Jonathan’s Mindless Blog

I love going to conferences as long as it’s not too many in a year. This year I think I’ll only get to do one and it’s NOW! I’m in San Jose, CA for a technical conference and NES is picking up the tab. The weather is incredible and I can see why people would want to move here. The sun is out and the night time temps are about 55F, daytime about 70F and a breeze is almost always blowing. I guess this is kind of like a vacation since I get to sightsee today (Sunday). Yesterday we drove up to San Francisco and drove by all the sights, like Alkatraz island, fisherman’s wharf, telegraph point and the Golden Gate bridge. It’s a really neat old city. Today is a wine tour of the Napa Valley, should be quite interesting with the bunch of techies. Pics will be coming soon There was a huge cruise ship in port as well. It was quite a sight from up close, about 15 stories above the water line.

The best part is the ensuing true vacation, I get to see K&K in their new city of PORTLAND! And I will be priviledged enough to see Katie kick tail at a Roller Derby bout. I also found out that my new yearly (or maybe twice yearly) vacation destination has been moved from Ancorage, AK, to Colorado Springs, CO! Tom & Corinna have gotten confirmation that the next station of duty (Air Force) will be there and, I think, at the same base that is associated with the Air Force Academy. I’ll have to check that to be sure, but it sounds pretty cool to me. Tom wants to do a long backpacking trip hopefully towards the end of the summer, which will be awesome!

Oh, and Loveless Cafe, long known for thier wonderful breakfasts, I discovered, also has incredible dinners. We were out riding the motorcycle and passed by and decided to stop and eat, what a great spontaneous idea! If you’re ever in Nashville, you should make it a point to stop in.

Sometimes I really get a kick out of the people at work. Today we had a design engineer send down a terse email telling me how I should be able to implement a circuit by only programming, that’s fine, except he has no idea how it works and it takes some wiring changes in addition to programming. The end of his letter (which he copied to about 7 other people) asked me to “call him if this was not the case.” I hate not keeping everyone in the loop [feel the sarcasm here], so I replied all and said merely that this is not the case and he could refer to the product manual for the details. I love not doing other people’s jobs for them

The weather is incredible and I’ve been mostly outside the past couple of days enjoying it! My motorcycle had to have some work done on it, so I won’t get it back until at least Friday, dangit. I hope they get it done by Fri so I can ride this weekend. I think I feel a motorcycle Grand Canyon run in my future… ride out then camp somewhere for a few days and hike some of the trails. That would be great, but first I’ll try it someplace closer, maybe the Ocoee area or something like that. Any great suggestions for car camping areas in middle TN?

It’s amazing how the nice weather makes everyone want to get out and play! It was sunny and 82 degrees and I got out and rode the bike around Cheatham county during the morning with a friend, met with the neighborhood bookkeeper in the afternoon, then fixed another friends mower in the evening… and she bought my supper! What a wonderful day. And to top it all off, my favorite radio program in on with the regular DJ, also you can listen to the show anytime here. I love old (and new) funk music. It’s been quite some time since I had a Friday off from work and tomorrow I have another day to play. Tomorrow my nieces are coming over to my parents to do the annual easter egg hunt, and I’ve been requested to be there with camera in hand. It’s always a fun time. I can’t wait to finish the first service on the bike and head out to the great beyond to go bike camping. I don’t feel like it’s cheating too much since you really can’t carry too much more than when you’re backpacking anyway. Now to decide where I’m going, ’cause after this week the bike will be ready for about 6k miles before the next service period. I think the bike is a nice consolation prize in place of AK. Maybe I can talk dad into taking a riding course with me and get him to catch the bike bug too.

What a beautiful day! Sun was out and I got to celebrate a friend’s birthday : ) After the storm comes the calm and nice weather. I didn’t get to work any overtime for the tornadoes, so today I wasn’t tired and added another 200 miles to the bike! Only 200 more to go ’til my first service, then I can actually go fast without doing long-term damage. I’ve got to get a flickr account so I can do pictures, but it takes effort and I’m just really lethargic tonight, so it’ll have to wait. In the meantime you’ll just have to visualize… I got the windshield all bug juicy from the ride today

Ok, well I found out for sure last night that I am not going to Alaska due to a lack of a job offer. I’m still soaking it in, but I think I’m pretty much relieved. That means I’ll get to do a bunch of stuff ’round middle TN with a lot of my new friends! I won’t get to go to AK and hang out with the bears and the hippie transient workers, but it could be a whole lot worse than just staying here. Anyway, today we’ve had storms, hail & tornadoes, but so far I’ve not been called in to work. I selfishly want to work for the money (not the satisfaction of getting people’s lights back on, although that’s a nice bonus) so I can hurry up and pay off my new motorcycle and watch my credit score soar!

Also this evening, I told a few of the necessary people that I won’t be coming back to church. I’ve finally had it with the small-town, do-nothing (or very very little), legalistic crap. I’ve got to find some place a bit less dead, or I’m going to shrivel up and die inside too.

I think I’ll go update my website homepage to include this blog now. Seems like all is working well and I guess I’m ready to update this thing on at least some sort of regular basis, probably every other day or so. Hopefully they’ll finish the new interface for uploading pictures on the website soon so I can start making links and such in here to photos I take without having to create a new web page and format everything with indexes and such.