So Many Things

Once again, I haven’t posted in a while. My targeted average of one post per week is falling apart at the seams… oh well, maybe I’ll get it back up.

There have been many things to do down here in the valley. Last Sunday, myself and Naeim saw Seth MacFarlane (creator of Family Guy). He’s an entertaining speaker, plus we got to see one of next years episodes (before it’s been animated, so it was really just storyboards & voices).

This weekend, I drove up to San Mateo to the Maker Faire. Lots of interesting things to see there, from amateur radio to car conversions to robots. It was also a good chance to take my new car for a run on the highway with the top down.

This coming weekend, I’ll be ‘entertaining’ Angus as he visits the area (for better or worse, I don’t know all that much of the area yet, but I now have a loan of a couple of tourist books–thanks Erin). I’m still not sure what we’ll do, but I’m sure it’ll involve a drive up to San Francisco.

Besides these things, I’ve also managed to play through Jade Empire (mostly on the weeknights after work). It’s a very good game, if you have an Xbox, I suggest that you track down a copy and play through it. It has an interesting story (with a couple of unexpected twists in there), the action is good not too easy, but still not all that difficult. There are a couple of cheap combos in there that make can make a few of the major fights pretty easy though.

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Gallery Lightboxed

If you’re into fancy web tricks/layouts/etc. and you haven’t already, check out Lightbox JS v2.0. It’s a neat little script that lets you link to images and have them display on top of your current page, without having to navigate away.

I’ve been meaning to try to integrate it into my photo gallery for some time now, and finally sat down and did it this evening. So, if you try to browse through my gallery now, and click on the thumbnail of an image, the full size version will load over the current page. I didn’t enable it for the random photo on the sidebar though, as lightbox needs around 110kb of JavaScript to operate, and I think that’s a little heavy for my page (my 12kb CSS file is big enough as it is), but if you follow a link titled ‘Photo Gallery’ while on a slow connection, you should be ready to wait for a little bit.

Update: I’ve made a few more changes to my Lightbox integration. I removed all the fancy effects, and made te necessary changes to my gallery theme to enable the use of the lightbox ‘previous’ and ‘next buttons’. As a result, I’ve cut that 110kb of JavaScript down to only 24kb.

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Geoff’s New Ride

My big news this week was that I (finally) got my new car. It’s a sly (grey) Pontiac Solstice, with ebony leather interior. Pretty close to fully loaded; it has everything except XM, OnStar, the smoker’s package, acoustic headliner, and automatic transmission (and who’d want that?). It’s a very nice ride, but I have to get used to the thumbs-up’s and approving nods that I get from other drivers.

The one thing I don’t understand is why credit ratings don’t carry over from country to country. Since I came down to the United States, I’m essentially starting with a blank slate as far as credit is concerned, even after years of using credit responsibly in Canada. I guess if I had bad credit in Canada, I’d appreciate this chance to start over, but that’s not the case.

I fail to see why they don’t carry over. At least in the US and Canada, the same companies run the checks (Equifax, etc.), why can’t they link the two? It dosen’t sound like a difficult problem from a technical point of view, so I can only assume that there’s some legal and/or political reason. It seems to me that linking the reports would be beneficial to both the applicants and to the parties granting the credit. The companies would like the extra information, and the applicants would like the information to be used. The only people who I could foresee taking issue with this are ones with bad credit, and if you’re moving to a different country to escape credit issues, you’ve got bigger problems.]]>

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Ping Poäng

I’m now officially moved in, I think I got my last piece of furniture (the Ikea Poäng chair, see photo). There are a few more furnished photos in my Apartment album. The only thing left to do is to get a larger TV… the 13″ one don’t really cut it for movies and Xbox.

I’ve been pretty busy for the last little while, between trying to learn the Googely way of doing things at work and trying to get everything else figured out, outside of work. I’ve managed to get myself a social security number, and am on the road (ha ha) to getting my California driver’s license. That being said, I should have my own car early this week (maybe even tomorrow)… photos will be forthcoming once I pick it up.

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