A Whole Lotta Nothing

Computers are just machines: they’re bundles of transitors, resistors, electricity and nothing more, right?

Try removing every personal setting and application from a computer you’ve been using for a long period of time. There’s lots of backing up, ftping, uninstalling, deleting, and then all the settings on everything have to be reset. It’s a lot harder than it sounds. I wish it were as easy as a “remove me” button somewhere in the control panel.

Today’s the day I finally went out and bought some banker’s boxes. All that’s left to do now is remove two years of belongings from my office and fit it into four boxes. Oh, and I have to try not to get sad or cry at the same time.

It’s not going to be a good day.

I love the new Powazek.com redesign. The new, open layout looks downright refreshing compared to the old frameset. It looks like Derek will be writing longer entries or posting more often, which is certainly a good thing.

And to top off my great day on the slopes, I had dinner with Crazy Uncle Joe. The man is an unrecognized genius.

Today I played with Jeff’s digital video camera and compared to working with analog video on computers, I am amazed by the ease and quality of digital video. I encoded a couple short segments of me riding into RealVideo, here’s the 56k version (which really, really sucks) and here’s the cable modem version.

In an effort to cram all the fun Southern California things into my last week here, I went snowboarding today.

It was a quintessential SoCal experience. We left 72 degree LA in shorts, t-shirts, and sandals, drove up to Mt. Baldy where it was maybe 60 degrees, and had a blast snowboarding on an empty mountain. Even though the snow was slushy and some of my favorite runs were closed, it was one of the funnest days I’ve had on the mountain.

Some shots from the weekend up north, starting with a 120kb panoramic of my soon-to-be-vacated office at UCLA.

I’m home-sweet-home in LA, but not for long. It looks like I’ll be in SF next week, and moving to the Silicon Valley a couple weeks after that. The Caltrain ride from San Carlos to Pyra looks to only be about 30-40 minutes long, so it shouldn’t be too bad of a commute. At some point in the summer, I’ll find an apartment in the city for my girlfriend Kay and our cats.

Pics and words from this weekend should be posted later tonight or tomorrow, and a special thanks to brig for showing me around Santa Cruz. I will forever be insanely jealous of her house and surrounding property.

I just realized something tonight. If a picture is worth a thousand words, it only takes a set of three pictures to satisfy Ben Brown. And here I’ve been killing myself on that long stuff, when 3 pictures could have said the same thing.

I spent most of today in Santa Cruz, and I can’t begin to tell you how different it is from the rest of the Bay Area, less than 80 miles away. It’s green, green, green down here, there’s so many trees you’d think you were in a National Park, there are huge sprawling fields and meadows covered in blooming wildflowers, and everyone is fairly mellow. It’s like the polar opposite of San Francisco startup life (not that I’m an expert in that already, but I have a good idea of what it’s like). I wish I spent my college years at UCSC, what was I thinking going to UC Riverside!?!