Yesterday I had to work later than I expected and missed playing golf with my friends. I got home wondering what I was going to do when my next door neighbor called and told me I needed to come over and drink margaritas. Woo. When I woke up this morning I was still a little drunk.

The worst part is a friend called to give me back my lawn mower and lend me his pressure washer. So instead of taking a nap, I ended up outside, trying to get the moss off of the driveway.

I suppose it wasn’t a good idea to take two-and-a-half weeks off from the gym. The first week Dave the Trainer was out of town and I golfed instead of working out. The second week I was in San Francisco. And Tuesday Dave wanted to go boating instead of meeting me at the gym and my tetanus shot was still bothering me. Heck, it’s still bothering me a little.

I got my new Mac today and I’m making a mess of it already. I even crashed the thing a little while ago (running beta software, my own fault). It sure seems to run cooler and quieter, but who knows? I gave my mom my old Macbook Pro but it’s no longer reliably running some of her games. Oh, the humanity. And I’m supposed to be going over to the low-income housing for the elderly place and helping them with their computer stuff. Oh, dear.

Tonight, I stayed up late because the episode of Scrubs was the one where they played an Erasure song. Pretty silly. I was also backing up my hard drive because tomorrow I should get my new laptop. Then I’ll have to delete everything off of the old one and give it to my mom.

Went to the lawyer today to finish some paperwork regarding the house. I’m not sure what we did, and we’re just supposed to sit on the paperwork until we really need it. The whole thing seems a little odd to me but he’s the lawyer and he’s supposed to know the rules. The last time I saw him he was in a building with a wood carver/chainsaw artist. This time he’s in a building with a forklift service shop. It’s all a mystery to me.

So I stayed up a little late after getting back from the ER. I think I’m OK for the most part. I got up the morning and decided to sleep in a little, but that didn’t seem to help all that much. My arm hurt from my tetanus shot but Dave the Trainer bailed to go boating so that didn’t affect me all that much.

So my sister has been yelling at me for a couple of day because her Macbook isn’t as easy to set up as I’d led her to believe. She couldn’t get it to work with her wireless network. I drove over there because I had some time (no gym as I mentioned) and it took me 10 seconds to get her hooked up to the wireless network. OK, so I exaggerate. It took me less than a minute, though.

If you have Roundup on your hand, you shouldn’t rub your eye. I was spraying some weed killer around and my hay fever was bothering me. I thought I moved my contact out of place and I even thought I saw it in the mirror later but the sprayer was leaking on my hand. It took a couple of minutes but I realized why my eye was so red. I called the advice nurse, I called Poison Control, I flushed my eye, and then I went to the emergency room. They flushed my eye out some more and gave me a couple of prescriptions. It took a while.

Man, I need to quit finding reasons to see the doctor.

I finally made it back from my trip to San Francisco yesterday and I was beat. Today was about the same and I tried to spend most of the day reading a book and watching golf. I went to the Apple Store downtown where I tried to sell a Macbook Pro to a guy (heh) and helped my sister get her new Macbook. She got a free printer and a free iPod and she gave me the iPod. Score.

The last day of the WWDC was virtually a half-day. I left in the middle of the day to meet Megan in Palo Alto. So I mentioned how she’s hazing me, sending me on the 71 bus down Market St after 11PM with the crackheads, etc. She told me to carry a coat on Friday and I carried that thing to Palo Alto where it was 90°F! The Caltrain down from San Francisco to Palo Alto had windows that didn’t open and no air conditioning. I down to Palo Alto early so I could walk around and the three mile trip through town was more boring and hot than I expected. I found a grocery store and hung around in the frozen food aisle, pretending to be very interested in fish sticks.

Megan took me to the Keith Urban concert in San Jose. When did they start playing music video-ish stuff behind the stage? We only saw a couple of songs by The Wreckers and a couple of songs by Keith Urban before we left. Then we made it back to the city where the drinking continued.

I didn’t leave until Saturday afternoon. My sister asked me to bring back some Japanese treats from Benkyodo in Japantown so I went in the morning. She didn’t tell me that I’d have to walk through the PJs to get to Japantown. There were flyers about the three shooting deaths that happened in the last 48 hours. On the way back, there was a street fair on Fillmore.

Oh, and I sort of went on a date. I met someone I know from online and she drove me to Pickles (the old Clown Alley).

It’s one of the places I was obsessing about, I guess, because one of the managers from Apple said:

21:54: damn, you finally got to clown fucking alley
21:54: thank god
21:54: I thought you'd never stop asking about it. :)

Well, anyway, I met a woman who drove me to a hamburger place and we walked around Chinatown. Megan says it counts. Heh

The Apple WWDC continued today and I’m about to pass out in some of the sessions. I’m way too tired. This morning Megan and I went to a coffee shop (Bluebottle) just under the architecture firm of the husband of someone who I only know online. We waited until he got to work so I could say hello. I conversed online with spouse about this and she said I should wait outside for him to go home so he thought I was stalking him. It wasn’t a nice-sounding thing to do at all. Oh, and we figured out that Cafe Roma in North Beach is better than Bluebottle.

So there was the standard Thursday night conference party with a band from LA whose name I can’t remember. The best part was that I met some students of an old MIT classmate (he was actually a couple years below me but now he’s a famous Media Lab guy) and also and old friend who I’ve known since grade school but who I haven’t seen since his wedding eight years ago. [insert pictures here]. Also, waiting for the bathroom, I met the guy who writes the program I use to blog with (MarsEdit) and asked him about a bug I’ve seen recently (comments are closed by default). He said he’s been seeing the same problem and was quite friendly, too. That’s tech support: standing in line with the right guy to use the bathroom.

Oh, and guys finally gave up and started using the women’s room. Heh.

After a day of geeking, sitting around on my computer, I’m wherever I’m staying, sitting around on my computer. San Francisco is a crowded city and there’s wireless everywhere, but none of it appears to be free like it is in the coffee shops of Portland. Anyway, trying to get from Megan’s bedroom to her living room is difficult because of the abundance of networks.

The Apple geekfest is fun, but it’s mostly white men. The bathroom lines for the men’s room are long and the women probably are alone in the theirs. The geeks, I mean guys, I’m hanging out with are online chatting with each other almost constantly. In between sessions we’re at a round table typing at each other rather than actually chatting. And how’s my week going? It took me a day-and-a-half to install the beta version of the new Apple OS. It wasn’t working at first and I had to buy an external hard drive to back everything up. I had Apple engineers looking at my computer with very confused looks on their faces. The following day I got a super-engineer to look at it and of course the errors went away when he looked.

Fortunately, Megan’s more interesting than the geeks. We went to an old-school Italian restaurant yesterday with great veal scaloppini for not to much dough. Hooray.

The only thing I’m allowed to talk about for day one of WWDC is the keynote address, and here it is: Steve Jobs is skinny. There’s some fun stuff coming down the pike, like the visual effects in iChat, but the only big surprise is that Safari runs on Windows. Not a huge deal. That’s what happens when I finally show up at WWDC. Nothing big happens.

I was supposed to hang out with Megan tonight but I ended up drinking very good beer with the usual suspects who I know from online. Bad me. I finally called Megan about 10:30 from her neighborhood (she’s still housesitting out of her neighborhood) and went to her Safeway for some shaving stuff. Is it every Safeway that’s full of crazy people? There were long lines of people buying booze and fights at the door. Fortunately I made it back in a taxi who took me on Mr. Toad’s wild ride.

Oh, and today I had an obligatory argument with a Seattleite about Seattle vs. Portland. My opinion is that Seattle is like Portland, but it sucks more. Seattleites never seem to like that assessment.

Well, I made it down to SF with no problems, but somehow I ended up driving 180 miles to get to a barbecue and back. So far, so good, though. I met a bunch of Apple people and they don’t seem much different than any other group of geeks I’ve met in the past. I heard some disparaging remarks about the google-ites who keep repeating “best and brightest” to prove something to themselves. I can’t say much because Megacorp is neither.

Tomorrow I’m supposed to get up early to hear Steve Jobs and his amazing keynote address. I’ve also heard that if you step on Steve’s shadow as an Apple employee, you get shown the door. Yeesh. Well, enough of that. Time for sleep.

I’m off to the Apple Worldwide Developer’s Conference where I’m going to pretend to be a developer for a week. It’s like a geek fantasy camp for me. I’m staying with my friend Megan, so I won’t be able to live the total geek life. She won’t let me. I’ll give it a good try, though.

Friday was another stellar day at Megacorp. My world-class manager told me twice that my bad attitude would no longer be tolerated. I asked (as anyone with a bad attitude would) how that compares to the guys with good attitudes who do nothing. Phooey. Fortunately, I got to play golf after work. I made a par on a par 3 but the next hole, a par 5, I got an 18 including penalties. Fortunately, I don’t care and it didn’t bother me that much. I’m in the sun, away from work, on a lawn I don’t have to mow, and I get to hit things. What could be better?

I had nothing to say yesterday and I have nothing to say today except I suck at golf. I’ve only been playing a week, so it’s not a big surprise. Monday I played nine holes (and sucked). Wednesday I went to a driving range, practiced putting, driving, and my chip shot, and I sucked. Today I played 9 holes at an “executive course” and I sucked. Tomorrow I may suck at another nine holes of golf.

Enough about golf. I got a new cell phone because my mom needed an easy-to-use cell phone and I figured my Razr would be good. I got a different phone for myself and she got the Razr. I got my first two phone calls on the thing today (two days after I got it) and I didn’t recognize the ring. I was in the doctor’s waiting room wondering whose annoying phone was ringing and it was mine. Sheesh.