Yesterday as I left work it dawned on me that I had been in the San Francisco Bay Area for a year. It is one of the most drastic changes in my life since going to college.

I have a mysql server for reviewsby.us that requires tunneling, and after establishing a tunnel like so:

I haven’t been completely happy with myself lately.

I am happy with my life in general, and external things. In fact, let me preface this post by saying that I’m happy with my wife, my friends and my family. Even my job is pretty good despite the oncoming layoffs which I hopefully won’t be subjected to, but you never know.

I mainly see my intellectual and physical development hasn’t been where I’d like, despite an urge to advance in both areas (i.e. in more simplified terms I’m getting dumber and fatter).

This post isn’t meant to be a downer… my hope is I can improve on each of these aspects one by one. I think it’s completely natural to have peaks and troughs in terms of personal development. I think it’s when I identify a low that I make valiant efforts at trying to improve myself. Let’s see how things go.

I’ll attempt to post more details. One of the things I want to do is keep a better journal of my life, be it a blog or otherwise… it seems to be what all the cool kids are doing … or were doing ;)

Email, in a lot of ways, is one of the most critical applications for me.

Here’s what I’m missing in the South Bay in the next week:

• Django Con is on the 6th of September
• Free Agile Training is on the 10-11th
• Yahoo Hack Day is on the 12-13th.

I am looking forward to seeing my friends’ wedding, and taking a look at my house, and settling some financial affairs, but all in all, I’m not looking forward to Minneapolis at all.

Visiting Minneapolis is way different than living in Minneapolis. It involves being away from home, taking care of affairs that are easier done in Minneapolis than in CA (we have professional contacts that we’d like to keep that live in Minneapolis as well as a small piece of rental property).

It involves driving around a lot… which is why I’ve been on a kick to get a folding bike so I can take it with me next time. I don’t drive much at all in the Bay Area, and I never did that much in Minneapolis.

It also involves working out of a coffee shop or possibly the Tea Garden, while I enjoy doing that, I don’t really enjoy doing that all the time.

It’s also the idea that this is taking place of a proper vacation where I can just rest.

It’s also going to be hot… and that’s compared to being in the South Bay. I’ll make the best of it, and I’ll enjoy what I can… but sitting at home, I am not really looking forward to this trip.

My mother-in-law was visiting this past week and she was happily shooting pictures with her Canon Powershot SD30 and then the barrel decided to not retract and the camera gave the E18 error.

My dad’s relationship to cars is way different than mine. He has a nice Lexus LS460 and my mom drives a practical Volvo S80. They drive their cars separately every day to and from the same office.

I’ve done some rewrites of code, and they usually are coupled with redesigns.

I want to start dabbling with postgreSQL on OS X. After several SVN checkouts, binary packages, etc, I’ve realize the easiest path to success is just installing from fink unstable.