Tag: Major Events

Carpe Diem, Spring in CA

Adventures in the Past Few Months

Our calendar has been packed the past few months with short adventures and weekend trips, all flavored with a strong dose of short notice spontaneity and disorganization. With the project shutdown and layoff I felt the need to take advantage of every single day between the announcement of the project shutdown and the end of my notice period when I would be officially unemployed. It was such a whirlwind of last minute plans we even packed for trips that never happened!

Tahoe Northstar

Our adventures began with a last-minute trip to Tahoe Northstar. We booked our stay at 10 PM the night before leaving  yet still managed to travel in style. I rented a Tesla Model Y to try out self-driving during the long (for us) trip up to the mountains. The car added some fun for me, though I’m not sure the kids noticed much difference. Continue reading “Carpe Diem, Spring in CA”

Max, with help from gpt-2

This post is written with the assistance of GPT-2. Sections written by me are used as model prompts, and the model output is then modified or curated and able to be used again in following prompts.

Beginning of post

August 23, 2021:

[P1] Megan woke me early in the morning around 3am and said it was time to go have a baby, her water had broken an hour earlier. We sprung into action, though with a tiny bit less apprehension than the first time with Jane. After a long day but mostly typical delivery Max Thomas Cosgrove was born. Birth specifications are as follows:

Length: 50.8 cm (1′ 8”)

Weight: 3.15 kg (6 lb 15.1 oz)

Head Circumference: 36 cm (14.17”)

Apgar One: 9.0

Apgar Five: 9.0

Gestation Age: 39 2/7 wks

[S1] Having another baby was the goal, so that we could round out the family and give Jane a sibling. There are a lot of factors that go into any pregnancy. Luckily for us Megan didn’t have any issues getting pregnant. Recently I’ve noticed that it’s really hard for many to get pregnant. This one was a little different than Jane, mostly because we are so busy keeping up with Jane already. The pregnancy passed quickly and even since Max has been here life just keeps rushing on by. Continue reading “Max, with help from gpt-2”

3 weeks at the beach, Capitola, CA

Since the pandemic began, I watched my coworkers’ locations change throughout the year. Some moved permanently out of state to places like Montana, Michigan, New York and Texas. Others have moved within the state but out of the Bay Area, also for the long term. And most seem to have done some extended traveling. It was nice this past summer to have some routine going to work in the labs and having a normal workday again, but after talking to another engineer on the project who doesn’t do lab work and who spent three months working from Hawaii it’s hard not to get a bit jealous. He told me because of the time zone he was off work by 3:30 PM every day and spent the afternoons surfing.

My current job will never be fully remote, although I can do much of it from anywhere, and Megan’s clinic days mean that for now at least, we can’t easily move to Hawaii. But I’ve been feeling all along during this pandemic that I don’t want the opportunities it presents to pass by  unnoticed since it is (hopefully) a very unique situation and time. So with this as context, when Megan asked for some input on a weekend beach rental for my birthday this year, I asked why not go for a month instead.

 

Continue reading “3 weeks at the beach, Capitola, CA”

Time off, 11/23/2019 – 01/06/2020

Two weeks into my planned company shutdown / paternaty / sick leave I started to really feel checked out from work. The first week off was company shutdown for the week of Thanksgiving and between the holiday and some other activites it still felt busy. The second week when everyone else was back at work I was still checking in daily and getting a few texts and calls for support. After this though, work communication slowed down and I really got into the swing of being away from work.

A colleague of mine (Foo Hooi Lee) reguallary takes all of his vacation between Thankgiving and the New Year in order to travel back to Malasia for a few weeks each year. In years past I haven’t had the nessesary time banked to pull this off but thanks to Jane and Apple’s paternaty leave policy this year I had the hours. I talked to Behnam about my plan for this back in July and he agreeded provided the AS platform was stable and I had a good software release process established which Hesam or Dan could take over while I was out. The big 2019 demos were planned in mid Decemeber and early January so it would be hard to justify leaving if we still had a fragile software platform. So over the course of the fall I worked a lot with this in mind and in early Novemeber we agreeded things were in a good enough place for me to take the whole block of time.

 

Continue reading “Time off, 11/23/2019 – 01/06/2020”

Sailing Trip, San Francisco Bay, CA

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“Stab it! Stab it! Did you get it? Stab it!” *

“Ahh… I’m trying”

“Alright! Nice! Now pull it back and cleat it.”

This was the end of the scene that played out in Ayala Cove on Angel Island this Labor Day as we were hooking up to the mooring balls to spend the night on our sailboat for the first time outside of a marina. I was driving trying to get the boat into position and Megan was hanging off the bow, attempting to use our boat hook to feed the line through the loop on top of the floating mooring ball.

Just before the actual mooring, we had docked at the day use slips in order to flake out the ropes and go over the sequence of tasks needed to moor the boat. The state park service expects all boaters to connect to bow and stern balls and after a failed attempt at bow first, we made a mid operation change in order to tie off the stern first which ended up being a better sequence.

Since the motion of the boat is restricted once attached at one end, it makes sense to back up to one ball while keeping the bow pointed toward the second forward ball. Then, once the stern line is passed through, you can simply motor forward and pick up the bow connection. The currents from Raccoon Straight tend to swirl through the cove which makes this difficult for many, but we had planned ahead and arrived at slack tide when the currents would be minimal.

We managed to get both lines attached on the second try and shut off the engine. Megan did a great job with our boat hook to feed the lines and I managed to keep the boat pointed in the right direction. This was the culmination of about 6 months of solid effort to get here. Continue reading “Sailing Trip, San Francisco Bay, CA”

bzzzztt

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     .    *  .    *   .    * .    *   .    *    .    *   .    *   .    *    .      *   .  *    .    *  .    *  .    *  .    *    .   *   .    *  .   *    .
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May 4th had the makings of a typical day. I rode my bike to work in the morning, and got a call from a coworker about 10 minutes before arriving to my building. He wanted to move a piece of equipment in order to test it in another area of the lab. He wanted a hand when I got there. “No problem.” I said.

I arrived, changed out of my riding clothes, and walked to the other end of the lab. Young, my coworker, hadn’t arrived yet, so I went over and started to unplug the equipment. It was only a single connection, albeit a big one: one hundred and fifty amps, 3 phase, 480VAC. Continue reading “bzzzztt”

Chile

At about 1:00 in the afternoon, the power went out in the Panama City International Airport. There wasn’t much of a reaction from the staff in the Copa Club lounge though so Megan and I continued as usual. I had been about to take a nap with Megan on bag watch after our layover showers, business class travel is rough. We we’re half way to our destination, Santiago, Chile, and a trip we had been talking about for well over a year. An hour or so later, with power restored, headed to the gate for the next half of the flight South.

Our plan was to fly into Santiago and head to the coast for 4-5 days, staying in Valpariso where Megan studied aborad 10 years before, and then Pichilemu, a surf town we had been scouting online. After this we would fly to Puerto Montt and Northern Patagoina in order to visit the new Chilean park, Pumalin Park, and spend time in nearby Puerto Varas. Then make the final leg to Southern Patagoina and visit Torres del Paine, and the adventure hub of Puerto Natales. We decided on this two and a half week iteniary after years of wanting to move abroad to live for a year. Originally we thought to simply quit our jobs and move, first to Pichilemu, then it was Puerto Varas since streetview in Pichelemu looked a bit rough. In retrospec, this may have been, if not a mistake, a bit more than we bargined for. While it would be nice to have a much extended break from our busy lives, we both ended up having a fantastic time despite the abreviated scope of the trip, and are already looking forward to our next trip aborad.

 

Continue reading “Chile”

Honeymoon Video

Welp, here it is.

When we took our motorcycle trip down HWY1 we took a ton of video from the bike and and basically zero video of ourselves at the countless stops and activities. It took a while to edit down to capture the road trip and then record some audio to help the paint drying process, but it was fun and Megan and I are both pretty glad we have this as a way to remember our trip.

 

Continue reading “Honeymoon Video”

Party at the Ritz

This year Apple out did them selves. Our SPG Holiday Party was at the Ritz Carlton in Half Moon Bay. I actually almost missed the signup deadline since it was fairly early in November, but luckily we got our names on the list and booked ourselves a room at the hotel for the night as well. 

It turned out to be a fairly decadent weekend. We were coming off of a week of vacation in San Diego for Thanksgiving, and that Friday we were delivered some Dungeness crab from our fish share. We ate up Friday evening and then Saturday we spent the morning relaxing at a coffee shop before checkin. Checkin time was at 4pm and we arrived promptly at 4 in order to take full advantage of our stay at the hotel. Everyone else who was staying had the same plan and there was a bit of a wait in order to get into the valet area but we survived and got our room at the nicest hotel either of us had ever stayed at.

 

Continue reading “Party at the Ritz”

First Anniversary – Palacio Los Gatos – 10/10/2016

Our first wedding anniversary. We made it a whole year.

On our actual anniversary we were recovering from a long day of moving furniture and boxes. The 10th was Monday, and the previous weekend we spent in Colorado. We had flow to Denver on the Thursday before in order to attend Matt Olsen’s wedding in Estes Park. It was a great event and we got to see a few old friends we hadn’t see in a while.

 

Continue reading “First Anniversary – Palacio Los Gatos – 10/10/2016”