Rand Wacker

After my finals last year, Alexis had planned a fantastic weekend for us in Mendocino, several hours north on the California coast. We had never been there before, even though we’d been very close on numerous occasions. Soooooooo glad we finally made it all the way, we totally fell in love with that little town! Beautiful views, great food, totally mellow, and no cell reception. We had a fantastic weekend, very relaxing.

This last weekend we went up again, for an early anniversary trip. This trip we ended up sleeping a lot, going for some nice hikes, and enjoying a couple of longer-than-usual road trips. We got some really good pictures out in the forest and I thought they were worth posting:

If you go, we highly recommend the Headlands Inn, in particular the Strauss room with the view of the ocean.

A couple of weeks ago I got to go to Hong Kong for work for my first time ever. Ridiculous trip schedule (taking a red-eye right after a school midterm, landing and going straight into three days of meetings, turning around and coming home less than 72 hours later), but a very good trip nonetheless.

Since this was a work kick-off event, we had half a day of team fun to get out and explore the city. I posted some of the interesting scenery photos to my gallery:

Particularly fun was an adventure to the “Ladies Market” with my co-workers Mike and Sonny. They were under orders from their wives to find some knock-off handbags, and had even been trained in what to look for as a “good quality fake”. We had little luck finding the right items in the usual street-level bazar, but we soon found a stall that consisted of nothing more than a folding table and a bunch of catalogs. Not catalogs of the original products mind you, but full catalogs of knock-off items.

It seems like there’s been some cracking down on displaying certain manufacturer’s wares out in the open, but there’s apparently no problem with taking people up to sketchy “showrooms” housed in converted apartments. We started in one place that was a 3-room apartment where the sales guy lived with his family, and used one of the rooms to store piles and piles of different fake bags; unfortunately none of what we wanted though.

The second venue was much larger (they dedicated an entire 4 room flat) and organized by different categories (handbags, purses, briefcases, and a huge table of watches). This place turned out to have just what everyone was looking for, and we ended up bargaining for a couple hundred dollars worth of knock-off goods. Actually, I use the term “we” lightly, as it was Sonny who drove the really hard bargain and essentially got my little gift for the wife almost for free.

Final note, don’t bother buying button-down shirts from a street vendor in Hong Kong. They might look like a good cut and color, but they are usually made out of polyester and of completely crappy quality. Oh well, it was a $6 experiment.

I’ve been thinking for a while my home DSL speed is slow (I believe I’m pretty far from the CO), but CNet’s not-too-scientific bandwidth meter showed me just how bad it is. I’m at 381Kbps (where I’m supposed to be getting 1.5Mbps).

All this wonders if maybe I should just go completely wireless.

Things have been insane lately, and I’ve been quoting a classmate of mine going through the same work/school insanity who said “it can’t get any worse than it is right now.” Why oh why do I bother tempting fate like this:

The under construction house next to ours caught on fire last Wednesday night/Thursday morning. I was fast asleep due to a late night but Alexis heard a loud crash at 3am and yelled “FIRE!” This woke me up but I was totally disoriented, didn’t know if it was inside or outside the house. We called 911, and the owner who lives across the street. We ran outside and saw that there were flames pouring out of the windows on the side next to our house, and starting to burn the tree and fence between the houses (this was literally 10 feet from our bedroom window). We manned spray hoses from both ends and tried to keep things from advancing, but when the fire department got there about 10 minutes later it was clear that the other house was a goner.

The scary part is that if we hadn’t been home I think this could have been a lot worse. No-one else on the block came out of their houses until they heard the fire trucks there, and things were already moving pretty fast when we placed that call. As someone whose away from home pretty often, my worst nightmare from before was coming home to a house that fell down, this came scarily close to coming true. I still don’t think I’ve fully processed this information, but its been a little stressful.

This Craigslist posting got sent to our (usually not) funny list at work. It was worth passing on.

(and it was also letting people know I’m alive, just insanely buried under a pile of work and school)