mmrobins.com

I helped Kim staff an Eco Encore booth in front of the PCC in Kirkland for a few hours. It was mostly just to get the message out about Eco Encore and what they do, but we got a few donations too. Afterwards we were driving to the Mariners game and guess who we ran into? Someone who lives in Kirkland… Give up? Okay, it was Jake, out for a bike ride. We chatted a bit and then took off for the game that we were already late for.

Gabe and Jacob were already there since I got all four of the awesome company seats and was able to invite friends. I suppose that could be because the Mariners kinda suck this year and nobody wanted the tickets. In fact, I think that they have lost every game that I’ve gone to see this year. True to form, they lost this one too. They were ahead when we got there and Ichiro was 3 for 3, but after we arrived they fell behind and Ichiro went hitless. Oh well, baseball games are fun anyway, especially when you get such good seats for free.

• Reading: "The World Is Flat" by Thomas L Friedman
• aktt_notify_twitter: no

We were going to go climbing, but Kim got really excited when Waleska mentioned that she and Jacob were going to the Puyallup Fair. So we hitched a ride with them down to the fair to do some fair stuff. (more…)

• Reading: Stealing the Network: How to Own the Continent
• aktt_notify_twitter: no

At the Mariner’s Game

My dad visited for the weekend to go to a Mariner’s game and hang out. He got in Friday night earlier than I expected, which was great because then we could go out and have some fun. He, Kim and I went to a supposed jazz show and fundraiser for one of Eco Encore’s recipients. (more…)

• Listening To: Sergent Garcia
• aktt_notify_twitter: no

I only went to one day of Bumbershoot this year. (more…)

The approximate travel route

My friend Brian has been traveling through Peru and Bolivia, doing all sorts of cool stuff that I’m jealous of, and he’s documenting the travels with a lot of great detail in his blog (not to be confused with the comically teenaged blog by a different Brian Alexander). I wish there had been such a good way to share my travels when I was in Egypt or China.

I really liked one of his latest entries about his trip to the mines near Potosi. I can’t wait to see pictures.

I realized after these weeks of reading his blog that I really didn’t know the geography and had little idea where he was, so I put together a little map of his travels so far and the order of cities that he’s visited. I wanted to just use google maps or something like that to make the map, but they haven’t mapped out much outside the U.S. and Europe, so I just drew it on a little jpg. I may have misread or missed something, but this is the list of cities he’s travelled to:

Peru

• Lima July 19
• Arequipa July 21
• Puno July 24
• Uros Islands July 26
• Tequile Island July 26

Bolivia

• Copacabana July 29
• La Paz July 31
• Coroico Aug 2
• Rurrenabaque Aug 4
• Pampas Aug 8
• Trinidad Aug 15
• Santa Cruz Aug 17
• Bermejo Aug 22
• Cochabamba Aug 23
• Punata Aug 23
• Sucre Aug 26th
• Potosi Aug 29th

Kim and I took a little trip, just the two of us, to Lopez to camp, bike and hang out for the weekend. Kim did all the planning, which was wonderful. We got to the ferry 15 minutes early thinking that would be plenty of time since we had bikes. (more…)

• Reading: Libertarianism: A Primer by David Boaz
• aktt_notify_twitter: no

Kim and I met up with Jessie at a bar after work. I was there with a bunch of people from work to say goodbye to Mike Flohr. It’ll be a shame to see him go. He was one of the funnest people at the company. Can’t remember the name of the bar, but it’s in Freemont next to the old Redhook brewery and they have the strangest beer list I’ve ever seen. The one that really stuck out in my mind was a 9 liter bottle of beer that cost $300. I really wish we could have ordered it and have had the company pay for it. Maybe one day…

After the bar Kim and I got ready for the weekend bike trip to the San Juans and then took off for Jacob’s. We had wine and cheese and visited with Jacob and Waleska, Jesse and Deborah, Betsy and Wes and Waleska’s friend. We sat around and caught up on what other people had been doing. I miss the rowdy parties we used to have, but everyone’s too busy to get trashed and take the whole next day to recover now. Silly working lives.

Kim and I had to take off early too since we were getting up early to catch the ferry. Weekend warrior time. Silly work, forcing all the fun to the weekend.

• aktt_notify_twitter: no

I finally got Tor working. I never tried very hard before, but I didn’t realize until reading some good setup instructions that you need to also download Privoxy and configure some things. Tor basically works by routing your internet web page requests through other computers so that your IP address isn’t available to remote server.

It’s cool that it works, but it really slows down web suring depending on who you end up routing through. One time I turned it on I ended up routing through a server in Germany, and web pages loaded painfully slow then. I turned it off and back on and got a server at Brown University and that was a little better, but still noticeably slower. I’m considering trying to setup a Tor server just to see if it would work, but probably not unless I find some more time.

• Listening To: Jason Webley

Jason Webley’s concerts are always a blast. (more…)

I’m still trying to figure out how I want to organize my blog content. WordPress comes with built in category support, but I’m finding that I don’t like using categories. I seem to have a tendency to make too many categories when I think that I should just stick to very general categories. I’m trying a plugin called Ultimate Tag Warrior that lets me assign del.icio.us style tags to my posts. I think I like this better since I can add new tags without having to go to a tag management page, unlike categories. This folksonomy style of tagging seems promising to me, but I’ll try it out for a while to see if it works better than categories, or if it just enhances them.