Hi everyone,
Here is a quick little message I recorded before our Thanksgiving here at the villa in Canguu. I have another blog post I have been meaning to send out, but I probably won’t get to it until later or when I come back :( …
Happy Thanksgiving and see you soon!
-Matt
Hello! So I haven’t sent out any updates yet for a few reasons. The first few days I had just been chilling at the pool reading books and relaxing in the sun. Not much to show you (although I have some great shots of my feet on various lounge chairs).
The real reason though is that I got what I most feared right off the bat … Bali Belly (I actually think it was something worse. I would have welcomed Bali Belly as some have described it to me). I will spare you all the gory details (and trust me they are gory), but my second full day here was seriously one of the worst days of my life. I don’t exaggerate.
I had to have a doctor visit me, go on a slew of antibiotics (some that I brought and new ones that she gave me) and a variety of other drugs to stop certain parts of the body from behaving badly. I had a fever, aching back, a butt that wouldn’t stop and a mouth that wouldn’t stop either. Yeah TMI!
I may seem jovial about it now (I’m not really) but it was definitely the wrong foot to get my trip going on and it was hard for me to really get relaxed. This was frustrating of course because as I looked around I was more or less in paradise, but it definitely didn’t feel that way 100%. Her advice to me was classic too: “eat at the hotels". I had actually eaten that night at one of the top 5 restaurants in Bali and had a very good dinner. Anyhow my time during these first few days was spent at the Peninsula Beach Resort.
Peninsula Beach Resort in Nusa Dua
Enough of the gross stuff. I still got to relax a lot. Like I said I read two books. The first was Fevre Dream by George R.R. Martin (and yes it is Fevre not Fever). He writes the Song of Ice and Fire Series that they are making into an HBO series now – it is going to kick so much ass. Think Rome but medieval fantasy.
The next book was Life of Pi by Yann Martel. This was very good. I had been wanting to read it for awhile and blazed through it in a day. Spoiler: I am going to search for a carnivorous algae forest while I am here.
The Nusa Dua area is the ritzy area of Bali with many of the big name resorts you would expect to find. I had been uber-amped up on glistening white sand beaches and other standard staples of paradise. Unfortunately it is not as I imagined but it is still gorgeous. There is a beach promenade that, in the maintained parts in front of the resorts, is a great walk. I spent one afternoon strolling along it and staring at all of the infinity pools and over the top amenities and services offered. Some of these hotels go all out. Other parts of the promenade are unfortunately not as well maintained and just accumulate trash and weeds. Later in the week I plan on going further south on the Nusa Dua coastline to see if the beaches get better.
My hotel is perfect though. Small, good food, a little bar (although I couldn’t drink for a few days because of the antibiotics – felt pretty good actually), and a great pool. Their beachfront is nice too. A lot of water sports take place here and in between chapters of my book I would watch jet skis, flying fish (has anyone seen one of these – really cool – and no not the animal), and parasailers go by.
Here are some shots of the pool:
This whole time I was still suffering from a war being waged in my tummy from the various antibiotics. It always kept me kind of on edge – what was going to happen next in the circus that was my body?
Wednesday however that all changed. No more antibiotics and a normal, healthy feeling Matt. I had no more books, had pooled it too long (is there such a thing) and decided it was time to see some of this island!
Ulu Watu
I called up my driver Made (Mad-ay) and asked if he could come get me around elevenish. Lucky for me the day was slow for him and he could.
Bali is much bigger than I expected and there are many people who will offer to drive you around for the day for a reasonable amount of money. A half day is about 35 $ (350,000 Rp) and a full ay is about 50$ (500,000 Rp). Keep track of the relative cost of things as I bring it up because I have a sucker of a story for later (where I am the sucker who had a brain skip).
I suited up with my backpack and some shoes because i figured there would be some hiking around and I also thought it more appropriate to go into a temple with closed toe shoes on. I was one of few who thought that would be nice and later regretted this decision when I was at the beach. Not a big deal though…
The distance to the temple from my resort in Nusa Dua is probably about 20-30 km. Maybe twice that. But it takes much longer to get there because they don’t have highways here and the roads are cramped with scooters. There are no lanes here really and everyone drives very offensively – tailgating is an understatement.
But I trusted in Made and in about half an hour we made it over to the Ulu Watu temple. The temple was built in the 11th century and that is about all I learned about it in particular. It is supposed to be gorgeous at sunset but I chose to watch the sunset at Jimbaran Bay.
The view from the temple was breathtaking. It is built right on these cliffs that plunge right to the crashing surf below. Of course I took pics for you to see (I have many more that I will send out when I get back):
One thing to be wary about at this temple (and others from what I read) is the monkeys will get frisky with your hat, sunglasses, pretty much anything accessible to their mischievous little hands.
That’s right f-ing monkeys. Coolest thing! I took many many pics of them. I may have even accidentally caught one of them plowing himself into another but I think I took my finger off the button.
Some monkeys:
After I was done being Indiana Jones and watching the monkeys we set off to check out the famed Ulu Watu beach and moreover its surf.
The beach itself was a tiny little thing down a series of stone steps and carved over time between two giant stone structures. Built above it were a bunch of villas and surf rental shops.
Here I met the first other American so far! Crazy. She was from North Carolina and her boyfriend was surfing. There are mostly Australians here, German, French, and neighboring Asian countries, but ay my resort – no Americans that I have met.
I took two dips on the ocean, watched the surfers for a while and then set off back up the stairway to the parking area where Made was waiting.
Here is the view from above the beach:
That about covers Ulu Watu. The next stop was Padang Padang Beach.
Padang Padang Beach
This beach was much more swimmable than Ulu Watu and had a break that was farther off the shoreline. I pretty much did the exact same here that I did at Ulu Watu: swim, relax and people watch.
The whole time at both beaches I was wearing a rash guard so I would blend in with the surfers. No really, I was wearing it so I wouldn’t get sunburned. My ghost like features haven’t adapted yet to the blazing sun here. (and again, not to bring it up but the antibiotics didn’t help much since you need to stay out of the sun… grrrr)
This beach also had some gorgeous Italian woman sunbathing topless which reminded me of Italy where the woman sunbathed topless :) … However I still prefer the bikini. Don’t show it all off at once.
After relaxing a bit more it was time to go off to get some food. It was about five o’clock and I had skipped lunch. The destination: Jimbaran Bay.
Jimbaran Bay
Jimbaran Bay is beautiful and was home to just the beach I was looking for. Reminded me a lot of Hawaii actually. Along the beach are twenty four restaurants (Warung as they are called here). I am not going to detail my sucker story in this post but here is where I got suckered.
The draw here is that they catch the fish fresh and you get to pick the fish, prawn, or lobster (or Live Lobster if your name is Matt Stein) and they throw it on this big grill for you and cook it up with various spices and what not. I was a big fan of the idea of fresh food after my ordeal a few days ago. I could see it alive, watch it be cooked and hopefully there is no room in between for error.
My driver and I posted up on a table on the beach (note to people: this would be a very romantic dinner spot, but I was with my driver). When we first got there it was just him and I and a couple to our left. By the time we left all the tables in front of us (two more rows) were filled to the brim with honeymooners, families, and other groups. It was slightly strange eating with Made, but not really. We would talk here and there, but mostly it was still as though I was on my own. I did share a bit of my dinner with him.
The sunset was spectacular and the food was amazing.
Here is the feast before I devoured it:
And after:
It was my first time eating lobster if you can believe that. After watching the sun go down I paid the bill (ugghh) and Made drove me home to my hotel.
This day was hands down my best day here so far. I got to explore some of the culture of Bali, see some wild monkeys, go to three beautiful beaches and indulge myself in a tasty if overpriced dinner.
More to come! Tomorrow I am chilling at the hotel pool and Friday I may head back to Jimbaran Bay to go to the beach there for the day and catch another sunset (but NOT eat Live Lobster).
Send me emails! They are fun to read…
Oh and here is a pic of me :) …
And another from the temple …
I recently need to display a set of items in a ListBox in a grid that wrapped based on the width of the ListBox. Simple right?
My XAML started out something like this:
<Grid x:Name="LayoutRoot">
<ListBox Margin="170,57,134,150">
<ListBox.ItemsPanel>
<ItemsPanelTemplate>
<WrapPanel/>
</ItemsPanelTemplate>
</ListBox.ItemsPanel>
<Button Width="75" Content="Button"/>
<Button Width="75" Content="Button"/>
<Button Width="75" Content="Button"/>
<Button Width="75" Content="Button"/>
<Button Width="75" Content="Button"/>
</ListBox>
</Grid>
and it produced the following result:
Notice how the 5th button is cutoff and is not wrapping. For awhile I was stumped and started looking at ways to modify the WrapPanel itself. One solution might be to give the WrapPanel a fixed width, but that is not very elegant. The solution I landed on (and what I believe to be the correct solution) is to disable the Horizontal Scrolling functionality on the ListBox.
The XAML changes to this:
<Grid x:Name="LayoutRoot">
<ListBox Margin="170,57,134,150" ScrollViewer.HorizontalScrollBarVisibility="Disabled">
<ListBox.ItemsPanel>
<ItemsPanelTemplate>
<WrapPanel/>
</ItemsPanelTemplate>
</ListBox.ItemsPanel>
<Button Width="75" Content="Button"/>
<Button Width="75" Content="Button"/>
<Button Width="75" Content="Button"/>
<Button Width="75" Content="Button"/>
<Button Width="75" Content="Button"/>
</ListBox>
</Grid>
The attached ScrollViewer.HorizontalScrollbarVisibility property tells the Scrollviewer the ListBox (and thus its containing panel) not to scroll horizontally. Thus the WrapPanel doesn’t assume it has an infinite width (this is a non-developer interpretation of what is going on).
The result is just what I want:
Hope this helps!
My friend, a woman (let’s call her Jane), just asked me dating advice. Why I don’t know because I am probably not the best to give it, but her question went something like this (over text message):
Went on a date. Was ok. Not bad at all but not smitten. Kissed goodnight. Agreed to a 2nd date. Now having reservations. If I am not super into him then why waste time.
I couldn’t agree more – and not just because of the time she would be wasting. Both parties would be wasting time. If there is no connection then move on. There are plenty of other people out there.
However, most girls I know don’t throw kisses around on the first date unless they are into the other party. With that in mind I think Jane should think about the following:
- If she goes on many dates then she should abort any future dates with this guy. Even though they kissed, not a big deal, Jane does this a lot maybe (not judging here)
- If she doesn’t go on many dates and she kissed this guy, and that is rare for her, then she should give it another go. There must have been a connection. The guy is worth another shot. Maybe he was nervous, not acting like his normal self – there could be more there.
- If Jane was drunk at all at the time then she should cut ties now. The kiss may have sounded good at the time, but not afterwards, and since Jane isn’t smitten then its not going to get better
But what do I know…
Tune in next time to find out what Jane does!
This is surprisingly not a rant about the DPT - although they are the harbingers of the evil "On Sidewalk" ticket that has been adorning my windshield wiper lately. It is actually a rant on some of the residents of San Francisco. I have lived at my place for about a year. I am not going to say where that is and you will soon learn why.
I am fortunate, or thought I was, to have enough space between the garage door and the adjacent buildings wall to park my car in front of my front door. A spot that does overhang the five concrete tiled sidewalk by about 40-50% depending on how close I park to my front door. Plenty of room for a wheelchair to go through. Glorious I thought - a free parking spot that is not in anyone's way (logically at least). For the most part things have been fine. To this date, during my twelfth month of living here I have received only three "On Sidewalk" tickets.
Each sidewalk violation clocks in at a whopping $100. One hundred dollars. Again, one hundred dollars. Some stats:
I didn't notice on the first two citations, but on my third it says "Complaint 60% in sidewalk". Regardless of the fact that I was only 50%, I found the part about the complaint very interesting. Someone, some other resident of the city, actually called the DPT complaint number and complained that my car was blocking the sidewalk.
As a happy San Francisco resident who has had his fair share of crap to deal with regarding street cleaning tickets, and parking meters, etc. I would only in extreme circumstances call out another resident, especially when there is five feet or more of room on the sidewalk to walk, bike, hop, skip, whatever. You could park a motorcycle behind my car!
If I am blocking the whole sidewalk, then go ahead, complain.
If I am blocking your driveway then tow my ass.
That's about it though - other than that just let it be. Or at least write a note on my car explaining what the problem is.
Another strange thing about this is that it happened at night. My ticket was written up at 10:12 pm. Thoroughly interested, I called the DPT tonight and spoke to two very friendly ladies about the issue.
The first told me the following interesting tidbit:
If one car on the block gets a complaint than every car that is in violation of the sidewalk law is written up on the block.
This is where the City of San Francisco becomes evil again when it comes to how they fill up their coffers. I also asked if I could have the name and number of the person complaining (not that I expected to get it) and was told that they don't take that down for sidewalk complaints since it is the law (a California one at that). That means I could drive by a street that is not even my own, see a car on the sidewalk (or partially as mine is) and have the whole block written up. That is messed.
Where is your compassion people? Next time you think about filing a complaint about something that is not too severe - like partially overlapping the sidewalk - think twice about how $100 would feel sucked out of your checking account.
Also, these tickets cannot be appealed - I mean they can- but both ladies told me you have a chance in hell at actually getting them dismissed. If anyone has done this successfully please let me know.
Well it seems as if more people actually read this blog now, at least two that I know of: Shaan Hurley, Between the Lines and Steve Johnson, Blog Nauseam. As Steve mentions we do tend to agree on disagreeing and this time it is my Mojave Experiment post. But what I don't agree with is Steve's interpretation of my post. I said that the Mojave Experiment is "cool" and "great". Whether a gimmick or not it is a fun experiment. I don't think this is serious marketing or will be able to make any big waves for Microsoft in ramping up Vista adoption. That said I think the experiment does show how brainwashed the everyday consumer is around Vista. I have friends and relatives when asked about Vista will reply, "Oh, I have heard its bad." From who - someone else who heard it was bad, the Apple commercials (because those aren't biased, right), etc.
The Mojave Experiment will at its best be a small viral addition to what will be their next large scale ad campaign.
Also, the mojaveexperiment site now uses Silverlight (definitely not because of my surprise) ...
Lastly, Steve, those early posts can get a little racy ... I now write all of that kind of stuff to friends only on Facebook :) ... Happy reading ...
Edited
Here is my first photosynth creation. It is only 88% synthy because I don't have enough pictures but is still fun. Behold Akaka Falls.
I have been waiting for this to be released to the masses since it was originally offered as a limited technology preview last year:
http://photosynth.net/Default.aspx
Edited ...
So I am watching the Olympics on NBC and enjoying what had been a fairly close game between China and the USA basketball team. At halftime I think USA was leading by ten or twelve. I then went into my room to check some email and browse the web and this greets me:
Yes, I went to Google News so you could say its my own fault, but come on. Google should throw up a temporary option to delay Olympic news by a day.
Note: I almost posted this during the game but then I would have just been contributing to the problem for the 1 person who reads this blog. That's you Chaffee!
I don't know when I became an uber-Harry Potter fan, but I took a month off work (3 weeks actually combined with our week of rest) after completing this and one of the things I did was read the Harry Potter series cover to cover in about a week and half. A week and half well spent. I don't enjoy the first two movies very much but like the last three quite a abit. I may go re-read Half-Blood before this November just to brush up. Enjoy:
I don't get it. I just posted about how great I thought the Mojave Experiment is - and I still think it is great. But why doesn't the site:
http://www.mojaveexperiment.com/
use Silverlight for its interactive video wall. I am pretty certain Silverlight can do everything going in in the Flash app that is running instead.
The only viable reason I can think of is that the Silverlight market penetration is still too low and that Microsoft really wants people (en masse) to go to the Mojave Experiment site. If they have to install Silverlight and then see the experiment results it will be a barrier to entry.
Still though - makes you wonder.
I think this is really cool:
http://windowsvistablog.com/blogs/windowsvista/archive/2008/07/29/windows-mojave-video-posts.aspx
Microsoft basically disguised Vista as a new OS named "Mojave" and then showed it to users. Before the test users were asked to rate Vista and gave it low scores on a scale of 1-10. Then after being shown Mojave they were asked to evaluate the OS and the scores were much higher. The kicker is that Mojave is Vista.
I have been using Vista Ultimate on my ancient desktop and have been more than pleasantly surprised by mostly the numerous little features here and there in addition to the larger, more prominent features. For example, small changes like this to the volume control allowing for per program volume:
or the newly improved Calendar:
are just tiny of the level of change throughout the whole OS.
Other things I find valuable:
Going back to XP makes me cringe. What is even better though is there are a bunch of Vista features I haven't even started to play with - like System Restore, the new wireless connection management (I am on a desktop at home), the Photo Gallery (I am still using Picasa, but this looks comparable now), Windows Remote Assistance (to help the parentals), etc.
Anyway, hopefully more people give it a chance and some good vibes about Vista will start forming.
One of the fun things our User Assistance group did for the AutoCAD 2009 release was a set of cue cards that shipped with the media. Now these Cue Cards are available online for everyone to enjoy. They are great way to get a quick overview of the new features introduced:
Two words: Anchorman 2. With Step Brothers getting pretty good reviews compared to Ferrell's recent duds Semi-Pro and Blades of Glory, let's hope this continues the upward trend and Will returns to form.
"It's called Sex Panther ... 60% of the time it works every time"
I have been meaning to, for awhile, start writing about bits and pieces of what I do at work on a day to day basis. Trouble is, most of what I do at work cannot be revealed until we release our product.
I work at Autodesk, in Marin County, as a Senior Product Designer on the AutoCAD team. For a certain portion of the product I am in charge of designing the user experience - everything from UI layout to business logic.
My education entails a BS in Computer Science so my first passion, I guess you could say, would be coding. I graduated near the top of my class, and really did like coding, but the dot com bubble had just burst (2002) and jobs were harder to find.
I had already been an intern at Autodesk since high school and eventually a position in QA opened up. I took that and eventually moved to product design making the 'decision' (although nothing is ever definite) to forego a career coding away.
But I still loved tinkering with code and kept up on new technologies and even flirted with them for awhile making silly games and other applications (Snake and an Outlook Contact Status Bar utility come to mind).
Whereas some Product Designers on my team opt for mockups in Illustrator or Photoshop, I would always start in Visual Studio and add interactivity as I went along.
Then WPF and XAML came along. 
Ah, what a wondrous piece of technology. Finally I was able to please the code tinkering with my designing side. Such a beautiful union. I am now one of the only designers in the company working on WPF related projects and actually contributing real, working XAML to the code stream. Last year, members of the development team and I pioneered a true designer~developer workflow for AutoCAD using XAML.
The experience has been amazing although there have been some frustrating days where I am sure I was experiencing what most developers experience when they are under the gun trying to fix bugs, get to code complete, and finish off their respective features. When you are working with XAML, you *are* still working with code. Not to mention WPF is a huge, robust set of functionality with lots to learn.
Which brings me to why I started this post. Since I cannot talk much about what I am doing on a day to day basis with AutoCAD, I was going to post some interesting WPF tidbits I find through my work. Hopefully I can post some stuff about AutoCAD too, with respect to our last release, AutoCAD 2009. Stay tuned!
I have held off seeing any but the first trailer for this movie. This new poster that was just released is making the wait for July 18 that much harder... originally posted here.
Okay, I am convinced that as I previously mentioned in this post: Does High-Def make great SFX look bad- there is something about watching a special effects laden movie in HD that is wrong. The green screening is too noticeable.
I just got back from a buddies house and where we watched half of Spiderman 3. We were flipping through OnDemand and saw it there and he was like, I have it on Blu-Ray, probably better than the HD delivered through Comcast (although technically it shouldn't be right??).
All of the scenes of Spidey swinging or that had extensive aerial maneuvering look too fake, especially the first battle between New Goblin and Peter. Don't get me wrong, it looks amazing and seeing the action in HD is great, but the composting is that much more noticeable.
I am thinking we are back in the early days of special effects where the blue screen was extremely noticeable - that got better and better. Now with the increased use of virtual sets and a higher resolution picture, we need to another technological leap to get the composition and lighting of the various elements of the digital scene and the real scene matched up better.
Windows Live Writer is a fairly new tool for publishing to blogs from a desktop application versus the web. Probably nothing new and groundbreaking, but it seems to offer easier editing and insertion capabilities than Blogger where my blog is hosted.
You can insert maps:
Pictures easily:
With different effects:
and even tables:
| Header 1 | Header2 |
| Live Writer | Is Fun |
Now to see if those images I entered automatically get upload when I click Publish.
