amdavidson

Canon 40D

posted on 2008-12-17 - amd.im/2gZl

Christmas came a little early for me this year.

Naomi got me a new Canon 40D to replace the 20D that I've had the last couple of years.

I haven't had a chance to really try it out, but here's a quick pic I took this morning.

Thanksgiving Pictures

posted on 2008-12-02 - amd.im/QYEg

I posted a few pictures from last weekend's Thanksgiving festivities up in Nevada City / Grass Valley.

It was a great weekend with lots of family, food, and a bit of fun.

All in all, we had about 38 people at the Delgado's so it was a lot of fun to see some faces I haven't seen in a while.

Anyways check out the pictures, Thanksgiving 2008.

Big Changes

posted on 2008-10-07 - amd.im/HFDq

You may or may not have noticed, but I recently made some big changes to the website and how it works. Many more updates are coming.

I rewrote the thing from scratch, there are probably bugs, and I'm working on them, but the site is close enough that I thought it could go live. Consider this a beta, at best.

A lot of content got lost in the galleries... well not lost per say... but it's not in this gallery. I'll re add some if it, if I get some free time. In the mean time, if there is something that you wanted to see the old site is going to stay online for a while at old.amdavidson.com so you can look there unfortunately the old site does not work, so there is nothing you can do.

Anyways, post a comment if you see something you like or don't like.

UPDATE: Cosmetic changes abound... I have tested this on Safari and Firefox on my Mac somewhat and did a BrowserShots to test it out on other platforms. I may not have caught all the bugs in the system so let me know in the comments if there is something that I havent gotten to fix.

Quickie Family Vacation

posted on 2008-09-06 - amd.im/VFso

I added some pictures from our labor day trip to Franks Valley.

Had a weekend off in the States and it just happened to coincide with Labor Day. Taking advantage, we took Friday off and headed up the hill with my parents to Frank's Valley for a weekend of no email, no cell phones, and relaxation.

It was a real nice weekend, did a little fishing, gold panning, shooting, and just general camping stuff.

Check out the pics!

More changes...

posted on 2008-07-24 - amd.im/NgdR

More boring changes to the website...

I know, I know... Boring.

Same drill, if anything shows up as an issue, email me.

This time around I made a bunch of cosmetic changes, that will be ongoing... I'm trying to add a bit of subtle changes to the visual, as I got bored with it.

I think it looks nicer, others may disagree, or simply not notice.

More importantly, I changed a bunch of stuff about how the posts are processed and displayed in the blog, so there might be significant issues displaying posts that I was unable to test. If you see something I missed, let me know.

Update: Resolved. Sorry if you had problems viewing the gallery.

Trip around the World

posted on 2008-07-15 - amd.im/acFN

So I realized that I haven't posted in a while. So here goes.

I'm currently on a trip around the world, and it's in full steam. I just got to Taiwan last night, and so far I've had some good adventures and brought my camera with me.

Germany was good, we were really stacked with work stuff, but I was able to get out in the early morning and the night to explore a bit.

I really enjoyed my last trip there, and enjoyed this one as well. It's a fascinating place, with a lot of true history to enjoy as you wander the streets of little German towns. I found a couple of old cathedrals and town squares that were fun to explore.

Taiwan is always a sight to see, I had the afternoon off in Taipei, so I went to visit the tallest building in the world. It was quite a sight... The mall below it is only the 'hoity-toity-est' of stores, and after 5 floors of Cartier, Piaget, Vuitton, and others, you get to an area that lets you head up to the observation deck, which costs like $10 USD but I figured it was worth it, and it certainly was.

The building is amazingly high, over half a kilometer up in the sky, dwarfing anything else in the Taipei skyline. At the top you can see for miles and miles, and there was a lot of cool information about the architecture and engineering of the building which I enjoyed greatly. (If you click through to the gallery, the big yellow ball thing is a huge mass to dampen the effects of wind on the structure).

Anyways, it was an amazing thing to hop on a plane and leave a country known for its history, and land in a country that is as modern as they get.

Working the Day Away

posted on 2008-06-29 - amd.im/iJiL

Here's a pic from working over in Taiwan.

Just thought it was kinda neat.

Unfortuantely, the photo has been removed...

Artistic Blast from the Past

posted on 2008-06-27 - amd.im/yVxs

So I finished the book that I had brought along on this trip, and went to an English bookstore today to get something else to read.

I got "Everything is Illuminated" as I watched the movie and was confused and heard the book was much better and explained a great deal better.

Anyways, what did I see playing on a TV in the "Art" section?

None other than Bob "Happy Trees" Ross

Sorry that I didn't get a better picture, unfortunately as soon as I took this one, that lady in the background came running after me to tell me that no cameras were allowed... Or something that I assume to mean that, after all... she was speaking Taiwanese.

Taiwanese Lunch

posted on 2008-06-26 - amd.im/Zfsx

So today I had Taiwanese for the first (real) time, it was interesting, thought I'd pass it along like last time.

Today I was daring, tried everything they put on the table. I even ate the bitter melon and clams.

The bitter melon was interesting... There really is no other flavor but bitter. I've never tasted anything like it, and despite me and Ethan trying to find a comparison to make, we were unable. It is a truly unique food.

I actually had to try it twice as I couldn't believe it the first time around. I don't think I'll be ordering it for myself, but it's an experience I recommend to others.

The clams were in the shell and in a soup with asparagus and string beans. They were better than I expected. I'm not usually a clam guy, but I ate a whole bunch of them. Otherwise not too remarkable, it wouldn't even be worth writing if I hadn't been so against clams for so long... Maybe I'll even give clam chowder another try.

Other items on the menu were fine, none too interesting.

• Chicken with Cashews
• Eggplant with some sort of fishy sauce
• Fish fried in and then crusted with a garlic-y something or another
• Goose breast slices that were soaked in wine and served cold
• Tofu with peppers and stuff, kinda spicy, not too bad
• Solidified Duck Blood and Pig Intestine

The usual.

Chinese Lunch

posted on 2008-06-21 - amd.im/GxA2

Had lunch on site with the vendor again today. They have a Taiwanese chef they imported that makes the execs lunch each day, and we join them.

They called it Chinese Spaghetti and, for the most part, it was really good.

It was like a rice based spaghetti noodle, that we put a Chicken based mixture of vegetables on. That part was all good.

There were additional garnishes that I did and didn't recognize, but this trip, I decided I was going to try it all, and yesterday I did the same and it was all fairly good.

Today however, I put a brown thing on there that looked like a sliced mushroom, but did not taste like one at all.

Missing from my mouth was the earthy mushroo flavor that I expected, and introduced was the delightfully gross taste of kidney from an unknown animal.

Gross, I won't be eating that again. We're going out for Thai tonight, from a restaurant that the vendor assures us is "very plain", so hopefully that means no kidney, liver, gizzard, or whatever.

European Attitudes

posted on 2008-06-11 - amd.im/tMqb

They say that Europeans are a bit less conservative than people in the states. I think this photo says it all.

Hohe Domkirche St. Peter und Maria

posted on 2008-06-09 - amd.im/xTzd

I woke up super early this morning (5AM but I went to bed at 12:30) and just wandered around Cologne... Figured that I don't have many other opportunities to visit Cologne (or Koln in German).

Anyways, check out what I'm told is the "oldest cathedral in Europe".

Website Changes

posted on 2008-06-06 - amd.im/w9Qq

There was a lot of stuff going on in the site that was just left over and cheap hacks.

I cleaned up a lot of the old bandaids in the blog section of the site, and may have caused major issues with it that haven't cropped up yet.

Tell me if you see things that are out of order chronologically, pages that don't display any posts, or get any weird errors.

Also, over the last week or so, I've rolled out a few features, there's now an RSS feed that fully validates, CAPTCHA authentication for the comments, added some javascript here and there, changed image display in the gallery to a "lightbox" format, and cleaned up some other old gallery stuff.

Tell me if you see anything else going on.

Gallery Changes

posted on 2008-05-19 - amd.im/z6h0

I added some fancy javascript features to the gallery.

Let me know if it breaks

Update (5/20): it is broken... on a slower connection a small loading image is supposed to display, however this does not happen... there is an error in the path, I'm tracking it down and will correct it

Update 2 (5/27): it's fixed now, email me if it isn't.

Photos from China

posted on 2008-05-19 - amd.im/G2aA

I took a couple of pictures here and thought they were amusing, but don't have enough to warrant an entire album.

I had no idea that "orporation" really did anything for society before seeing this sign implying that it leads to "quanlity".

[Photo down for the count]

And when you're in the mood for something familiar, head for to this place for a "troditional" snack.

[Photo down for the count]

Chinese Dinner

posted on 2008-05-18 - amd.im/OITp

The vendor was about 11 hours late on Saturday bringing us data so we sat idle all day long.

As a sort of "Thank you" they took us out for a Chinese dinner. The items on the menu were picked for us, and I don't know how authentic they really were, but I thought the menu was a bit interesting. So I figured I'd pass it along.

The dinner started off with appetizers, we were served Turnip and Lotus Root. The lotus root was sweet and kinda sticky, but good. The turnip was a little spicy, but it was good.

Next up came a little Juice as a beverage.. I wouldn't really call it "Juice" like they did though, it was more like someone chopped up a seedless watermelon and put it in a glass, and warm. It was only ok... but it actually might have tasted good if it was cold, like some sort of all fruit smoothie.

The next dish made me believe that, at least in part, Chinese food is designed to be inconvenient to eat. The next was a dish you would be more likely to see in an American Chinese restaurant, beef with shiitake mushrooms and peas in the pod. The flavors were good, but it was quite difficult to eat as the beef was still on the bone, and we were not eating with a knife and fork... there was a lot of gnawing and spitting going on at the table.

Next came a vegetable dish: asparagus with chickpeas and sweet onions. Good, nothing too remarkable.

Then we really hit the main courses. The first of which was a whole fish cooked in some sort of oil. One of our Taiwanese hosts was kind enough to take the head and the tail and the rest of us received sections of the body. The fish was good, but oily and kind of bland... Again difficult to eat as the bones were still in it, and not just a few, but every bone that fish ever had... More spitting ensued.

Another of the main dishes was lettuce wraps which I'm sure most of us know and love. These were good as well. The flavor was very much the same as you would get at a PF Chang's or another Chinese restaurant. As I was finishing my first wrap, one of our hosts asked if I enjoyed it, and I told him, "Yes, very much so" and he said, "You know what you're eating?" I replied positively, assuring him that I have had chicken lettuce wraps plenty of times. He looked at me quizzically and says "Chicken? No, no chicken, pigeon!" ...... Well, it tasted like chicken.

We wrapped up the main courses with lobster, still in the shell, very buttery and again difficult to remove from the shell for consumption with the chopsticks I had been given, but good all the same.

Desert was some sort of tapioca balls in blueberry sauce with peanuts in it. We dipped some sort of fried bread in it. It was good.

All in all, it was a good dining experience, if a bit foreign.

New Web Host

posted on 2008-05-03 - amd.im/wX2C

I've switched to a new web host for more control and capability.

Email me if you notice any problems with the site, if there are problems with my email, call me, as email got switched over as well.

UPDATE:

It seems that my new host is working out nicely, and the website seems to be super stable. If anyone is interested in a new host that offers extreme functionality in a cheap VPS package, check out SliceHost. They have been extremely responsive and seem to really be out for my best interest, including catching me signing up for the service using a Chinese IP address and an American credit card (I looked like a scammer), but what was even better is that I was able to chat with them, and explain the situation and have it fixed in minutes, even late at night!

Chinese Traffic

posted on 2008-04-18 - amd.im/Gzg3

Traffic laws are never obeyed here. my cabbie blew by a cop last night passing on the right the cut him off on the left to get in front of more traffic. There are people littering the streets, more people than I have ever seen in my life... It's like the Times Square shot when the kid is lost in New York and everyone is pushing him into crosswalks that he doesn't want to cross.

Until today, I have been amazed that there aren't constant collisions all over. I would venture a guess that I spend approximately 15% of my commute back and forth from the factory driving in the shoulder to pass cars that are driving slower than the flow of traffic.

However, on my commute to work today, our driver had an "incident". We were driving down a busy street on our way to getting to the highway for the 20 minute highway ride to work. We left a bit later today being that it is Sunday. We decided that if we don't get a weekend, we're going to sleep in and leave at 930... Well this decision led to commute during a time when a lot of people are on the road, or at least thats how it seemed.

As we drove down the street I saw that there were pedestrians crossing the street back and forth and back and forth, and eventually two of them got trapped on the dotted yellow line between a VW Santana, a bus, and our Passat... Well, the man was able to skinny up and squeeze between the cars. The pregnant woman with him was not so lucky, our driver clipped her with his mirror and ran over her heel with his tire. He then slowly crept his car for some distance looking out the back window as they yelled at him. Eventually, he stopped in the street and left the car and proceeded to yell at the pedestrians! After much yelling and a beggar approaching them with an empty bowl outstretched, the driver returned to the car and pulled out his wallet and handed the man what looked like 200RMB (~$30). What amused me is as soon as the car was stopped Matt told me that this would be resolved with money and to be sure that I did not acknowledge that I actually had any on me. He was right on.

Getting to Suzhou Part I

posted on 2008-04-14 - amd.im/CMA8

Well, it took me about 23 hours from Joy's door to the hotel.

It was tiring, but really not as bad as I was expecting.

I'll just go through it chronologically, for the sake of my memory.

I woke up, went through my normal business, getting ready for the 1030 AM pickup from the driver, and got a text from United saying that my flight was going to be delayed. The first nice thing about global services / business class. So I called my traveling companion Matt and we decided to push our pickup back to 12 to give ourselves more time at home and less time sitting in the airport.

So I tooled around the house a little bit more, and sorta got everything sorted out and was killing time in the back room when Tanya came in and said that my driver was waiting outside.

At this point I kinda panicked because I had set up my personal cell as my contact point for the limo company, and had already turned off my personal cell forgetting that they would likely cal me on it. So I rushed out the door and into the Lincoln, and did not find out until later that he was waiting until exactly 12 to knock on my door and I had just run out and into the car at 1155... That was nice of him to do I suppose, but him waiting and me feeling bad about him waiting caused me to rush and spend about 4 hours on the flight going over in my head all the things that I could have forgotten.

No matter though, I got to the airport fine and met up with Matt and got to skip the huge lines in economy by taking the business class line (second nice point about business class).

I went into a bookstore at this point to get something to read and bought a book I tried to read years ago when I was probably 12, but didnt understand it so I ended up giving up, but I figured I'd give it another shot. The book is Tom Robbins' Still Life with Woodpecker. Then I hopped in the security line, and unfortunately at SFO there aren't special lines for business class (although apparently there are in Shanghai for the way back).

When it came turn for me to head into the metal detector, I wandered through... BEEP BEEP BEEP... and I realized that I still had my stainless steel watch on, which is heavy enough that it had to be the problem and I stepped back and put it in a bin for XRay... then stepped through again BEEP BEEP BEEP... I had forgotten the iPhone in my pocket... Dangit!

So two failures at the metal detector led to me getting the whole once over by the TSA... my whole person was frisked and metal detected more than once, and each item in my camera bag and briefcase was swabbed with a cloth and then the cloth was analyzed for any errant chemicals that may have been on them. Oh well, so Matt went on ahead and wandered the shops while I caught up with him. We then headed to the Business Class lounge where I munched on the food that was there in lieu of buying myself a real lunch.

And then we got on the plane.

Getting to Suzhou Part II

posted on 2008-04-14 - amd.im/UWf5

So then I got on the flight and immediately realized that business class is a whole new world... I'm not sure how I'm going to fly economy again...

The seats are large and comfortable, the stewardesses actually pay attention to you, they give you the whole can of soda. It was nice.

For my in flight meal(s), I had the smoked salmon for my appetizer, and the pork with some sort of mustard seed crust, and then chocolate cheesecake for desert. I still wouldn't call it gourmet, but it's about as well as I could have cooked any of it. Then towards the end of the flight I was served a pastrami/turkey/swiss cheese sandwich melt.

The inflight movies were kinda nice, but it was interesting how they ran them... all the movies started at the same time, and then they would just keep them running until the last movie finished, at which point they would all restart simultaneously... this was nice in that you could, in theory, figure out how long the longest movie was and then calculate when movie start times were, but I couldn't figure that out, and it wasn't listed in the "entertainment guide".

But I did manage to read ~150 pages in my book, watch 3 movies (Dewey Cox, National Treasure II, and August Rush, Dewey Cox was surprisingly good and the others were miserable).

All in all, the flight wasn't that bad... I read some emails that I had downloaded to my laptop, and not read yet... got some personal projects on the computer done... and the first 9 hours went by real fast. The last three and change were a little slow... but it was fine, I just read and tried to nap (unsuccessfully) and passed the time however I could.

At the airport we got through security and got our bags and got out to the pick up area quickly... but could not find the guy that was supposed to pick us up and bring us to the hotel. We wandered back and forth looking for someone holding a sign that had our name, or the vendor's name, or something... We called the vendor and our contact told us that the driver was in the airport. Well eventually after wandering around, Matt noticed "Catch..." on a rolled up piece of paper wadded in his fist, and held at his thigh. Matt yelled at the man, and introduced me to the "point back and forth" method of talking to people.

Basically, we don't talk to anyone... there's lots of pointing and gesturing... but it seems to work well enough in my first 18 or so hours here.

Well we got into a car with him, and went on a wild ride back and forth through traffic, passing on the right just as frequently as passing on the left... it was a phenomenally interesting drive, and is the standard... but there were surprisingly few close calls, everyone just expects it and deals with it.

We got to the hotel and checked in, that was easy and then went to my room, and crashed... I barely got my teeth brushed before hitting the bed.

But when I awoke, I did pay a bit of attention to the quality of the hotel, and it's nice... very asian styling, kinda pagoda-y. but the bathroom is all granite, there's an LCD TV recessed into the wall with some American channels, so that will be nice if there is some downtime in the evening.

And after that I went off to go to work at the vendor...

I'll update on how work actually is here after a couple of days because I am acclimating, but the last 4 or 5 days of work have had a great learning curve I'm finally starting to get up to speed with what happens here, and what my role is going to be in making it happen.

China Already?

posted on 2008-04-09 - amd.im/tngU

Well it's all happening really quick, I just learned today that in 7 days I'll be in China. The project I'm on has business over there, and so I have to go.

I had no idea that it was going to be so sudden, or this quickly into my employment two weeks ago, but two weeks ago, I had a lot of misperceptions about what life was going to be like at Apple.

Here goes my big adventure.

Day 1 at my new job

posted on 2008-04-01 - amd.im/V1Aa

I arrived a bit early, despite my the email that indicated that I should avoid doing so. It wasn't too early and the lobby had already been opened. This was nice because I was able to get into the line to get my badge picture taken early, when the line was much shorter. Before long there were 59 "Corporate Employees" that were here for orientation.

Because there were so many employees orientation was delayed a bit. When the dust had settled from the all the badge registration we sat down in the orientation auditorium, and we were greeted by "PC" from the Mac vs. PC commercials on a large projector screen. He did an amusing little bit about how we were making a bad decision by working here, and asked us all to leave. The rest of the orientation covered basic HR stuff, corporate history, security, and the like.

After orientation I met up with a guy from a related department who had lunch with me and showed me to my cube where I worked on all the administrative stuff for the rest of the day.

It wasn't a particularly exciting day material wise, but I was quite excited to be here, and am rapidly becoming enamored with the culture and peoples' outlooks here, everything is very positive and energetic.

Scarlett Elizabeth

posted on 2008-03-09 - amd.im/b08g

Yesterday, David and Tanya had their baby.

Scarlett Elizabeth

She's a bit early, but she seems to be doing fine.

New Job

posted on 2008-01-11 - amd.im/dMRb

Well, it happened... I found a career to enter into when I graduate from Cal Poly towards the end of March.

Apple computer made me an offer that I could not refuse. Great news for me as I am already and avid Apple fan-boy.

Security Flaw

posted on 2008-01-04 - amd.im/NakH

I located a security flaw in my authentication and permissions code. I had to make some drastic changes and may have broken something significant so if you notice any issues with the site, please email me.

On a side note, I haven't posted anything to the site in a long time. I'll have some Christmas pictures up soonish for some fresh content.