Tim Gerla's Blog

Gardening

2010-05-02T20:11:00.000-07:00

I've been taking advantage of the great weather here in Santa Barbara by planting a bit of a garden in our back yard. So far I have several varieties of tomatoes, some hot peppers, three types of peas, carrots, radishes, cucumbers, and lettuce. Here's my pea fence, and some carrots. The radishes are already done--I'm currently eating a slaw made up of the rest of the daikon radishes. Delicious!

I installed a drip irrigation system to make watering easier. It's attached to the house hose spigot, and there are a bunch of different ways to get water to the plants. The black hoses in the previous picture are "drip tape"--lightweight hose with drip emitters every foot or so. Those are great for long rows of plants, but I've found it easier to use individual drippers per plant, especially in my tomato beds:

If you look closely to the right of the photo, you can see the stream of water coming off of the drip emitter. I think my water pressure is a bit too high for this system, though--it should be dripping, not streaming.

I've also experimented with mini-sprinklers. These seem good for watering a larger area, but not so great for targeting individual plants:

There's a main 1/2" line that I have running from the hose bib, out to the back beds, and up to the roses in the front yard. Off of that main line, I tap in and connect a 1/4" microtube along the way. Off of the 1/4" line I can connect drippers or sprinklers. The drip tape, though, connects right to the 1/2" line. It's cheap and easy to set up, and super convenient! My trouble has been getting the pressure right along the entire line.

Our yard has a bunch of established fruit trees, too. Loquat, grape, peach, pineapple guava, fig, and lemon.

We also have a bunch of very fragrant jasmine in the back:

Adventures

2010-04-12T11:09:00.000-07:00

Liza's sister Whitney came to visit us this week. We wanted to show her a good time in Santa Barbara, so we kept busy. We started by hiking up to Montecito Peak, one of the most prominent peaks in the area. It's a 7 mile hike up to a peak of 2400 feet, with about a 2000 elevation gain from where we started. We started at the bottom of the Cold Spring Ridge trail:

We didn't quite bring enough water up to the top; it was HOT. The trail has a lot of exposure, and we started a little bit after noon. Luckily the East Fork of the Cold Spring trail had a lot of cover on the way down, and we drank from the very clean creek. Refreshing! Rufus did great. He's a trooper and he's going to be the best hiking dog ever. He doesn't like it when any of his party gets separated--he constantly runs back and forth making sure we're nearby. Must be his herding instincts. We signed the logbook at the top, and enjoyed the great views:

On Friday, we went surfing. We bought a few hours of lessons from the Santa Barbara Adventure Company. We started out in Carpinteria right off of Santa Claus Lane, but we moved down further south to Faria Beach where, apparently, the surf was better for beginners. I still got dunked a couple of times. The water really grabs the surfboard with a huge amount of force. We were already sore and tired from our hike the day before, so it was a real workout! None of us managed to stand up on the boards, but we managed to get up on our hands and knees and rode a couple of waves in. Definitely something to try again.

On Saturday we went up to Solvang and tasted some wine. Much more relaxing!

No words, only pictures

2010-02-14T20:36:00.000-08:00

Preparing for the puppy...

2010-02-12T10:31:00.001-08:00

This is familiar...

2010-01-20T16:11:00.000-08:00

Two months and 9 days after a previous post, we've moved again. We loaded up our PODS storage unit and had it picked up yesterday, then we packed the car to the gills and headed south through the crazy rainstorms. We did pick a place out to rent. It's a small house in West Side Santa Barbara.

It has a big back yard with a bunch of fruit trees: loquat (whatever that is!), guava, lemon, fig, and peach. It also has some pre-built raised beds that we're planning to load up with tomatoes, peppers, and cucumbers, and who knows what else! There's a very large unfinished garage on the property. It's not suitable to park a car inside, but it will be great for storage and perhaps a photography studio.

The house is small but the owners did a lot of work to make it space-efficient:

The home was built in the 1930s and it has a lot of original character left, including a pop-out writing desk on the mantle for all the times you want to sit down and write a letter. Hah.

Work is going well. I'm traveling to Tucson next week to deliver a training session, and I already have another trip lined up for next month.

What's Next?

2010-01-04T22:00:00.000-08:00

I'm starting a new job this week! I have taken a sales engineering position at Eucalyptus Systems, a small startup in Santa Barbara, California. I had been at rPath for nearly 6 years, and it was time for me to move on with my career. I wish the best of luck to everyone I worked with there. rPath is a fantastic company and has amazing technology, and they are going to continue to do great things. I was incredibly privileged to be able to work with the greak people there.

Along with the new job comes a relocation to Santa Barbara. My faithful readers might remember that Liza and I recently moved from San Francisco to San Jose, and yes, we are moving again. I'm heading down today (Sunday) to take a look at a few more places for rent and hopefully sign a lease. I'm starting the job on Monday, too, so I'll be there for the week. We have a portable storage unit from PODS in the drivewy that we're slowly loading up. Once we've found a place to live, we'll have them pick it up and deliver it down south.

After driving the San Jose to Santa Barbara route too many times in the last month, I decided to try Amtrak. They have a bus that goes from San Jose to San Luis Obispo, and a real train from SLO to Santa Barbara. For some weird reason, the all-train route on the Coast Starlight takes eight hours, but the combined bus+train trip only takes 6. I'm on the bus portion right now--it's full of college students returning to Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo. It's a relatively comfortable ride; no worse than an airplane; and it sure beats having to drive. Hopefully the train will be on time and I can get to my househunting appointments!

Mazatlan, Mexico

2010-01-04T21:57:00.000-08:00

Liza and I took a trip to Mazatlan, Mexico in the middle of December. It was a great time to go--flights and hotels were pretty cheap, and the weather was absolutely perfect. We flew down on a Wednesday. Our flight left at 6AM from the SFO airport, about a half-hour drive from our house in San Jose, so we left very early. I don't even remember exactly what time it was. We hopped on the AirTrain to get to the terminal. The train took its route through the various stations up to the terminals, but at one stop, the doors didn't open. A few moments later a recorded voice said "The AirTrain system is experiencing technical difficulties. The train will be moving shortly."

After a few minutes the recording played again. Then the doors opened--and closed. The recording played again. After waiting for 15 minutes, we started to get anxious. We had a flight to catch! The doors opened again and we made a break for it and ran to our terminal on foot, checked in, and hustled through security. We ran to our gate with only a minute to spare before they would have closed the door, but instead of an empty gate, we found a huge line of people waiting at the counter. Sure enough, our flight had just been delayed an hour, and ominously, they were rebooking people on different flights. We learned that most of the flights at the airport had been grounded due to ice on the wings. Yes, even in San Francisco.

Instead of waiting in line, I called US Airways' customer support line and asked them if they could do anything. Turns out they'd already rebooked us on an Alaska Air flight to Los Angeles! Score! She said that the tickets had been booked but not issued, whatever that meant, but she could go fix it. We trotted back outside security to the other terminal across an icy construction zone (yes, even in San Francisco), found Alaska Air, and tried to get boarding passes. The counter agent told us that we were really on an American flight. We went to American and waited in the Platinum line where a horribly rude woman wasted precious time trying to make me prove that I was indeed a Platinum customer. She must really hate her job. We went through security again, and boarded.

We didn't think we'd make it, but we did! We had a short layover in Los Angeles and then flew over the border to Mazatlan. Mazatlan's airport is about 45 minutes outside of town, so we bought passes on the resort's shuttle. We stayed at the Pueblo Bonito Emerald Bay, which sits north of the city, out of the main tourist section. Here are some pictures:

Mazatlan is an interesting place. It's definitely tourist-focused. There's a lot of development and some of it seems to be unfinished. I think that the recession has slowed a lot of the building projects down. As you'd expect in a poorer country in a tourist area, there's a sharp contrast between the walled condo compounds and the "real Mexico" that supports it. Mazatlan doesn't really have the lush tropical landscape that Costa Rica does, but it is beautiful anyway. Besides tourism, agriculture is the main economy of the area.

We had a very low-key vacation this time. We didn't rent a car, like in Costa Rica, and we stayed at the Emerald Bay the whole time. We made nearly daily excursions to the city, checking out some of the shops and the massive indoor market. I wish I had taken some pictures of the market! We paid a "pulmonia" (open-air taxi) driver $30 to drive us around old town Mazatlan. He actually grew up in California. Here are some pictures from the tour:

Most of the time, we just relaxed at the pool, and when we got tired of that, switched to the beach. We picked up a small pile of used paperback books at one of the Super(markets)s in town and just relaxed. We avoided sunburn, although the risk was really high! Every day was completely cloudless and 85 degrees. Totally perfect for December.

We had planned on doing a couple of excursions: we wanted to do the Fire Opal Mine tour--a 13-hour tour that started at 5:30AM and went up into the Sierra Nevada into a working opal mine. Unfortunately, the rest of the resort was too lazy--they didn't have enough people interested, so they canceled the tour. Perhaps next time.

We had a great time. It was definitely more of a sanitized resort vacation this time, compared to Costa Rica. I think our idea vacation will land somewhere in the middle of those two extremes.

Moved in!

2009-11-11T21:33:00.000-08:00

Well, we made it! We moved to San Jose today. We hired Pat Ryan Moving again. We hired them once last year to move from the U-Pack terminal in Oakland to our place in San Francisco. They made it so painless! There's no way we could have navigated our large couch through the very small doorway into the apartment. I highly recommend hiring professionals.

Here are some photos. I still forgot to get a good shot of the front, but I'll get one soon:

More Pictures

Another year, another lease.

2009-10-17T12:30:00.000-07:00

It's hard to believe we've been living in San Francisco for nearly a year! Our lease is coming up at the end of November, so we began the hunt for the next place to live. We basically decided that although we liked a lot of aspects of the city, it was too expensive and we needed a little bit more space. So we began looking at rentals south of here, down the peninsula. Rental prices aren't much cheaper in our favorite area, Palo Alto/Menlo Park, so we extended our search into San Jose.

A couple of hunting trips later, we found the place. It's in San Jose, close to downtown, but in a rather suburban single-family area. It's less than a half mile to the CalTrain station, a mile from downtown, and has a WalkScore of 80! Not bad compared to our current score, which is 88. I think it'll be a great compromise between the city and the suburbs.

It's a very cute little 3-bedroom house with a great yard and a huge deck. The landlord loves animals, so we will probably look into that. Her last tenant had a huge great dane, but the house seems to be in really good shape anyway. It has a big kitchen with a cool solarium over the kitchen sink which will be perfect for starting plants. We are planning to build a couple of raised beds for gardens--this will be the first place we've lived in that should be very good for gardening. It also has two mature fruit trees in the back: fig and lemon. Liza's really excited about the fig trees--we just need to figure out how to keep the squirrels away! The lemon tree is going to give us more fresh lemonade than we know what to do with.

We'll get some more pictures when we move in. For now, here's a capture from Google Street View:

We now have a cat.

2009-08-04T12:30:00.001-07:00

We adopted a cat from the local SPCA yesterday. She doesn't have a name given by us yet, but she's 5 years old and very sweet:

Figure Drawing Class

2009-07-04T15:33:00.000-07:00

Three weeks ago I started a figure drawing class at the City College of San Francisco. I haven't drawn anything since junior high school, so I wasn't sure what to expect. I'm having a blast! I've had three classes so far. As the first exercise in the first class, we simply drew the model using any technique we wanted. We then learned to do "gesture sketches" of very short (30s-2m) poses, and practiced those for a while. Gesture sketches are intended to show the "flow" of the thing you're drawing, not actually draw what it looks like. It's also intended to help establish proportion and scale in the drawing, something I'm still learning to do well.

The next few exercises involved "blind contour" where we hid the sheet of paper we were drawing on and simply tried to let our eyes guide our pencil. These drawings, again, are not intended to look like our subject.

After those two exercises, we combined them into gesture and contour drawings. We'd establish the scale and proportion with the gesture sketch, and then begin to fill in the lines using the techniques we practiced in contour drawing.

At the most recent class we covered the idea of "value": shades in the drawing. Our teacher had us draw a sort of an "armature" using gesture sketching, and then imagined we were "pushing" clay over the drawing, pushing harder on our drawing instrument the further away the point of the model was from us. Finally, we did a gesture plus value drawing, using value instead of contour to convey lines.

Here are a couple of drawings I was pleased with. I'm still practicing proportion and scale--it's so difficult to translate what you can clearly see with your eyes, to the page!

Kayaking in the Redwoods

2009-07-01T08:50:00.000-07:00

This weekend Liza and I went for a short weekend trip up north to Sonoma County, to a town called Guerneville. It's up in the redwoods and hills west of the famous Sonoma Valley, and it's full of beautiful vineyards and orchards, as well as seedy river-side resorts. We drove up on Saturday morning and took a quick hike through the redwood trees at the Armstrong Redwood State Reserve. We saw the oldest tree in the park, the Colonel Armstrong Tree, which is estimated to be over 1400 years old and 308 feet tall. The tallest tree in the park is only a bit taller, at 310 feet.

We took a 3.3-mile hike through the park in the 85-90 degree heat. It was quite hard work! We passed a couple of people on horses along the way, which really looked like a better way to travel except for the ridiculously tight path and steep dropoffs. Yikes! We were exhausted and dehydrated when we were done, and promised ourselves that we'd get a "camelback" water backpack instead of the little 1-liter container we had with us.

After the hike we checked into our resort and tried to find something relaxing to do. We headed out to one of the tiny towns next to Guerneville, Monte Rio, and found a movie theater. Sort of. It was a converted World War II quonset hut with no air conditioning that they had outfitted with stadium seating and a screen. We watched Angels and Demons, which was a really fun movie! We loved the scenes from CERN, having visited the lab last year.

The next day was even hotter--nearing 100 degrees during the heat of the day. We picked up our kayak in downtown Guerneville and headed to the river. The Russian River was incredibly calm, shallow, and warm. We kayaked for about 5 miles back down to Monte Rio where the kayak rental place picked us up.

We found some excellent food at a little place called "Boon Eat and Drink", and then I got a call from our real estate agent to tell me that we had received an offer on our house! We celebrated with some delicious rum and ginger ale by the pool. It was a great little trip!