Did I tell you about this trip? I can't recall.

It's less than a month since I was last here and a quite funny feeling to be traveling light, as in no wife and kids. It took me no time to get here at all. Sunday afternoon was spent dozing off and on in my parents garden listening to the wood pigeons throaty coos. Kate Bush's last album used the calls of these birds to set the scene of an English summer afternoon and whenever I listen to it I am transported into my folks back garden with family conversation over coffee and cake.

My mothers reminiscences are somewhat repetitive as something will trigger a memory in her mind and she will reminisce about it and then forget, only to reminisce again an hour or so later. It doesn't really matter I guess, as I don't think she notices or if she does she probably forgets that she has noticed. Sometimes it saddens me, like when Dena and I gave my father his Birthday gifts on the day we were leaving, 4 days ahead of his actual birthday. One day later my mother called me in a panic because we hadn't gotten my father any gifts for his birthday. Or the Christmas gifts carefully hidden behind the couch by my mother only to be discovered at New Year. In the end it doesn't really matter and I try to assure my father that from my research it isn't the beginning of a downward spiral. It won't get worse, it won't get better. Be happy with life as it is here an now.

...A warm summer afternoon sitting under the cherry tree together with coffee, cake and the people you love, talking happily about the stuff of then and now. This is as good as it gets.

Fiona around 2.5 years

Fiona has come on a lot in the past few months as one might expect. She has definitely got her own personality, but I remain a little concerned by her language- perhaps this inhibited by the fact that her brother translates for her. We shall see...



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The dopplr effect

Unhappiness is looking down your list of Skype contacts at 11:30 in the morning and realizing all of the folk online are more than 300 miles away from you. So much for typing "Wanna do lunch?" to any of them. :-(

I thought about this for a while and thought there really ought to be a better way of finding out who is out and about in my neck of the woods wherever that happens to be. Quite a few ARM folk use their Skype Mood to state where they are and if you look down the list you might find someone is in town and subsequently available to "Do lunch". However, what about dinner? Being married with children, negotiating a "Night Pass" isn't something you can do on the spur of the moment. It takes advanced notice and negotiation- "If you're going out on Tuesday for dinner with Brian, I want to go out on Thurs night to the Making deserts with spinach class" etc.

Also what are the odds of turning up somewhere and hooking up with someone from somewhere else? Recently I went to Japan and hooked up with Ian our marketing VP for dinner purely because I happened to hear from someone that he was going to be in the the next town to me? I thought "There has to be a better way!" and maybe I should propose some kind of internal Web 2.0 "See you there!" website that allows people to log their travel and have the site tell their work friends when and where they are going. The site could look for co-incidental travel where two people from different offices are going to intersect in the same place at the same time. I had it all planned out in my mind and as my friend Bryn used to say about software "The rest is just typing." Then I met a guy from Mozilla who burst my bubble and told me about Tripit.com which seems to do just what I wanted. I also discovered another service called dopplr which purports to do the same kind of thing.

Both have their pros and cons, so for now I have decided to sign up to both. Tripit is big and gaudy and dopplr seems to epitomize the simple minimalism that Google has brought to website design. I found that I could hook dopplr into Facebook and this blog (see on the right) so people can roughly see when I am making trips and to where. I just need some other folk to sign up to dopplr. Come on! You know you want to do lunch with me.

The Prisoner of Zander

The Cub Scouts had an outing to Alcatraz.

"Better get used to those bars kid!"



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Landing in Moss

Last night of freedom and I decided to go and actually do something. For a piece I recently completed Kanute (spelt with a K 'cause I like spelling it with a K) I have visualized a number of pictures to accompany it on the website (whenever I get round to that), so tonight seems to be a good time to go and take some snaps. One of the odd things about Santa Cruz (and there are rather a lot) is that it doesn't face West. Monterey Bay forms about 2/3 of a semi circle covering and starts out facing South. A quick consultation with Google confirms what I had already guessed that the half way point around the Bay is Moss Landing and that is going to be the best place to see that sun sink slowly into the Ocean. I arrive a the beach with 10 minutes to spare, get set up, and start snapping away. At first its just me and birds but as time goes by I notice that I am slowly being surrounded by photographers young and old- this if definitely the place to be. So engrossed am I that I don't notice quite how far the tide is coming in and by the end I notice that my bag is full of water. Luckily both of the cameras weren't in the bag.

8:30pm and the sun has set. I head back up the dune to the car along with the rest of crowd, and as we each head off in our respective modes of transport theres a nod or a wave of camaraderie.

But what now?

I just can't face spending my 3 evenings off building another blasted computer. It's just too much hassle for no real creative return. I just don't see the point, but I know I will have to do something about it. Just not now.

I decided to fire up Photoshop in the end and work on some of the Gates pictures I took a few years back. I have forced this to the top of the pile by asking and getting a voucher for my birthday from Bob and Marty for a framed 36x24 print from the new framing store downtown. I have to do something about these pictures and now seems to be as good a time as any.

What now?

Well at least it was all backed up and I got the contents of My Documents onto a portable hard drive and I can see them on Dena's laptop.

47 is a Prime Number

47 is a Prime Number and I don't like that because I only have some many left. All in all it's a pretty lousy age to be, being in some kind of nowhere land between early 40's and 50. Still Bob and Marty came down for the day and we had a great time at the beach rounding off our time with a great family lunch at Bangkok West. For some reason this seemed to me to be one of the best lunches we have had as big family- the conversation flowed, the kids behaved (more or less) and the food was cosmic.

On Monday Dena took the kids to Tahoe to hook up with her Aunt Dena and Cousin Jenny for 4 days. 3 glorious child free evenings when I could at last turn on my creative side again and do something. I turned on much treasured mult-media 'puter for the first time in months and settle down to work on the "The Train to Scacramento" my latest piece. There was a smell of burning and keyboard and mouse stopped working. I rebooted and all was dead!