Ryan's Journal

This journal entry is actually being written on June 1, but I didn’t want to leave May empty.

The great Iceland adventure, and my first big vacation in two years, starts in a week. The schedule looks like the following:

• Five days in Boston. Lobster will be eaten.
• Slightly more than two weeks in Iceland with Rod, Marlene and the Skipper.
• Slightly less than two weeks in Iceland on my own. This is the part of the trip where it’s most likely I’ll do something stupid.
• One-night stopover in Boston. After four weeks of eating pickled herring there will almost certainly be lobster on the menu.
• Back to LA.

For those wondering “Why Iceland?”, here’s a pretty picture. It’s not of Iceland, so it doesn’t really answer the question, but it’s pretty:

This month’s big event was a fishing trip in Santa Barbara with Aaron’s (potential) Fall MBA class. We got a hotel room the night before, and after a crazy day of work I arrived late and exhaused to an empty room. Aaron and one of his co-workers showed up shortly thereafter, suffering the effects of a night on the town. The wisdom of going big the night before heading out on the water revealed itself the following morning – after an hour of exhaltation on the water, Aaron heaved over the side and spent the rest of the trip shivering in the fetal position when he wasn’t tossing cookies in the head.

For my part I decided not to fish – I’d never been ocean fishing before and was a bit disillusioned with the process. The captain would steer the boat over a rock, check his fishfinder, announce about how many fish were on the bottom, and then everyone would drop a line and wait about a minute for a bite. If nothing bit in that time they moved on. Making matters worse, the rock fish we were fishing for apparently didn’t handle changes in depth very well, and as they were pulled up the decompression caused their brains to explode and their eyes to bug out of their heads – it was a bunch of catatonic, bug-eyed snapper that came on deck.

Despite the puke and the fish massacre, the trip was a lot of fun. Two gray whales met us on the way out to sea, several sea lions made appearance, and there were tons of birds around the Channel Islands. The weather was sunny, and while cold it was awesome being out in the wind on the water. After getting back to land we ran passed a mouse that was standing on a cat that was in turn standing on a dog in downtown Santa Barbara, ate a delicious meal at Chipotle, and then caught a showing of the heartwarming and very funny (yet overly weiner-revealing) flick Forgetting Sarah Marshall.

Andrew Sullivan posted an excerpt from this article, which tries to put into perspective how much time people really have available:

“…if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project–every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in–that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it’s a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it’s the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.

And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that’s 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus. People asking, “Where do they find the time?” when they’re looking at things like Wikipedia don’t understand how tiny that entire project is, as a carve-out of this asset that’s finally being dragged into what Tim calls an architecture of participation.”

I’m of course typing this while watching Deadliest Catch (which rules), and would be useless without an hour or two of downtime every night, but the analysis above puts the phrase “if only there was more time available” into perspective.

I started trying to figure out how many people I knew who were at least mentioned in Wikipedia about two weeks ago, and have sadly discovered that I don’t know a lot of famous people. My criteria was that I had to know the person well, so even though I went to high school with Scott Savol of American Idol fame, and have joined Audrey and her friend Brian Kehew for drinks on several occasions, neither made the cut. As it stands now, I’ve found only two people that I know that have their very own articles:

• JB – The super-cool electric-Porsche-driving former roommate who is now the successful CTO of Tesla Motors. The article correctly notes JB’s penchant for eating cereal, but fails to mention that he is a two–time veteran of the “Active Galapagos” trips.
• Carter Bays – Of Shaker Heights and Plymouth Church fame, Carter has since been nominated for an Emmy for writing on Letterman is is a producer/writer of several television shows. He is best known, of course, for his harmonica work back in the days at Camp Fitch.

And there are only four folks I know with mentions in Wikipedia articles, and that’s only if you include a questionable mention for the author of JAMWiki:

• Audrey – My current roommate fails to get a mention for her Scare the Children work, but is mentioned for singing backup on a couple of Rob Zombie albums.
• Yours Truly – Who snuck in via work on JAMWiki thanks to Wikipedia editor “Khartlage” a couple of months ago.
• Felicia – A multiple national-champion fencer and two-time Olympian who shockingly doesn’t have her own Wikipedia article yet. Felicia and JB had the misfortune of having to deal with living under the same roof as me for several months back in 2003. For the record, Felicia is wicked awesome.
• Jerome Poncet – The memorable French captain who led the trip to South Georgia Island in 2004.

It’s been a rather fun time wasting exercise to see who shows up and who doesn’t – I was surprised that Rod wasn’t listed, and shocked that Felicia doesn’t have an article of her own. I’m sure I’ve probably missed a bunch, but since a bunch of friends read this journal hopefully the list can be expanded via the comments link. Extra points to anyone who knows more than five people with their own articles.

One of the perks of having to work hours that make grown men cry is that my company offered all employees who had averaged over 45 hours per week during the last four months of 2007 a weekend at the Four Seasons in Santa Barbara. The weekend took place in mid-February, and it turned out to be one of those places that normal folks like the Holliday Boys usually only see in movies. We arrived to the resort to find some guy in a bath robe on the putting green, passed by the croquet field, and arrived rather starstruck at the front desk. The girl at the checkin obviously didn’t realize Aaron and I were brothers, and initially offered a room with a single king bed. I set her straight by asking for separate beds, and Aaron helpfully noted that “we could always push them together later”.

Our first order of business after checking in was to check out the spa and take advantage of the chance to get a massage. The list of treatments was extensive, and we finally made appointments for treatments that offered a bit of everything, from mud to massage to weird facial treatments. We hit up the resort’s restaurant for dinner, and again ran into some confusion about two guys spending a weekend together at a resort and ended up being seated at a romantic corner table. Portions were small but pricey, and I’ll probably not be ordering abalone again.

On day two we joined the owner of my company and his girlfriend on a rented yacht and were given basic lessons in sailing. Despite the fact that we both took turns at the wheel and trimmed the sails we still arrived home alive, although in fairness Jason was keeping close tabs on us to ensure his own survival. We got back in time for our spa appointments, and the fireworks began. The resort’s guide recommended that most spa treatments were “enjoyed without clothing”, but both Aaron and I figured a pair of boxers was the way to go. Both of us were met by the masseuses (massagers? whatever…), led to separate rooms, and then told that the mud treatment was too messy for boxers. Luckily I noticed the blanket on the massage table and crawled under it, but Aaron missed this important detail and was greeted with “Oh! Mr. Holliday!” when his masseuse returned to the room. Aside from that little disaster there weren’t any further surprises, and while it was great to get a massage, the mud smearing was a bit odd. In any case, we both came away relaxed and more-or-less useless, and spent the rest of the night watching TV and eating room service food.

The next day’s highlights were a ridiculously great brunch featuring crab claws and caviar, followed by a visit to the beach and its resident bikini-wearers, and concluding with the croquet championships of the world. Since neither of us knew the rules of croquet it made for an interesting game, and other guests at the resort who passed by were obviously aware that Aaron and I were a bit different from most of the folks the resort was used to hosting.

And that’s the highlights for February. It’s a little over three months until the great Iceland expedition, but until then there may not be a lot of fodder for the journal, so the one-a-month entries may unfortunately continue for a while.

Aaron, Ryan, and Garth. Tonight’s installment of the Holliday brothers’ concert tour led to the Staples Center for Garth Brook’s fourth of five concerts in a two-day period. As usual it was a bit of an ordeal aquiring tickets – when they went on sale I got on Ticketmaster’s web site early, timed it so that I hit submit the millisecond tickets went on sale, but instead of getting good seats I was treated to a “Sorry, a system error has occurred” message. By the time I had re-submitted the request the tickets were sold out. But then a second show was added, and then a third. I finally got seats for the fourth show, and they were good ones.

Highlights of the show:

• A two minute long “yee haw” fest outside of the Staples Center before the concert. Folks were pumped up.
• The loudest and most enthusiastic crowd of any concert I’ve ever attended.
• Tricia Yearwood coming out for a song, and then not being allowed to leave due to the cheers.
• A kid sitting near the front holding a “Please sign my hat” sign. As Garth was leaving he looked at the kid, and shortly after the lights came up someone came out from backstage, talked to the kid’s father, and then took the kid backstage. About two thousand people sitting in the area cheered so loudly that everyone leaving Staples stopped, thinking there was going to be a third encore. Further cheers followed when another guy emerged from backstage and brought the father back.
• The second encore, during which Garth brought out one of the food service ladies from backstage. He said that she asked him what it’s like to be on stage in front of so many people, and he figured the best way to answer something is to “jump in with both feet”. She apparently asked him to sing “Ring of Fire” – obviously not the biggest Garth fan out there – but he sang another song that the crowd enjoyed, then took her to the middle of the stage, told her “this will be cool”, and then told everyone to take a picture on the count of three. After the flashes died down he said that in case she didn’t get a copy of the photo he wanted to make sure she had something to remember, and she left the stage in tears and wearing his hat.

A good time, and well-worth the ridicule from co-workers about being a country music fan.