistake. It was boiling hot and you had to stand in the hot sun for close to an hour to do a 4 minute ride or show. The Shrek 4D show was kick-ass. The T2 show as cool, but dated. The Jurassic Park boat ride was sort of fun, if you like bad animatronic dinosaurs spitting water at you — although the last 5 seconds of the ride were KICK ASS (a giant T-REX snaps at your head as you go over a huge drop). The biggest disappointment was the Mummy Returns roller coaster ride. The ride was really cool — a roller coaster in the dark, But after waiting for close to an hour in the sun, the ride was really really short — it felt to be about a minute long.

Then on Sunday, myself, Rob, and another new fellow from Dublin went down the Santa Monica Beach. This time, we were prepared for the hot sun. I couldn’t believe how huge-normous the beach is. It just goes on and on for miles. We saw a lady hopping around on pogo-stilts cracking a bull-whip. Ok, that was cool.

I’d have pictures of everything, but my camera is all broke-like.

This week, I’m slowly starting to feel slightly less useless, as I am actually writing tiny bits of code now.

So I’ve been a week in Los Angeles. I’m in an area called Westwood, which is sandwiched between Beverly Hills and Santa Monica. The hotel is just a few blocks from the office, which is in a nice area next to UCLA and lots of little shops and restaurants. The wireless internet in my hotel room BLOWS. Other than that, it’s a decent hotel. It has a small gym and a nice outdoor pool. I’ve actually used the gym twice since I got here. *SHOCKING* I might have a bicep or two by the time I leave.

On the weekend, I just wandered around the neighborhood exploring. I walked about for hours. The weather has been absolutely perfect (I guess that’s why millions of people live here). I found a Whole Foods Market and bought some porridge ingredients for breakfasts, and lots of fruit, berries, and cherry tomatoes to feast on in my hotel room.

The office brings in lunch every day, and there’s always a vegetarian option. I’ve actually had little trouble finding healthy choices and have stuck to the CR diet fairly easily here. My last few trips have been to Las Vegas, where finding healthy food is extremely difficult. I was a little worried it’d be the same here, but not at all so. I’ve had dinner out a few times, and take the opportunity for getting some fresh salmon.

Work-wise, I’m still in new-guy mode. I’m still wandering around the code base, documentation, dev-environments, and office hallways like a lost little puppy. But the fog is slowly lifting.

I’m blogging this from 38,000 feet. I’m on route to Los Angeles and have some time to spare. I start my training with tiltware tomorrow. I’ll be down in LA for about two and a half weeks. I’m feeling pretty excited, nervous, and anxious to get started.

On Sunday evening, Christine & I impulsively hopped in the car and drove to Jasper. We wanted to spend the remainder of Canada day long weekend connecting with the Canadian wild. We tried to find camping, but coming late on a long weekend, all the camp sites were full. We ended up snagging the last room left in a motel on the Jasper strip. We got up early and enjoyed our included breakfast. It was your standard north american buffet breakfast — scrambled ‘eggs’, bacon, sausage, hashbrowns, pancakes, and the like. Oh how I love that stuff. Loaded with saturated fats and besides the protein in the eggs, not very nutritionally dense. But it is my weakness, and I can’t figure out why. I really love diner style breakfasts. Past-Aaron would have had two or three plate-fulls. Reformed CR-Aaron settled for one. My normal quotidian breakfasts are around 300 calories. This one was in the neighborhood of 800.

However, we were going to need that extra energy to burn. We drove out to the Miette Hot springs, where the sulphur ridge trailhead starts. It took us roughly two hours to hike the 5km trail, which moves entirely upwards (+2300 ft) in elevation. The view from the top was phenomenal. I just love being in high places like that. I’ve attached three of my favorite shots from the top.

The descent was not much fun. While I virtually flew up the trail effortlessly (a good sign of my improved cardiovascular health, and a side-effect of being 40 pounds lighter than I’m used to), I found coming down very painful. My nemesis from last year, an injured knee joint, made a return about 30 minutes into the descent. Just as last year, it only hurts when walking downhill, when making a very particular motion. It’s painless walking on flats or uphill, or even going down stairs. But when walking down a slope, nasty. It put me out of hiking all last summer, and I thought after a full year, it would be healed. I went downhill skiing in the winter, and have been out dancing, roller-blading, and mountain biking without any pain. But it seems I still cannot hike into high-places, if I have to walk back down. This really really sucks. Even with two hiking poles (I had mine, and borrowed Christine’s), it was a very painful two hours to get back down to the car.

I’ll have to really get serious about strength training the muscles around that knee. If that doesn’t solve the problem it might be a joint or cartilage problem only surgery can fix. Uhg?

What a gorgeous day today. Christine & I have been gardening today. We just enjoyed monster salads for lunch. They contained some of the first yields from the vegetable garden — radishes and green onion stalks. YUM. The garden is growing like mad, the soil is so good. I’ve got lettuce, beans, cherry tomatoes, spinach, zuchini, carrots, and mint coming along nicely as well.

It’s berry season so we’ve been snacking (nay, gorging) upon fresh berries all weekend — blueberries, blackberies, raspberries, strawberries, cherries, and grapes. Double yum.

Last night we rented the first two discs of season 1 of Lost. We got hooked and watched all eight episodes until 3AM. We’ve recently plowed through a lot of excellent series: Battlestar Galactica, Deadwood, Carniv?le, and Rome. Those last three are all HBO shows. Damn those are some good shows. We tend to rent what we can on DVD, but for everything that’s not out yet thank the good internet for bittorrent 🙂