I really should have done these, at the least, weekly, but I guess this is good enough for today.

Seattle

For 4 nights and 5 days, I had the pleasure of visiting Seattle with a friend of mine from Chicago. To tell you the truth, I haven’t had a real vacation since I visited San Jose in 2006, so I really needed this trip to get out of town.

Definitely quite the trip. Did all the touristy things I could think of, and then some. This involved, in order:

• Downtown: I didn’t know this place was so hilly, more on this later.
• Seattle Public Library: Beautiful. I could get so much work done here if it wasn’t so crowded… and if the Internet didn’t suck as much. Very interesting color choices on some floors. (Yes, an entire floor of blood-shot red? Awesome.)
• Shiro’s: Sushi? Yes. $5.50 for toro worth it? HECK YES.
• Space Needle: Definitely picked the best morning to go up during our stay. (As a sidenote, not a single droplet of rain during our entire stay… I heard that the whole rain thing is a bit of misnomer. Just a lot of overcast/fog.)
• Sci-Fi Museum/Experience Music Project: Sci-Fi Museum was kinda broke, but the EMP was hotness. So much fun messing around with the demo exhibit. Totally bring over a band to practice…
• International District: Lots of things to see… only if I had a Chinese friend in Seattle. Had the best Dim Sum at House of Hong (of course, this was only my second).
• Underground Tour: History of Seattle, learned that the place was actually even hillier… and shadier…
• Mars Hill Church: Pastor Mark Driscoll is the man. And the music, oh so good. And the people, oh so awesome.
• Microsoft: Visitor’s Center is quite well done, except it’s not as big as I thought it would be. Campus is quite large and pretty. Reminded me of Yahoo!’s campus, but only bigger and shinier.
• Nintendo: Eh. What’s a visitor’s center? Oh, that’s right… it’s integrated with the customer support center, featuring the most nondescript office buildings I have ever seen.
• Pike Place Market: Chowda. Confectional. Blah blah blah. So much to do and see and eat here.
• University of Washington: A beautiful campus, with some very interesting architecture.

This really isn’t a comprehensive list, but all in all, a trip to be remembered (and it has been recorded… maybe one day you’ll see the video I recorded). Definitely opened my eyes to Seattle as a possible option for where I want to be in the future.

Cost: ~$700. $229 for plane, $150 for hotel (Thanks, Danny), and like $300 for food and everything. Totally worth it… especially the sushi. Freaking sushi…

Sickness

On the last day of the trip, I awoke with a headache and a sore throat. This only continued to get worse, on the plane and on the drive home. My entire body was shaking violently as I tried to keep warm. It was insane.

Popping DayQuil and NightQuil like candy, I tried to stay alive. (Add digestive problems on top of some ridiculous headaches and nasal blockage, as well as the aforementioned chills…) I missed work on Thursday and Friday, and felt miserable coming back to work on Monday. Really, what a horrible end to such a wonderful trip.

Giving Up?

All the while I was sick, I kept trying to bring back the blog and restart my efforts for HanMeta. (The keyword here is try, I don’t remember much of that weekend…) But really, I kept getting hit in the face with failure. And maybe if I did it with a fully recovered brain, things would have gone better… no, I take that back; I just didn’t know what the heck was going on.

In the end, I got better. (I think today, I am finally rid of this) But from it all, I’ve realized that I’m probably going to have just as much, if not more, crap times ahead. What will pull me through next time, other than my silly human fickleness? I don’t know. I sure hope, at that point, I’ll have enough happy thoughts to get me through the dark times. That, and hope. And faith: Faith in knowing that this is what I really really want to do.

The Last Two Weeks

It’s been tough, but I’m getting the hang of the server admin hat. No, I take that back. Let me start this again.

It’s been tough, but I’m starting to realize how insane server administration is. Just having that appreciation alone has made me a better person. Of course, this isn’t stopping me from trying to keep going with this… but definitely I have a post or two in the works on the matter. Maybe one day I’ll have enough knowledge to share with the world, but until then, I hang on to Google queries like a n00b. (This, by the way, is definitely a post-worthy topic… the fact that while you can search exact error strings, some docs are just horrendously out of date or just wrong.)

Got the blog back up, started to set up some Rails server side business, and slowly learned more Ruby and vim in the process of these past two weeks.

Health

Gym. Once every two days. It started, purely coincidentally, on the 1st of this month. Let’s see how long this streak lasts. And I have no idea how I lost 5 pounds. I think it was probably because I was sick. I guess it’s good news? I sure hope it’s not muscle loss.

This cold weather is wreaking havoc on everything. I don’t think I can stand another winter. Good thing I’ve already made plans to be out of this town by August… the question is where to go from here. More on that later.

And So…

That concludes another long post. Congrats on reading up on my life, as I portrayed it. One thing is for certain, I really want to write more on HanMeta stuff as it unfolds. I’ve been recording some podcast-y material while I leave notes to myself, but I wonder if I’ll ever get the courage to post them online.