Wonderful breakfast at Jam on Hawthorne.
Month: April 2013
Lisbon Happiness Meetup
Back in February I spent a week in Lisbon with a portion of my team at Automattic. We ate great food, completed two cool projects, and generally had a wonderful time. There were 11 of us so we rented out the entire place at TheHouse. Can’t recommend the lodging enough. Truly phenomenal place.
One day we headed to the aquarium which, I think, surprised all of us with how awesome it was. They had a sea turtle exhibit, sea otters, penguins, and generally way more than we could see in the afternoon we’d allotted for it. I’m not typically a huge fan of aquariums but this one was really cool.
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- Life is hard when you’re a sea otter.
Another day we went to the Castle of São Jorge which is a fantastic spot to look out over the city.
It’s also facing the direction of the flight path in to Lisbon’s airport so you can watch planes land. There are also loads of peacocks wandering around.
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- Look closely near the cannon and you can spot a plane coming in.
Finally we spent some time at Hieronymites Monastery. This place had amazing architecture with intricate ceilings, stone work, stained glass, and more. It was a bit crowded at times but was a cool spot to wander around.
Lori also snapped a couple photos of the team.
As always it was a great meetup. This was my second time in Lisbon and, just like the first, I loved it. It’s a surprisingly reasonable city to travel in, too. Fantastic food for great prices and taxis are the cheapest of any city I’ve been to.
Maui – Travel Log, Recap
I got back from a week in Maui on Tuesday morning. The rest of the trip was a blast. I posted some earlier notes and, before I forget the details, wanted to recap the rest.
After that day 2 recap we got a lot more snorkeling in and ended up seeing 8 turtles varying from old, large ones to a relatively tiny one that looked to be not much more than 18 inches to 2 feet across. My favorite snorkel spot was Honokeana Cove. Despite the cold water and somewhat murky visibility it was fantastic to be swimming in cove filled with turtles. Pretty neat to watch those animals eat.
We woke up early at 6am one morning to make the 2 hour drive to Haleakalā, the main volcanic crater on the island. We didn’t go for sunrise and, instead, decided to do an 11.2 mile hike down the Sliding Sands trail and back up the Halemauʻu trail. Leah wrote up a fantastic post about that hike so I won’t recap the details. It was a great day and I have some photos to post later on.
For our last meal we headed to Star Noodle which was fantastic food. The steamed pork buns were amazing and my Hot n Sour was a wonderful bowl of broth, noodles, and all the fixings. Props to Toby for the recommendation.
Overall it was a fantastic trip and a nice way to get away for a bit. I still did a bit of work here and there but was mostly offline. After my first trip to Hawaii I can’t wait to go back. Handily I already have enough airline miles again to make that happen. 🙂
Code with me: Portland
I’m really excited to be a mentor for Code with me, a 2-day workshop in all things HTML, CSS, and Javascript for journalists without coding experience. The event’s in Portland on May 4th and 5th and costs just $85. That’s ridiculously affordable for 2 full workshop days and a student to mentor ratio of 2 to 1.
Applications are due tomorrow, April 6th, at 9 pm Pacific. If you’re interested you should apply now!
The Code with me site has an early outline of what the schedule will be along with information on the rest of the mentors, sponsors, and more.