Shortly after writing this post last year, I sent my future self (me now) another email with my hopes and predictions for the future. Today I have received that email:

Dear FutureMe,

Hello from the past! I feel a little strange writing this letter considering how WRONG I was on the previous one. But, here we are.

Looking at 2014 from my vantage point, there shouldn't be much change from the latter half of 2013; you'll still be at LinkedIn and, of course, in the Bay Area. I'm hoping that you'll have become slightly more suave with the ladies because that's really the last item on the checklist.

Also, there's the very vague possibility of an Oktoberfest trip with the ol' TN folks. At this point in time, I'm not sure how that will play out or if it will and it wasn't just a bunch of "Whooo!! Riding the high of life" type talk.

Finally, I'm hoping that summer with Chris hanging out while he interns winds up being every bit as awesome as I'm anticipating right now.

So, get your ass a girlfriend and I'll see you in a year!

All in all, that summed up the year pretty accurately. I'm still at LI, still in the bay, and Chris' internship was a lot of fun. Of course, the Oktoberfest trip didn't happen, but I did wind up visiting all of those folks in their new home of Smogsville, TX just last weekend.

There does seem to be a recurring theme here in the form of "get a girlfriend you big ass". And, as I prepare to write the letter to myself for next year, that thing will come up yet again. Of course, actually trying to meet somebody would probably be a huge step towards actually realizing this. Having a handful of dates with one girl per year isn't getting me anywhere very quickly...

So, I've fallen off the horse on that daily blogging shit. Whatevs. Not much has been happening that's worth talking about or that I can talk about (NDA and all). Until today, that is.

When I woke up terribly sick.

Normally, I know when I'm getting sick the night before, but not this time. I woke this morning and started thinking that something didn't feel right. Snooze the alarm, attempt to sleep for another nine minutes. But I don't as I'm assessing the situation. Then it hits me: I feel sick. Well, that's not right. I get sick the night before; I should have known this is coming. My body, however, apparently had other plans. Alarm goes off again and I'm lying there deciding if I should go to work where we're currently in crunch time or stay home. I decide the latter and text the boss my physical and work status. I throw my phone on the floor and attempt to get rest.

But the weight of deadlines prevents me from getting much actual rest. I have a weird fever dream where I'm on a date eating hotdog ice cream. Well, kind of. It's actually a hotdog in an ice cream cone with a cone of chocolate on top. My date throws her cone on the ground and then proceeds to steal food from a good truck. I'm flabbergasted and am about to tell her off when I realize... this can't be real. Sure enough, it's not.

So, I get up, drink some juice and pop out the work laptop. After about an hour-ish of work, my body feels like it's actually going to start falling apart at the seams. So, I abandon work and crash on the couch figuring now would be a perfect time to catch up on the animus that I've not been watching lately. One episode each of Girls' Monthly Nozaki-kun, Hanayamata, and Sword Art Online later, I decide I should try to get some more work done. But, the 12 foot journey from my couch to my computer makes me realize that my health has actually declined in the time since I'd last been over there. I IM the boss my status and that this is the end of me, grab abother Advil and OJ, then head back to the couch.

Where I proceed to watch ten more episodes of Sword Art.

The show isn't bad, certainly better than the second half of season 1. However, I can't help but notice that Kirito is coming to rescue yet another damsel in PTSD distress. Fuck having strong female protagonists in that show; I just don't think the author has it in him to keep his initially strong females that way. Also, there are so many ass and taint shots of the main female character. Which is okay, I guess...

But, this isn't about SAO, it's about me being sick. As I'm watching all these episodes, I'm toying with the idea of getting a pizza. And get a pizza I do. It arrives ~40 minutes later and I chow down as I finish watching SAO. The pizza makes me feel a bit better, having filled the void in my stomach. And then sleepy.

I crawl into my bed where I try to get cool enough to fall asleep. It must have been successful, because the next thing I know the sun has gone down and the clock reads five hours later. I finish up the orange juice (which I am now sadly missing) and lie down on the the couch where I've basically ever since, power watching Fairly Odd Parents and Hey, Arnold!. At some point during that mess, I remembered that I have a thermometer. Curious, I take my temperature.

100.4

Well, that seems a bit high. I've been taking my temp a few times since, coming up with everything from 100 to 102.2. If I wasn't sure before, there's solid numerical evidence that I am pretty goddamn sick.

I wonder what tomorrow will bring...

As I was talking about yesterday, today I gave the card pattern a shot with regards to the past bracket page. As for the cards themselves, I'm really pleased.

However, the background leaves a lot to be desired. Putting it against a solid color loses the energy that I've got going to the landing page and, in the end, just looks empty. There's not enough content here to fill up all that empty space. So, I tried playing around with the layout some.

Not really satisfied with any of those. Perhaps I should take a photo that has less going on, something that could be centered more. Or perhaps I rework the cards themselves to fill more space on the page.

I dunno, back to pushing pixels.

So, I found my bike pump. Turns out I stashed it in the back of my car at some point. Probably that time I drove down to San Mateo to bike into work (as I'll be doing very early tomorrow morning).

As I begin spinning up the ol' design gears readying myself for the inevitable yearly update to the bracket, I was scanning the docs for Google's Material specs. Interesting stuff, for sure, and an aesthetic I really like. That in mind, I attempted reworking the bracket selection page somewhat in this style. Failed miserably, but it was an interesting night of exploration.

The thought of a full screen selection page was kind of nice for about the first 30 minutes, but has since lost its appeal. Also, finding the right kind of imagery to pull that off would be difficult. On top of all that, not really pleased with the typography.

I think the better patter to use in this case would be a card. This will scale better with more brackets, will be easily transferrable to the other bracket site that's been spin from all of this, and also easily made for mobile devices. We'll see how that one goes.

But I wouldn't bike 500 more. At least, not within the span of a month.

This morning, as a friend and I were biking our disappointment of not biking away, he made a comment about attempting to hit 500 miles by the end of the month. Though I grunted an agreement, my thoughts were skeptical. However, as I was biking this evening, attempting to bring my total milage for the week above my goal of 50, I considered how I might go about this without killing myself.

Truth be told, it wouldn't be all bad.

Let's consider that today is the 7th and that I have 23 more days with which to achieve my goal. I've already biked 51.7 miles, so that leaves only 448.3 miles to go. Let's crack out some math:

448.3 / 23 = ~19.5 miles per day

Might seem high, but actually quite attainable. Let's break it down piece by piece.

Five days a week, I can bike to work from home. It's about 6.3 miles in each direction, so that'd be 12.6 miles. Lately, I've been enjoying doing an end-to-end-and-back-again ride on my street, which is just shy of ten miles even. So, on any given work day, I could bike 22.5 miles. With 17 work days left in the month, that would be:

22.5 * 17 = 382.5

Now to figure out the other 65.8 miles.

One way to do this would to simply continue my ten mile evening ride on the weekends. There are six weekend days left in the month, so that'd be 60 miles. Of course, there's no reason why I couldn't do something a little longer, such as a bike to San Jose and back. On average, these run about 20 miles, so trade out one ten mile ride for that and I'm already there.

But, let's assume I don't want to bike every day. Let's also assume that I'll be doing some riding from San Mateo (because I most certainly will).

The ride from San Mateo to Mountain View is on the order of 25.5 miles. Were I to do just one of those per week (let's assume Tuesdays), I could get four of those in. Here's the new workday break down:

13 * 12.6 + 4 * 25.5 + 4 * 6.3 + 17 * 10 = 461

So, that's 13 days of biking to and from home and work, four days of San Mateo -> work -> home, and then doing that short ten mile ride every evening. Suddenly, my weekends are free to collapse onto the couch and do nothing :D. Now, let's see how many calories this would burn (using some quickly head-calculated averages):

13 * 500 + 4 * 850 + 4 * 250 + 17 * 300 = 16,000 calories

So, basically 16 Taco Bell box meals if I don't drink soda. But, in actuality, I could eat more.

Because just living also burns calories...