December 2005

I am writing this from the lobby of my hotel in La Jolla, California where I arrived last night. It’s a fancy hotel and at the end of the room there’s a grey-haired guy in a suit jacket with a hooked cane, staring out the picture window at the ocean.

In a few hours I will drive to the Deer Park Monastery in the hills over San Diego for an eight-day meditation retreat. It is a mainly silent retreat, and as a guest there I will be following the daily monastic schedule.

I’m a little bit nervous because I’ve only tried to meditate twice before and one of those times I started sweating and itching all over. But I’m looking forward to detangling my head.

On the flight here I read a few books about Buddhism and I was surprised by how obvious it all seemed. I grew up believing a lot of the things Buddhism seems to espouse (e.g. the interconnectedness of all things), maybe in part because of early exposure to Douglas Adams books.

Anyway, I may break into hives and run screaming after the first day, or I may achieve total consciousness and come back radiating Dharma like a mofo. Either way, I’ll be completely incommunicado for the next 10 days, so don’t expect to hear from me till the 9th!

And happy new year!

Spent the last week in Charlottesville with the family for the holidays.

Me, dad and peach

Peach and Tor

I scored some awesome Archie spinoff comics Christmas morning

Dad perusing Victoria’s kama sutra tearoff calendar

Highschool friend Emily Page and her husband Vince

My RC helicopter arrived today. I turned it on and it slammed directly into the ceiling. A piece of the rotor assembly snapped off.

That was the most expensive 1.5 seconds of entertainment of my life.

Jon sent me a link to yet another dashboard-like program. This one is the most similar to dashboard of any I’ve seen. Personally I’m glad other people are doing this.

Friday a windy blizzard blew snow sideways down the street in front of the office and buffeted the snow against the window panes and blew the snow up against the building and then back into the street, a swirling vertical gyre of snow against the office building, whiting out the street.

After work we went to the Common and had a snowball fight and I practiced flipping over the fence like in those parkour videos, but I’m pretty sure I wasn’t quite as graceful as that Latvian guy, my new hero. And Sean hit me in the face with an iceball.

Just before midnight I darted to the grocery store and filled my arms with food coloring and spray bottles of Mr. Clean and ran back home to empty the bottles and fill them with water and the food coloring: handheld airbrushes for the snow.

Note the BananaGuard in the corner

Weapons of mass colorization

Toshok came over and we headed outside and worked our magic on a car someone had left parked on my street.

Those are speed stripes

Our little forearms tired quickly, squeezing again and again those Mr. Clean squirt-triggers.

Our opus magnus was a fence in front of a neighbor’s house, done up in color-by-Turner blue and green.

Toshok as Lady Macbeth

We need to find a lower-effort, higher-volume spraying technology. Ideally backpack-mounted and pressure- or battery-powered. Compressed air canisters are very heavy, so something pump-driven is probably best.

(More pictures on my flickr stream)

Watch these videos:

• Latvian Russian parkour video
• David Belle, one of the founders of parkour
• Yamakasi parkour video

And here’s how to do all that stuff.