Jeff's LiveJournal

I returned home early last Thursday morning after finishing up a week-and-a-half road-trip through New Mexico and Arizona. The total mileage was approximately 2700 miles, and was shorter in both distance and duration than than previous roadtrip last year.

One of the primary goals of the trip was to visit my parents and see their new home (in Vail, AZ) for the first time. I also got to visit long-time distributed.net buddies (cdy and bang), and a former coworker (Jon Woodring) from Jet Propulsion Lab who now works at Los Alamos National Lab.

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This past Sunday I arrived back in Austin from a 2-week roadtrip that I spontaneously decided to take. My goal was to visit interesting places that I had never seen before. In total I drove about 4500 miles in my Jeep Wrangler (and 18 tanks of gas). I got to meet up with Mike Woss (ex-coworker), Lucent (first IRL meeting with long-time d.net buddy), Mary Bass (coworker), and Rey/Swiggy (ex-coworker).

There were a few cities that I had hoped to go through (Atlanta and Birmingham) that I ended up cutting out so that I could spend more time in other locations. I could have easily have spent more time in most of my stops if I had more vacation time.

I bought a new Digital SLR camera (Nikkon D40) specifically for the trip, so I had some fun playing around with it at the same time. Snorkeling and night-time kayaking in Key West were both pretty fun. Visiting Kennedy Space Center was also pretty neat, since I had been involved with parts of the Shuttle missions but never seen the launch facilities. The Great Smokey Mountains National Park was also a great place to explore and hike around.

• My photo gallery of my trip photos
• Approximate Google Map trail of the path I took
• YouTube video of my Everglades fanboat tour
• My personal wiki page that I was using to plan my trip and sights

(Click pictures above to embiggen)

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Over the Christmas holiday I went back to visit my parents in Pasadena again. We had the usual big group dinner at one of my aunt's houses with all of the other aunts, uncles, and cousins.

Then from Dec 26-28, I went to Las Vegas with a smaller group (Aunt Shirley, Uncle Chuck, and my 4 oldest cousins) to see the Cirque du Soleil: Beatles Love show [wikipedia] and do some gambling. The Cirque du Soleil show was great and incorporated lots of songs by the Beatles with great choreography and a fair bit of acrobatics. It didn't seem to have quite as much of the acrobatics as I think other Cirque du Soleil shows are known for, but it was still quite enjoyable.

While I was there, I also went on my own into the Star Trek: The Experience [wikipedia], saw the museum, the two attractions (Borg and Klingons), and brought back some souvenirs (including a Tribble). The recreation of the ship interiors there were neat to see up close--the ride and experience is kind of similar to the Star Tours at Disneyland.

Although I did a bit of gambling, I didn't really gain or lose very much. I mostly played Video Poker and some of the slot machines. I did much better with video poker than the slots, especially after finding this Wizard of Odds: Video Poker website. A $20 bill lasted me 2 or 3 hours in the quarter Video Poker machines with the optimal strategy.

My dad and mom had just retired, so there was also a big retirement/birthday party for my mom, which was pretty exciting. My parents are also in the process of selling their home in Pasadena, so I was helping with some of the packing and furniture moving to help stage the house for its sale. It's too bad that they'll have to sell such a neat house at a low point in the housing market though.

Well, I'm back from my 2-week trip to New Zealand to visit Greg and Amy and celebrate their wedding. I traveled with Decibel, Heidi, Snax, and Doppler on the flights. Nugget and Monica met us there to join us for part of the time, before they split off to visit some of the other sights on New Zealand's north island. Our travels were exclusively on the south island.

I've uploaded my photos to two places. My gallery on my personal server has the complete set of over 400 photos, but I've also decided to try uploading a much smaller subset to Flickr.



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I just got around to uploading the photos I took during this week's trip back to California. My main reason for going back was to attend the birthday/reunion party for my grandma. It was a nice party with about 100 people total, but I didn't take any pictures since there were already a dozen other people taking the same pictures. :)

However here's one picture related to the party... My mom ordered custom Chinese fortune cookies printed with a special message, but the smallest order she could place was for 1,000 cookies. Even though the cookies were liberally placed out on all of the party tables, there were still lots left over after the party so I just had to bring a few dozen of them back to Texas with me in a bag.

Although I only had to be back in CA for that Saturday, I ended up booking my trip for Jun 4 through 9th so that I would have time to relax a bit. I've added a 5 more pictures of my parents' Pasadena pole house that I took while I was staying there.

While I was in Pasadena, my old neighbor Hal Frank encouraged me go walking with him on the trails running behind JPL. We brought along my old school friend David Baker, and Eva wanted to come too. Eva is from Papua New Guinea and came to the U.S. to study Computer Science, and is currently Hal's house guest. She had plenty of exciting stories about living in the jungle and in tree houses as a child. The three of them are also considering taking a trip out to Austin to visit me and see Texas later this summer. In any case, I've added some new pictures that I took during the hike to bottom of my existing Gould Mesa gallery:

  

Greg and Justin and I are back from Colorado and we certainly had fun. You can read Greg's LiveJournal post about what happened.

The day we landed (Wednesday) we met up with Daa and got the United Airline Flight Center tour, had some buffalo burgers at Tommyknocker's pub, and then headed the rest of the way up to our condo at Copper Mountain. The next day (Thursday), we got up early and hit the slopes with Daa. I was snowboarding (on my recently purchased E-bay snowboard), Justin was snowboarding too, but Greg and Daa were on skis. That day was tiresome on me, so I decided to rent some skis and go skiing for the next day (Friday) and the day after (Saturday). The next day (Sunday), was our flight back to Austin.

My photos from Copper Mountain and our visit to the United Airline Flight Training Center are also worth looking at.

This Wednesday, I will be joining ghewgill and cowquat on a 5 day ski/snowboarding trip to Copper Mountain, Colorado. Justin started snowboarding only in his most recent snow trip, and Greg has been a life-time skier but indicated that he might be willing to try snowboarding this time (we'll have to wait to see what Greg decides to rent once we get up there). I started out skiing when I was young too, but I've only done snowboarding during the last 6 or so snow trips, so I could do either sport if I chose to. This will also be my first opportunity to test out the the snowboard that I bought on e-bay last year. :)

The weather forecasts (on the greg page and on weather.com), say that we'll have about a 30% chance of some snow for the first two days, with it getting slightly sunnier over the following days, so snow conditions should be good.

Although we're staying at the lodging at Copper Mountain (which is conveniently walkable from their ski lifts), we might decide to drive to one of the neighboring mountains just to get some slope variety--we'll have to see how motivated we are after a couple of days up there. We hope to also meet up with Dave Avery (daa from distributed.net) and get some hints about where the best runs are. :)