PeteCarpenter.com

8/26/2008

• You may have noticed that things have changed a little bit around here. It was time for a new look. The old one was so 2006. Thanks to Ed for the theme. It’s still a work in progress, but I’m digging it so far. Nice and clean.
• I think the majority of meals I’ve eaten in the past week have consisted of tomatoes, bread, and cheese, in various forms. Not that I’m complaining.
• The San Francisco side of the family is in town visiting this week. When you get five kids under the age of five in a room together, you’re bound to have some fun.
• I’m bound by an NDA and can’t really say too much, but we have a new foster “child” this month. Her name is Vicki. If you would like to talk to her, let me know.
• Thank god these Olympics are over. I can finally get back to watching normal TV. Oh wait, there’s nothing on TV to watch. I guess I’ll watch the DNC instead. Never mind.
• Last week, smack in the middle of the Olympics, the smart people over at Verizon decided to change the entire cable lineup without telling anyone, including my Tivo. I couldn’t even find the right channels by hand they had moved so much. Stupid Verizon.
• So we’ve had our iPhones for a week now. How do I feel about it now that the honeymoon has worn off? I love it. This deserves its own post sometime soon, but it really is life-altering for me. Sure, it could do some things better, and yes, the actual phone service is sort of sucky, but everything else about it pretty much lives up to the dream I’ve always had of a cell phone. Go get one, now!
• I’m home today with a pink-eyed Lovely Tess today. So I have to go now before she throws George in the trash.

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8/18/2008

• Well, this weekend wasn’t quite what I was expecting. Momentum had been building up over the course of the week, but Saturday night, we decided to go get ourselves some iPhones. Yeah, we still had a few months left on our existing contracts, but it was tax-free weekend, our early termination fees had been pro-rated down, and we just sort of wanted them. So Saturday night, we tag-teamed our purchases with the lovely Tess asleep in bed. The Apple store was open until midnight, and I finally got mine around 11:00pm. And yes, there were still people waiting in line when I left. So, how is it? Pretty fricking awesome. We still haven’t had time to fully set them up yet, but so far, it exceeds my expectations. I’m sure you’ll be hearing plenty more about this.
• I can’t think of anything else.
• It’s full-on tomato season. Our plants are going bonkers, with big giant Mortgage Lifters and Purple Cherokees ripening every day. Some of our meals consist of tomatoes and basil and not a whole lot else. This is the only time of the year that tomatoes are going to taste like this, so we’re enjoying it while it lasts. Tomato sandwiches, tomato salads, panzanella, tomato and mozzarella, tomato ice cream, tomatoes on my cereal. OK, maybe not the last two.
• How about those olympics, huh? We’ve been watching them pretty much every night, and is it any surprise that they show women’s beach volleyball every night? Really, they maybe repeating the same match every night, and I wouldn’t know any better. The Lovely Suse tries to stay up late to watch gymnastics and inevitably falls asleep with the TV on. I watched all of the Michael Phelps gold medal races, except for the last one. I was at the Apple Store. I watched it on Tivo, but got a Twitter telling me the results before I got to watch it. Oh well. I must say, I don’t care a whole lot about Track and Field. Watching a complete marathon is not what I call exciting.
• The sweetest sound to hear on a hot Sunday afternoon is the sound of our upstairs neighbor mowing the lawn. I really wasn’t in the mood to do it.
• Here’s what I learned in my eight hours of Marketing class this weekend: our professor likes expensive suits, expensive ties, drives a Lexus, had a corner office, was the youngest manager in his company, is a Six Sigma Blackbelt, and about 20 other facts about how awesome he is. He didn’t teach us anything marketing-related, but aren’t these facts much more important?
• We made this whole roasted branzino with potatoes, tomatoes, and olives on Saturday night and it was perhaps the most delicious thing I’ve made in a while. I just realized that I forgot the pine nuts, Whoops. We ate it in about five minutes as we hatched our iPhone plan and started the first leg of the tag-team, but we’ll definitely have to make this again. Soon.
• Today marks my ten year anniversary at my company. Ten years is a long time.

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8/11/2008

• So how kickass were those Olympic Opening Ceremonies? Pretty kickass. Good luck to any city that has to follow that.
• I’m pretty sure that the Smuttynose IPA that I bought on Friday poisoned us. I drank on on Friday night and got some sort of awful stomach issue. Then, the Lovely Suse drank on on Saturday and the same thing happened. I think they rest of them are going down the drain. Stupid delicious beer.
• Yes, I finally pulled the trigger and joined Facebook. I just couldn’t resist. To paraphrase one friend, it’s sort of evil but sort of really good. It is, perhaps, the greatest time suck I’ve ever experienced. It’s completely fascinating, mostly because there are so many people that you know on there and it’s fun to be able to see what people are up to and what they look like. All of those old friends from camp and high school? Yeah, they’re all there. Old girlfriends? Yeah, they’re all there, too. I realized that I was on pretty much every other social network (flickr.com, last.fm, LinkedIn, twitter, youtube), so what’s one more. Plus, this let’s me aggregate them all in one place. Whenever I update any of them, it shows up on Facebook. It makes stalking me that much easier.
• Could this Clark Rockefeller Case get any more awesome? Seriously, child abductions, murders, false identities, amnesia, German exchange students! I can’t wait for the movie.
• The Lovely Suse got her wallet stolen last week. That’s not so fun. I think she was most upset that she lost her fun pink wallet. Fortunately, she was able to find the same wallet. Phew!
• Is synchronized diving the dumbest sport ever? How about synchronized horseshoes? Or synchronized golf? Who thought that this would be a good idea?

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8/4/2008

• I spent the majority of last week being pummeled by a nasty cold. But you would have known that already if you were following me on Twitter. Yes, apparently my work has opened up access to all of the social networking sites (at least temporarily), so I once again have daytime access to it. It’s basically used as a quick update on whatever is going on, random thoughts, links, etc. It’s a hell of a lot more interesting when you’re following people that you know, so sign up and let me start keeping tabs on you. You know you want to!
• Well, the Lovely Tess is full on walking. Not like, takes 5 or 6 stumbling steps before falling into something. Like full on, here I come, get out of my way, I don’t need to hold your hand, walking. She walks a little like Frankenstein, but she’s getting better and more confident every day.
• Tired of my crappy Verizon-supplied router, I picked up a used Linksys router on ebay for cheap and installed DD-WRT on it. One of the many nice things about it is that you can manually adjust the strength of the wireless signal and pretty much double the power of the signal. All of a sudden, better wireless coverage everywhere in the house. Nice.
• Speaking of social networking, I’m beginning to think that the Lovely Suse is addicted to Facebook. Every time I walk by the computer, she’s on it. Honestly, I can’t blame her. Part of the reason I still haven’t signed up on it yet is that I know what will happen. I’ll spend all day spying on people and looking up people that I hated in high school in hopes of seeing that their lives have turned out miserably. That’s what you do on Facebook, right?
• We started watching the first season of Mad Men last week, and now I feel like we have to churn through all of the episodes in order to catch up with the second season. So far, we’re really digging it. But seriously, how isn’t every person from the 60’s dead from lung cancer?
• The first of this year’s tomatoes are finally ripe and, man, these plants must be enjoying the rain and crazy heat. The yellow jelly beans are first, but we’ve already gotten a couple of purple cherokee’s as well. I think in about 3 weeks, I’m going to have to start giving them away because we’ll have so many, including the ones I’m expecting we’ll get from our CSA box. Not that I’m complaining.
• If you’re wondering if I miss Manny, the answer is “sort of-ish”. I was as sick as anyone of his antics, but I sort of just expected them every year around this time. He eventually forgets about it and gets on with hitting dingers and winning games. I had a feeling that the Sox weren’t going to pick up his option at the end of the season anyway, so they might as well get rid of the distraction, get a decent player in return, and get on with it. I think they’ll be fine, although I don’t expect them to win it again this year, with or without Manny.
• I must say, I’m sort of looking forward to the Olympics this year. Probably just because I get to watch in HD and I’m guessing that NBC is going to make a huge effort to make it very HD-worthy. Like extra coverage of women’s diving!

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Ten

Today marks a special day here at the ol’ petecarpenter.com. Ten years ago today (ok, yesterday), long before the word “blog” existed, and before it became cool to share your life and thoughts with the world, the first official post went up on this website. That’s ten years, 1462 posts, two different service providers, two different names (I know you all remember the pete carpenter homespace on netspace.org, right?), a whole lot of photos, and many life experiences documented here. I don’t know exactly why I started this or what kept me doing it for all of these years, but I can probably count on one hand the number of weeks that I missed posting. I guess I’m sort of stuck with it, huh?

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