TitaniumLou

The Alamo Drafthouse always has a really neat film festival called Fantastic Fest.  The festival is focused usually on sci-fi and horror flicks and always has some “interesting” features.  It’s not the biggest film festival around but according to their twitter feed they’ve been getting some really good press this year, which is great news since the Drafthouse is always doing cool things and deserve some recognition now and then.

I browsed through quite a few of the trailers from the Fantastic Fest site and found these that I’d like to try checking out.  I won’t have time for all (or possibly any) of them, but here’s to dreaming right?

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I posted a bunch of old pics to my Flickr account.

If you know me now and wonder what I’d look like with short hair, check them out. Otherwise stay away.

Click here

Yesterday after work I went running with a few colleagues, or that’s what the plan was.

Thanks to some highway traffic on Mo-Pac (big surprise there) I ended up getting to the Lady Bird Lake Hike & Bike trail before everyone else, even though I thought I was running late.

So I ran from the Mo-Pac bridge along the north trail until the Congress bridge, then back to Mo-Pac.  According to City of Austin Parks & Recreation department website that’s just under 5 miles.  I took my phone with me so I was able to time myself, and all told it took me 52:18, which I’m pleased with, but I did end up walking a little bit and I was trying to at least jog the whole way without stopping.

I’ve never been a runner, I enjoy sports that require running, but I’ve never taken much joy from simply going out for a jog.  I’m interested however to see if I can train for a 10k that’s coming up at the end of April, on the 26th to be precise, to see if I can do the thing in under an hour.  I’m within that goal I think, just have to pace myself a little better so I don’t end up walking, but in reality I don’t have a whole lot of time before the event to train up.  So we’ll see…

I’m going climbing tomorrow which should be pretty nice, and then maybe I’ll try going for another run on Monday or something.  A couple of runs next week should give me some good training and also let me try figure out a consistent pace I can keep up for 5 – 6 miles.

Here’s hoping…

A bunch of the folks at work have taken the Clifton StrengthsFinder online quiz to see what their attributes are, and here are mine:

People who are especially talented in the Learner theme have a great desire to learn and want to continuously improve. In particular, the process of learning, rather than the outcome, excites them.

People who are especially talented in the Achiever theme have a great deal of stamina and work hard. They take great satisfaction from being busy and productive.

People who are especially talented in the Deliberative theme are best described by the serious care they take in making decisions or choices. They anticipate the obstacles.

People who are especially talented in the Analytical theme search for reasons and causes. They have the ability to think about all the factors that might affect a situation.

People who are especially talented in the Responsibility theme take psychological ownership of what they say they will do. They are committed to stable values such as honesty and loyalty.

How well do you think these describe me?

Way late, I know, but better late than never right?  right?

In years past I’ve enjoyed the SXSW Music Festival with various strategies, sometimes with a music wristband, sometimes without.

This year Sara was going to be out of town for the Music Festival (which was disappointing) but I had taken days off from work and purchased a wristband, intending to go to free (or wristband-required) day shows, then also go to shows at night.  This is always a pretty good test of endurance, since most of the day shows have free or discounted alcoholic beverages, and it’s tough for me to resist having at least one drink during the nighttime showcases.

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So a few weeks back I attempted to ride to work from home, since a colleague who lives a little further north had made the commitement and had ridden in a few times.  He lent me his copy of his Austin Bike Map and let me know the route he took, which would end up being pretty similar to the one I would need to take.

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<typical blog post after a period of silence>
I’ve been meaning to keep this blog a lot more up to date than I have as of late, but since I’m on holiday I’ve got some spare time to actually put in some updates.

Yay for me
</typical blog post after a period of silence>

I’m currently in San Francisco since Sara had some work stuff going on today and yesterday.  We decided to stay through the weekend and make a nice little vacation out of the deal, which has panned out pretty well so far.

So today I’ll be uploading a good number of pictures to my flickr page, and posting a few blog updates that I’ve been meaning to post for a while.

Hope you enjoy

So 2008 was a pretty big year.  I finished up my Master’s in Software Engineering at the end of 2007 and then left IBM in late August of 2008.  I’m now employed at Reddwerks as a Software Engineer doing Java development.  It’s definitely interesting work, and since it’s a small company I’ve been working A LOT.

Sara and I bought a house at the end of October.  It’s a 2 bedroom 1 bathroom just under 1000 square feet in a nice quiet neighborhood in Austin, which we’re both very excited about.  We’ve both been working a lot so we’re still working on unpacking everything and getting things put away where we really want them to live, but we hope to have that all taken care of soon.  Hopefully soon.

Along with that I’ve done a couple of things in the past week to the house, which I took pictures of since I was pretty proud of what I did, even though they weren’t super big projects at all. 

There are pictures on Flickr here.

First task was to see if the dryer exhaust pipe had any lint clogging it, since we weren’t getting good drying out of the thing.  Turns out it was really really congested, though not technically totally stopped up.

Second task was to install some Infinity in-wall speakers that I bought off of Ebay.  A couple of them were a little rough since I had to crawl way towards the end of the attic to cut the holes in the drywall, but all in all they turned out pretty well.  I hooked up our receiver yesterday but have to figure out how to get the FM input to output to all 4 speakers.  I’ve seen it posted elsewhere, but the Denon receiver manuals are very difficult to understand…

Next week I’m back to work, but I’m going to try to keep this blog updated with more thoughts/stories/happenings/etc since it’s a nice way to “write” things down. 

Leaving for los angeles this morning and unless there’s some horrific “lightning-strikes-twice” type of event, I’ll be coming back to a new job starting on Tuesday!

More after the trip, but in the meantime if you know of anything that we should do specifically in L.A. let me know.

Somehow I had been expecting something like this to happen.  Still sucks to have it actually go down though.

So I’ve been interviewing at different places in town recently, looking for a Junior Development position since my qualifications don’t really justify a senior position in the eyes of most.

Tuesday I received an offer letter via email offering me a job with Company X detailing a proposed starting date of July 28 with a salary and other benefits details.
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