Category: Photos

Posted on
by

Seriously, doesn’t this chair look like it was made of the material they were trying to find a use for in the first episode of Better Off Ted…and turned into a chair so irritating that it increased worker productivity because people couldn’t get comfortable? (You can see it in the middle of this 10-minute preview.)

office-chair

It was the chair in our hotel room (the converted bank office with the impressive lobby). Fortunately it wasn’t nearly as scratchy as Viridian Dynamics’ “Focus Master.” (Incidentally: more Better off Ted episodes are starting up in a couple of weeks for the summer!)

Some graffiti on plywood in the Gaslamp District area:

And then there was this “You Are Under Surveillance” sign. Something about the combination of the sign, the stairway, and all the posters on the walls just looked interesting.

Posted on
by

We’ve been following singer/songwriter Butterfly Boucher since 2004 — in fact, since the first day we tuned in to the now-defunct Indie 103.1 and heard “Another White Dash” for the first time. We caught her opening for Barenaked Ladies a few months later and picked up her album, then caught her again opening for Sarah McLachlan later that year. Her second album, “Scary Fragile”, finally came out on Tuesday (it’s very good — Katie says it may be the best sophomore album she’s ever heard), and she’s doing a concert tour. She’s playing in Los Angeles most of this month, but timing worked out better for us to go see her in San Diego on Saturday. So we bought some tickets and made a weekend trip out of it.

Historic San Diego

Old Town San Diego Wagon.We drove down after lunch on Saturday and hit Old Town San Diego on the way in. (More Highlander Grog!) I could swear I don’t remember having trouble finding it before, but the last few times it’s been hard to get to even following a map. At least we managed better than we did in December, when we ended up several miles inland before we could find a place to cross the inlet.

I don’t remember much going on the last time we were there, but this time Old Town was in full-on living history mode, complete with tour guides dressed up in 1800s outfits and a horse-and-buggy ride.

Fancy lobby. Once it was a bank, now it's a hotel.I’d booked the Courtyard San Diego Downtown because it’s literally next door to the House of Blues. It took a while to negotiate the one-way streets, but once we arrived, we stepped inside and were blown away by the lobby. It turns out that the hotel used to be the building for the San Diego Trust & Savings bank. After the bank closed in the 1990s, Marriott bought it and converted it to a hotel. The vault, safe deposit rooms, and other rooms on the first floor became a conference center, and the offices on the upper floors became guest rooms. They’ve preserved as much of the old look of the place as possible, down to keeping the mail slots on the former office doors. (Don’t worry, they’re blocked.)

Clouds and TowersWe ate dinner at Chopahn (6th Ave. near F St.), an Afghan restaurant we first visited during last year’s Comic-Con. It was empty when we got there, which I hope was just because we were there on the early side, because the food is great. Another couple arrived while we were eating, but they were the only people we saw other than the waitress. She had started pushing tables together as if they were expecting a larger party later on.

After dinner we wandered the Gaslamp district for a while. I kept making notes of where various hotels or restaurants were located. Eventually I realized I was basically scouting for Comic-Con next month.

Around 7:00 we made our way to the House of Blues.

Concert

That’s when we discovered that we’d been under a misapprehension about the nature of the venue. Continue reading →

Posted on
by

Hard to believe it, but this is the 2,000th post on this blog. Yeah, I know — crazy.

In celebration of this milestone, here’s looking back at…

The Year 2000

I was a recent college graduate, while Katie was finishing up her last year at UCI. We’d been dating for a little over a year. I’d started working as a web designer just before Y2K, only to be thrust into the role of sysadmin when our previous sysadmin pulled up stakes and moved to the other side of the country.

Travel

Cypress Point Lookout.In March, Katie and I took a trip to the San Francisco Bay Area to check out UC Berkeley as a potential grad school and visit San Francisco and Monterey. (I’ve got one photo from that trip online.) In August we went north again to attend a friend’s wedding near Santa Rosa, and a few weeks later, Katie was a bridesmaid in our friends Stacy and Jim’s wedding.

Hike in the Angeles National Forest.We went camping with UCI’s Campuswide Honors Program that April in the Angeles National Forest (in the mountains north of Los Angeles) — you can check out funny quotes from that trip. We may have hit the Renaissance Faire that spring (we definitely went in 1999 and 2001). In July we went with Katie’s family to the San Diego Zoo, and met up with a bunch of friends at Disneyland in November.

Sometime that summer I went on a company trip to do whitewater rafting on the south fork of the American River. It was a lot of fun…even though I fell out of the raft on a Class III rapid with the cheerful name of Satan’s Cesspool. It happened to be the spot where the rafting company set up their camera, so somewhere I have a series of pictures of our raft heading through the rapid while I lean farther and farther out until all you can see is a hand. (I was fine — I just swallowed some river water and rode the rapid like it was a water slide, and they picked me up when the water calmed down.)

Katie dressed as a Centauri.I definitely went to Comic-Con International that summer, and we both went to LosCon in November. That was the year Katie dressed up as a Centauri (Babylon 5), and we have quotes from LosCon as well!

Cyberspace (Yeah, people still called it that)

I bought the hyperborea.org domain name in January and had my entire website moved off of the UCI Artslab servers by February. That included Flash: Those Who Ride the Lightning, nearly four years old at the time, and Les Misérables: The Complete Multilingual Libretto…which, after nearly five years online, netted my my first (and so far only) takedown notice just one month after I moved it from .edu to .org. I still think there has to have been a connection.

Meanwhile, Katie moved her website from GeoCities to Xoom…which shortly thereafter became NBCi, then disappeared entirely, and she set up shop on hyperborea.org.

Living Situation

Lake Forest ApartmentIn June, after about a year living with my parents post-graduation, I took my saved-up money and moved into an apartment in Lake Forest, where I never quite finished unpacking. (I never picked up a couch, either, just folding borrowed chairs.) When Katie graduated, she moved out of student housing and back in with her parents, and I racked up a lot of miles on my car driving back and forth to Downey.

In December, Katie moved into my apartment for a few weeks while she looked for a job, and we looked for a larger apartment. We officially moved in together during the week between Christmas and New Year’s. During a December heat wave, naturally.

Update (August 2009): I’ve been cleaning up the Twitter digests, and ended up just deleting some that were redundant. So technically, this is no longer the 2,000th item in the archive, though it was at the time it was posted.

Posted on
by

Stopped Freeway

Here’s something funny that happened last weekend.

We were driving back from Los Angeles Saturday night around 11:30pm. You might think at that hour traffic would be relatively light. Not so: it was Saturday night, after all, and the route we were taking (101 south to 5 and onward) went straight through Downtown LA. By the time we merged onto the 5 we’d already been delayed by several slowdowns from accidents. It was a bit past midnight when traffic just…stopped.

We waited, figuring it was another round of stop-and-go traffic. And waited. A fire truck quietly worked its way along the right shoulder. After a few minutes, I put the parking brake on.

But the funny part was the driver of the car next to us.

He looked like he was probably around 20, and was driving an SUV with a sunroof. After a few minutes of dead stop, he opened the sun roof — this was midnight, remember — and climbed up on top of his car to see what was going on.

Then he got back down, opened the door, and walked around to the back of his truck so he could get his camera…and his guitar.

Next step: He handed the camera to his friend in the passenger seat, then walked out in the middle of the lane to pose by the car in front of him, giving a double thumbs-up sign and a goofy grin. As far as we could see, he didn’t actually end up playing the guitar.

I expect the photo is probably on Facebook or Myspace by now…somewhere.

All I’ve got are some blurry photos of the dashboard and the cars ahead.

Oh, and the traffic break? Not surprisingly, it turned out to be an accident. Once we started moving again, we passed an area where several lanes were blocked off…and a car was propped up on its side.

Posted on
by

I’ve been posting old photos to Flickr lately, including some shots from a couple of trips to Las Vegas.

Like this shot of the Flying Saucer Mall — excuse me, the Fashion Show Mall. (I got the initials right!)

Seriously, doesn’t that view just say, “The visitors have landed?”

Maybe they’ll want some Alien Fresh Jerky.

»All pages site-wide with this tag