Thursday, October 25, 2007

Southern California Wildfires



We were actually on a road that everything north of which was evacuated... right near a canyon that was close to burning. Still is, if you look at the map, but they think it's safe enough here that they receded the evacuation perimeter...

This map is centered on our house... it is looking less and less scary, since that map is real-time, but it looked bad around Tuesday. Still tons of fire around, but at least it's getting a bit more controlled because the wind and humidity are cooperating a bit more.


View Larger Map

Our thoughts go out to everyone else impacted by these fires.

Thursday, July 26, 2007

Moving

There are very few things about moving to a new place that aren't difficult, stressful, or frustrating. Actually, we aren't even to that point yet... let me restart...

There are very few things about THINKING about moving to a new place that aren't difficult, stressful, or frustrating.

We're thinking about moving, though we're very actively thinking about it. We have the house we are thinking about in sight, and have already started the processes of getting pre-approved for the loan, getting our house on the market, and letting the selling agent of the other house know of our interest.

We've already visited the place once, and are going again, this time with a more specific idea of it actually being the place we buy, not just looking at it in comparison to other places. To make things easy, we're listing our current house with the same person who is selling the other house... so he's both our selling agent, our buying agent, and our potential house's previous owners selling agent... obviously that alone presents so many potential conflicts of interest, but I'm watching that carefully...

But SELLING our current place... that seems easy... but the steps to actually let people see it are going to be very tiring... almost as much as moving itself will be (though, probably not quite). The fact that we still live here makes it difficult... we need to make it look 'demo-house lived in', which is VERY VERY different than 'reality lived-in'. And actually living in it while it's in that state will be difficult and a little uncomfortable. Fun stuff...

And we have to figure out where to hide all the junk we aren't supposed to let people know we use... all the stuff on the fridge, on our desks, on the kitchen counters, tables, etc, etc... People don't realize most kitchens actually have things like coffee makers, toaster ovens, toasters, etc? Yeah... well, it's all about psychology. People are too lazy to have to think about what they see when they are looking at something to buy, and we aren't going to be changing that any time soon. :/

Would be so much easier if we could move out before trying to sell it... and trying to figure out what to do with our cat and dog during this process is going to be interesting... the first random viewing person who lets either of them out is probably going to have to file a restraining order against us.

I can't wait...

Oh, and assuming everything goes past this point.. the move itself... *shudder* Then... making the new place livable (unpacking, painting, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc)... I think we should have been storing up energy for the past few years in preperation.

The place isn't even a mile from here... but it is almost twice the size, so that'll be useful.

Wednesday, July 18, 2007

Flickr test

This is a test... Yahoo! Photos is closing, and I had to move to another photo storage solution... Yahoo's been working on flickr, and so far it seems relatively interesting. So I'm testing posting an image blog from Flickr.

And if anyone else uses flickr and for some reason reads this blog, look me up, send an email, or otherwise add me or invite me. :)

Tuesday, May 15, 2007

Tournament update

Just an update, I already was pretty sure, but just officially found out that I did actually come out as the 4th place competitor overall. Missed the 2 slots above me by such a small margin... guess I have a goal for next year. :)

Sunday, May 13, 2007

White Dragon Tournament

The annual White Dragon tournament in San Diego was this weekend, and it was probably the best one I've gone to so far. Overall, it was the best organized it has been, though there were still a couple oddities (there were combatives going on before some forms divisions were done, and several people couldn't compete in a few forms divisions because they were hurt in the combative... my wife was one of these, unfortunately, and her open weapon set would have done really well in her division).

I didn't miss a single event, and overall most people got to all their events, because not only was the event called, your name was called a few times specifically if you hadn't reported to a ring yet. Again, somehow my wife got passed over by this, though the ring judges say they called her name several times and actually went to the sparring ring asking people personally. She never heard her name (and neither did I) and never noticed anyone asking her ring if they were in open weapon division, but it probably wouldn't have mattered, since by then she could hardly stand anyway. I think she still wanted to try to do the set, even with her ankle hurt. But... next year.

But beyond the few issues I know about, it was a quicker tournament than previous years, and more organized as a whole. And the quality of people competing was better than I remember, even for the lower level divisions. All in all, it was a really fun tournament. I did well, Karen did well, and our school did really well as well. We got 2nd place as a school, missing 1st by only .2 points per competitor, a lot of that lost due to people not showing up who were registered. Not a bad achievement. Myself, I actually missed 3rd place for grand champion by 2 points, which is REALLY close. Basically the difference between getting 3rd place in a division and 2nd place in the same division... or a lot less than getting 2nd instead of 1st.

Karen came away with a Gold medal in her forms division, and I'm pretty sure she had a good chance at gold in her open weapon, and probably would have placed 1-3 in sparring if she hadn't won her match but lost her ankle at the same time. I ended up with 4 golds, 4 silver, and 2 bronze, placing in 10 of the 12 divisions I competed in. Not bad, beat last year, I only got 3 gold, 2 silver, and 2 bronze then. I could feel the improvement... I was pretty confident in my sets last year, but this year felt more fluid.

Now back to regular training for a while. Tournament always sidetracks things a little, but in a good way. Training for tournaments always leak back into the normal curriculum.

Friday, April 06, 2007

Calendars

I switched to Windows Vista, and it's built in calendar program makes use of ICS, which is a fairly global standard for once! Because of this, I've been playing around with ways to publish and use the calendars...

I have pushed my own personal calendar as well as a calendar for White Dragon Mira Mesa, and found a decent solution to allow people to view those calendars... publicly, it only shows White Dragon (Mira Mesa)'s event calendar, but if you ask me, I can give you info that will let you see my own calendar (a feature probably only 3 people are interested in :) ).

http://www.truebits.net/phpicalendar

I'm going to find a ton of other ways to annoy people with this stuff now!

Also, if you happen to want to subscribe to either of these calendars via some means that allows ICS subscription, just ask, I can give the link.

Thursday, April 05, 2007

Updates

Someday I'll update this.. really! Oh, look, I just did!