Lots of Updates!

Well, it's certainly been a busy month!

Reno, Nevada

I went to Reno, Nevada three weekends ago with some friends from church. They went to college there and have family there. It was a spur of the moment thing, but I decided to go. We mostly did some errands they had to do. But it was a lot of fun checking out a part of the country I've never been to. There aren't many trees, and the trees that you do see don't seem to want to fit in. That weekend was also Hot August Nights, which is apparently the largest antique car show in the United States. So there were many nights filled with looking at old cars. It was a pretty interesting weekend.

Also, it's not pronounced neh-VA-duh (like the A in cat), it's pronounced neh-VAH-duh (like the A in wash). People from Nevada will try to stone you if you do not pronounce this correctly. So get to practicing.

Palo Alto, California

Work has been going pretty well lately. The company has recently IPO'd, which hasn't really changed a whole lot. Except that we've stopped hiring now. What this means for me is that, for the foreseeable future I'll be pretty much taking the lead on the front-side development. We hired a few people leading up to the IPO, but nobody that's dedicated to helping out with the development I'm doing. There is one new person that might possibly be able to help out, but all that is completely up in the air. So the stress levels stay up, but it stays exciting!

VMWare has its VMWorld conference next week in San Francisco, and I'll be working the booth for our product for a day. I'm getting excited about it, it should be a lot of fun.

San Francisco, California

At the church I'm going to I've been taking over some of the volunteer organization. This past weekend I organized a group to help out a homeless center fundraiser. It was a silent auction event that had a bunch of food. So we showed up early and helped prepare some of the food and stayed afterwards to help clean up. It was a lot of fun. There were a lot of pretty good auction item. Mostly gift certificates to random places around San Francisco. I ended up with a gift certificate for two to the Museum of Modern Art, two tickets to the Exploratorium (science center) and four lift tickets to the Donnerville Ski Resort. All in all a lot of things to do over the next year!

I've also been working hard to get the next set of songs learned for the church band. The set of songs for the next service (this coming Sunday) have increased in complexity. I'm getting a lot better with the bass guitar though. It's been pushing me pretty hard. I'm almost there, but there's one bass solo that moves pretty quickly and it's up in the air if the solo is going to be able to be played on Sunday.