Dear Life of Leisure, I love you
Well, after 1.5 months in Israel, I think it's safe to say that given time to loaf around, I will do it indefinitely. Which isn't to say that I've done nothing here, but there have definitely been weeks that I've done more or less nothing out here.

I did however learn a bunch of windsurfing, and feel like I could enjoy another 2 summery months of that pretty much whenever. I think that I enjoy it about as much as climbing. The things that made me think of it in terms of climbing is it's physical component. I'm definitely getting to the point in my life where if I'm not super in shape I sometimes think "body, fuck you". And windsurfing uses your back and core a lot. And forearms! If the breeze is steady, it's very easy to put your hips in and lean your shoulders back, extend your arms and hold on to the boom just like you'd grab a good hold while climbing. Except with much less than your whole weight on it.

Secondly, it's one of those things that one (or at least I) concentrate on with 100% of my brain. Sometimes I use a small part of my brain to enjoy the nature that I'm looking at while on the frickin' ocean. Yeah, it's pretty cool to have you, the windsurfer, and horizon in sight and that's it. What's that, you say? Take your mind off a little and make your mental shopping list? That is exactly when you fall into the water. The shiny, salty water.

Anyways, the Mediterranean kicks ass and is super warm. I recommend it to everybody. Except the days when the water was filled with garbage. Those days were sad. Made me think of http://www.boingboing.net/2010/06/08/plastic-century-a-ta.html a lot. Except most of the junk is in tiny (1/2" or less) pieces. The occasional floating bag of chips or bubble wrap. Frowny. Face.

Anyhoo, if you know of a job opening for coders in New York the city, please let me know. T-11 days till I return to being just another american in america.

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My Weekend
The most productive thing I did this weekend: http://projecteuler.net/index.php?section=problems&id=265

Dunno why my solution took ~10 min when the popular forum solution took < 1 second and was equally brute force.

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My company gets a lot of user-uploaded content. Sometimes it's funny.

http://cdn6.quizapps.com/images/image?id=12347130

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Launch o clock
Click it to play: yakuza lords

Now on to milestone 2: making it better and more stable.

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Moving Day
Well, moving day is finally here. I'm only moving 4 blocks, but the chaos of not having all your stuff upended from its usual location is proving stressful.

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Lolapps not so stealthy anymore
http://www.allfacebook.com/2009/04/lolapps-launc/

Yay, we sorta have press!

Anyhoo, in case I haven't pointed you at it before, our gift and quiz creators:
http://apps.facebook.com/giftcreator
http://apps.facebook.com/quizapps

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Denied
Reasons you cannot donate blood include, but are not limited to:

Blood transfusion in the 80's
Lived in the UK for too long
Lived somewhere with Malaria for too long
Had a tattoo in the last year
Taken aspirin recently (last 24 hours?)
Had sex with a dude who has had sex with a dude
Had sex with someone who has had sex for money
Sick in any way (including getting over a cold) <--- relevant to me.

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NerdFilter
I was very impressed with this list of "essential" win32 apps.

http://www.maximumpc.com/article/features/maximum_pcs_32_totally_essential_apps

PS, if you've never installed windirstat, do so now.

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Things I Did Today
Woke up Early.
Helped a ski patrol person recover their buried skis, so they could hurry down the mountain and help some poor sod.
Ate lunch (while still wearing my skis) sitting on a rock, overlooking mountains and lake Tahoe.
Abused my quads.
Talked to someone in Hebrew.

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youtube wins
I hate to use livejournal as a platform for slyt posts, but youtube won the "can I make you laugh at work" battle against me today, so here goes.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HN1ru6_u8lY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=61Qv_8cFFbQ

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livejournal may be hurting
http://www.metafilter.com/78002/Livejournal-circling-the-drain

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internet tabloids
Because I don't have enough to entertain me on the internet (people! Give me more entertaining web sites!), I have resorted to reading dig a lot. Which, in turn, makes me read cracked once in a while. There humor is, I'm sure you will agree, low brow. Still, they usually make me smile.

http://www.cracked.com/blog/7-images-too-badass-to-be-real-that-totally-are/

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Web Programming
If there's one thing this job has reminded me of, it's that I am NOT a web programmer. Here's a link our front end guy sent out. Go to it, and click on the right under the "select a design" box. All the different links use the same html page, but different css files. The moral of this story (and my job) is: css is important.

http://csszengarden.com/

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Pony Up to the Nerd Table

Created by OnePlusYou - Free Dating Sites

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http://www.portfolio.com/news-markets/national-news/portfolio/2008/11/11/The-End-of-Wall-Streets-Boom?tid=true

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upbeat shit
I've been on a peppy upbeat music kick the last few days. Not necessarily the no-words electronica I usually go for while coding. Leading the charge is The Flaming Lips, with It Overtakes Me, the first half of this song.

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Celebration Time
Wow. I have never seen anything like that.

I went over to Lenza's tonight to watch the election results. It was pretty obvious obama was winning, and when the networks called it for him, we heard people shouting on the streets / honking as they drove by. We opened the windows and shouted back. And drank some champagne.

Later we went to a bar. I followed some people down Valencia, where, at 19th street, A HUGE INTERSECTION PARTY HAD BROKEN OUT. People were milling around, and then some friends of mine showed up with some drums. A guy played the star spangled banner on the trumpet, and a good section of a brass band showed up (sousaphone, wearable cowbells, some others).

As I walked home, at 16th and Guerrero the street was again filled with people. A guy twirling fire on chains showed up, in addition to a lot of people.

The police were out, but not really interfering with people.

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Ever since pneumonia (aka labor day weekend), I've been laying low. My rule was no more than 2 drinks a night for a while. Not that I'm still sick, but I definitely am still coughing a little, and feeling tired every morning.

So, yesterday a PM accepted his offer letter, so we went to dinner / drinking with him. Needless to say, my coworkers goaded me into having more than 2 drinks. Mostly at Doc's Clock. Fun, (yay shuffleboard!) but now I am tired again.

Other than that, it's been the high holidays, so I've been doing that. People at work are real chill about me taking all of them off. I had a drunken conversation with our office manager last night about how I'm taking them off unpaid, so she has to dock my pay, because I'm sure as shit not making it up on sundays or whatever. We'll see what the official version of that story is come monday.

Watched the VP debates with my team. I was responsible for sticking a paperclip in the coax antenna hole to get reception (thanks Heine for the idea). It was bad picture, but way better sound than streaming internet. No surprise that I'm working with a bunch o liberals.

Oh yeah: work. If I haven't told you by now, go check out our game. http://apps.new.facebook.com/space-raiders/

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simplicity
Ok, so I'm not positive that I love my work machine (mac laptop) yet, but I will admit that some stuff is just awesome. Here is a screen shot of the "installer" for a mac multi-IM client.




And yes, dragging the green bird and dropping it on the application folder shortcut is how you install.

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Good Customer Service
So, I blew through my 450 minutes per month at at&t. I called to upgrade to the 900 minute plan before the end of the month, so that they'd backdate it and cover all my super-expensive minutes. Done.

In the middle of the phone call, however, my cell phone dropped the call. And within 60 seconds the nice lady on the phone had called me back. It was awesome.

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