Ryan Giordano in California

I am finally getting a blog set up for California, largely because on my bike ride to work I something think of things I could write in it. I think basically my parents and Randall Phelps are the only people who might still follow this, but that's good enough for me. (Randall actually emailed me -- twice -- when I stopped posting, which I thought was very nice of him and very surprising to me. I hope I'm not embarrassing him here.)

The default template is probably here to stay since making it pretty doesn't look like all that much fun, and if I'm going to choose a pre-made one, I'm going to choose the simplest one. I did redo the pictures for the home page, though, since Kazakhstan and Boise were getting treated unfairly. In particular, I remember picking out the Kazakhstan one before I even left, thinking an ice-covered road was a nice joke. And although it turned out to be a truer picture than I expected, it also isn't a fair summary of the place, and I think the sunset on the Soviet apartment blocks of Kokshetau is a nice balance of the good and the bad.

The California picture there is kind of lame, but the pretty pictures I have of the mountains and the seaside don't really characterize my life very well. Maybe I should take a picture of a Google micro-kitchen, or use a screenshot of a Goobuntu desktop running R in a shell, or a photo of a suburban thoroughfare as seen over the handlebars of my creaking bicycle. Between these three things, you have about 85% of what I see every day.