Happenings: September 2005 Archives

I just got back from my first trip out to Yosemite, accompanied by Anjali and Pratima. Yosemite is simply amazing, I can't believe that I have lived in California for over two years, but just got to Yosemite now. Even in late summer, the beauty of that park is staggering. We left the bay area early on Saturday morning, and came back late on Sunday night -- which is nowhere near enough time to see everything. Still, we managed to cover Yosemite valley, Bridal Veil falls, crested Glacier Point at sunset, and went to the Hetch Hetchy reservoir:

The above is a view of the reservoir, facing the dam. Anyways, it was an awesome weekend. I took tons of pictures and short videos, which I will post in a gallery sometime this week.

-Andy.

So, months after my ergonomic evaluation and new keyboarding environment that I got at work, I finally have one at home too:

I bought a refurbished Kinesis Advantage keyboard (per recommendation from Carl), and a Biomorph Exo desk.

So far, things are working fairly well. The keyboard is definitely a hit -- I can type far more comfortably on the Kinesis than I can on either a Microsoft Natural keyboard or the "straight" keyboard on my PowerBook. The desk isn't blowing me away as much as I had hoped, but it is solid. I chose it because I was looking for something where the keyboarding surface as height adjustable independently from the monitor surface. While the Exo does support this, it is not to the degree that I thought -- what you see in the picture is the maximum degree of separation that can be achieved.

Nevertheless, I am typing far more comfortably at home now than ever, which is great. The only thing that is missing is a nice new 20" iMac G5, to replace my aged Sony monitor and not-quite-fitting-on-the-desk PowerBook. If only Apple would release a dual-core model, to force my hand...

-Andy.

While my grand plan for the Labor Day weekend was just to sit around on my ass, my friends didn't have the same idea. So, I spent two days in South Lake Tahoe with Anjali and Stan. We had a nice hike in Horsetail Falls, went biking around the lake, and I even rode a jet ski. And a grand time was had by all.

And of course, I am still in love with macro mode on my camera:

I took that shot while biking back from the beach. The rest of the pictures are of course online.

-Andy.

That was pretty much all I could think about when watching the evening news.
The aftermath from hurricane Katrina is staggering. Right after the hurricane, I really didn't think to much of it -- at least, I didn't think it would be so bad. I mean, Florida had four hurricanes last year, and taken together, it didn't amount to the worst human tragedy that the United States has ever seen (link from Omar Shahine).

I missed the news on Tuesday night (was busy out to dinner with visiting dignitaries from work). So things didn't start sinking in until Wednesday night -- when I watched both Tuesday's and Wednesday's NBC Nightly News. I have been glued to the news since then, with what little spare time I have had this week.

EDS has announced a donation matching program similar to what they did for the Tsunami. I believe that I will be contributing when I go to work tomorrow, once again.

-Andy.