2018.09.17 – Vacation is over

Realizing that I have 13 business days of e-mails to filter

Over the last 18 days I was on a road trip and now the reality of having to catch up and go back to work is kicking in. Sometime between now and this weekend I will get my Silicon Valley Pride pictures done (since I didn’t have time before the trip to finish them) and start slowly typing my journal from the trip. I am going to get back more to my normal pattern in a bit.

The more Facebook friendly angle.

2018.07.08 – Taking Control over Twitter

Just a casual Sunday

Twitter has been an outlet of Social Media that I have just given up on. The reason why is that so many people that I follow retweet a lot of stuff without any comments added. As a result, my feed is just 95% retweets with very little original content. For the most part, the only time I cared about Twitter is when I got push notifications from a very select few about their tweets or a DM on it. In the end, it became useless for me.

But yesterday noticed that Twitter allows one to block all retweets from a single user. The next thing I thought is someone must have an chrome extension or tool to do this. After a quick ‘let me google this’ I found LifeHacker had a javascript snippet to drop into the debugger to toggle this mode on for everyone you follow. Link to article.

This was a life changer for me. My twitter feed has slimmed down a lot. And while retweets with comments are still there – this was the exact behavior I wanted since I often like to see what people think of something they are sharing. You still get the x people have liked a tweet things – but compared to what my feed looked like before, this is now manageable. I have a feeling I will be using Twitter a lot more now.

And in other news – I never linked the following two galleries on my SFW site here and probably should:

Independence Day Fireworks in SF

 

Weekend Road Trip to Lava Beds

2018.05.21 – Letting my hair down

Letting my hair down after my weekend road trip

1200 miles in 52 hours. Yesterday alone was nearly 600 miles of riding that contained 4 mountain passes and 100 miles of 30-40mph headwinds. On top of that my chain decided to go from being good but nearing the end of the adjustment range to OMG – REPLACE ME NOW in the last 150 miles of the trip.

But what a lovely trip it was. I will be posting up a trip report and pictures tonight or tomorrow. But it’s time to shower and get my ass to the office.

2018.03.05 – Just a chill day yesterday

Matte needed to get his new rear broken in.

Instead of selfie filled post, I am just going to post up a lot of pictures from my ride yesterday. Yesterday was the first day since getting the rear tire replaced (due to it getting double penetrated on Monday night) where the weather was good enough for me to get out and get it scrubbed in.

I am glad I did – it was nice just to take a chill ride down the coast.

Just a perfect day.

While it may seem silly to wear a one-piece race suit on a really chill ride – it has become my normal wear when I decide to go out for the sake of riding. I have found that it really doesn’t change how I ride – which is a very good thing. I can see how someone could get more aggressive and ride faster than they should. But for me, there is something just right about riding around California in race leathers enjoying the scenery.

More important than being on the open road is looking around and seeing what is going on. The poppies are all in bloom down the coast. If I didn’t get off the bike and walk around for a bit, I would have never found this bunch of poppies just after I took my selfies.

Often all one needs in life is some roadside food. My goal was to grab lunch in Santa Cruz. But instead I have passed by Pie Ranch and realized that I have never stopped at it. This time I decided that I am going to stop there for pie. I wish I had someone with me to enjoy one of the larger pies like the Buttermilk Meyer Lemon Pie, but the Apple Pie pocket hit the spot.

While I typically take a small tail bag with me – I am not sure a small pie would have successfully made it home. But now I need to think about going to work and starting my Monday.

2018.02.25 – DMV hassles.

Come on coffee!

Yesterday I attempted to sell my car. However due to a huge mess with the California DMV, CarMax is unable to buy my car until California has things updated right. So despite having a free and clear title in hand I get to deal with the DMV tomorrow. *tears hair*

The good news is the new espresso machine has seemed to adjusted the grinder dosing (yes, the machine is self-learning). The coffee that is coming out of it is a lot better than my old machine. It appears that this grinder is grinding the coffee finer than the last machine. Also – the coffee is hotter. I was starting to suspect the old machine was reaching its last legs even before it broke. With it so cold, I decided that I needed to pre-warm my gear before hopping on Matte.

Coffee can be dangerous stuff, right?

And I just did things for me today. Hopped on Matte and seeked out breakfast. I went to Apple Fritter and got a bacon hash and (finally) an Apple Fritter. This was the first time ever that they had apple fritters available when I have been there – since they often sell out. Once I finished my Fat Dog Agenda – I then headed up to the Treasure Island Flea – which is now the Treasure Island Fest.

Unfortunately this name change appears to be bad. One of my regular vendors I go to for tea and spices said next month will be their last. It has felt like for a bit that they are going higher end – and this is bad for me since it was one of the reasons I attended. Also I have noticed a drop in the more down to earth type of stands. Not everything needs to be 10 buck bars of organic goat milk soap or artisanal cupcakes. Sometimes we all need the cheap little stuff in our lives.

On the way back I stopped by Wicked Grounds. I noticed that I sometimes feel strange for having a life and interests outside of kink. Recently I have not been as active in the community due to many reasons. But also, I am tired of attending play parties and having nothing happen. My rule of thumb is if you want to have a scene with me, say something to me before and I can make it work. But I have hit the point where I have too much in my life to Stand and Model at an S&M party and have nothing happen.

Now I get to clean up the mess I made digging though lots of old mail for the hassles of yesterday.

2018.02.24 – 1 Year with Matte

Wow – it’s been a year already?

Time flies when you are having fun. On this weekend a year ago, I brought home Matte from the dealer. Over this last year I have ridden 24,000 miles – something that I would have never guessed I would do. And looking at my spreadsheet – I have driven the car just a hair over 3,000 miles.

Today I am going to make a different thing happen that is just as scary as an American. I am going to sell my car. I took the car to CarMax this morning, and I got an appraisal a bit higher than expected. Might as well just do it instead of talking about it, especially before the redesign hits and knocks down the value further.

I think it’s time to write about this first year. I am going to keep this post updated with links to sub posts.

2018.02.23 – New Espresso Machine

Yay – new espresso machine!

Yes, I am addicted. For the last two weeks, I went without having a super-automatic espresso machine after my old one decided to stop working. I am not complaining too much for getting 13 years out of it. I realized how much more coffee I was going through making French Press and I also missed the taste of espresso. It was time to order a new one. So I claimed any recognition points at work for amazon gift cards and bought one – no one will ever argue over saving 300 bucks on a device like this.

Now that my coffee is back to being controlled by robots – I will have more time for selfies again.

But thinking about it – I think I have a fetish of being controlled by robots. There will be more info about a personal project I am working on with a friend control me in sexual situations. Stay tuned.

2018.02.19 – Day Off

It was too cold to go running this morning so I just basked in the day light in my nice warm apartment as the sun rose over Lone Mountain.

As I was waking up I was thinking to myself this morning, “Why am I beating myself up?” Little setbacks lately have been ended up as major issues. I really need to stop doing that. But why is this happening?

I think this is one of the downsides of living in San Francisco. You are surrounded by many successful people (or at least they portray that they are successful) in both your personal life and corporate life. When you have friends who do porn, who are perfect looking, who have no issues hooking up – it amplifies all of your imperfections. The people I know who look up to me often are shocked that I have these insecurities – but I do.

And it is the same thing on the business side. I meet up with people who seem to be successful entrepreneurs, or they are successful in a specific niche. There are days I ask myself, what I am missing? What could I be doing different to tap into this market?

This all leads to having any setback feel like a huge blow. Be it my weight or issues with my career. By all means I am doing well on both fronts. When all you have to compare yourself are externally perfect – it is hard to keep a balanced perspective on your life. I need to break this cycle.

This is also a reminder to everyone that what someone externally portrays themselves as is not always the reality

 

2018.02.18 – Getting back to my habits

Time to make the coffee

Over the past few months, I have fallen out with a bunch of the habits I built up. More or less over the past few weeks I have gotten back on them and I should get back to posting my selfies here along with other social media sites. Over the next few days I am getting back to writing.

Writing these posts about what I am thinking really has helped center me. I don’t know how many people who follow me actually read them. In a way, It doesn’t matter if you are following me for my pictures or my thoughts. The goal for me is to just get what is spinning around my head down. Sometimes that’s all I need to get something that is building up out of me so I can get back to a sense of normalcy.

Many of these upcoming posts will be about having the motorcycle for a year. It has changed my life in many ways, mostly positive. And having gone head first into owning a sportbike there are many things I have learned that I think will be helpful next time someone asks me about learning to ride.

Also, selfies have also been hard for me since I have gained 10lbs due to work and family stress over the past few months. I have managed to get back on track again and will be getting myself back to it. The hardest thing to do is getting back to a running routine. 10lbs is enough to make your body hate you when running even a short distance like 5k.

But for now, here are some of my morning coffee selfies. It was too cold to run this morning, I will take a run after lunch and there may be more up later.

2017.11.14 – SF Leather Cultural District and Some Thoughts.

If you are not aware of it – there is a community effort to create a Leather Cultural District in Western SoMa. Tonight there was a meeting at the SF Eagle about it. I did bug out after the discussion went to the details of setting boundaries and so forth. But for those who are interested the website is: http://www.sfleatherdistrict.org/

Let me set my record straight – I think this is something we should be pursuing. What little that remains needs to have a better seat at the table for city politics and neighborhood planning. And for the community that is here, having increased opportunities to access grant money and better visibility is vital. I want this to be the opportunity that we as a community here in SF uses to reinvent ourselves.

The one thing these discussions that really bugs me is the talk about the community dying. To me – we are focusing on the wrong aspect and establishing a cultural district won’t help those factors. In fact, I think we stay stuck living in the past, we are going to faultier even more. I urge for all those in the community that say things are dying to reflect on what they are doing to keep grow it.

Communities and cultures change constantly. Things will never be the same as they were in the past. What we should be asking to ourselves is what can we do to grow things or how do we evolve? I do not believe evolving means we destroy the past. If we get Board of Supervisors to pass this and Ed Lee to sign it, what are we going to do with our new found status in the city and nation? What will be the new event, who will be the new artist, where will be the new store that energizes us? And there will be real risks and failures we will have to take on this path.

Anyways – I just wanted to get my thoughts out and hope causes gears to turn.