Not At Work...

Master Cleanser...

brian — Mon, 26 May 2008 01:10:56 GMT

I have never really been one to try out fad diets or other sorts of healing type things but about a month ago I was just feeling really dumpy. A friend had mentioned that she was going to do this wierd "Master Cleanse" thing, which sounded kinda suspect. So what I did was look it up on line and I started reading about what this thing is and what it does to you. The people who had tried it out raved about how this cleanse cleared their minds and bodies and it sounded like the things that it solved were exactly the things that I was feeling -- unfocused, kinda burned out, unable to take on the hard problems at work... that sort of thing. Oh, and a little overweight (185 is too heavy for a guy with my build and height). So I thought I would give this thing a try. Here's the deal: * for 10 days, you eat NO SOLID FOOD. * instead, you drink this weird lemonade mixture - 2 tbsp fresh squeezed organic lemon juice, 2 tbsp organic grade B maple syrup, little bit of cayenne pepper, 8 oz. bottled water. 6-12 glasses of this stuff a day. * also, at night you have a cup of herbal laxative tea * in the morning, a quart of luke warm salt water. I am writing this about 4 weeks after I finished. The results of this thing were astounding: 1) I have my focus back! I am starting to think big again! I think that the last year at Tribe really burned me out (it was a tough year) and I had sorta been coasting ever since. 2) By the end of my cleanse I was down to 169 lbs! Now I am back up to 173 but that's a lot more like where I am supposed to be. 3) I had a mountain biking injury from 6 years ago just go away! Now I have full mobility again and can do all the stretches that I used to be able to back when I ran seriously. 4) Best of all (and this was a completely unintended side effect) is that my cholesterol which at last check was over 300 is down to 159!! Is that crazy or what? So I guess the bottom line is that I will probably do this thing again -- like once a year, maybe next time in January when it's crappy outside anyway.

You've heard it all before, but this time it's true!

brian — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 07:43:10 GMT

She really IS the most adorable baby ever in the history of babies!!!

Charlinn Rae "Charli" Lawler...

brian — Sat, 24 Nov 2007 03:46:38 GMT

At 6:56pm on 11/22/07, Korin gave birth to our first child, and as we had been previously informed, it's (still) a girl! She weighs 6 lbs 10 oz and is 19.5 in. long. At this point, she has just turned a day old. So far, she has already learned to breastfeed and had her first doctor's appointment. So far so good! Korin is in the process of recovering - we decided to take the risk averse route and go with the c-section as there was a risk of bleeding that we knew about coming in. What we didn't expect was that she would come on Thanksgiving - 10 days before we expected! For my part, I changed my first poopy diaper this morning at 11:15. Just wanted to mark the day. Charli has been wonderful so far. A sound sleeper with a big appetite, who hasn't been too fussy so far. It would appear that Asian genes trump Irish ones, as my little girl looks a heck of a lot more like korin than me. That's probably better though, considering that korin is a hell of a lot better looking than me ayway. I would have posted a picture, but i am working from an iPhone here and can't upload files to tribe on it. Hope you all had a great thanksgiving, but I am pretty sure that mine was better!

it all seems new again on an iPhone...

brian — Sat, 03 Nov 2007 06:32:03 GMT

Well, I just couldn't wait til Christmas and I got my iPhone today. It's damn cool (as I am sure you all know by now) and I am having all sorts of fun playing with my new toy. Typing is still a little slow for me, but I am improving already. Now if I can only figure out how to get my corporate overlords to pay the bill I'll be thrilled! It is funny though how even youtube seems interesting and useful on a phone that looks so nice and works so well. Getting things going was pretty easy, provided you wanted to do things the way Apple wants you to do them. So now I have a new phone number (as cisco is still paying for the old one) but it is a minor inconvenience compared to the coolness factor of having tribe.net in the palm of my hand! First iphone blog post complete!

Finally took the leap...

brian — Mon, 25 Jun 2007 04:48:56 GMT

On 6/15, at San Francisco City Hall, Korin and I finally got married after almost 7 years of being engaged! It was actually a really cool day. Our parents and siblings were all here and we rented a limo and drove around SF to get pictures at key spots. GG park, the Pork Store Cafe, Al's Comics -- you know, the usual wedding day stuff.

!!

brian — Tue, 05 Jun 2007 07:48:15 GMT

Employee #205,652

brian — Thu, 15 Mar 2007 15:24:30 GMT

I recently went to the Dominican Republic for a little rest and relaxation, and while I was gone I went from employee #1 of Tribe.net to employee #205,652 of Cisco Systems. Seems like all the interesting stuff that happens at Tribe happens when I am gone. It's not like it was a surprise, we had been working a LONG time with Cisco to figure out what sort of deal may be there. It was pretty much coincidence that the final signing of papers happened while I was gone. Anyway, now I am a small cog in a HUGE machine. Frankly, it is a bit overwhelming just how big this company is. I drove down to San Jose on Tuesday to drop off my HR paperwork (since I missed the orientation - also because I was gone). There have 2 campuses on Tasman - one that counts buildings by number (Building 1, Building 2, etc.) and one that counts by letter (Building A, Building B, etc.), and with all that space we are not even working down there! We are still working in the City and will continue to for the foreseeable future. The internal website for employees probably has more pages than all of Tribe.net does. But the upshot of all this is that Tribe is out from under its debts (and payroll!) now, but it still has current and past employees that care deeply about the site and its future. The site does a pretty good job of taking care of itself at this point, but it is still continuing to slowly grow and will certainly require those of us who know how it works to continue to be involved. Sounds like a fun hobby to me. So "Uncle Cisco" signs the paychecks now, and another chapter of my career has been written. Thanks to all of you guys for making Tribe.net by far the most interesting and rewarding chapter yet! I don't know if I will be keeping my little "t", but I will certainly be keeping my account! Maybe someday it will be noteworthy that I am Tribe.net user #2.

I suppose it's getting tiresome -- more snow sculpture...

brian — Wed, 27 Dec 2006 03:24:23 GMT

Today is the finale of our snow sculpture series, and the whole family got into it today. Korin, her sister Sam, her mom and dad, and I all had a hand in this, our final masterpiece of the great blizzard of '06. The snow is melting pretty fast actually, but there is still enough to build some really cool stuff, like this sea monster for example. All I did on this one was work on the tail, and build up the piles for the head and humps.

You're a mean one...

brian — Sun, 24 Dec 2006 23:35:56 GMT

I just couldn't help myself! All this snow...

Carving Trolls...

brian — Sat, 23 Dec 2006 23:59:09 GMT

Korin and I drove out to Colorado last weekend from San Francisco. It was a fairly easy 2-day drive, out I-80 to Salt Lake City then south to I-70 (as the weather turned nasty in Wyoming). We arrived in time for dinner in Ft. Collins on Sunday night, where Korin's parents live. The plan was to stay here a few days, then fly to St. Louis on Thursday for a couple days. Until it snowed a couple feet and completely shut down everything. I haven't been in a snowstorm like that for a long time - a full fledged, national news making blizzard. The snow is over now and there are piles of snow 6 ft. high on the side of the street. And you know what 6 ft. high piles of snow means: Snow Sculptures! The one attached to this picture is my own handiwork - an ogre guarding Korin's parents house.

Tribe REBOOT Party 10/10

brian — Thu, 28 Sep 2006 00:46:47 GMT

Join the http://rebootparty.tribe.net tribe to RSVP! I know I know, we have an events system. Why didn't I use the events system? Cause I wanted people to get in there and talk beforehand, and to post pictures afterward. Just like the the party we had in November 2003, for the 3 or so of you who remember that. Anyway, we are having a party and would love to have everyone out to join us!

Nervous Anticipation...

brian — Thu, 21 Sep 2006 07:08:58 GMT

I should be in bed. I should be sleeping. I have to wake up at 6AM (to get to work at 6:15, bob bless the short commute!) for our big rollout. This will be the biggest rollout at tribe since we upgraded the profiles - almost a year and a half ago. I have been working with the new version of the app (specifically the home page) for many weeks now and I am SO TIRED of not being able to use it on the live site! But as we were wrapping up at the office tonight, around 10:30PM -- it's been a bit of a death march this week -- we were mindful of the fact that EVERYTHING is changing. And that people are absolutely going to freak out. And that some will yell and scream, and that some things won't work just right at the beginning and we will have some emergency fixes. But this time, I will gladly take the verbal abuse from irate members because this time, I am confident that this is a site that the whole team is proud of. We are turning back the clock in some ways, but we are springing ahead in many others. We will finally have a blog. We will finally have a customizable home page. We will finally have a masthead that gets you *anywhere* on the site that you want to go without being overwhelming. We have worked hard to make sure it will work. But you never know how these things will behave in the wild. We have been working on this release for a few months, but we weren't sure it would ever see the light of day until Pincus took the company back. As always, we are still unsure of our next steps, still talking and planning and pitching and hustling, but now even if I had to ride off into the sunset I could at least do so in the comfort that the product I worked on for so long has finally returned to its true colors. I hope you all enjoy using it as much as we have enjoyed (re-)creating it. Tomorrow morning (9/21) we will be offline for a few hours. But rest assured, we will be back.

3rd Birthday...

brian — Fri, 21 Jul 2006 17:40:39 GMT

Well, another year has gone by and what a year it has been. We went into production 3 years ago today, and the picture attached to this blog entry is of me and my 3 kickass cohorts Paul, Elliot, and Patti - all of us at the bar after leaving work that night at 11:30PM, with the site up and running and waiting for all you people to come and breath life into it. We moved into our offices and started working full time on the product on June 1, and rolled it out July 21. Looking back, it feels like we had been together a whole year before that picture was taken, not just 7 weeks. I am the last one in this photo that still works here at tribe, but there are people in this office now that care just as much about tribe as we did back in the beginning. I know that there have been lots of rumors lately, and lots of problems before that. Lord knows I have been close to leaving this place more than a couple times over all these years. But at the end of the day, I am always glad that I stayed. I don't know if tribe will ever be a huge internet success story. But after all the time I have spent here and the people I have met because of this job, I have to say that it has already been far more personally fulfilling than any job I have ever had. Thanks to you guys for using the site (some of you since the start). I still don't know what the future holds but today I am content to not worry about it.

Hot days in San Francisco...

brian — Wed, 21 Jun 2006 23:20:37 GMT

Hot days are few and far between in SF, but today I was friggin' hot and I did what any good midwestern boy would do - cut out of work and went to the ball game. We got GREAT seats right behind home plate (sure they cost an arm and a leg, but on such a rare HOT day we thought we would do it up right!) The Giants lost 6-3 to the Angels, but it was still cool to have such a great view of the action. I could call the balls and strikes right along with the umpire!

Quake this morning...

brian — Thu, 15 Jun 2006 12:33:51 GMT

http://quake.wr.usgs.gov/recenteqs/Quakes/nc51171759.html So I was sitting here tribing away and things started to rattle a little bit. Not too much, enough to get my heart pumping a little bit. I don't have a lot of experience with earthquakes. This one lasted long enough for me to have time to think about the fact that I have no idea where I am supposed to run when my condo starts shaking. I just had this sort of deer in the headlights thing going where I was hoping that things didn't REALLY start shaking.

World Cup Soccer - excitement over a 0-0 final...

brian — Mon, 12 Jun 2006 16:27:06 GMT

I love World Cup Soccer. On Saturday I was watching the match between Sweden and Trinidad & Tobago. This match ended in a 0-0 tie, and at the conclusion the Trinidad folks went batty, players and fans alike. Turns out that this was their first ever World Cup game, they are the smallest country ever to qualify, Sweden was heavily favored, and Trinidad was issued a red card in the first half, meaning that they had to play one man down for much of the game. And they still came out with a point! And the Swedish fans were absolutely crushed, even though they came away with a point too. So yeah, a 0-0 result was pretty exciting.

Tivo.... Ahhhh....

brian — Thu, 01 Jun 2006 17:45:31 GMT

Now we have this huge TV and I also have a Tivo. Time is being wasted at a tremendous clip. Or is it?? Now, not only can I record almost every game played by my beloved St. Louis Cardinals, but I can skip over the commercials and most of the boring bits too! I can watch a game in 45 minutes! Time waster my eye.

New TV is coming!!

brian — Sat, 04 Mar 2006 17:42:45 GMT

With the help of our friend and man on the inside, Vance, ordered a new gi-frickign-normous TV. Korin doesn't even really watch TV all that much, but Vance got us a sweet deal and here's the goods: http://ultimateavmag.com/rearprojectiontvs/1105sony/ This thing is so much bigger than our current TV that I am afraid it is gonna look silly in our living room. At first. But I think I'll get used to it...

Film at 11!

brian — Thu, 25 Aug 2005 06:05:40 GMT

Well, 11:03. Here is a link to the QuickTime file of us building the arbor I blogged about last night, complete with accompaniment from Cake. The download will probably take a while but if you have a spare browser window you can witness first hand how bad Korin and I are at doing construction! The link is http://daflink.net/~blawler/ac.mov

Weekend construction project...

brian — Wed, 24 Aug 2005 02:45:20 GMT

While I am not busy ruining everyone's Tribe.net experience by putting ads into every nook and cranny, I like to partake in a little home improvement. Korin and I spend 2 weekends on building a new arbor on our back deck, and the results are actually better than we anticipated. Korin worked hard designing this thing and we put our table saw to good use - the thing makes cutting lumber like cutting paper, just really big paper with lots of dust and splinters flying around. All told builing something like that can be a great way to relax and keep you mind off work on the weekend. I wholeheartedly encourage everyone to take a chance and try it!

Camping at China Camp...

brian — Mon, 01 Aug 2005 16:29:22 GMT

We went camping again, this time with the goal of finding out just how close we could stay to San Francisco and still feel like we were camping. I have been to China Camp many times before to go mountain biking - the trails there are really good - but I never went there to camp. The verdict is that it was absolutely awesome. It is a short drive up to Marin from San Francisco (~40 minutes without traffic) but it is far enough (and quiet enough out there) to give you all the seclusion you need. Throw in a campfire and requisite adult beverages and you have a camping weekend as good as any other! It is actually quite interesting to walk on trails that you are so used to biking on. It seem like it would make that big of a difference, but it really does. When you slow down to look at things it really affords a whole new perspective. That, combined with the fact that we were there at dusk on Saturday and dawn on Sunday gave shed China Camp State Park in a whole new light for me. Another interesting feature of the campsite there (which is different from Limekiln where we went camping last time) was that you have to schlep you stuff in from the car. Our site was the furthest from the parking lot - 300 yards or something - so after a couple of trips back and forth to the car to get everything we didn't have to contend with auto traffic of any sort for the rest of the day. Doesn't seem like a very big deal, but I think that it makes a big difference. Anyway, here's some more pictures. Korin did all the picture-taking this weekend, and she got a couple of good ones... http://daflink.net/~blawler/Camping/ChinaCamp/ChinaCamp.html

The healing has begun...

brian — Sun, 19 Jun 2005 21:55:37 GMT

On September 21, 2004, some degenerate fuck stole my bike. And I made a tribe about it! This tribe ( http://somedegeneratestolemybike.tribe.net/ ) was a nice way to document the day, and to get supportive mails from people I didn't even know, all offering similar stories and condolences. I didn't pursue it much, and have been hoofing it for almost 9 months now. But this weekend, I finally took the plunge and replaced my bike. It is a Trek 6500 with 24 speeds and front suspension that is easy to turn on and off during your ride (in case you need to have extra power while you are climbing). I just got back from the maiden voyage and I am here to tell you, my ass is no longer form fitted to a bike seat as it once was. I am hurtin. Turns out that 9 months is a long time to be out of the saddle, so to speak, but now I am back in! A couple more days of saddle sores and I hope that all will be well with the world and with my posterior. Here is some pictures from the ride: http://daflink.net/~blawler/Biking/MaidenVoyage/MaidenVoyage.html

Get your geek on...

brian — Sun, 19 Jun 2005 21:35:06 GMT

I am embarrassed to find this stuff funny, but sometimes you gotta get your geek on! Quotes like "If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate" are wonderful because they bond geeks together. Geek language provides a safe haven for you when the non-technical people around you are doing things you can't explain. "Calculate every possible destination along their last known trajectory" - Darth V. launches self-DoS Come on man, now that's funny... http://tevp.net/quotes/list.php3?category=1

Lamborn Vineyard visit...

brian — Sun, 12 Jun 2005 17:52:49 GMT

Trips to Napa, once you have been there a few times, can range anywhere from relaxing and rejuvenating to just kind of boring. The first thing I did when I moved to the Bay Area was meet up with some friends who also happened to be here on business the day I moved out. We went up to Napa and did the main drag. It was my second visit to Wine Country, and I did not know the backroads and we ended up where everyone else who doesn't know what they are doing ends up - at Mondavi. That was boring. This past weekend, we went to Napa and got deep into the backroads a visited one of those by appointment only vineyards. Now I had thougth that by appointment meant that is was expensive and snooty, and they didn't want to bother with the hoi polloi. But it turns out that, at least at the Lamborn Family Vineyard, they need the appointments set up so that they know you are coming and that they should come in from tending their vines to receive you and give you the tour! Getting there was a windy drive down narrow backroads, climbing up to an altitude of 2200 feet, where this lovely 30 acre plot of land is located. We had to get out of the car and open the gate ourselves, and close it behind us after going in. I later found out that this is important for keeping out the deer, bears, and mountain lions (oh my!). We pulled up and Mike and Terry Lamborn were just seeing off their previous guests. For the next 2.5 hours, they were the most gracious hosts you can imagine. They took us around their vineyard (they grow Cabernet and Zinfandel grapes) and told us all kinds of interesting information about grapes and wine making. And for the most part, they do all the work themselves - except at harvest time when they have a crew come in and do the harvesting. So we tasted wine in their kitchen, then walked around their vineyard, then tasted more wine in their kitchen and sat on their back porch overlooking Pope Valley, where we tasted more wine. Needless to say, this was one of those visits to Wine Country that falls under the relaxing and rejuvenating category... More pics at: http://daflink.net/~blawler/Lamborn/Lamborn.html

Weekend at Limekiln State Park...

brian — Tue, 07 Jun 2005 06:37:48 GMT

Korin and I (and a couple other friends) finally managed to get out the camping gear and head to the wilderness this past weekend. Well, wilderness that you can drive into, and that had clean bathrooms. While not all that rugged, it was still an outdoorsy thing to do and well worth the drive. We went to this park: http://www.parks.ca.gov/?page_id=577 This place is 56 miles south of Carmel, so its kind of a haul to get there, but the scenic central coast just never gets old. There are a couple of easy hikes in the campground, one that goes to a waterfall and one to the limekilns for which the park is named. The path winds up a beautiful valley with a crystal clear creek rushing down it. Our campground was right next to this creek and Saturday night we all went to sleep with the sound of rapids rushing by in the background. Having that sort of sound cover actually adds some level of privacy to what would otherwise have been a pretty compact campground - you could not hear anything but the creek. There is also a beach front section of this park, but the campsites near the beach are in my opinion to be avoided. There aren't as many trees down there and it feels much more like camping in a parking lot. Also, the ocean winds could knock you over down there if you are unlucky, whereas the other sites are protected by the redwoods.