Welp -- I did it tonight. There was a V5 that I've been working now since last tuesday and it finally sent tonight.

It's a "true" V5 -- I had climbed one other marked a V5 but everyone seemed to agree that it was a V4+. Although, as my old outdoor ed teacher said, if it's rated a V5, who cared what anyone else says? But everyone agrees that this was a V5 -- and a hard one at that!

There's two more V5's that I'd like to get done before they take 'em down but I'm on my way!! What a relief getting it done!!

*yay*
*jumps up and down*

--B--

I went to a very small middle school -- My graduating 8th grade class had 8 kids in it.
Two of those guys played guitar. In fact I helped 'em build their first amp out of circuit parts that Marc Kummel had in the science lab. Ahhhhh -- those were the days!

Anywase, those two guys got together and started a band (I think they were just out of high school when they started it) called Ivy League. Well, it turned out that their was already a band called Ivy League -- plus they were a ska/punkish type band and that was too close to Op Ivy, another ska band.

So -- after changing their name to the Mad Caddies, they released a couple of albums. It's all fun music... ska-ish.. punk-ish.. metal-ish.. squirrel-nut-zippers-ish.. lots of styles all rolled into one.

Whats my point? They are playing in San Francisco in late February. That means I've got tix to go see 'em. Unfortunately Carter, one of the two that I knew in the middle school, is no longer with the band. Owning his own business was interfearing with the band and vice versa. But it'll still be a great show!!

yay!!!
--B--

Hello all...
Came across this software that was talked about on Lockergnome that allows me to post blogs from a seperate "client" application. So.......... I'm testing it out!

So far it looks good to me...we'll see what it does when I click "post" though!
--B--

Welp...
Sorry about the lack of updates recently -- I haven't felt very motivated to do much of anything. I'll make sure that I post about my lack of motivation in the future -- only I have to be somewhat motivated to do that and that sorta negates the idea of the lack of motivation -- therfor I would need to be motivated to -- you get the idea.

Spent the weekend visiting my grandparents in SoCal this weekend. Reloaded their computer for them and visited with them -- trying to be the good grandson that they wish I was -- or something like that.

Now I have some questions...
Every time I leave on a vacation, all hell at my work place breaks loose. Nobody remembers to do my daily rutines, even though I have written them out and emailed them around several times in the past. Nobody remembers to "babysit" the servers. It seems that nobody does any sort of systems or software maintenance, allowing things to go south incredibly quickly. Why is that?

Every time I come back from vacation, I dread the next day at work. I get all stressed out about it and worry my ugly little head off. Is that normal?

Every time I am *on* vacation, I strongly consider never returning to my job. Instead, going off and finding some mundane job paying minimum wage where the people that I work for actually appreciate other humans and don't treat them like robotic slaves... how do I curb that?

As they say in office space (the movie), most people don't enjoy their jobs -- but if you can find something you like doing then go do it. Well that is only true so far as you also enjoy the people you work with and the people you work for. If you don't then you risk hating the thing that you liked doing before...

*throws streamers in the air*
Welcome back Brent

*sigh*
--B--

Welp -- it was a build day again...
It was supposed to be the humoungous ol' update to our AOL site. We do this partnership with AOL where we give away a limited version of our software to users of AOL@School. Nywase, we were posting a new version of our tree -- the old version is slow, a memory hog, etc. The new version is a .net control and is supposed to be way kewler (and there is deffinately no memory leak!).

So everything is going smoothly and I get to the point where I'm getting ready to test the site. I attempt to log in to the new updated tree/site, and bam -- I get some wierd obscure error back. I attempted to try everything I could think of to fix it -- and then went and got Michael. We finally put a "debug" version of the component out and found the problem.

We ran out of hardware in our office so at one point I was told to take a machine out of the QA environment for whatever other reason we had at the time (why buy new hardware to replace old broken hardware when you can use other systems that are currently being used??!). So the problem was that we have a clustered environment on our live servers and a non-clustered environment in QA. So... we had to back out those changes (last minute like) and we will try and get it fixed tomorrow.

A big fat *ugh* to that.

In other news, Jason and I went climbing tonight. Got up a 5.11a with a little bit of work (lots of small holds on that climb and two falls) and a 5.10d (on sight flash!!).

Nywase, came home, rode my bike (only for 45 minutes -- I couldn't manage a full hour) and then that brings us to now. I'm off to bed shortly...

*yawn*
--B--

Okay -- so I don't know how many times I've posted about kewl sunrises. Nor do I know exactly why I find sunrises so fascinating. To me they are way more magical then sunsets (although I've seen some pretty damn impressive sunsets as well...). Maybe I find them amazing because normally, if I had my way, I wouldn't be awake to see them. Ever.

However with work being the way work has been recently, I've been going in to the office early in the morning. If I leave between 7:10 and 7:15am on my bike normally I get in to work at 7:30ish. That also means that I get to see the sun rise. If I go in to work at 7:00am I don't get this.

So anywase, last week I saw one of the more amazing sunrises I've ever seen. I'm not sure what the metorlogical events that caused it to look like this were but it was freakin' amazing.

I head out the door at 7:10am. I'm a little bit ahead of schedule which means a leisurely ride to work -- not a sprint. I round the corner of the condos to my first view of the south-east sky and see the dark clouds that would mean rain if they were lower. The sun hasn't peeked above the hills and mountains of Sonoma County yet -- but that part of the sky was deffinately brightening up. You could easily make out the mountains and the deep purple that happens right before the sun starts to begin it's daily climb.

As I pulled onto Marlow (the road that will take me to work -- it's a north/south road), the sky began to change colors. Only it wasn't like a normal sunrise (although those are still quite impressive). There must have been (some magic in... oh wrong thought -- sorry!) some other clouds right at the edge of the dark clouds. Only these were much much higher in the sky. They began to reflect the sunrise like you would expect to see during a sunset. They turned a very deep red.

So let me try and paint the picture a little better for you. I'm bicylcing south looking south-east (where the sun rises during the winter for those of you closer to the equaiter). There are dark mountains in the distance. Above them is clear sky -- then a strip of clouds that is reflecting the sunlight -- above that strip is the overcast grey of rain clouds. So the part that was reflecting the sunlight was just a small strip. If you were to hold your arm out straight with your thumb up, it was the size of your thumb.

The color lightened and became a fire-colored-red. Much as I remember seeing hills in so-cal during fire season when they were burning (that time always made for impressive sunsets -- even if they were impressive only because of the destruction going on). The strip of clouds lightened even more as the sun rose higher, becoming a orange color and then a pinkish color.

As I crossed over a highway, I looked out towards the west and saw something else I had never seen. A full rainbow (I've seen those). What made this one amazing was a) it wasn't raining and b) the sun wasn't visible yet. Now I'm sure with the curve of the earth and the water molicules that was in the rain clouds above, this could be expected -- however it was way freakin' kewl!

So on one side I've got the sun rising up with a strip of clouds doing the (not-quite-web-safe) pallete of reds; and on the other side I've got this humongous rainbow.

The whole ride in to work was quite an amazing experince. It set me up for a decent day. Unfortunately -- I then arrived at work -- but I guess I can't have everything all the time...

--B--

Last night I got myself up a V4+ that I had been working for a couple days. I'm pretty sure I'm not doing it the way they wanted it to be done but hey -- it works for me!

It starts down low in the roof section of the bouldering area, comes out into the back room using a couple decent holds moving towards a big ol' sloper. You hit that hold, get a foot way high (like almost the same hight as your hands), match hands on the sloper and crank like mad to the next hold. Thats where it gets tough. The move that they want you to do is this funky heel-hook on the sloper you just had your hands on and then throw your body up to the next hold. I could do this move maybe one out of every 5 tries.

Then I was working it yesterday and someone was like -- instead of doing that, why don't you just smear your feet over on the other wall? The next hold is pretty decent so I decided to give it a shot. I'm not normally one for smearing, but in this case it worked out quite good. I hit the next hold first try. Two more attempts on it and I was up to the top! I'll keep working the heel-hook move but sheesh! It's a hard move!

The other routes that were put up in the outer bouldering area seemed really hard. However after looking back on it, I didn't do my normal warmup (A couple V0-'s, a V0, V0+, V1, V2, then on to V3's and harder) and there was a serious lack of concentration on my part. Oh well. Tomorrow!! (I was falling off V2+'s!! What was up with that?!?).

The super secret project is progressing nicely... slowly ... but nicely! Hopefully we'll have more information on it soon!

--B--