The Other Half

I was just on my way to see a house that I'm designing and was listening to NPR discussing the real estate situation in the bay area. The part of the discussion I heard dealt with how people like teachers and service workers are leaving the area because they can't buy a home. And prices are only getting higher.

And then I arrived to the house, which is a huge single-family home in Pacific Heights with four bedrooms, four full bathrooms, library, office, two-car garage, etc. It is already a beautiful home and my favorite part was the three plasma televisions throughout the house. Three!! The remodel, though, will make the house even larger. It will still have four bedrooms but now five bathrooms, a four-car garage, home theater, excercise room, and breakfast room. And all this for just one couple. Amazing.

I envision striking out on my own with the ability to reject jobs that I find unreasonable. I'm hoping the green building direction will take me that way. Bigger is not always better. There is a really good book that my mother has called The Not So Big House, which shows examples of using smaller houses efficiently. We generally only use a few rooms in a house anyway, so if you design the floor plan such that those rooms flow together well you can get a lot more use out of a lot less space.

Indoor Climbing Structures

I'm currently designing an indoor climbing wall for Planet Granite in Sunnyvale. I don't know how our company became the local experts on indoor climbing structures, but we design just about every one in the bay area. We've even designed one for as far away as Berlin, Germany.

I've included a picture to give you and idea of how we start. It's a 1/2"=1'-0" scale model and I just finished entering every connection point and interconnecting members into the computer for analysis. Luckily, I didn't have to measure each point, which was done by someone else this time. Inside will be some steel towers and then a spiderweb of steel angles making the shape of the structure and connecting back to the towers. It's a big mess inside once it's built.

This particular wall is one of the bigger ones we will have designed. The rectangular area that it covers is about 110 feet by 60 feet and it's almost 60 feet tall at it highest point.

Anyway, I thought you might find it interesting because it's a little different than the usual run-of-the-mill building. If you've never seen an indoor climbing wall, check out the link above and go to their virtual tour.



Click on the photo for a larger size.

Multiplexes in Club Passing

I just published the almost final version of an instructional juggling page that I have been working on for a while. I got most of the remaining videos at the Colombian circus convention and have been editing them into their final cuts. I still need video for a behind-the-back double multiplex, an Albert multiplex, and the triplex, but other than that it's complete. If you're a juggler, let me know what you think and give me any suggestions.

Multiplexes in Club Passing

Otis

I was down in Santa Cruz this weekend visiting my family and late Saturday night I woke up for no reason with an anxiety attack, which is something I've never really had before. I was seeing my future flash before my eyes and having inexplicable fears of death. It was the strangest thing and very unlike me and the only thing I could attribute it to was a result of how I've been feeling this past week as I try to reinsert myself into a settled life.

But then last night I got a call from James and Sarah with the news that our cat Otis had passed away. They returned home from Bruinslair to find him on the kitchen floor. There was nothing that indicated how he died and he had always seemed healthy but he was ten years old and many things can afflict a cat without being discovered so it was just his time I suppose. And it may just be a coincidence that my anxiety attack about death occurred at a possible moment that Otis passed away, but I'd like to believe that I still had a connection as his father even though I hadn't been around for him these past four years.

Otis was a very special cat and he will be dearly missed by those who knew him. We will be holding a small funeral service for him this afternoon and will say our goodbyes.



I'll miss you Otis.

CleanUp!

I'd like to recommend a program to you that you may not have discovered called CleanUp! It cleans out files that accumulate while using the internet such as cookies, temp files, images, etc. It's amazing how much junk accumulates over time. I just ran it on my office machine and recovered over 500MB worth of space.

I have been using it for a few years now, but the latest version has a much better user interface. It does not do anything about spyware, it just cleans up internet garbage. And it's free.

Circus Convention videos

My friend Dave made a couple videos from the convention. The first one is our performance as Los Bajitos, which now has subtitles and is a more reasonable size file. The second one is an awesome video compilation he put together to Manu Negra's 'Mala Vida.'

Click here for the Los Bajitos performance.

Click here for the Circus Convention Compilation.

Back to the Grind

It was back to San Franciso Sunday night and directly to work on Monday. And I already feel swamped. A new engineer (or tenderfoot as my boss called him) started the same day and it seems as though I'm responsible for training him. Plus I have my own projects, a network to bring up to speed, and a life to establish. I think it was just a bit overwhelming yesterday and I need some time to settle in. I feel a bit rushed and I have to realize that I'm going to be here awhile. I think I'm just so accustomed to being around for a few weeks at a time that when I'm at work I feel I need to pack as much as I can into a limited time. So I have to readjust my sense of time.

Now there's a fascinating concept: time. I think I have an unusual concept of it and one of these days maybe I'll get a little philosophical about it since I've had some time to think about time and discover that it truly is relative. But for now I'm just trying establish myself in a routine and get a sense of where I am now so I can start get some efficient use of my time.

Happy Birthday Dad!

I'm in Rhode Island for my dad's birthday. He's sixty-one today.

New Look

I'm changing the format of my journal to make things a little easier for me to publish my entries. Blogs are all the rage these days and there are numerous sites offering their services. I wanted to finish off my latest travels with the old style so that I could create that collection of entries as one extended journey. As my travels come to a halt I'm hoping I can come up with something interesting to read every once in awhile so don't give up on me yet. And if you're looking for old entries that you might have missed they're still here.