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I made a group for this year’s March Madness. Please to be joining it.

I haven’t been home for Thanksgiving in four years, mostly because its the worst possible time of year to travel. It worked out great this year, because Alec was able to use the holidays to get enough time off for a reasonable California vacation. Instead of just hanging around San Fran, we decided to do something interesting: go backpacking in Yosemite. Alec’s been before with Amy, but never in the backcountry, so this was new for both of us. We’ve been planning the route and the gear for a few months; in retrospect, this is pretty funny, since we obviously completely underestimated the difficulty of the route. More on that later.

He flew in at noon on Thanksgiving Day. We spent that afternoon trying to find an In and Out Burger that was open, and after that failed we walked around my neighborhood and had coffee and doughnuts at the only place open for miles. After a few hours of hanging out, we took another long walk to downtown and back, followed by a really nice dinner at Avalon, less than a block from my apartment. I’ve gotten into the habit of eating out at expensive places for Thanksgiving; most restaurants have a fairly cheap fixed price menu, and they’re usually not that busy. The food at Avalon was amazing, but the wait was agonizing. We must have been there an hour before our food came out. Since Alec was on east coast time, he was overdue for food by about three hours.

The next morning we have breakfast and hit the road. The plan was to drive to Yosemite, pick up our wilderness permit, and reach a camp at Little Yosemite Valley (2.6 miles away) by sundown. Sitting in my apartment this all seemed really reasonable: it’s only a four hour drive, and we can easily walk 2.6 miles in less than two hours, so we only had to get to the park by 3:00pm, two hours before sunset. No problem, right?

The first problem was traffic. The smaller roads in rural California were not as car-free as I had hoped. We also stopped for lots of scenic overlooks along the way. By the time we had actually arrived in the valley itself, it was already 2:30. Add another half hour to find the permit office, fill out the forms, and get to the backpackers parking lot and it was only an hour and 46 minutes before sundown (which was at 4:46pm on that day). We set out on the trail, fully loaded with gear, and immediately get lost on a trail that dead ends on an island in the Merced River. So with barely more than an hour before getting dark, we finally get on the right trail.

The scenery is indescribably beautiful. Redwoods, giant granite boulders, and sheer rock faces every where you look. We were able to enjoy it a lot, since we had to stop for breaks every five minutes. I’m not exaggerating here; the one thing we didn’t take into account was elevation. The trail was staggeringly steep. Imagine walking up a flight of stairs with 30 lbs of gear on your back for 2.6 miles. This is exactly what the Mist Trail was like. We pass beautiful waterfalls, rock domes and lots of hikers heading down for the day. The trail was stunning; giant steps carved directly into the rock face with dynamite. We were walking right along the edge of a hundred foot drop every step of the day. By the time darkness falls, we have gone exactly 1.3 miles (and 4000 ft vertically). At this point, we weren’t worried. We both had headlamps, so we figured we’d keeping walking until we found the camp. This optimism evaporated as soon as we saw that the trail was just as steep and treacherous ahead as it had been before, only now you couldn’t even see where the edge of the cliff was. We decided that going on would be too dangerous, so we stopped at the only place we could, and little area of dirt and trees among miles of bare granite.

We set up our tent in the dark and cooked some delicious dehydrated mac and cheese. Sleep came almost immediately for me; I was completely exhausted. The next morning we awake to find ourselves right next to a huge waterfall. In the dark of the night before, we had no idea where we were; now we see that this was literally the only place we could have stopped and made camp. It’s at this point that Alec drops his camera in the river. He finds it ten minutes later, floating in an eddy, but it won’t turn on. We use our cameraphones (my iPhone and his Ace) as our only cameras for the rest of the trip. I was actually pretty impressed with how the photos turned out. Here is a slideshow with all of the photos from all four cameras that we had with us; they tell the tale better than I can. The best way to see these is at full-screen (the button in the lower left corner), and with titles and descriptions showing (click Show Info in the upper right corner).

After the excitement of the first night, the rest of the trip was fairly sedate. We walk to the camp at Little Yosemite Valley the next day, set up camp, and hike to the top of Half Dome with only water and Clif bars on us. The cell reception at the top was fantastic; I was even able to get on the internet. That night was absolutely freezing. It may have been the coldest I’ve ever been while still being able to sleep.

The next day we wake up and make our way back down into the valley. Instead of taking the crazy steep way we took up, we decided to take the trail that was twice as long and half as steep. We manage the hike in a little under three hours, half what it took us to go up. We spend the drive back thinking about real food (and stop at the first In and Out we find), and then relaxing on the couch watching Sly in Cliffhanger (seemed appropriate).

Despite the first night, the trip was a complete success. All of our gear performed beautifully, the food was good, and no one was attacked by bears. I’d really like to do it again, though on a slightly less mountainous area of the park. All in all, it was great to see Alec and to be able to take a few days away from civilization.

I really hate moving, and yet somehow I seem to do it every single year. The move to San Francisco was fairly easy, though driving a giant UHaul truck on a 10 lane highway is completely terrifying. I’m still unpacking boxes and drilling holes into my walls, but for the most part I’m settled. Once I’ve got things cleaned up a bit, I’ll post some photos.

I don’t have cable here, so I’ve been following the Olympics online. For the most part, it’s ok, but I really hate the scrolling new alerts at the top of each video. They seem to only have one purpose; tell you who won the race you’re currently watching. It completely ruined the Men’s Cylcing Road Race me. Between the Olympics, Hulu and Netflix (and Bittorrent, of course), there is no real reason to pay Comcast for TV anymore. The only downside is that you have to be ok with seeing the shows a few days or weeks late. I’m especially enjoying Firefly on Hulu, which I never saw the first time it aired. It’s all free and the commercials are extremely short.

I’ve been spending my weekend (the first since I moved to the city that was completely free of reasponsibility) engaged in athletic pursuits. Yesterday I biked all around the city (that link has a map and a fantastic elevation chart (click “Show Elevation”), which shows just how hilly parts of SF can get). Today I spent the whole morning and some of the afternoon at Mission Cliffs, taking climbing classes. Something interesting I learned today: I used to think that the only two things I do left-handed are write and use scissors; turns out I belay left-handed as well. I am insanely sore, and by tomorrow I bet it’s going to be worse, but definitely a lot of fun.

Work is going well. I’m just starting to get into the swing of things. We’ve got a few very cool projects that I’m working on, with a few more on the horizon. If you’re interested, you can follow the action pretty well by looking at any photos tagged with “flickrhq”. This one is particularly funny. They played a prank on the guy that sits next to me by piling really heavy office chairs all over his desk. You can see my Billy Donovan bobblehead in the lower left corner.

By the way, the photo has nothing to do with this post. I just wanted everyone to see how good I looked.

So, it’s been a little while since I’ve posted. Here’s what’s been going on:

I met my folks in Europe, to see the fam and attend the wedding of my cousin. The weather in England was fairly awful, but we still managed to have a good time, walking around the countryside, and visiting huge gardens and the city of Bath. My role of navigator proved to be extremely challenging, and we got lost at least once a day. Holland was a whirlwind of family visits, drinking, weddings, and more drinking. The strange thing about this trip was the fact that I never really adjusted to the time; I was tired the entire time I was in England, and kept taking long naps in the middle of the day. The new trend in combating jetlag seems to be fasting before a flight, but I don’t really want to fast for any reason, ever. I think if I ever missed eating dinner, I’d be dead by morning.

Two weeks ago Chris, Mariah and Zach flew in, and Nick came up from LA. Despite the fact that I had to work (it being my last two days with Yahoo! Small Business), we managed to eat out a lot, go up to San Francisco, and drink 40s (not me obviously; Nick and Chris drank 40s). Nick had to go back to LA late Friday, but the rest of us (including Ashley, Juile, and Court, who met up with us) went up to Sonoma for the weekend. Saturday was spent at the wineries (they managed to hit an impressive seven wineries, a feat I would not have thought was possible; I’m done after two), with a very nice meal at Meritage afterwards. Sunday was spent at a Nascar race at Infineon Raceway. First, let me give some background. I went because there was an extra ticket, not out of some burning desire to see a Nascar race. That being said, I thoroughly enjoyed myself. We got there early and tailgated in the stunningly beautiful and gently rolling hills surrounding the track. We watched the race from fantastic seats at the top of the grand stand (in the shade, no less). And we ended the day at In & Out Burger. Not a bad weekend (I have the photos posted; some of them are pretty good).

One funny story: the entire time they were in town, we were spouting a non-stop string of “That’s what she said”s. I mean that quite literally; Chris, in particular, could string them together so that those were the only words to come out of his mouth for minutes at a time. While eating dinner Saturday night, we agreed that the winner would be the person to first say that in response to something the waitress said. This was a joke, as we obviously didn’t want to get thrown out of the restaurant. At the end of the meal, while we were telling her how great the dessert was, she said, “I love that dessert. I could suck it down in three seconds flat”. Chris, Zach and I made eye contact, each of us struggling to contain the words. I was literally crying with the effort of trying not to laugh. The waitress must have thought it odd that we all started laughing uproariously the second she left the table.

I’ve had a change in job in the last two weeks. I’m still at Yahoo!, but now I’m with a different business unit: Flickr. Small Biz was great, but I’ve been there for two years, and it felt like time to move on. I’ve also always wanted to work at Flickr; they manage to keep themselves very separate from the rest of Yahoo!, and run the place very much like a start-up. I’m surrounded now by enormously talented people, and by talented, I mean that they can complete a full day’s work while still spending significant amounts of time playing ping-pong and Rock Band. If you need a place to put photos online, I highly recommend Flickr; you can see my photos here, and I expect that I’ll be posting a lot there in the future (if you do sign up, be sure to add me as a friend as that I know when you’ve posted new photos).

Some interesting things have been happening here this month. In reverse chronological order:

I’m going to be moving to San Francisco in the next few months. Sunnyvale is really convenient for commuting to work, but insanely boring in all other respects. I’ve decided that it’s time to take the plunge and dive head first into one of the most expensive rental markets in the country. If you don’t hear from me in a while, it’s because I’ve had to give up the internet and sell all of my computers in order make rent.

Tristan visited Sunnyvale last week for a little vacation. See his full account of the trip for more details and photos, including some shots of me next to a ridiculous red car. That last bit deserves a full explanation. Two weeks ago, I was driving up to Tahoe to ski the last day of the season. The friends I normally go skiing with were all out of town or busy, so I ended up driving up by myself. It’s a really easy drive, usually three hours without traffic. In order to get to the slopes right when they open (8:30-9:00am) I leave Sunnyvale at 5:00am. I wasn’t feeling great that morning, so I skipped the coffee; this turned out to be a serious mistake. A few hours later, at 7:30, I nod off for a few seconds; since the alignment in my car is a bit off, the car immediately pulls to the right, directly into the large, commercial F-250 flatbed next to me. The truck has no damage whatsoever, mostly because the bed is surrounded by large, cast iron tie-down hooks, spaced about eight inches apart. These hooks shredded the right side of my car like it was made of cheese, hitting every single important and expensive control element in the process: front door handle, rear door handle, front door lock, side-view mirror. I had a funny moment when I tried to open the rear door, only to have the handle come off in my hand; I stared at it for a while, not really that meant. At this point, I am fully awake. I finish the rest of the drive, have a nice day skiing, and drive back, stopping every hour to get coffee. I must have had at least three of the large Starbucks coffees (venti? grande?).

When I get home, I give Geico a call and make an appointment to bring my car in to the shop. Tristan flew in the day before I took it in. Since neither the front nor rear right side door opened at this point, every time we got in the car, he had to make a decision: sit in the back, behind me (which made conversation difficult at best), or climb in (and later out) through the window, Dukes of Hazzard style. He usually opted for the window for longer trips, and the back seat for shorter ones. At the body shop, they give me a choice of rental cars: a bright red Chevy HHR or a giant Silverado Extended Cab (for $5 a day more). I take the HHR, thinking to myself, “How bad can it be?”. This turns out to be the absolute worst car I’ve ever driven for any extended period of time. Let me list its myriad faults:

• It’s huge on the outside and tiny on the inside. Mike and Tristan couldn’t both be in the car at the same time without one being folded up into the back seat. The trunk area was barely big enough for a single suitcase.
• The controls are completely unintuitive. The window controls are hidden, the cruise control has twice as many buttons as needed, and the dash is littered with unlabeled buttons, most of which I still have no idea what they do.
• Gas mileage is horrendous.
• The handling is god awful. It oversteers like a maniac at high speeds, which makes a simple maneuver like taking an overpass from one interstate to another into a terrifying near-death experience. Tristan and I had a few close calls, where I would turn the wheel to follow the gently curving ramp, only to have the car continue in a straight line as if I had done nothing.

I have no idea why anyone would ever buy this car; there is no upside here. The fact that it was bright red didn’t help either. I can’t even describe the joy I felt when I drove my car out of the parking lot of the body shop on Friday. Despite it’s faults (poor alignment, failing power-steering, high-strung engine, temperamental clutch), it’s so much better to drive. There is something deeply unsatisfying about driving an automatic, even if it did have more power than my car.

A few weeks before this, I had a horrible series of flights to and from Austin. Without going into too much detail, every single flight I touched was late at least two hours, which means I spent most of a Thursday trapped in the Pheonix airport and all of the single-digit morning hours of Monday in Vegas, waiting in lines for hours to get a hotel room (in a smoke-filled casino called Arizona Charlies 45 minutes away in a very shady part of East Vegas) where I was only able to sleep four hours before turning around and waiting for another flight (which was also delayed two hours). The lobby of this hotel looked like it was populated solely with meth addicts and people actively in the process of collecting various hepatitis strains. I would say that I will never step on another US Airways flight, but it turns out that my flights to and from Europe at the end of this month are on US.

My “Interesting Links” sidebar has not been updating automatically this month. As such, I would like to call attention to some particularly good ones:

• 2008 Brewers Association World Beer Cup Winners: From Nick. Be sure to check out the winner of the gold medal in category 35, “American-Style Specialty Lager”.
• I am RICH and I want to spend it on YOU tonight: Hilarious craigslist posting: “I am so rich. Goodness, gracious. My, my, my. I am so, very, very wealthy. How many dollars do I have? That’s a question only my team of ten fat accountants can answer, because they have golden calculators which I bought for them with my money. And what is on those golden calculators? Numbers. And those numbers equal the dollars in my bank accounts, which are huge.”
• The Daily Show - Gaffe-In: “Barack Obama’s claims about western Pennsylvania, God and guns puts Hillary Clinton and FOX News into overdrive.” Unbelievably funny, I’ve watched this several times now.
• Interview with DMX: Skip to the middle; it seems that not only has DMX never heard of Barack Obama, but that he finds his name personally offensive. Seriously funny.

Photo by Dustin Diaz

I was in Austin for a week for the South by Southwest Interactive conference. I was able to convince work to send me because we had a book talk and author signing scheduled for the first day (which went pretty well; co-author Dustin handled the talk while I… uh… supervised). The conference itself was made up of hundreds of panels taking place over five days. As you can see by my intended schedule, I was planning on going to see a lot of them; in the end, it didn’t quite work out that way. Most of the blame for me missing panels falls on a girl by the name of Erin that I met during the book signing (she was in charge of corralling the authors into sitting and interacting with their fans). By way of establishing her street cred for this audience, let me tell you that the first movie we watched together, at her suggestion, was Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, during which she was able to recite every line from memory. Yeah, I’ll just give you a moment to let that feeling of overwhelming jealousy die down.

I spent most of my free time with her (ignoring Tristan almost entirely; sorry, buddy), getting a tour of Austin from the view of the locals. The city is nice; lots of good places to eat, and, as you would expect from a college town, tons of places to drink (my personal favorite place had to be the movie theatre that served food and alcohol, kind of like Mugs and Movies but much, much better). Wanting to spend as much time with Erin as possible, I stayed out way too late and got absolutely no sleep, which means I was in no condition at all to attend the early morning sessions; I was lucky to stumble in by noon. The sessions that I did make it to were fantastic, and I want to try to listen to as many of the others as possible when they are released as podcasts later in the month. Overall it was a great trip, and I’d definitely go back to Austin.

I’m really looking forward to the end of this week. Erin’s flying up for a long weekend and I’m taking a few days off of work. Now that I’ve got my taxes done (the governments of California and the United States of America really bent me over the table this year), and with no more book or conference stuff to worry about, I can actually relax and enjoy myself.

We decided a few months ago to take a family trip to Tahoe this winter; the fact that I live only a few hours away makes it a really convenient holiday destination. Alec, Mom and Dad flew into San Francisco late on Thursday, and Friday morning we drove up to the mountains. The weather was unbelievably good all weekend, with clear skies and moderate temperatures. I did not need the snow chains I bought, which is good because they look about as easy to put on as a straightjacket on a 400 pound epileptic.

We arrive at the cabin and instantly know that no one has rented it since the last big storm a few weeks ago. This is because there is three feet of snow on the boardwalk leading to the front door. Rather than climb over it with all of our luggage, we decide to shovel it off, which it easier than it looks. Once again, I am thankful that I don’t live in a place where shoveling snow is a normal activity (sorry, Josh). The cabin is fantastic; it’s decorated in the theme of a firehouse (though lacking the one thing that would have made it perfect: a pole from the loft to the kitchen). Art and Mary join us from Fresno, and we have a huge dinner with lots of alcohol. Since everyone but me is on east coast time, and since I can sleep anywhere at any time of day, we make it an early night.

The next day we get up early and head to the slopes. Heavenly’s Boulder Lodge is less than a mile away, and it’s not too busy when we get there. Alec goes off to join a class on snowboarding (since he’s never tried it before), and my dad and I hit the slopes. The run at the bottom of Boulder is a green, but still really fun. It takes a few runs to get any amount of control over my skis, but eventually my skills from 13 years ago come back to me. By the end of the day we are even hitting a few of the blue runs, though that was riding the extreme edge of my ability. My dad was keeping up with me, but my mom called it a day after a long run. Alec was even able to do a run after his class, with a fair amount of control. The slopes close at 4:00pm, so we head back to the cabin for lasagna and a movie (Die Hard was on AMC; I’d forgotten just how good an action movie it was).

The next day was even better. The weather was sunny and clear, with the temperature in the low 40s. We do green runs for most of the day, and I hit the occasional blue, though I had a pretty tough time with them. At the end of the day we head back to the cabin, exhausted, and pack for the trip home. The fam flies out of SF in the early afternoon, so we had to leave Tahoe at 8:00am. Overall it was a great trip, with absolutely nothing going wrong. Considering the potential for bad weather, traffic jams and skiing injuries that the area has, that’s pretty amazing. Photos of the whole weekend are up, all of which were taken by either Alec or Mom.

I went back to Tahoe this weekend with a few guys from work and had the complete opposite experience. The slopes at Squaw Valley were pretty tough, and the powder was impossible to move in. After the first three runs, I was completely exhausted. The weather turned bad around lunch, with the snow really coming down. That, combined with the wind, made it seem like you were being sandblasted. Visibilty was zero, which did not exactly improve my meager skills. The drive home sucked, since we had to go 30 mph and avoid tons of people putting on or taking off chains. It was still fun, but today I feel like I was at the receiving end of beating with a bag of doorknobs; everything is sore.