Dave Dash

So I’m trying to do a bit more than the 2.5 miles to the station and back, so I biked to work today and decided to bike part of the way back like so:

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but ended up doing something more like:

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And I was totally confused. Luckily there was a VTA bus station nearby, and I noticed I was near the light rail which I intended to take home and another Yahoo! One company perk is Yahoo! has placed offices between my regular office in Santa Clara and my home in Mountain View. So I stopped by the local Yahoo! office and hopped on the wifi and posted this… I now wait for a shuttle

I know this, but a lot of people were surprised that this is what I do at Yahoo! When I attended Lunch 2.0.

Yes, del.icio.us is a part of Yahoo!

People keep asking me how things are going in CA.

They are going well.

Biking

I finally told myself I need to start biking more. So I biked to work… all the way (normally I bike to the Mountain View caltrain station and take a shuttle to my work). It was 8.6 miles of bike lanes everywhere.
I went this-a-way. I totally felt like a champion. There was a few scary parts, one where I had to cross over an on ramp. It wasn’t too bad. Then there was a scary part where I cross four lanes of traffic. See here. I made it in at about the same time I normally came in and I didn’t leave too much earlier.

Of course this really was nothing compared to yesterday when Katie and I met our friend Al at a halfway point in San Mateo… about 20 miles from our place (and his). That was quite a work out and a thrilling ride. There’s so much to see in the Bay Area on our bikes, it’s great and there are lanes everywhere.

Work

Work is fine. I work at Yahoo! on del.icio.us using the symfony framework. We’re really making it a great product that will not only look great, but perform well as we gain more and more users. When it launches I can tell you what I worked on

Now, we don’t get free food like Google does, but it’s fairly inexpensive. We do get free fountain soda and coffee. By free coffee, I mean its pretty much an inhouse coffee shop that’ll make whatever you want. Every now and then I treat myself to a frappé (which incidentally isn’t free, it’s $2.00).

Also, because people ask. Yes, I’m allowed to use GMail, Gtalk, Google Maps, etc, etc, etc. Yes, it’s Yahoo! and they do want you to use Yahoo! products, but if you happen to use a competitors product, oh well.

Home

Our apartment is slowly coming together. It helped that Katie doesn’t have a 9-5. We’ve got a couch, and although we’re not fully furnished, we have enough of our place ready to entertain guests.

Outside of Home

We’ve been rather busy. Whether it’s our good friend Katie Romportl Cook coming down from Sacramento, or other friends coming into town, or events in the city, or just hanging out with our friend Al… we’ve had a lot to do. We do a lot of biking, and we’re checking out meetup.com. It’s a lot of fun.

So watching Heroes has made me want to learn Japanese again. I’ve noticed that one difficult thing is using hiragana-only to learn Japanese. Here’s the same sentence that means The book is good:

1. hon wa ii desu.
2. ほんはいいです。
3. 本はいいです。

The problem for me isn’t the script, it’s the spaces. It’s very easy for me to read the first one and know that there’s different words.

The second example is in hiragana only. There’s no way of knowing (unless you know the language) what the different characters represent. It’s all one space-less sentence.

The third example is actually quite easy to read in comparison to the second. The kanji for book is easily recognized.

I’ve been doing the Rosetta Stone Japanese lessons and I go through the lessons three times. Once to just figure out what words are what and what is a part of speech, so Romanji (the first one) is best. Then I go through it to torture myself using hiragana. Then I use the kanji which are just symbols that represent things, thus making it easy to say, “oh yeah, that’s a book, that’s a tree, that’s an elephant” and immediately answer questions.

For most of my adult life, I have had terrible vision in my left eye (the one affected by congenital ptosis). The “1-2″ test that doctors and nurses have given me have always been a frustration. “1-2″ what does it matter if I can barely read the third largest line on the eye chart.

I’ve been seeing the same eye doctor twice a year for a few years, and finally I asked, what can I do to improve my vision in the left eye. It’s a simple question, but for some reason, it needed to be asked before something was to happen.

We did a much better “1-2″ test where things didn’t just go from blurry to blurry, but from blurry, to “oh my God, I can read.” He wrote me a prescription that brought me up from 20/100 to 20/25. This is like a total upgrade to my life.

In the next week or two, my intent is to exchange my lenses at America’s Best and try out my new vision. I’m very excited.

Yesterday I finally reached that target weight, 159.6 pounds. If I can maintain this weight, that would put me at a BMI of 25, which is the border for “Normal weight” and “Overweight.” My goal since sometime last year was to meet or beat this weight. Judging from my past performance it could take me as long as a few weeks to just over a month to maintain that weight. Since I know my goal is to be at this weight by June 17th, I’ll be putting a lot more effort into continuing to lose weight.

Once the wedding is finished and after firmly nailing down my goal, I’ll post a detailed summary of my year of weight loss. It was easier than I expected to drop the 15-25 pounds. Also, once this goal is nailed down, I’ll come up with a new goal that gets me firmly into the healthy weight category. Stay tuned.

I’m getting silicon implants.

I have what is known as congenital ptosis in my left eyelid. Basically Ptosis is a drooping of the upper eyelid.

When I was four I had surgery which fixed a significant ammount of problems that I did have with my eyelids. Around last year I felt that it was time to have more work done on my eye.

I met with the very doctor who worked on my eyes 15 years ago and we scheduled surgery. The processis basically adding a silicon sling within my eye that will keep my eye open like normal.

The surgery will take place next Tuesday (3 Aug).