New York, New York!

I went to visit my brother, Chris, again in New York City again, this time I brought R'achel along, our second trip in less than two months. Chris is studying photography at the School of Visual Arts on the island of Manhattan, so he's right in the middle of everything. We got to do most all of the touristy stuff, being that it was R'achel's first time, but we also got to experience the magic of Christmas in the city. We went to the top of the Empire State Building, saw the Christmas tree in Rockafeller Center, Ice Skated on Trump's rink in Central Park, went on a carriage ride, saw Wall Street, and the WTC site. The highlight was probably seeing Dave Letterman on the Late Show with Adam Sandler as the main guest. Now I've seen both Leno and Letterman. We made a lot of the several days we had.

Photos are here...
http://picasaweb.google.com/jonathanphelps/NYC2008

I'm a homeowner!

After contemplating for awhile, I bought my first house and closed November 20, 2008. I had movers get the bulk of my stuff the next day, but had until December 8th to get completely out of my apartment, which gave me time to clean it up a bit. Even though I'm the third owner, the house is hardly 3 years old and in great shape. It's one and a half stories with 4 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms downstairs and an extra game room and half bathroom upstairs.

It's in Murphy, which is just east of Plano and north of the Garland/Richardson area. It's actually right down the road from South Fork Ranch (from the TV Show "Dallas" and across the street from where my mom grew up). It's also in the neighborhood of R'achel's school, which makes it convenient for her to come see me. I'm still getting used to the size, and slowly trying to make it my own with more furniture and things. I also have to drive about 15 min. further to work, but it's worth it to be in a nice neighborhood.

ITC and Cali

I recently presented a poster on some memory testing work I had done at The International Test Conference in Santa Clara, CA. The poster was titled, "The Importance of Functional-Like Access for Memory Test" and it's available through that link on IEEE Xplore for anyone that already has access.

I also got to spend some time in the bay area with my girlfriend for the weekend. We drove up to San Francisco for a night, then drove out to Napa Valley to visit some wineries for the day before returning to San Jose. Then I just had to spend the rest of the week going to meetings and attending presentations.

Photos are here...
http://picasaweb.google.com/jonathanphelps/SanFrancisco2008

new stadium

Eww!

Sailing at the Olympics this year in China is going to be a mess...

This pic is from sailinganarchy.com. Apparently the pollution is also making people sick. More news here...

http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5i_N9vizI8lf8MdBXCEldiPR4JNVA

http://www.voanews.com/english/2008-07-03-voa39.cfm

"Sailboat Sinks Off Oriental"

I guess this is what it's like to sink a Catalina 22 (my boat)...

http://towndock.net/news/sailboat-sinks-off-oriental

No More Hosting

I think I'm done with hosting companies for now. Even though they often try to make it easy by providing an application to install other web applications and such to run your website, you're still responsible for keeping them working. Sometime last year my site was supposed to get moved to another server, and then not, and then... well, I don't know. Since then I had to get the billing straightened out after a brief lapse in the transfer that led to my account being disabled for a day or two until I noticed. Now my photo gallery is broke, the statics page lost it's configuration, and I just don't care to deal with it anymore. Luckily, I've been eying this Google blogger thing for awhile. I'm already an obvious Google fan, but I don't have time to write my own php scripts anymore and I'm willing to give up that flexibility, which I haven't used in forever, for some ease of use and consistency. Some of the default templates actually look pretty good too, at least until I ever get around to customizing something of my own. So here I am, the new JonathanPhelps.com, pending DNS updates of course.

2008 Catalina 22 National Championship Regatta

Recently, I sailed in the 2008 Mount Gay Rum Catalina 22 National Championship Regatta, on Lake Grapevine, Texas. We finished at the back of the pack, but I'm still pretty new to this and we learned there's a lot of tough competition. It was fun though to race with over 40 identical boats and help out on the planning committee, which I think did a great job. I'm officially a member at Grapevine Sailing Club now and keep my boat in the water on a hoist at Scott's Landing Marina.


The Catalina 22 Fleet 30 and Regatta website is catalina22fleet30.com. Also, there's an article I wrote for Velocitek, one of our sponsors.