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Emily and David Jaffe decided to have a joint birthday party this year. The theme was the 80′s and costumes were required. There were plenty of flourescent colors, Tom Selleck mustaches, leg warmers, side-ponytails, retro sunglasses, scrunchies, and pegged jeans. Oh and Back to the Future was playing on repeat on the TV. Good times.
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I am slow in posting this big news, but Emily and I are engaged! I proposed on December 16th when we were in Thailand on the island of Koh Phangan. Emily and I have been together for nearly six years, and I can’t wait to spend the rest of my life with her.
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Emily and I had a bunch of our friends over on the Sunday after Thanksgiving for a traditional American feast. The menu: turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, gravy, cranberry sauce, green beans, and pumpkin muffins – plus Rich and Julia made a homemade lemon meringue pie for dessert.
It was a bit difficult to find all of the necessary ingredients in the Swiss grocery stores, but we managed to find just about everything. We bought the only turkey they had at the Coop near our apartment. It weighed a little over 8 kg, or about 18 pounds. And turkeys are quite expensive in Switzerland too; the price was CHF 120 but luckily happened to be 50% off. The other big challenge was that the ovens are very small in Switzerland. The turkey fit but it filled up the entire oven (it was on the lowest rack and the foil covering it touched the top). So we had to cook the muffins the day before, the stuffing after we took out the turkey, and everything else on the stove.
All of the food came out perfectly, if I may say so myself. Literally everything. The turkey was nice and juicy, Emily’s famous stuffing was delicious, the buttermilk mashed potatoes were a big hit, and even the gravy was great (even though Emily had never made it before).
The group ended up being 10 people including us. Everyone seemed to enjoy the food, but I think the biggest hit of the night was the turkey baster. Apparently turkey basters are exotic and fascinating in Europe, who knew? After dinner, everyone hung around our apartment and played Taboo. We all had a great time, and it was fun for Emily and I to be able to share this American holiday with some of our European friends.
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I have been unemployed for over two and a half months now. The startup where I had been working for the last year was unable to secure its second round of funding (fell through at the last minute), so the company was forced to dissolve and now I am on my own. It was very unfortunate but completely out of my control, so “que sera sera”.
Some people ask me how I am “coping” with being unemployed, and the truth is that I am really enjoying myself. Luckily I had planned ahead and saved up some money so I can support myself for awhile without having to desperately grab the first job I find. I am trying to take full advantage of this opportunity and often find myself just as busy as when I had a job. It’s funny how when you have a job, you have plenty of money but lack the time to enjoy it, but when you have no job, you have plenty of time but lack the money to take advantage of it. I have been trying find the right balance between utilizing my time and trying to conserve my savings.
Here is what has been keeping me busy lately:
All that being said, I am looking forward to finding a job in Zürich. I have a few good leads so hopefully one of them will work out. But in the meantime if anyone knows a company that is looking for an English-speaking programmer/developer/software engineer in Zürich, let me know!
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I’ve always been a big fan of Picasa – it is a great, free application for organizing (and making small edits to) your photos. I especially like the ability to easily straighten, rotate, and crop pictures. And now it just got a whole lot better with facial recognition built-in to the latest version (finally!). This has been a web-only feature for Picasa Web Albums for awhile now, and I have been waiting for Google to integrate it into the desktop application too. Fortunately, the wait is over and it works very well.
Facial recognition is like magic. After it scans your entire photo library (which can take awhile), Picasa will ask you to identify the faces it has found. This is linked to your Gmail Contacts to make it easy to find people’s names. After this, it will start suggesting other pictures that it thinks are the same person, and I’d estimate that over 90% of the time it is correct. Even if the person is wearing a hat, making a funny face, turned to the side, or wearing a fake mustache, Picasa is usually able to identify the person correctly. Like I said, magic.
And the best part is that after you have gone through the minimal effort to label everyone, you instantly have a very well organized photo collection. You can easily find any picture with a particular person in it, or even a particular combination of people. Awesome.
Tricking Picasa with the “Tim Face”
So I went through a phase where I made the same face in just about every photo taken of me. I’m sure you’ve seen it before, it’s not particularly original – I just have my mouth wide open like I am really, really excited about something. (It was college. I didn’t know any better). Anyway, some of my friends started referring to this expression as the “Tim face” and often copied (i.e. mocked) me in their own photos. Apparently they must all do a really good impression of me because it was good enough to fool Picasa. That’s right, Picasa’s facial recognition assumed that anyone making the Tim face was me! See example below:
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Today is the two year anniversary of the first post on this blog way back in 2007. It’s hard to believe I’ve been doing this for two full years already. I must be getting old.
As a special celebration, I’ve updated all of timothyrchurch.com to be valid HTML! (Yes, I know how to have a good time 
Go ahead, check it out:
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I just got my first DSLR camera the other day, and I am very excited about it. Ever since Emily and I took our around-the-world trip, I have been getting more and more interested in photography. I had just been using the Canon point-and-shoot cameras, which I love and take great pictures, but I was ready to step it up to the next level.
After doing some research I narrowed it down to the Nikon D60 and the Canon XSi. In the end, I went with the one that was on sale. I got the Nikon D60 kit which included two VR lenses and a 16gb memory card among other things. I am just starting to learn how to use it, but so far I love the camera.
Look for improved photographs coming soon!
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I’m an uncle! Ok, that is old news but now I have finally met my baby nephew.
I spent the last five days in Seattle (well, Sammamish technically) with my brother and his wife and their baby boy. Lochlan Kemsley Church was born on February 6, 2009, which means he just turned twelve weeks old on Friday. He is a happy and healthy baby who really likes his Uncle Tim.
Welcome to the family, Loch!
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Emily and I moved out of the hotel and into a temporary apartment on Thursday. We are enjoying having a little bit more space and being able to cook again! While the restaurants are good here, eating out every night was starting to get a little old (and expensive!). One of the things that I will miss most about San Francisco is the amazing food (and the prices). I thought I would write down some of my favorite restaurants in San Fran before I forget.
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I’ve been at the new job for 4 weeks now. I was coming from a small company (~30 people), but this is a different level. Right now there are just two of us, in a room with no windows (“The Dungeon”) that we are subletting from another company. We are right in the middle of their office, so we have to walk past their cubicles to get to our area. The location of the office is great, though; it is right in downtown San Fran, just 2 blocks away from my old office. But even though it is close in proximity, the work environment of a startup is definitely different, and I love it.
Today, the whole company went out to the movies for the premiere of WALL-E. Of course, this is much easier to do when the whole company is only 2 people, but still the spirit/mentality is much different than in a larger corporation. I had expected that theatre for a matinee would be pretty empty except for a few kids on summer vacation, but the place was pretty packed. And the best part was, we fit right in – I think the majority of people there were startup employees. Only in San Francisco…
Another benefit of the startup life is being able to work where you want when you want. Don’t have to worry about the usual corporate bulls*** like “face time”, all that matters is that you get your work done. A couple weeks ago, on one of those beautiful summer days that are so rare in San Francisco, I spent the afternoon working outside in Golden Gate Park. This was like a dream of mine come true. I love being outdoors and enjoying warm, sunny days, but on weekdays (ie work days) these days often go wasted while everyone piles into the office buildings with their air conditioning and artificial lighting. It was always seemed like a pipe dream to spend time outside on these gorgeous days, but now it has a become a reality for me.
While some people may think that this is unreasonable and leads to lower productivity, I actually believe the opposite. I think that if companies remove some of the unnecessary restrictions/rules and give employees more freedom to work when, where, and how they want to, then those employees will be happier and more productive. This is one of the themes of a book I recently read, The Seven-Day Weekend
Finally, while our office itself may not be very impressive, we do have some nice tech equipment. How do you make a developer happy? Easy, give him a brand new MacBook Pro laptop and a 30″ Monitor
All in all, I am enjoying the startup experience so far and definitely learning alot.
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