Another year goes by and surprise, I'm another year older. As the years pass, the festivities get smaller and the list of spoils shorter, but bigger things in my life can be considered birthday related if they're stretched a tiny bit. San and I have been dating for 2.5 years, which is a pretty long time! And we've been living together since I bought the house we're in 1.5 years ago. I've also been working on the Operations team at SugarCRM for 1.5 years and gotten a lot done, but there's still a lot to be done (and a continually growing list of interesting technical things that I need to write about here). They still fly me out to California every quarter or a so, and each time I get to experience a little bit more of Silicon Valley and San Francisco without having to pay rent there.

The GalleryDevelopers Conference was in San Francisco last year and I spent the first half of the week at the SugarCRM office getting some work done, but this time it's going to be in Santa Fe, New Mexico and since SugarCRM doesn't have an office there, I'm figuring out what it's going to take to squeeze in a few days of mountain biking before GalleryCon starts.

Last year was my first century (100mile) ride so it's only fitting that this year I did 125 miles (200K), and 2 weekends ago a handful of us that met each other through Faster Mustache rode on the Silver Comet to Alabama and back. Also bike related, while not officially a birthday present, the timing worked out that I got to take my new mountain bike on it's inaugural ride at 7am on my birthday. It's a pretty bike, has dirt all over now, and I'm looking forward to putting a lot of miles on it this year. Many thanks go out to Nate at Outback Bikes for making the build kit side of things happen, and many thanks to Eddie at 55Nine Performance for a fantastic job fitting me and working with Independent Fabrication to get my frame made. The day after my birthday, I headed up to North Georgia for some more mountain biking and revisited the location of my broken collarbone, this time choosing to enjoy miles of fantastic North Georgia singletrack instead of heading to the emergency room after the long climb up a gravel road.

I'm still on track for all of my new years goals for 2009, and already thinking about what might happen in 2010. ithought continues to do well and pay it's bills, and I'm halfway through race season. My two goals that needed a little extra kick halfway through the year were nutrition related, so I finally talked to Namrita at 55Nine Performance Nutrition about what I should be eating to fix some cholesterol numbers and make me go faster on a bike. The first grocery store strip with the new grocery list was a very different experience, but hopefully I'll start to notice some differences over the next few weeks.

Lastly, I've managed to stay on top of Project 365 somehow. I'll definitely try and keep doing that until the end of the year, but it may be more stress than it's worth so perhaps I'll do some other photography challenge for 2010. Suggestions?

As of the 2nd, I'm 24 now. It's not really any different than any other day, but this is the first birthday I've had after being done with school, having a real job, owning a house, etc, so thats kinda neat.

Some spoils:

• Shed from the parents for storing yard tools, etc
• Leatherman Skeletool from San
• LEGOs from San
• Daniel J. Boorstin Reader from parents
• Guitar Hero: Legends of Rock for Wii with 2 Guitars from Roger/Ben/Frank/Kurt/Me
• 5 Pizzas from San
• Something unknown in the mail from my brother. Will update here when it gets here -> Antitrust DVD and a book "Stuff White People Like"
• Entirely too many facebook wall, etc, posts from lots of people

I'll probably get me a Dell MD1000 for my hosting setup sometime in the next month or two, but that's not really birthday related.

Last weekend was spent in Destin, FL with San and some of her relatives. I took a few pictures and the good ones are here. These include some of my first fireworks pictures that aren't awful. The gorillapod worked out pretty well but next time, perhaps I'll remember my remote shutter release.

In 2 Weeks I'll be in Amsterdam for the 4th Galery Developer Conference, and then it's off to Paris. While I've been to both before, hanging out with Gallery people in Amsterdam will be a lot of fun, and I'm managing to squeeze in seeing the final stage of the Tour de France in Paris! Expect many pictures.

Earlier this week I turned 23. Just another day really except San was in town and we ran around all weekend and I ended up with slightly more things than I started the day with:"Thinking of You 2" by Sam Brown, and the Japanese edition (none of this silly American dubbing and cropping to 4:3 stupidness) of My Neighbor Totoro. (And a crochet corn dog. with crochet ketchup and mustard on it). So hooray for crossing of another book and dvd from my wantlist. San actually came up with what to get me before looking at the list even though they were on the list. Awesome.

Saturday we went to Big Basin State Park to see the Redwoods and then headed down to the Monterey Bay Aquarium to see the Sea Otters, and then down to Pebble Beach to see the ocean. Sunday was the SF-88 Nike Missile Site and Mt. Tamalpais.

Fireworks in Mountain View on July 4th were pretty disapointing. Lenox Mall fireworks in Atlanta (pictures from 2005) and things like fireworks over the river in Prague (pictures from 2005) just have me spoiled. Most of what I got out of them on the 4th here is that I need to get better at taking pictures of fireworks and maybe use a tripod once in a while. Hopefully I'll get around to uploading the pictures from this go at it tomorrow.

One more month to go in California!

It's now a little over a week since I've turned 21 and everyhing I expected has come true. Nothing is different really. It's mostly just another day but I guess it has its perks. Benifits include being able to buy whatever I want and the one forgotten one, places with a cover charge less for us older folk. Cool. I think.

Anyways, first comes the list:

• From the parents:  Lots and lots of $$ of things fixed on my car.  Some things more important than others but stuff was broke and now its substantiall less broke. My dad gave me a book as well, and much food was consumed.
• From the grandparents: The usual cards and checks.
• From the gf (details on that in a min):  Bambi on DVD (HELL YES!) and a rice crispy treat the size of a small planet that more or less had the usual cake type message on it in icing. mmm. 
• A card from Richard, like one of the paper kinds you put in an envelope and put a stamp on and all that. I didn't know they stil made them.
• Shirt an belt from Becca because after I got her computer related things for her bday she figured she get me something in the realm of what she likes for mine.
• And the usual pile of facebook notes, wall changes, emails, IMs, irc messages, voice mails, text messages and smoke signals.

Thank's to everyone for the stuff, and if you feel all guilty now it's never too late.... I even accept paypal if it comes to that, but I digress. Here's whats been going on with me.

For the birthday weekend I went camping with the FM crew at Cloudland Canyon and we had an awesome time. As usual there are pictures, but highlights include conveinent thunderstorms, jumping off of rocks into the river, exploring, checking out the big waterfalls in the canyon, shooting bottle rockets at one another, hiking to accordian music, utilizing dry ice to keep drinks cold, and eating awesome tasty healthy real food.  Basically if you weren't there you should have been.  Upon our return we had pizza and I purchased my first legal alcoholic beverage. Cool or something..

Other fun things over the week included buying fireworks in Georgia which is now legal for those of us over 18, getting a great birthday dinner and a huuuuge margerita with Melissa at OTB, buying the newest Starting Line and Bloc Party CDs at Target, and other things that I can't quite remember and not because I was wasted because I wasn't you crazy who ever you are.

Then Wednesday afternoon I headed down to Tampa to hang out with Laura.  So Laura and I have been friends since last October where a certain someone poked me on facebook. Twice.  We've hung out lots and lots since then, primarly eating more than our share of unhealthy food and watching awful movies, but as of last week we're all __insert favorite "relationship"ish word here__ and stuff now.  So with that said, how could I not go to Tampa.  I got back Sunday night and those 4 days or so were about as crazyness packed as they come.  Beating her little brother in SSX3 more than once or twice, dinner with the parents and stayin in their house, throwing people in the air in the pool after 3 person marco polo prooved to be not enough of a challenge, getting attacked by sand fleas on the beach at night, line dancin it up at the Dallas Bull and then spending tons of $$ at Steak and Shake, staying up late watching movies, "Batman Begins" at an IMAX theatre after lots of BBQ for dinner, aimlessly wandering around atop parking decks in the crazy hurricane wind, biking around south Tampa, taking Riley to the doggy beach, gettin new clothes for me at the mall, meetin all of Laura's friends that i kept hearing about (except for Shawn, that bum), nice old ladies working at CVS giving discounts, etc, etc.  Lots of fun, gotta do that again but now its Laura's turn to come visit me again. Can't wait. School starting up again and being able to hang out whenever will be nice too.

Driving back in the Hurricane rainy mess was scary scary but I survived somehow, And so begins more working and taking care of things and listening to loud music and biking and all that.  After no internet all day and two steak grilled stuffed burritos for dinner I'm about beat.  More this week if there's time between the eating and biking and hanging out that needs to be happening when I'm not working or sleeping.