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I finished my last job on Friday, and for some reason I thought it would be a good idea to start the new one the following Monday. Guess that means I start my new job tomorrow, and to say I’m excited would be an understatement.

I know, it’s been a while. Here’s the thing: I got a new job!

Been a while, I know. Will have more to say later. For now, we are having us a nice little blizzard here in Colorado. The best part is that my favorite bar is on top of things. Here’s an email I received today:

Brent Graber was a guy I casually knew, a co-owner of a fun little dog named Delaney.

Today is Hooper’s second birthday–sort-of. I mean, today is the day Brenda & I selected to represent that milestone for him; since he was a stray, we really don’t know the day, but we know the general vicinity of the day based on his development when we adopted him a year and a half ago.

I’m listening to The Evens here while studying bacteria, and the song “Everybody Knows” just wrapped up. It occurred to me that I should have rigged up some loudspeakers to the roof of my car and rolled around town blasting this song at maximum volume on Inauguration Day. I doubt I’m the only one who still thinks about January 20th and smiles. The last lyric is great to listen to, now that the door has indeed hit Bush on his tired, phony ass.

Someone please tell me what the fuck this is. I mean, I know it’s a Ford Windstar with “Ford Windstar” in cursive script, the comedy and tragedy masks, and a pair of mudflap girls adorning the rear window. This, this is known. But, WHAT THE FUCK.

I don’t know that I did much more than allude to it, but Hooper hurt his knee a few weeks back, and we’ve been walking on eggshells ever since.

I read a recent post on Lifehacker this morning about resume writing (no, I’m not looking for a job, I just read Lifehacker religiously), and readers were encouraged to post their own tips and peeves in the comments. I thought I’d share my thoughts here. (Can you smell the rant coming from there?)

The cynic in me has taken a day off. Watching Obama’s rig rolling to the Capitol has me in tears, for real. This is awesome.

A wildfire is raging in the foothills just north of Boulder; it started this afternoon, and really high winds and lots of open (and dry) land have provided the perfect ingredients for disaster.

The Maneki Neko, or “beckoning cat”, is a traditional Japanese good luck charm, commonly seen in storefronts, placed there to attract business. During the migration process of taking my files from my old computer to my new one, I just took my trusty little Maneki Neko and placed it down in the corner of my desktop and it made me smile.

awright, I got my iPhone talking to my new user account. All I did was tell the “Applications” tab to sync with my iPhone, and it copied the apps to my new iTunes install. Then I did the “wipe”, letting iTunes blow out my iPhone’s music library. At this point, my contacts and iPhone apps are synchronous with the iTunes install on my new laptop’s new user account. I spent an hour or so copying the music from my old user account to my new one, and after all that things aren’t perfect, but they are good. My old files from my old user account are on my new laptop, and after a little terminal action I changed the permissions on those files so I can move them freely about to my new user account’s directory structure. This I will do over the next three years.

now my Time Capsule is not recognized by my new user account on my new machine. Soooooo glad I tried using the “easy” migration fucking “wizard” to make all this fucking bullshit easy.

I fucking hate this shit. New computer, started setting up, got my iTunes all dialed in, then realized my goddamned motherfucking iPhone is really not interested in syncing with my new setup. Apparently, I was supposed to use the Apple Migration Assistant. That utility is fairly impressive, but now my Mail.app is busted, and I have a crapload of duplicated bytes in the form of redundant applications and all kinds of extra shit. The whole point of the new computer was to start fresh, and now I have one halfway setup user account on the new computer (that does not want to speak to my iPhone), and all the binary turdlets from my old computer copied over, with a broke-ass malfunctioning Mail.app. It’s bittersweet, because while I’m sure I can fix the Mail.app thing eventually, there just seems to be a lot of other weirdness and I can clearly see that loads of files I never need again have migrated over. I’d really like to just keep getting my new user account set up on this new MacBook, and get my iPhone to divorce itself from my old laptop. Now that everything from my old computer is now copied to my new one, I guess I can just tell the phone to start fresh; the applications should all be on the copy of the data from my old machine, right? Most of my applications have been re-installed on the new computer already, and like I said I basically have a copy of my entire old computer on here for now, so I should be able to pull over all the missing bits I need. I should do it, right? Start fresh with the iPhone?

3421 seconds. That’s how long it took my new laptop to render the de facto radiance benchmark scene. That’s good enough for 13th place on the list, not bad for a laptop marketed to college kiddies and soccer moms. My old laptop is 36% slower in this test, and cost me $700 more than my new one. Amazing.

I got new stuff. Lots of new stuff. Plenty of fodder for posting in the future. For now you should know that in the last couple of months I got a new TiVo, an iPhone, climbing shit, rollers, and today, the big purchase of 2008, a new MacBook. The box was cute and small. They emailed me my receipt (which caused my iPhone to buzz with delight as I was walking out the front door of the Apple Store). Moments after firing it up, my new mac was already performing a full system backup, wirelessly, to my Apple Time Machine. Brenda’s getting my MacBook Pro as soon as I get everything off of it and do a fresh install, and I’m psyched to be an all-Apple house once and for all (and I’m hopeful that the new graphics on the MacBooks will be adequate for my needs; for now, I’m pretty delighted with the keyboard, the form factor, and the new-to-me version of OS X).

The nice thing about learning to climb at the Boulder Rock Club is that the place is so packed with awesome climbers that you never, ever get it in your head that you are even in the same league as these people. Today Brenda & I were at the gym and I was totally mesmerized by these two women and one guy in particular. Muscle and tendon rippled underneath a thin veil of skin, with not a gram of body fat to be seen. These people owned the walls and I was totally amazed by their talents. At one point I must have said something like “holy fucking shit, look at her go!”, because some dude standing near Brenda & me said that the woman on the wall was one of the top female climbers in the country. It sorta makes you feel better about your own lack of ability when you hear that; at least you know you’re looking at the high-water mark of climbing ability, so you don’t feel so bad about your own lack of form or skill. It’s like everything else aerobic in Boulder; no matter how good you get, there’s someone about to pass you who makes it all look so easy.

This is a door in my office; my office full of engineers. Is anyone still wondering why bridges fall down every once in a while?

With my winter goal of keeping in shape taking… uh, shape, I have gone to the climbing gym a couple of times, and now own a harness, shoes and belay device of my very own. But while climbing is no doubt very strenuous, it’s a lot of short bursts of energy and not a lot of sustained aerobic activity. One of the reasons I want to exercise through the winter is so that I can emerge from the Colorado snow in the spring already in shape to ride in the mountains, instead of spending April and May getting in shape.