Fleet Weekend San Francisco

Every year on the first week of October San Francisco has their Fleet week celebrations. The Blue Angels fill the skies over the city for the weekend.

This year we watched them on the bay aboard Philip's Ketch "Siffleur".

Ireland

This year Jen and I headed to Ireland together for the first time. My sister Maura who lives in Syndey was having her wedding in Dublin on Sept 6th.



We arrived into Dublin on Sept 1st. Spend the night on the town with my good friend Justin and then crashed Maura's hen party.....ending up on Harcourt st until the wee hours of the morning.



We rented a car and headed over to Galway, via Tullamore, Clonmacoise and Athlone.



We spend one night in Clifden and then stayed with Joe and Iris in Athlone.



The following day we spend a couple hours dodging tractors and sped through the back roads to Navan, showered and headed to Balgriggan for the wedding....with 5 mins to spare.



We then spend the weekend in Dublin and flew back to the states on Monday Sept 10th....shattered

Emigrant Wilderness- Surprise Engagement

Well Jen didn't expect that our weekend backpacking in Emigrant Wilderness would be a super meal in front of the camp fire and a proposal of marriage…..there you have it, August 4^th 2007..John Stewart dives into the deep end and signs up for a life of love, happiness and good times with his super chick Jen !!!

Hiking in the Bay Area

The other week, I went for a quick hike over in Marin with Jennifer, Louise and Boris. We started in Mill Valley and headed up the old railway grade to the top of Mt Tama. This went from a quick hike into a marathon hike of 6 hours. The views from Mt Tama are amazing. I have posted some photos on flickr.com

Houston and back

Just back from a productive 3 day customer visit in Houston. Unfortunately I didn't see too much of Houston except for the 2 hour tour on SuperShuttle from the airport to the hotel via every other hotel in Houston. The nice thing about being dropped off last was the driver pumped up the Jazz and got out his harmonica and gave me a free gig for about 10mins. He then wouldn't let me out of the van until I had listened to a Billie Holliday track.

I learnt a few new features of Vault and Auotloader. I have a long way to got to understand all the features of Inventor. There is a lot of information out there in many websites, so have a lot of reading to do. Back in San Francisco and have a race tomorrow night and 3 on Sunday. Looks like the weather is going to be excellent and the wind should be over 20knts in the afternoon.

KFOG Kaboom

Every year the local San Francisco radio station throws the Kaboom party. It is a fireworks display sycned with music. This year was the best yet. Thanks to my sailing friend Karsten, we had the best seat in town. Karsten has a Santa Cruz 52 berthed at South Beach Yacht Club at the end of D dock. The fireworks display was between South Beach and the Bay Bridge. The highlight for me was U2 and Mary J Blige singing One.

Tax Day

Finished my taxes last night, as usually I was putting it off, since I knew I owed them a wad of cash. Surprising it was not as bad as I thought. I was surpised that TurboTax wanted $34 to e-file, looks like the IRS will have to pay someone much more to data entry it into their systemes. I don't understand why it is not free, cos now they will receive a check that will take a few days to clear and all that effort. Ah well, my energy will be standing in line at the Post Office, people watching....nothing better after being stuck indoors all day.

Sailing season is starting again, I have a can race Friday night and an offshore race on Saturday. The Vallejo opener starts at the beginning of May. This is the offical anniversary of meeting Jennifer. Jennifer got her hair done in preparation for the Vallejo race. So yesterday I got my hair done as well !!




Here is a photo of my new office at Autodesk. We are located on the 5th floor.


John

Big Daddy weekend

I believe global warming is truely a reality, this weekend the temperatures got up to 80 in the Bay area. I spent the weekend on the water with 3 races on Saturday and a wonderful pursuit race on Sunday. The currents in the bay were as interesting as ever. As usual the wind it not fill in until after noon, but the sun shone and the waves were excellent. There was not much time between races and we were 3rd overall. We probably could have got a second place as we were doing very well on the last race, but due to a building flood we have a collision which resulted in a 720 and any chances of a 3rd place. Sunday was excellent on the water, due to the spring forward time change, the wind filled in later and the race was crazy with approx 100 boats drifting across the start line. We decided that the pin end was quieter, motored out turned around and motored to the start, shutting off the engine at 4 mins and floated to the start line abeit a bit early, be with enough slowing down we crossed the line on time and drifted out in front of the fleet. The wind filled in around Alcatraz and then died entering the racoon straits. We came 11th out of approx 100 boats, of which only 39 finished, so not a bad result. The winner was Double Trouble who picked up an elevator and shot ahead of the fleet never to be caught.

New Job and skiing trip

Hello,
It has been a while since my last blog. I have been busy. Started a new job on Monday with a local bay area software company called Autodesk. I work in their Manufacturing consulting group specializing in Data Management. The first week has been busy getting setup in all the internal systems.

I have also been trying to ghost an image of the new Thinkpad T60p laptop, so I can support multiple hard drives, as more than likely I will face many different VPN clients at customer sites.

Last week I spend 5 days skiing in whistler. As always the two mountains kicked my butt and assumingly the older I get, the less risks I'm taking ie no high speed descends down the Dave Murray run !!! well just a little slower than usual.

This weekend is the Big Daddy regatta out of Pt Richmond which is my first time. Hopefully the weather will be good, as it is beautiful today. Jenn and I are racing on Mistral.

Look out for some pixs from the Whistler trip.

ciao

1982

Here is my 5th class in Ballinamere National School



Front Row : Patrick O'Brien, Dermot O'Flahery, Adrian Connelly, Aidan Doyle, Vincent Buckley
Middle Row : Edel Cusack, Vivienne Kiennen, Sean Boland, Alan Martin, Enda Heffernan, ME, Orla Brennan
Back Row : ????, Fiona Buggy, Marie Neary, Hilary Murtagh, Monica Scully

1975

Finally I've started to digitize my photos and this is the first photo I have as a child. I'm planning to upload some home movies from around the same time.



This was taken in June 1975 at my school in Belfast called Our Lady of Lourdes Primary School or Park Lodge. Here is a map link to my first school

It was then managed by the Christian Brothers and located on the Antrim Rd in the northern part of the city. I was there from P1 to P6. Looks like it is now a mixed school of Non Denominational religion, which can mean only a good time, as back then schools were not moixed and corporal punishment was giving freely and often.

Here is a goofy one with my older brother Mick

Two years later

It is hard to believe that around this time 2 years ago I was in New Zealand, halfway through my Global adventure. This stopover would be the longest at 4 weeks. It was a wonderful 4 weeks, especially since we were 2nd in the leg and were joint 1st over-all in the race.

In hindsight leg 2 was the most physical and challenging due to variable wind which was around 18-26 knots.This prompted continous sail changes from the yankee 1 to the 3. Unfortunately we didn't record the total number of sail changes, though I'm sure if we went through the log book, we would get a pretty close number, I suspect it was over 100.

Here are a few photos that capture the beauty of the South Island.

LA view of Hollywood

This photograph was taken with my new Nikon D80 DSLR. The detailed guide book tells you how to do stuff, though I have yet to understand what the stuff is !!!

I decided to purchase the Nikon D80 after seeing the National Geography article www.stunningnikon.com/dslr and reading the reviews on www.kenrockwell.com/tech.htm
& www.dpreview.com

I also downloaded the interaction learning suite 123di www.123di.com

I purchased the camera from a www.adorama.com
I also purchased a 5 million dollar home Crumpler camera bag from www.cravedweasel.com

The world according to Microsoft

Believe it or not, I have managed to survive in a world outside of Microsoft. yes my desktop has been Windows and I use Office, but most of applications I managed or developed where hosted on Unix/Oracle. Therefore I managed to stay away from Visual Basic, C++, .NET and SQL servers. Alas that is all about to change. I'm starting down a new path, a path that those in the open source arena would say is the path of the dark side.

I've download the VB and SQL server express editions and so far their online video lessons seem OK. Downside is the time needed to review each video and the gazillion books on the subject are enough to make my eyes water over.

Hopefully the express editions will introduce me slowly and effectively to these new programming languages and applications. Will keep you posted

Global Challenge BP Explorer website

With the demise of Challenge Business, the organization that ran the Global Challenge round the world yacht race, I have taken on the task of publishing the daily logs, photos and videos of my follow crew members on BP Explorer.

It was a wonderful year and its essence should be captured forever.
The blog site is http://globalchallenge2004.blogspot.com with links to videos on youtube and photos on flickr.com.

I hope I'm successful in capturing this great event. There is truely a lot of material around it. It is hard to believe that 2 years ago we were half way around the world in Wellington,New Zealand. The blog captures the build up and the actual event. It was a wonderful experience that for me feels like it was only yesterday.
enjoy !!!

Hopefully within the next few months I will receive the 32 hours of onboard footage and start the task of editing it and showing some unseen material.

You have to realise that 1/2 the crew didn't seen the other half for most of the actually onboard racing, so the videos may surprise even the crew.

cheers
John

Kiva.org

Here is a link to a great San Francisco based non-profit organization. This startup is located three blocks from my home. It is truely amazing that with today's technology that we can see where and to whom our money goes, check it out !! you can lend a small amount to people who are trying to make better lives for themselves.

Please lend/donate, every little bit counts

John

First Blog

Hi all,

OK I live in San Francisco and I'm a techie. Surprising this is my first blog. A couple of months ago I decided to build a Linux server on SUSE 10.1 with the plan to host my photo gallery. At the time I also looked into Blogging software. I build the website using Nuke-PHP and installed PHP5, mysql, Nuke-PHP and gallery2 successfully.

Unfortunately last week a virus pretty much destoryed the Linux server.

With that I decided to host my photo gallery on flickr.com and paid the annual $25 fee for unlimited files/bandwidth etc. Since I use gmail as my primary email account, I decided to use Blogger, event hough I'm a yahoo shareholder, Yahoo360 just doesn't seem as easy to use as blogger.

As I build out my photo album on flickr.com, I will post blogs with links to my photos past, present and future. I'm very excited to share my adventures with you.

Let me introduce to my muse...Jen. The greatest adventure lies ahead with you !!!



all the best
John