Manlio Rules

so, this weekend i tried to get out a little more than last weekend. friday night a friend from work invited me to this theatre thing, where everyone who came was supposed to sacrifice an object, and go on video talking about it. i sacrificed an old watch that i never wear anymore, and sat around talking about improv. good times i suppose.

yesterday i went on a bike ride through GG park. and at the end of that ride, i came to this:

the photo doesn’t do it justice, but it was pretty cool to come upon the pacific after a long bike ride. last night i did very little, fell asleep early.

today was something called “bay to breakers” it appears to be the bastard child of road races, where everyone walks the 7 miles while drinking.

the trojans were there

as well as the monsters

and the big ball of saran wrap.

tonight i am possibly going to bar trivia in berkley, or an improv jam somewhere. or neither, cause i’m becoming a recluse…

as to why i’m so weird about some things, here is an excerpt from a conversation with my dad recently:

Dad: be careful of friends. you may be too talented for them
manlio27: i’ll be careful
Dad: your co workers will be intimidated
manlio27: how are you?

now imagine growing up with that being force fed down your throat once or twice a week. yikes.

well, i wanted to work hard, and it looks like that’s going to be an ‘option’. here. we just scoped our next project, and the next three weeks of my life include about 2000 hours of tasks. I’m exaggerating, but really only a little bit. luckily the project is super cool, so i think it’ll be fun. and i have no life, so it won’t be an issue.

on a personal note, it’s been very hard to find a regular workout program here. there are no gyms near my apartment, so the only convenient place to exercise is at work. The gym here is fine, but that’s all it is. the machines are relatively old, and the range of weightlifting equipment isn’t so great. also, my left wrist is hurting a lot, making weightlifting a bit of an issue. And since i’m on a schedule with the morning shuttle, it’s been hard to find a good time to go work out.

My eating habits are ok (i’ve only gotten takeout twice since i’ve been here), but not great, better than NY, but that’s not saying much. and I’m running a few days a week. But it appears that i’m still experiencing a net weight gain. So the question is, do i start driving down to work 2 days a week to use the gym? or do i take earlier/later shuttles in hopes that i can find some time in the morning to get to the company gym? Or do i find a gym in the city that i can use in the evenings after work?

also, the shuttle has been frustrating a bit since the one i like to take does not have the wifi on board. there’s rumors that there will be a new shuttle coming that will stop much closer to my apartment, so maybe everything will change.

wow, this has been maybe the most boring blog entry i’ve ever written. perhaps something fun will happen over the weekend. if not, you can look forward to more musings on my weight and commute and work next week, at which point i may just decide to start making up great stories, or turn this into one of those “informational” blogs where i just copy other stuff and make short comments on it.

On friday, thanks to one of my co-workers, i got to see AT&T park, for the giants/dodgers game. That park is gorgeous. People are friendly, and i didn’t even once get anything thrown at me, a welcome change from previous experiences.

Giants games have been sold out lately, cause everyone wants to see Barry pass Babe on the career home run list. his at bats are a whole deal. everyone stands, no matter who you’re rooting for.

This was one of them. i actually took a photo of every pitch thrown to Mr. Bonds. None of them resulted in a home run. And for what it’s worth, Barry looks terrible out there. Steve Finley is carrying him defensively, and his bat speed has slowed down a ton. i guess that’s what happens when you get older, and stop um… you know…

After the game, we went to a bar and had a few too many drinks. funny thing about SF, the cabs are not plentiful, so i ended up walking about 20 minutes until i was able to find a cab back home. certainly something to remember for future outings.

saturday i had 2 events i was supposed to go to. i missed them both. Today i took a run and played some catch, and had a guitar lesson. my new teacher seems interesting, he’s older and can’t seem to stop shaking his head. my guess is that he’s done too many drugs in his life, which always makes for good music.

This bus continues to elude me in terms of what precisely is going on with the traffic on it. Granted, my dataset is insignificant, but this is what I’ve found so far (each time is the departure time, the arrival time is an hour later, with a standard deviation of 5 minutes) :

7:15AM – crowded
8:15AM – not crowded at all
9:15AM – almost empty

5:30PM – crowded
6:30PM – not crowded at all
7:30PM – unsure, I haven’t taken this one yet. I imagine that it’s pretty empty, wouldn’t you think?

So the conclusions I can draw are as follows: People take the bus early in the morning, to make sure that they get to work by 8:30 or so. Similarly, they leave work around 5:30 and arrive back in SF at 6:30, just in time for dinner. Of course, my predisposition is to take the later buses, and return later in the day. Especially now that I know the late buses aren’t crowded. The next step is working the gym into my schedule. I haven’t exactly figured out how I’m going to do that yet.

and supposedly i can take my bicycle on the bus, but i feel bad about doing that, since it will require the driver to get out and unlock the storage locker. that seems inconvenient for everyone involved.

Powerbook update: Erased the hard drive last night, and reinstalled the OS, plus a few of the applications. Looks like my copy of CS2 is no good, so i’m back to photoshop 7 and no version of illustrator. I loaded final cut, logic, and managed to retrieve my Mail. the computer seems to be running better (of course, booting up would qualify as better than before), but i remain wary of a hardware problem with the drive.

So yeah. i already wrote this post, but my powerbook is in the process of dying a very painful death. right now it freezes up pretty much every 5 minutes while playing a song, and it fails an fsck -f test in single user mode, telling me that there’s an I/O Error and the volume cannot be repaired. fucking awesome.

this post was originally about the intricacies of the bus system at work. to make it super short, we have buses that take us from downtown SF to the campus. this is my second day riding these buses. the point i was trying to make was that the bus i’m on right now is a lot less crowded than i thought it would be, given what time it is (6:30 or so). somehow that took me like 3 paragraphs previously.

the other super weird thing that happened today occured this morning, as i was looking for a water fountain to refill my aquafina bottle (weird thing number 43 about SF: no poland springs). I wandered around my floor till i found the copy room, which has, among other things, a bubbler and some mailboxes. They told us at orientation that we all had mailboxes and said mailboxes were used to give us very important information. so, after filling up my bottle, i tried to find mine. The boxes aren’t in any sort of discernable order, so i had to look at all of them. while purusing, i happened across one labeled “trudy wong” (not the real name). Trudy Wong is the name of a girlfriend of mine back in high school. we dated for maybe 5 weeks during a summer trip to france. She went to school up in NH, so we ended up breaking up (she dumped me) when we got back to school that fall, because when you’re 15, having a long distance relationship to NH might as well be having one to China. The weird thing is that i’m pretty sure i went up to her school that fall, and yet i can’t remember if i saw her or not. regardless, the last time i saw trudy was sometime right after college graduation, in the philadelphia airport, as she was on her way somewhere exotic, and i was probably going to boston or something like that. The last time we really hung out was freshman year of college.

so i go back to my desk, to find out if it’s really her. of course you know by now that it must be, otherwise this post doesn’t make any sense. and sure enough, there she is. son of a bitch. so i figure out what cubicle she’s in, and decide to swing by. as i’m approaching, it occurs to me that this probably isn’t the brightest idea. I mean, i love seeing people from my past, but it’s a bit of a shock to be working and have your ex-boyfriend from 13 years ago stroll in the room and say hi. so i decided to go back to my desk and IM her. Which in truth, is probably just as weird, but i think it was the better way to handle it if for no other reason than no one had to give anyone else a surprise awkward hug or whatever. She honestly didn’t seem thrilled to hear from me, or that i was working here. I’ve been trying to remember all day if i blew her off or not after the last time we hung out. my guess, given when that was, is ‘probably’. but the morale of the story is, life is really weird like that.

work is going well, i think. i still am not sure if anything i’m producing is worth a damn, but i’ve been getting less and less of the LW style “ummm… we’re going to get someone else to do this”, feedback. so that’s good, i guess…

P.S. I don’t appear to have a mailbox
P.P.S. my powerbook is officially dead.

my first day at work was pretty cool. I sat next to a woman in orientation who used to work with lyandra, and knew amy and noonan. that was cool. the whole day was spent going over the basic stuff, like don’t harass people in the workplace, and try not to give quotes to the NY times about what a bunch of jerks everyone is, assuming you think everyone is a bunch of jerks, which i imagine i might, or at least i have as good a chance of thinking that as not.

oh, and the commute wasn’t as bad as i’d heard, though i can picture myself getting furious with it if i have somewhere ‘important’ to be…

they gave me this star for my cubicle. i love stars.

my first weekend in SF was pretty easy, truth be told, thanks to some outside help. Mike Sharon was in town for some meetings, so after i finished all my busy errands on friday, i met him and super research star danah boyd for some food and shopping for a little party at danah’s house.

The party was very nice, lots of talk about tech and research, lots of ITP alum floating around, good times had by all in general. Then I rolled with danah, mike, and ron to a club called mighty, where we danced till about 3AM. at the very least, now i know of a place that’s open past 1AM.

saturday night i went out with amy and we found some bar in the mission (the latin american club, i think it was called). we had a few drinks, amy tried to make friends with the bachelorette party, and i pissed some woman off while trying to save amy’s seat. all in all it was par for the course.

So, one weekend down. 51 to go before i have the option of moving back.

So, i took my maiden voyage in my new car yesterday. i’m still trying to think of a good name for the car, but i’m leaning towards “smokey”, because the car is black, and it’s the same car model that the police use in NY.

anyways, as i was driving to IKEA, over the bay bridge (the bay bridge scares me because in the event of an earthquake, it will collapse. but there’s no other way to get to that ikea). i was minding my own business when i hear a car really gunning it in the lane next to me (on the left). I turn around to see a guy in a white car. we make eye contact, and he smiles and gives me “the nod”. and then speeds up.

I’m confused, as “the nod” is not something i have gotten in awhile. I used to get it all the time in college when i had long hair and other guys with long hair and I would exchange it, as if to tell each other: “i acknowledge that you are also somewhat against the norm, even if long hair has become much less abnormal than 40 years ago.” in any event, it was always good to know that other people were similarly psuedo rebellious.

But as the guy speeds off in front of me, i notice the back of his car says “sho”. and it all makes sense. he is also driving a ford taurus sho, and i’ve just been given the “we drive the same car” nod, which has fallen out of favor in my recent experience, but given that we were both driving old ford taurus sho’s, i think it was appropriate. Rock on, random stranger.

Briehan and Myself

Originally uploaded by mloco.

When i went out to dinner with Briehan and alex before i left, briehan mentioned that the only reason she reads my blog is to see if there are any pictures of her on it. Since i’m always one to give my readers what they want, here is a picture of briehan (and me). i’m actually not sure where this is from. Brie, do you know?