Happy New Year

While the rest of you are out partying and drinking champagne, I'm sitting in my apartment boxing stuff up. It's true that you never realize how much crap you've accumulated until you try and move it all. So here's a virtual toast to 2007, from me to all of you, including the two Californians who appear to have forgotten their Blogger passwords or something. I hope all of your evenings are better than mine, or at least involve more vomiting.

Holiday Spirit

We knew for a long time that Bo had a problem. We try to ignore it. We imagine that he's okay and that these are just one-time occurances. But we have to face the facts sooner or later.

This is Bo's second Christmas (alive) and he hasn't been handling it well. I didn't realize the size of the problem until I awoke one morning to find him passed out under the tree, his breath reaking of tuna fish. Doesn't he know how this hurts us? Doesn't he care?

Bo passed out under the tree.

On to other cats.
We had to take Ally to the emergency room again because she got the lesions on her back just like last time. They gave her the steroids, pepcid, antibiotics regimen. They also shaved the area around which the lesions occured. It turns out they were all around her neck. She looks like she's in pretty rough shape, but she's doing better than she was a few days ago. Looks like we will have to see an animal specialist if this is going to keep happening. The last time we took her was in October.

One side of Ally's neck.

Ally's back.

Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas from the Cardenas Clan to the outside context crew :) Hope you're having a great holiday!

Another Disa-google-pointment.

So, I signed up for a YouTube account today. I was hoping that I could just use Google Video (especially since Google bought YouTube) and be satisfied.

However, Google video makes it a little harder to do the one thing that I really want with video - post it here. With Google, I have to upload the video, then post it to Blogger (also owned by Google) from the video.google.com website. On the other (better) side, when you see a video on YouTube's site, there are two links right there, right next to the video. One is the actual URL for the video, and the other is a short piece of HTML code that you can use to imbed it into any site (like this one). This little piece of HTML code is infinitely more useful than what Google video provides.

For example, when I embeded the two videos in the Vail post, I had to actually pretend to post those two videos individually from the Google site. Then I had to cut and paste the HTML from those two fake posts into the actual post that I had written. Then I had to go back and delete the two fake videos. Pain In The Ass.

Once I logged into YouTube, it took me about two minutes to find this clip of Leo Laporte reporting on the MS Zune (which I have disliked from the beginning and quickly pinned as destined to commercial failure):


I just cut and paste the whole object tag right from the YouTube site and put in right into the HTML of this post. How easy. By the way, Leo is one of my favorite tech guys because he is extremely knowledgeable and down to earth about what technology needs to do for people to be successful.

The "Perfect" Form

So, it turns out that Jen and I actually enjoy skiing. I don't enjoy the expense. I don't enjoy the painful learning curve (I still have bruises on my shins). I don't enjoy the half-pint six-year-old kids going in a snake very slowly down the slope. But I do enjoy the feeling of rushing down the grade (in control) and "shushing" my way back and forth through the snow.

After our first day's instruction on Sunday, Jen and I went back by ourselves on Wednesday. We were big fans of the pizza-french fries technique.
We never went off of the bunny slopes, but we had a good time. We went up and down the mini-lift just to the right of "Minnie's Lift".

We spent the first half of the day going up and down what's called the "magic carpet". It's basically a conveyor belt that very slowly takes you up the almost-flat grade of the bunny slope. In the picture above, they are labeled 35 and 18. Here's Jen on 18.

If we had one more day of skiing, we would have conquered the greens, no problem. For your laughing enjoyment, here is a vid of my very second trip down the side of number 18 on Sunday. I wish I had a video of me toward the end of the day on Wednesday. Trust me, it would look much different.



There are some other Vail highlights, to be sure, courtesy of the patented Kellogg team bonding technique. First the Sunday night wig-walk:

Monday night Wild West Party:

Wednesday night pub golf in the condos. My condo hosted a drink called a "Colorado Bulldog". It looked like ass and tasted very yummy. Here's our hole before people arrived:
And after:

Thursday was relatively quiet, save for the fact that the closing concert was put on my the 80's rock cover band Fast Times.
It turns out the bar had a wooden floor installed above a layer of tires to help with country western line dancing. When you fill the dance floor with excited, drunk grad students all jumping up and down in unison, the effect is quite shocking. This is a video with very bad sound (the camera was overwhelmed by the huge speakers in front of me), but you can still make out the song being sung mostly by the crowd.



When I took this video, my feet were flat on the floor. The movement is the floor itself. And I was on the side, it was worse (better?) in the center of the crowd.

That's about it for Vail. Watch out, Tahoe, here we come.

Our First Christmas Tree

Is it wrong that I spent an hour getting this together today even though I feel sick? Well, I'll put up some more info about the ski trip tomorrow.

Workin' it once again

So my languid days of lying on the couch at home, traveling the world and collecting unemployment are over. My first day here was nothing like my first day at Brunswick, where I was given my paperwork and then left to rot in my cubicle for the rest of the day. Here they had a whole schedule ready for me, and my every moment up to now has been blocked out. They're hitting me with information pretty fast and furiously, which is kind of nice. It sounds like when I'm busy around here, I'm going to be really, really busy. The volume of candidates, interviews and hiring is pretty much quadruple what I used to handle.

The commute - 10 minutes in the car, 55 minutes on the train and 35 minutes on a bus - is gruesome. Fortunately, I move down to the city in about three weeks, and then the commute will drop to a half an hour, like it was during the old Brunswick days. In the meantime I'm getting a lot of reading done - if you've never read Herman Wouk's "The Winds of War," I highly recommend it.

In happier news, I have a window cubicle here and a pretty good view, all things considered. We're on the 30th floor, and when it's clear I can see the lake. So if you feel like impressing someone, you can say you have a friend with a window office in the John Hancock Center. It'd have to be someone who's very easily impressed, however.

Bienvenidos a Cabeza del Leon

So, it turns out that we are actually in Lionshead, not Vail Village.

Here are the highlights so far:

• Counting Crows suck.
• Counting Crows in an outdoor venue really suck.
• Putting on ski boots hurts.
• Walking in ski boots hurts.
• Skiing in ski boots hurts.
• Jen + short red wig = hooker look-alike.
• What's the deal with outdoor hottubs?
• The profit margin on everything and anything for sale in Vail has got to be huuuge!

I have some pretty good pictures, but ofcourse no way to post them. I hate T-mobile. Tomorrow we hit the slopes again. Hopefully we will both get better by the end of the day. Today is hangout day (thank goodness).

Later.

7° and -8°

Those were the temperature readings for the current temperature and windchill, respectively, that they announced on the radio this morning as I drove Jen to work. Brrrrrr! It's cold in here!

Today is errand day before we take off for Vail. The high will be 27° F today. Tomorrow and Sunday, you ask? Mid to high 40's. Great.

Phone pic of our courtyard after first snow.

66.66%

That's how done I am with my program. This morning, I finished my last final for this quarter; Management of Technology. It wasn't too bad, all things considered. I have now completed four of the six quarters needed for graduation. I have the rest of the afternoon to feel accomplished.

I went back into the archive and pulled out this picture of the Beanski. This was on the beach near Hermosillo, taken in the spring of last year, before we moved back to Chi-town.

I originally tried to post this using the built-in blogging tool in Picasa. I was a little disappointed in the functionality. Picasa and Blogger are both owned by Google, so there is a link directly from one to the other. But, there is no way (that I saw) to post more than one picture, and you can't move the picture around in the editor or is goes away irretrievably. And the connection is really, really slow. So, I'm still looking for an efficient way to post pictures. Things I've tried:

1. Direct email address provided by Blogger to send posts: you have to log in after you send the email to actually publish it.
2. BlogMailr.com: The embedded pictures that I sent with my emails didn't get published, only placeholders.
3. Picasa Blogger tool: very slow and lacks functions for multiple pictures and formating.

On an unrelated note: I just finished a Law & Order episode where Grey's Anatomy's Kate Walsh was a Navy pilot that killed a guy. She was a blond and still very hot.

With a little luck, I will put up a couple more pictures the LA trip from the handy-dandy Samsung-cam.