d03sntm4tt3r

Where was I in 1983?

Just spent five days in Lake Tahoe for a great ski trip.  The Tahoe area is having a terrible year for snow.  Very little snow has fallen, and the temperatures were in the 50s F during the day.  The good news is that I can't ski in powder.  No powder problems for me.

I went to Heavenly for the first two days where I ran into ultra hot Ryan, the photographer with a world-class beard.  I saw Ryan when I visited Tahoe last Sep.  My first and only time in Tahoe.  What are the odds I would see this hot little bear again? Taking pictures on the mountain.  

After a day off to recover (my legs were trashed), we went to Kirkwood.  My new favorite ski resort.  This place was soo much fun.  Tons of fun runs, crazy huge ravines all over the place.  I couldn't stop skiing into the ravines.  They have some sort of strange power over me that reminds me of skating half pipes back in the 1980s.  Kirkwood has these intense double-black cliff runs they call the wall.  Seriously, you ski off a cliff with a vertical drop.  There was no way my injury-prone ass was going to drop into those.

We found this cool little restaurant called the Bear Beach Cafe.  I'll post pics of their sign when I am back home and pull the pics off my camera.  There is a hot muscle bear man working in the cafe wearing a wedding ring.  At first I thought "hmmm, married, maybe he's bi?"  Then I remembered I was in California.   Duh.  Married?  Yes.  Bi?  Doubtful.  Hot?  Hell yes.

It's Wednesday evening, December 17.  Christmas is only a week away.  I haven't started Christmas shopping and probably won't for many more days.  Do I panic?  Am I stressed about it?  No.  That's because, for me, December 25 is merely a suggested deadline, and nobody complains because I give killer gifts :-P.

I am a little confused, however.  By this time of the year, work normally starts getting really slow.  Everybody is too busy trying to manage holiday decorations, parties, DUIs, shopping, and traffic.  That's great for me, because I start to catch up after four or five months of running behind everything.  The strange part about this year is that nothing is slowing down.  I have massive unread email, several tasks with deadlines this week, and work is coming faster than I can reply.

The good news, and this is probably excellent news, is that I haven't been missing the gym.  Ahhh, the amazing motivation to exercise when I can't fit into my clothes.

For years I have carried multiple electronics.  Work phone, personal phone, bluetooth, PDA, and nav (for the car).  It's time for an optimization exercise, starting with the phones.  I'm in the market for a new personal phone I can use for work and has nice PDA capabilities like my Palm Tungsten T3.

Does anyone have mobile phone recommendations?  Fun apps are fine, but I really must have a phone with exceptional call quality and reliability.  Phone reviews I read haven’t mentioned call quality, which continues to surprise me.  My old Treo phone was praised by everyone, but I thought it was the worst phone I ever used.  I could never hear the caller well, they couldn't hear me, the phone sometimes wouldn't make calls, and it sometimes didn't ring.  The phone was slow.  I could press a soft key on the touch screen, but the phone wouldn't process the action for several seconds.  It was lots of fun when the soft key definitions would change between user selection and phone action, especially when the key changed from "unmute" to "hangup".  My customers loved that.  The replacement is a Samsung Blackjack.  Junk.  I stopped using it as a phone.  Now I only use it for email.

 

I’m working on a list of mandatory and desirable requirements, but can anyone suggest a good review website that covers the basics like call quality?

 

 

This is new to me.  Live journal or blog.  I probably should have done this many years ago, but I didn't have the incentive.

Whoa, html tags.  Fun.  Where is <blink>?