(from 2005)

Mahlen Morris's weblog from 2005, in newer-items-at-the-top style. (All the links to places on the site are broken and just being kept for history.)

Last weekend was the Google Christmas party, and a giant affair it was. Here's Diane in front of the on-theme posters inside.

Oh, and yes, we got back from China and all that. Someday there will be pictures here of it.

I was wandering around our neighborhood one afternoon, when I heard a band playing, and following the music, I found this block party going on in the middle of the street.

The other dog who comes to my office, and the artistic arranged remains of one of George's toys.

That's my laptop on the left with a picture of Diane and me, and two 24" monitors for my Linux box.

I switched offices at Google last week, and my new office not only has four other geek guys in it (hardly surprising), but also George, pictured here.

A design firm working on seriously small, individual houses. So small i could fit a couple in my back yard.

So June 30th was my last in-office day at Shopping.com. I start at Google tomorrow, and so I've had about a week in which to do not much in particular. Here's what i did:

• For our 7th wedding anniversary, on July 3rd Diane and I went to Sonoma Mission Inn in Sonoma. Even though there's a big fancy spa, we didn't feel like dropping all that money on it (the place has a way of charging for every little thing that rankled a bit), so we just hung out by the swimming pools. On the 4th (our actual anniversary), we went to a restaurant called The General's Daughter, which happens to be next door to the field where the fireworks go off. They had a great buffet and Champaign, and it was nice and warm outside into the evening (which is certainly not the case right now in our neighborhood). A nice anniversary. Being married to Diane just gets better and better.


• Did a few chores around the house, but not nearly as many as I had planned.


• Bought the PC game Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, which may have to do with the lack of completion of the item above. It's pretty amazing so far. And very addictive in the "just one more mission" way.


• Also played the Battlefield 2 demo, which is very engrossing in the multiplayer mode.


• Had some work done on my teeth and an eye checkup.


• Helped Diane a little bit with her Montage Home Styling job that completed quite successfully yesterday. "Help" in this case would mean lifting heavy things and typing up lists on the computer.


• Went to the Haight yesterday and ran into my old girlfriend Joan, who I haven't seen in ten years.

Nothing expresses love of country like Fourth of July flip-flops. Found at Old Navy.

Longtime readers of mahlen.org (hi, Mom!) will remember that about two years ago I interviewed at Google. This was around the time that Harmonic was about to go under, so I was a bit desperate to find work, as the tech recession was still very present. I had one in-person interview at Google, but ended up not being called back.

Well, they did call me back in April this year, and I've been slowly interviewing and talking with them. This time around was MUCH easier on me, since I already have a great gig at Shopping.com. This time I made the cut at Google, they made an offer on Thursday, and it was announced yesterday that I'll be leaving for Google, probably in early July (we need to iron out the proper amount of time for me to hand-off my current projects).

This was a really hard decision to make, because Shopping.com has been a great job, and their impending purchase by eBay will do great things for them. But I am looking forward to seeing the inside of Google, and doing some big work there. So it's excitement all around!

Last week my former boss Joel, who has bought himself the J/120 boat pictured here, called me at work and said that he was in the Brisbane Marina (which is walking distance from Shopping.com), and he wanted some help with something. It turned out that there was a little spinny bit at the top of the mast that was shaking a lot in the high wind, and he wanted to go up there and tighten it down. So I manned the winch and rope clamps you see below, and cranked him up there (uh, and back down).

It's been a while since I've sent an eCard to anyone, since it's not even worth a tiny smidge of time to deal with the commercial providers of such things. But this service lets you pick out photos from the intriguing flickr, so while you don't get the cheeseball Flash animation, you do get an immense number of pictures to choose from.

This Saturday, for a change Diane and I went to Hartford St. Zen Center in the Castro (we usually go to San Francisco Zen Center on Page St.). Hartford is way smaller and more homey (it is, in fact, an old Victorian home), and it was a nice change from the large impersonal crowd that SFZC draws. There's room for everyone to sit around the living room and have tea and cookies afterwards.

We were talking about how the word "Zen" has been appropriated by marketers to denote a sense of peace or relaxation to various products, and someone mentioned that ultra-pricey local store Gumps has a 12-foot tall statue of Buddha in its San Francisco store, and i thought, i'd like to have a storefront with just a Buddha in it, so people would walk in, see the statue, think "I already have everything I need", and then walk out. If i get rich and go crazy, remind me to do that.

When we were on vacation in St. Helena a couple weeks ago, this comically large van would park next to the xB. Diane and I liked the contrast between this behemeth and our little city car.

Saw this box atop the shelves at a bookstore on Clement today.

Came home from a play the night of April 30th to find Lucy had died. We buried her in the back yard the next day.

I'd gotten both Lucy and Pooky from my girlfriend Roma Estevez when we broke up in 1992 (as Roma said at the time, "Mahlen, the cats love you more."). So for more than 12 years I've had tiny Lucy (she never got above 9 pounds); she was with me for the entirety of my 30's. I'll miss most the conversations she and Diane had every morning in the bathroom.

A surprisingly funny comic with art derived from photos of various action figure dolls, struggling with life in NYC, and not getting a date.

I've been playing with Backpack, a simple web-based data organizer, with shades of wiki, and noticed this World of Custom page, listing various companies that let you custom design a shoe/shirt/bag of candy.

Work just gave me a laptop to use, and I'm using Synergy to tie all three of my machines together using one mouse and keyboard. Can you ever have enough screen space? I can't.

I've become very intrigued by a technology called Ruby on Rails, especially after working through this tutorial. Also, I've been wanting to get the big, noisy, power-sucking computer that runs this site out of my garage and out of my life, but it's hard to find affordable hosting that will take the mix of Java and Ruby that does the work now. So, I'm in the midst of porting the whole mess of code to Ruby on Rails. So far, it's going quite easily.

Today Diane and I went to SF MOMA's retrospective of Robert Bechtle, a Bay Area artist of the Superrealist school. It was a great show. His work really is beatiful; there's a lot more to it than "enlarge and repaint this photograph", although his technical skill is amazing. Driving around afterwards, i couldn't help but see the ordinary automobiles sitting by the beach in Bechtle's hyperreal rendering. The images online don't begin to do the work justice; they need to be seen in person.

Then Diane and I went to Costco (her boss just gave us memberships). It's been a few years since I've been there, and it's a shock to rediscover how loud, crowded, and banal it is. To walk the aisles of Costco is to punched in the gut by American capitalism's productive strength at its most visceral. And sure enough, Diane had the classic "sticker shock" at seeing the final bill, cause even though things are cheaper than usual, you're buying a lot.

At the San Francisco Zen Center Saturday lecture last week, Blanche Hartman gave a wonderful talk which included the following poem:

The Summer Day

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean--
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down--
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life? 

Either I drove our car onto a giant keyboard, or my coworker Daniele gave me a toy Scion xB.

Just found out that my first name is German verb meaning "to grind" or "to mill". Nowhere to go with that, but it seemed worth remembering.

It's spring here in San Francisco...

Last week we bought a new Dell 8400 after the 2.5 year old 8200 starting having some serious stabilty problems with the old machine (largely caused by my trying to install a USB 2.0 card so that the iPod my work gave me would work). Diane had the brilliant idea of adding the old hard drive to the new machine, which means that i could buy a smaller new hard drive and make the transfer of files to this machine MUCH easier. Clever, ain't she?

But, when i opened the new machine, uh, hey, where's the plug for the new drive? Oh, the new machine is using SATA, and the old drive is an IDE drive. Dell's forums have nothing on the topic, but a search for "adding IDE hard drive 8400" found several forums that mention this very issue, and mention the existance of SATA to IDE converter boards. So last night I head to Fry's in Palo Alto, and sure enough, they had a couple kinds (I bought some completely unbranded device with the name SABR1000DV). This morning, i plugged all the little pieces in, changed the BIOS to know that there was a second drive, and lo and behold, a new drive appears. Most excellent.

Thanks to all who make me look clever.

Clement St on a rainy morning, while waiting for Diane to get her breakfast double cap.

A visceral personal history of the first Gulf War, from the eyes of a Marine sniper. Jarhead excells at conveying the raw desire for war these men possesed, as well as the fine details of suffering in the desert. I'm sure the memoirs of the current gulf war will be quite different. Jarhead is certainly worth reading.

A wild fractured ride of a science fiction novel. A young man who can't recall his name arrives in a largely abandoned city which is falling apart and changing in myriad ways. It's truly an anarchist situation; nothing like enforcable rules exist here. Dhalgren is at times frustrating in it's occasional opacity. It reads more like a memory you have but can't quite put your finger on.

The writing, like all Delany, is first class. It's no day at the beach, but a read that rewards the patience to let go of the need for clarity.