A Dreaded Sunny Day

One of the things I love when traveling is running in new cities. It's a great way to explore unfamiliar territory on foot. So after sleeping off my jet lag last night (with the help of a few pints in nearby pubs), I awoke this morning to a beautiful, sunny day and went for a run around London.

I'm staying near the London Bridge, so I basically combined 3-4 different walking tours from my Lonely Planet guide book into one 11-mile run past many of the tourist sites, including St. Paul's Cathedral, the Wellington Arch, Buckingham Palace, St. James Park, Hyde Park, Piccadilly Circus, Trafalar Square, the Eye of London and Shakespeare's Globe Theater, among others. The run started and ended with a run along the Thames, which is lined on both sides of the river with a promenade.


Now I'm off to the pub for some fish & chips. The Octopus Project will be arriving later this afternoon — they played a show in Nottingham last night and will play in London tomorrow night.

June Gloom

The general assumption is that it's always sunny and 75 degrees in LA, and for the most part that has not proved to be entirely untrue. This week, however, I learned about a Southern California weather phenomenon known as June Gloom (or May Gray), when a cloud layer blows in from the ocean and effectively creates winter in spring. This entire week has been overcast and relatively chilly (for LA standards), although thankfully without drizzle. I suppose it's a fitting primer for my trip to London tonight.

Catch a Wave

I finally got in the water this weekend. The possibility of surfing becoming a new regular hobby was one of the major lures of California, but I've been nervous to just run out and jump in without knowing what I'm doing outside of a few goofy attempts in Costa Rica. Fortunately, one of my coworkers surfs every weekend and invited me to meet him yesterday at Manhattan Beach, a pretty chill spot with moderate waves and no territorial locals.

After a quick 15-20 minute drive from our apartment, I rented a board and wetsuit and spent about four hours going at it. The water was about 62 degrees, but the wetsuit really does its job and the cold never bothered me much. My rental board was kind of a boat, but it made it easy to catch waves, sometimes unintentionally — there were several occassions when my board decided we were taking this wave, and I had little choice in the matter.

Today I'm sore in places I never knew existed, but the net result would have been fairly easy to predict — I'm hooked. Time to start shopping for a board.

Recent Work

A New Error has been gathering dust lately, partly because I just spent the past three weeks working pretty much around the clock to get a freelance project finished on a very tight development timeline. Once again, I built this website using ASP.NET 2.0 and SQL 2005, and it's entirely tableless except for a fairly complicated scheduling grid (which is tabluar data, mind you). Nearly everything on the site is dynamic and managed by the client via a CMS admin tool I built for them, as well. If you have absolutely nothing going on in your life right now, check it out.