Winter arrived swiftly...

This morning we awoke to a frosty scene, with all the cars sporting a nice coat of white crystal stuff.
The crisp air made for a lovely sunrise, seen here as I was exiting the Mt. Baker tunnel and headed across Lake Washington. I was hoping that Mt. Rainier would be visible for this shot, but it was shrouded in clouds.
Hope you all had a great Thanksgiving holiday.

Early adoption can be painful

As I write this message from a Windows Mobile 5 device, I begin to realize that being an early adopter can be a painful thing sometimes. This device and it's software are great, but there are some issues that need to be worked around. I'll go into more detail some other time, but wanted to try accessing the Blogger systems using this thing.

Oiy - who'da thunk 7 yards could be so far?

So as Wendy mentioned, this weekend our friends Steve, Katie and I moved a little over 7 yards of topsoil. Only it wasn't really just "moving" it...

When the provider delivered the soil, it was a "mixed load" of 7 yards topsoil, 2 yards steer manure, and 1 yard sand. So they put 7, 2, and 1 yard into the dump truck, drove it to our place, and dumped it. Not mixed up. In patches in the pile.

So while Steve was running the 'barrow up and back, I'd blend the next 'barrow-full. I basically was shoveling all day long. Throwing a few shovel-fulls of soil, then one of sand, and a couple of manure back up onto the top of the pile until he made it back for another load. Then help quickly fill the 'barrow with all that I'd been able to mix, and starting the process over again. I'm not complaining, mind you. I just wanted it to be clear that it was a bit more work than how it was described, which explains why the ibuprofen doesn't seem to be working. And why I have this funny pain where the inner edges of my shoulder blades move over my back. And also why, when I first try to stand up, my legs and lower back don't seem to be communicating with each other well, resulting in a couple of stumbling steps before I'm able to become fully upright and get into a rhythmic walking pattern.

Boy, that garden better be nice by this time next year when I've finally recovered...

Me and my car(s). Or, "Why Stephen is a nut."

OK, so here's the deal about the car...

First a bit of history. I grew up with a Dad who was a car buff. But not an average, american muscle car buff. we watched NASCAR at home, sure, but we also watched F1 and several of the sports car series when I was growing up. Dad went to see the F1 in California one year when I was too young to go with him (boy, I sure hated him for that for a while...). That was one of the years that the cars were using skirts and fans to increase downforce. One of the cars that that was part of my driving education was his 1974 Saab Sonnet III (an early front drive sportscar.) This was the first manual tranny car I ever drove, and it set me up for the future quite well.

My first car was a 1965 VW Beetle. Dad & I stripped the interior and reinforced the rusted floor pan with fiberglass. We dropped the engine, replaced the clutch, and re-installed the engine before I took it out of the driveway. After that one, I had a 4-speed 1974 Volvo 145 wagon. Great car for all kinds of things (Drive In movie dates, camping, etc.) Although a little heavy. After a time with that one, I saved up some money and bought my first sports car, a 1979 Toyota Celica. I think it was the GT version, but the badges were missing, and I didn't know enough to be able to tell. That car lasted a long time, and I learned a lot in it. When it retired, I replaced it with my first new car, a 1993 Mazda Protege DX. A 5-speed, of course. Had it for 8 years before Wendy & I traded it in for a 626 and I started driving her Nissan 240sx with a slushbox (automatic). Neat cars, but really boring and uncomfortable for me. I just couldnt get used to the disconnected feeling of the slushbox.

I finally found a great replacement a year or two later, and was introduced to the wonders of mid-engine madness. A 1985 Toyato MR2 showed me how much I missed a sportscar. This became my daily driver for several years, and I had great fun with it. Small, nimble, relatively quick. Nearly bulletproof, this car let me rack up over 30k miles with barely any maintenance, and I sold it for only a little less than what I paid for it. Which kind of brings me to the current stable of what's in the family now...

When we were getting close to the end of the lease on the Mazda 626 that Wendy was driving, I encouraged her to test drive what was my personal favorite choice... the MINI Cooper. She fell in love, and we ordered one to arrive concurrent with the end of the lease. That's been the family car ever since, and Wendy's daily driver.

For me, I decided I wanted a BMW E30 (80's 3 series small sedan). I initially had planned on trying to find a 1991 318is, as it had most of the features I was looking for (light, nimble, LSD) but had a great deal of trouble locating one. In the process of that search, an E30 M3 showed up in the newspaper. Then a few weeks later it was still there. Then it showed up on the BMW Club website... After much discussion with Wendy, I went and test drove it, and rediscovered a dream car (further details to come later.) So I am now the proud owner of a piece of automotive racing history...

A 1989 Diamantenshwartz (er... Black Metallic) BMW M3.

Color, or the lack thereof

On seeing this blog, and linking to Wendy's blog, a friend commented that "her's is so pink. And your's is so, not pink!"
Well, it's true. This one is definitely, not pink. It's not that I have anything against pink. It has it's place. As a matter of fact there's a pink highlighter that I used to use frequently. There's a pink lighter on my desk that gets used when I need to heat a piece of cord etc. There are other things around here that I use that have pink involved as well.
But for me, of the available templates, this fit the best. I've got a black car (you'll be reading more about that as time goes on. Wendy would call it an obsession.) We have two black cats (only one of which is my fault, and not entirely at that.) To counter Wendy's pink tennis shoes, I have all black Converse high-tops. (Great for driving. Very comfortable too.)
So that's why this blog is festooned with a general lack of color. Like the main title says, "It's just a guy thing."

A (somewhat) brief history...

I thought it might be appropriate to provide a little history on how everything got started (from my point of view, of course.)

I didn’t start out a geek, really. It sort of slowly happened over time. Although, as I look back, it was always a possibility that never realized it’s potential until the last few years. I guess a “closet geek” would have been a close description.

You see, the tools required to really get geeky weren’t available to me as a kid much. Electronic gadgets weren’t in the family budget (or at least were lower in priority than outdoorsy stuff like a good bike.) Since I couldn’t play with the stuff much at home, it made using it at school much less interesting. So instead I became more of an artistic bookworm type. Buried myself in SciFi for a great many years, while avoiding homework as much as I could.

When it was finally time for College, I initially tried to keep to that artistic path, and studied Illustration and Production Art at the Art Institute of Seattle. This landed me a production art job that I kept for quite a few years, while the geek side of my personality started to get a little antsy.

I finally bought my first computer, an Apple Macintosh Performa, in around 1995 from my roommate at the time, as he was upgrading to a newer model. This allowed me to start getting into email, and web surfing, and I actually started to think about “what can I make this thing DO for me?” This of course began leading me down what I considered at the time to be “the path of the dark side…” Using Microsoft® Windows. Eeww.

It was a very slow conversion. It took 7 years for me to become turned. The final steps took place after my third job. The process was helped along by one of those major life changing events that has helped me to do many things that I would have otherwise never have started… I got married. I’ll save that story for another post, but will say that it was a highlight in my life, and continues to be a source of happiness.

She was a Windoze user, though, so we became a two-platform family, along with her two cats. After a couple years, I left my first after-college job for a more design-oriented position. This was short-lived due to financial woes that befell the company that hired me. After a few rough months, I was able to find a (better) job with a telecom-oriented company, and began to try to teach myself C/C++. Not having much luck, I abandoned that for a time. A couple years later, at the beginning of the Dot Com bust, I was again unemployed, followed closely by the events of 9/11/2001. That was another one of those “Life-Changing” events. I went back to school to gain some new skills, and became entrenched in the Windows environment. It was a matter of economic feasibility at that point, as training on a Mac for programming was not available in the area (especially not state-sponsored education…)

Two years later I was graduating with my second Associate degree, this time from South Seattle Community College, in Software Engineering. I ended up getting hired by a contract agency, and placed within Microsoft Corporation. This lasted (as a “vendor”) for almost two more years. A month later I was picked up by S&T Onsite and placed as a Programmer/Writer in the Windows Platform SDK group working on Shell documentation.

It’s been a wild ride so far…

Getting used to another system...

Wendy & I are getting ready to take a trip to Italy in December and thought this would be a good medium for documenting our trip. We'll be posting pictures and talking about the things we do.

Sometimes I might just use this as a place to practice a little creative writing, or just blast the blogosphere with a random thought, programming question, or other imaginatory bit of info...