thomasm

I keep trying to remember to post more regularly, and then I just get busy and forget. Oh well... I'm posting more frequently (as in "I'm actually posting!"), so that's a start.

Saturday, we went to a mall we'd never been to before, the Westfield Oakridge mall. An enclosed mall, quite different than the open-air malls we're used to in San Diego, but not too different than the ones I'm used to from the northeast. This one had a sizeable food court, which also acted as the lobby for the movie theater. Lunch at Carl's, with Cap'n Crunch milkshakes. Yum!

Went to visit a new church on Sunday, the UU Fellowship of Los Gatos. It's a small fellowship, about 100 members, so not many kids or need for Sunday School teachers at the moment, but it did have its own building. Not as many people came up to say Hi to us as we experienced on visits to other churches in the area, though. Time to start the rounds again, give the churches a second visit, see how it goes.

Work's been fine, though Tuesday evening went long, as I got some last-minute work that took several hours. Wearying, but actually nice, as I felt nearly useful finally, instead of just doing self-paced playing around with the application.

Off to dinner.

But the evenings got busy, and things just slipped past. Amazing how that happens, isn't it?

The work week was more watching training videos, until Wednesday, when I got the laptop for work. That's a bunch of fun, as I didn't find out until _after_ I ordered the laptop that a lot of the work we do will be done on VMWare images (basically, software that emulates running another computer on top of mine). Turns out the images may require so much processor power and memory that the machine may slow down. Wish I'd known this _before_ I ordered the laptop.

But, I got the laptop, configured most of it, and started working on it. VMWare seems to run okay on it, but I'll give it some more time to figure out if it will really work. May have to send the laptop back and get a desktop. Wheee!

The evenings were a bit more entertaining. Monday we went out to reserve a room for the game Tuesday, and then had dessert at a Marble Slab Creamery (which was on the way home). Tuesday was the RPG. My sweetie is running a True20 game, and I've been looking forward to playing. Three of the other five players are players I've played with on others of my sweetie's games. And I haven't seen them in somewhere between months and years. It was so good to see them again. And it was good to play in a game again, since I haven't done so in something like 8 years. It felt good to be doing it again, and it felt like it was just last week that I'd played in a game with those guys.

Wednesday evening was bill-paying night, not much fun in that, but it needs to be done regularly. I'm not so good about doing it regularly, but I'm trying to get better.

Thursday was dinner out with other and new friends. Went with my sweetie, and got to meet some cool people, as well as see nakaleen again, whom I'd been looking forward to seeing since moving up here. Dinner was Chevy's, which I'm always a fan of.

Last night was fun knitting with some cool people, got another 10 rows or so done on my latest project, a Pinwheel afghan. I think I'm about 3/32nds done. No matter, though, I'm having tons of fun working on it. The folks I was knitting with were most entertaining, and most delightful company. I'm looking forward to getting to knit with them again.

For this weekend, who knows what's up. I'm planning on finding a local UU church to attend. I'm still "auditioning" churches, trying to find a church I'm going to be able to call home for a while. I've already been to 2 in the are, while my sweetie was up here and I was still down south. I've got another one I definitely want to check out. And then I want to go through all three again, since I feel that a single experience at a UU church is not enough to get the whole picture of what the church and its congregation are like.

Well... that's enough for now, I think. Off to see if I can get a few more rows done on my knitting project, and then get the day moving.

Well, I made it through the week at work, though it was only 4 days (hooray for holidays). Monday, another QA Engineer will start as well, and the training's expected to get more in detail, since they were waiting for the new person to arrive, so they can train us both at the same time.

The weekend went okay... I went to Stitches West, a knitting/crocheting/spinning/felting convention-type thing, though they had classes on different knitting techniques instead of panels. They also had a largish dealer's room, though they called it the Market. I went Saturday afternoon, getting there about 2 hours before it closed. I strolled about half, maybe more of the floor, and managed to only buy 2 patterns, each for about $5. One's a customizable monster, and the other is from the Mother Bear Project. It's probably next on my list of things to work on, once the afghan I'm working on is done.

I then went back Sunday morning, after a delightful spur of the moment brunch invitation to Hobee's. I wandered the rest of the floor with karenbynight, and it was quite enjoyable. I bought a pair of Therma-Gloves, kinda like "support hose for your hands". I also bought a small skein of glow in the dark yarn. It's cool, it does indeed glows in the dark. It's not likely that the yarn can be used as the main yarn for anything, but it'll make great accent yarn, like in a scarf or hat. Purchasing it went against my "don't buy yarn unless you've got a project in mind for it" rule, but, hey, it glows in the dark! I couldn't pass it up.

The rest of the day went okay, got laundry done, now I'm posting here and to Ravelry, then I'm going to work on some more knitting, woo-hoo!

Yesterday was my first day of work, and it went well enough. I checked my work mail, and didn't see anything from my boss about when or where to go, so I showed up at the Lobby where I met her when I went for an interview. A few phone calls, and then she meets me and takes me to an R&D All-Hands meeting going on. Yay, my first minutes there on the job were a meeting.

The meeting wasn't as bad as previous all-hands had been at my previous job, this one actually communicated useful information, well, at least some. Then to an available cube (not sure if this will be my cube permanently or not, but I'm using it while I got it. Since I wasn't technically reporting to my new boss until this past weekend, she couldn't order a new pc for me, so I'm using the one left in the cube by its former occupant. I had originally offered to take a laptop, since my boss mentioned in my interview that work may be done at odd hours (due to working with teams in other countries). Turns out, though, that the other QA people have desktops. *shrug* Oh well. Apparently, they do their remote work from their own pcs/laptops. Not so feasible from mine, since I've got a Mac, and I don't know (or care) if I can Remote Desktop into pcs at work. So, we'll see if I get a desktop or a laptop as time goes by.

I spent most of the rest of the day reading pseudo-documentation on line. I say "pseudo" because it's not really docs for the application, per se, but more how the company uses the application. During the last hour or so, I watched a video taken of a training session given (it turns out) over 2 years ago. So, the training's a bit old, but still contains some useful information. I just have 6 more hours or so to go through it. Hopefully in the next day or two I'll get an actual installation of the software to play with.

Off to work, then, for day number two!

So, after much paring and pruning of possessions, and cleaning room after room, and then packing a car full of what was left of my stuff, I've arrived in my new home of Cupertino, CA.

The weekend started off well, with one last meal with a bunch of friends from my regular Wednesday night gaming, at Ruby's. It was, as always, an enjoyable time spent with the guys. Then home to do last minute packing, and shipping of items that wouldn't fit in the car. Thankfully, we managed to ship just enough, as the rest of our stuff just fit into my car. We left several hours later than we intended to, and we finally pulled in to SLO just about 11pm, after some pretty not-good driving on my part. The next morning, we had a nice breakfast with univacgrl and her spouse at the Apple Farm, thanks to some timely reading of hers. Then, a short(er) trip up to Cupertino, ending the day with dinner with princeofwands and dangerpudding at Outbacks. I'm thinking this is a good start to the new adventure.

( IndianaCollapse )
There's a hole where you used to be, Indiana. A sweet, loving, puppy girl shaped hole. You are sorely missed, and you always will be.

Okay, I know, I haven't posted in forever, and it'll prolly be just as long until I post again, but, hey, this is for science!

This is an experiment to trace the propogation of memes from a given root. Please copy this into your LJ and add your username at the bottom of the list. If you see multiple copies from different friends, use the earliest one posted.

1. maniakes (original post here)
2. jkusters (original post here)</span>
3. thomasm (original post... well, you're looking at it)

For tracking purposes and to make people feel loved, please leave a comment on the meme entry in the journal of every person up the list.

So, did you not know what I was talking about in this post? I can try to talk about it, but showing you is not as much work. This, happily, will count for that 2-point listing (#4).

Well, I think I've recovered from the weekend. I think. Comic-Con was fun, got a chance to meet some friends from the PyraMOO. Which is always a nice thing, since they're such cool people. Got a chance to play Strange Synergy, an upcoming game from Steve Jackson Games, and had a total blast. I'm so looking forward to that. Walked all around the show floor. It's gotten twice as big as it used to be when I started going to the Con 5 years ago. Of course, jkusters points out that he's been to Comic-Con when it was in the Concourse, a much smaller venue.
I had to have spent at least a dozen hours stopped at some booth or another, perusing the items for sale or on display. Other people may wonder that time could have been spent doing other things, more important things, but sometimes, you just have to shop. You need to take the time to explore what's going on around you. Okay, that's too metaphysical, don't you think? How'd I go from Comic-Con to metaphysical? Who knows. But it was fun, wandering the aisles. There were 52 of them. Well, technically, 54, but those extra 2 were the endcap aisles, and I didn't walk them explicitly, just covered them when moving from one aisle to the next. If they do it again next year (52 aisles that is), I may have to design some sort of game using a deck of cards, and you get one for each aisle you buy something on, and at the end you try to make the best poker hand.
Somewhere along the way, I know I attended at least one panel, the one with Amanda Tapping and Don S. Davis, from Stargate SG-1. It was entertaining, seeing how the people were off-screen. Davis was a hoot, much more lively than his sedate General Hammond character. And he could be loud, when he wanted to. Tapping was quite charming, which I figure her Major Carter character would be too, if we saw her being more social. After the panel, I went and got an autograph from them both. The people at the Sci-Fi Channel booth said that they'd either sign a picture of mine or a picture of theirs, but I got one of each, which was really nice. They even let me get a picture taken with them, which was *way* cool, and actually turned out really nicely.
Thinking a bit more I remember the other panel I attended. It was with Jill Thompson, author of "Scary Godmother", and involved the presentation of the computer-animated version of Scary Godmother. Quite entertaining, too.
Well, that about wraps it up for now. Time to post, twice in just three days. Wow!

So. Looking at that last date, it's been almost forever since I've posted. Well, I think I've taken care of that. Something that will encourage me to post more frequently, and hopefully give me some fodder for posting materials. Because I know everyone is just dying to hear me babble. But that's all I babble for now, because it's a secret. shhhhhh!