Dang bikes are great. I Went mountain biking at Chicopee Woods on friday and even though its been a while since I've been on a mountain bike the walking in Europe and California and the road biking like crazy got together and helped me keep up with Christopher and Kurt most of the time. I think we rode every bit of trail they have there at least once and one of the downhills was perhaps the fastest best downhill section I've had the privilege of riding a bike down.  No falling this go around, just lots of sweaty grossness and riding through a couple of small rivers that led to things gettin a little wet.  After riding we hit up an itty bitty BBQ place down the road from Chicopee (with some Mountain Dew from Publix) and it was fantastic.  Now I just need to get Robert to go on one of the mountain biking trips and the video camera can be busted out and I can share what it's really like. On a not cool note, Yellow River (one of my favorite and usual biking places) is being "improved" by bulldozing all of the bike trails and putting in "nice wide concrete paths" for people to walk around on.  If you'd like to see this not happen check out the content information in the first comment on this page and show your voice so that they know people care.

So after all that I went and saw Mr & Mrs Smith with Melissa and Jean. It was entertaining and all, lots of laughing out loud at the awkwardness of situations in it but eh, I don't think I'd need to see it again.   Now compare that to the movie I saw tonight at movie night at Christopher's.

The Experiment is perhaps the most intense movie I have ever seen.  It's a German movie about the 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment and words cannot do it justice.  You need to see this movie and thats that. Anyways, its bedtime here in the ATL. Work in the morning and i need to ride that road bike some more tomorrow afternoon. Out.

So I have been wanting a road bike for some time... All my mountain bike friends got road bikes and commuter bikes and single speed fixed gear chopper crazyness kinds of bikes as well and I rode one of their road bikes and wow. Speed like there has been no speed before.  To achieve this speed on a regular basis and to be able to keep up with the roadies I finally gave in and got one yesterday.  A used but extreemly well taken care of KHS Flite 300 56cm is now in my possession.

I picked it up at about 9:30 last night and then went over to the lair to get some ridin in, and Ben, Robert, and I went to town on Tech campus with a video camera and a mount for it that Robert made on his bike.  There definitely needs to be another revision of the mount but it was pretty sweet and the footage is worth watchin once or twice.  A full length feature film could be in the works...

Today I did the work thing and upon getting home rode to my parents house which is 5 miles or so away.  I've done it on a mountain bike before but the difference the road bike makes is too much for words. Anyways, time for finding the counter and sink in the kitchen an cleanin up, replenishing my non-existant food stockpile, cooking dinner, and maybe a movie or something?

And I am finally back in Atlanta for the summer.  WWDC as very cool (pictures can be found here), and hanging out in LA with Ashley/Alex/David/etc was pretty awesome.  It's not every weekend you can play edward 40 hands, see a micro VTOL turbojet engine getting tested, build a massive space shuttle and castle, and see people you haven't seen in a while.

It's back to going to work and catching up on the piles of mail in my inbox and on my desk, the pictures from Europe that all need to be uploaded and captioned, the biking that hasn't been happening as much as it should, the guitar sitting on its stand looking lonely, and all the people that I really should hang out with more often.  This summer is going to be the summer of doing what I should do over the summer, and if i'm not doing something fun and cool every week something has gone dreafully wrong.  Places to go outside of the perimiter in no particular order of preference, timeframe, or likelyness:

• Warner Robins, GA - Hangin with Jess
• Dallas, TX - July 4th with the Lair people?
• Tampa, FL - Laura!
• Cloudland Canyon, GA - camping with Faster Mustache and whoever else wants to go
• Jack's River, GA - camping with anyone that wants to go
• Sali, NC - mountain biking like theres never been before
• Lake Rabun, GA - chillin with anyone that wants to go
• White water rafting on the Ocoee
• Sea Kayaking somewhere?
• Skydiving (again) anyone?

If you have any interest in any of these or know things that should be added to the list, let me know. But until something awesome happens I'm going to go see about getting some food in me. It's been 12 hours?

So I'm in San Francisco at WWDC this week. After spending Friday and Saturday in Menlo Park hanging out with Bharat ("The Gallery Guy") where there was eating and doing Gallery things.  I took pictures of his son's freakin huge tonsils shortly before they got taken out. Then it was off to SF saturday night and I checked into the Adelaide Hostel.  Sunday morning was WWDC student stuff and that night was meeting with all kinds of company reps.  I have some business cards and asking of emailing resumes to some people from NVidia, Apple, Microsoft, and that sort of thing. Apple has been providing food the whole time so except for the 6$ of pizza when I got to SF it's all been included.

Monday was the big keynote with Steve Jobs and I'm sure a lot of you have heard a lot about it.  OSX runs on Intel architectures now and Apple is making the big switch. It will be interesting to see how it all turns out 2 years from now.  I still need a new laptop and if Apple doesn't do something cool soon like dual core G4s then I might have to go with a IBM Thinkpad T43 with linux and save my next mac purchace for a desktop.  As a registered Apple developer I get a once in a lifetime pretty hefty discount on a system and it shouldn't be used until I get something sweet..

After that it's been classes on things and eating and talks from people like Tim O'Reilly of  O'Reilly Media. He's all talking web 2.0 which is stuff like map, traffic, weather, etc data supplied through web services through companies like Amazon and Google.  All the stuff I did for senior design is XMLRPC crazyness and it all fits in, and turns out the guy that wrote iPhoto2Gallery is also here and I've been emailing him about using the XMLRPC in his program instead of the crazy old Gallery Remote protocol. Also kinda cool is getting to play with OSX running on Intel P4 boxes.  They could handle such sweet apps as Quartz Composer which my PowerBook can't handle. QC is about the coolest thing ever but from what I can tell theres not much public info about it.  Heres the basics of what I could find. You should use a mac with the 10.4 dev tools on it and play around. Its spiffy. Oh yeah. I read a book today:  "Terminal Man" by Michael Chichton and I bought a new cd: "Atticus: Dragging the Lake 3". Both were pretty cool.

More classes to come this week and Friday afternoon I head off to Los Angeles to hang out with Ashley for the first time in a long time and hang out with david for the first time in a week or so. Then Sunday its back to atlanta where I'm gonna be workin and biking and getting my hangin out on.  If you exist you should join me.

So my Airport base station may not be dead, but the stupid Comcast cable modem certainly is and my house has been without internet for a few days now.  Speakers are hopefully getting fixed but its going to be a few weeks and Klipsch 4.1 speakers are on the way so I'm taking  offers for the 2.1's once they are in working order.  The building at work thinks it is still a holiday so it is not fully functioning and my boss is on a plane to South Dakota.  Pictures from my trip are up now if you haven't found them already, and I'm slowly going through and putting captions on all of them. 

In the lack of network connectivity at home I have rediscovered Sim City 4 (made a city yesterday that has almost 200k people), hung out with people that I should be hanging out with anyway, and gotten on the bike more.  I'm now active in "Faster Mustache" which is a bunch of my friends with the goal of riding bikes a lot, specifically to bars.. but look for an announcement about the launch of our website some time. Friday we rode about 30 miles all around downtown Atlanta, and Sunday was a cookout type thing most of the day. More biking to come and there will be pictures and all that when that happens.  The guitars are also getting used more and hopefully I'll find some people to play with regularily, theres one band type possibility already.

So with that I'm off. I'll be back online to check things sometime today perhaps. Crazyness.

I'm back in Atlanta and everything is crazy. My Airport Base Station is dead, as are my Klipsch 2.1 speakers, and theres just a lot going on to "recover" from Europe and get life back in gear here.  The pictures should be up tomorrow, and there will be a big update on here with the full trip summary when I have some time, but I am alive and just working and catching up for the next 1.5 weeks until i head off to WWDC.