Ryan's Journal

Greg just added a new update on the Galapagos. I may try and get another trip together for May 2005, so if you’re interested or know someone who might be drop me a note and I’ll keep you in the loop. If you need details, the trip would be very similar to the last trip, although there are no guarantees of snorkeling with orcas this time around (as Greg would say, “it’s a crapshoot”).

I was writing to an old friend from work today about places in the world that I still want to visit. While trying to remember how to spell “Lechuguilla” Caverns I stumbled on this page (and this one) which has some absolutely amazing photos. Lechuguilla is high on the list of places to visit before I die, but it’s also very difficult to get access to.

A few of the other places on my list (since people ask a lot) are:

• Australia and New Zealand – This one will be a trip that lasts several months some day, but I’m waiting to first meet exactly the right travel partner.
• The Himalayas – The dream is to spend a few months trekking in Nepal, Pakistan, and/or Tibet with just a backpack and a camera.
• Pribiloff Islands, Alaska – If you’ve ever seen a picture of a puffin or a walrus, there’s a good chance it was taken here.
• Polar Bear National Park, Manitoba – I need to do some research to find out if there’s a lesser known place in which polar bears can be seen, otherwise Manitoba will be the spot to visit.
• McNeill River Sanctuary, Alaska – Highest concentration of grizzly bears in the world.
• Turkey – A girl I met on a train in Greece in 1998 put this one on the list.

There are hundreds of others; throw a dart at a map and you’ll hit something interesting. Easter Island, Machu Picchu, Siberia, Africa, the Great Wall of China, and so many others. Plus, there’s no doubt that I’ll return to the Galapagos, Alaska, and Europe. One lifetime isn’t enough.

progress (n) – Steady improvement, as of a society or civilization

Thousands of years ago primitive humans lived in caves. Their diets consisted of whatever they could scrounge up, and their social lives were little more than grunts directed at one another.

irony (n) – Incongruity between what might be expected and what actually occurs

Today I work in a small room with no windows. Occasionally I wander out to pick out whatever items might be left in the vending machine (yesterday it was a pack of mini cookies and some snack mix). I don’t know the names of most of my co-workers, but I mutter a hello when passing them in the halls.

I’m not complaining, especially not with only forty-four days remaining until I leave for Antarctica, but it is amusing when you step back and think about things a bit.

Picture from CNN of the World Beard and Moustache Championships. I wish I was funny enough to be making that up. One can only hope that the winner is crowned Mr. Chester A. Arthur.

While trying to figure out who the heck Barry LePatner is (the guy quoted at the top of this page) I stumbled across this gem:

“Sometimes when you connect the dots you get a picture. Other times you just have a bunch of dots.”

Obviously tonight I’m in the “bunch of dots” category, but I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader to determine whether those dots are drawn with crayon or finger paint. And for anyone wondering, Barry LePatner apparently is the author of The Role of Failure in Successful Design.

Apparently I didn’t get the memo stating that I would be spending tonight lying in bed, completely unable to fall asleep. I did, however, receive the memo stating that tomorrow I’m going to be exhausted and will spend the day feeling like monkey turd.

I was all excited for the weekend — JB and I were going to grab some lawn chairs, sandwiches, and water balloons and go up into the hills to watch the fires. Then God showed up and decided that it should snow in October in Los Angeles. Understand that the temperature was in the nineties earlier in the week, but as soon as the weekend arrived it dropped fifty degrees and poured rain and snow. Now, this freakish weather is all good for the people whose homes were saved, but there would have been a sort of fiendish joy in watching houses built in once-remote canyons go up in flames. Oh well, in another six months the rains will be here and houses will be washing downhill in mudslides. Never a boring moment in this town.

Absolutely brilliant.

Score! Bought a five piece chicken strips at Burger King, yet when I opened the package six tasty chicken pieces greeted me. There is a God! And yes, today was a very slow day.

Can’t sleep, and I’m gonna ramble. Stop reading now if you’re looking for anything coherent.

Two weeks ago when I was in the mountains and trying to do some thinking my brain was fixated on Survivor and Claymation Christmas Specials. Now that I’m trying to clear my head and get to sleep I can’t stop pondering thoughts that matter to me. Thoughts about past friends and girlfriends, and how it’s sad that we’re not as close as we used to be, but how great it was to have had the experience of that closeness. Thoughts about how maybe it’s time to put some roots down somewhere, but also about how much I’d have to give up to do so. Thoughts about the tradeoffs between a comfortable routine and taking risks. Thoughts about big technical ideas, how they could literally change the world, but of how difficult the challenges would be in creating and implementing those ideas.

It’s crazy. There is so much going through my head at the moment that I want to stay up all night thinking about things, sketching out ideas, writing some code to test some theories, and working out some details to figure out how tough it would actually be to move back to the Bay Area and stay there. At least right now, the idea of having a real home again, something I’ve not had since college, is a very appealing one. A place that was more than just a temporary spot to sleep at night — somewhere where I could call up friends to go out on weeknights, rather than having to drive 375 miles to meet up on weekends. And this is a weird thing for me — I’ve been a nomad for six years now, and I’ve enjoyed it immensely. And if I stayed a nomad for the next six years, I wouldn’t regret it. But I miss my friends. I miss my brother. I miss belonging somewhere.

And the technical ideas are flying fast and furious. When I was with Accenture I created a prototype system for intelligent information storage and retrieval that I think was actually patented. Since then I’ve been pondering something much more extensive in which everything that we do that deals with information is stored, organized, and then made available to us in a useful format. Along the lines of Nat Friedman’s dashboard system, but using many more sources of input including how recently information was viewed, what that information means to the user, how long the user worked with the information, the context in which the info was used. It’s a wide open field, but the first person to do it right will quite literally make everyone who uses a computer about ten times more efficient.

And as a result of all of these thoughts I’m awake at 12:15 (or 1:15 if daylight savings hadn’t just ended) banging away at the keyboard. As soon as I’m done with this journal entry I’ll probably pump out several emails to let old friends know they’re missed, write a few lines of code, check out the Bay Area job and housing markets, and by the time I’m actually tired hopefully there will be a few hours for sleep before I need to get up for work. Insomnia sucks, but at least it’s insomnia with a purpose.

Because the weather in Los Angeles is confused and wrong it’s been nearly ninety degrees outside even though it’s almost November. As a result there are a bunch of fires burning in the hills around the city, so a thin layer of smoke is drifting over everything. That in and of itself isn’t unusual (at least not for LA — anywhere else when the city is burning down it’s cause for panic) but what is strange is that the sun shining through the smoke this morning turned a weird reddish-purple color, and all around it the sky turned a blood red color. I can only imagine what people thousands of years ago would have done after seeing a sight like that — when I first saw the sky my immediate thought was that we needed to start sacrificing goats and virgins left and right. It’s no wonder that this is the city that brought us Armageddon, Volcano, and The Core.

Unrelated, but just for fun guess which pumpkin was carved by the art school graduate.