Halcyon Repose

Just got back from Vegas, and I got a few good shots. Check out the new page for all the details, or the slideshow below should have some highlights.

Time for the Women’s World Cup! Brenden and I are heading to Vegas to watch some fencing, and I am hoping I can put the camera to good use. I want to try playing around with it a bit to see what I can get to come out. Should be a fun time.

Last night I met up with Ed, Frances, Joe, Jon, and Zach at a local Irish bar, and I must say, I was not impressed with the place. It kinda had an unclean smell to it, and this morning my stomach is rolling over, way more than the three beers I had should warrant. I better not have gotten any food poisoning from that place, if so, I will be a very unhappy Jaime.

When I moved in with Brenden, my cats, Lois and Clark, went to live with Ed and Frances. I knew they would be well loved, and I would get to go and visit whenever I wanted. Unfortunately over the last few weeks Clark began getting really sick. It started with seizures, and once he recovered from that he stopped eating and started losing his strength rapidly. Despite having Frances and Ed to nurture and mother him, he continued to get worse, and last night the vet recommended that he be put to sleep.

Ed, Frances, and I were at the pet hospital last night, to say good bye, and to hold him as he received his shot. He was peacefully asleep when it happened, which is all we could have asked for.

We love you bunches Clarkie, I hope you are off chasing birds and running through fields in the kitty afterlife.

I am about ready to crash, but I ran across this page and I had to share. I was a bit skeptical. After all, how unbelievable could 25 pictures be? Personally I wouldn’t say they are unbelievable, but they definitely inspire. I would pay money to hang some of these on my wall, and if I take even one photo this good, I will feel like I accomplished something with my life.

After a weekend full running around I finally got some downtime today. Things started off Friday night with a call from work about 11 at night, and I wasn’t able to get away till 6:30 Saturday morning. I overslept the next morning since I was planning on getting a hold of one of the other fencing instructors to make sure he could handle the class, but I slept through the alarm, and didn’t wake up till 9:45. I frantically made the phone call, found out that he was already there and the world wasn’t going to crash down around me. Just as I was about to head back to bed for some much needed sleep, I realized that the Sabre coach was out, and I had to take his class, so I got dressed and ran to the fencing center.

I made it to the center and started the sabre class off, and about 11:30 I got another call from work, and stayed online till about 3. Once I finished up with that, I ran from the center over to Kenny and Chris’s for some Tamale goodness (just as good as the first time), but I had to bail out at around 7 I was so tired. I got home around 8, and just as I was about to drift off to an early sleep (since I knew work was going to call around midnight), I got an early call and had to get back up. I worked till probably 1am, and then fell into a, thankfully, uninterrupted sleep. I slept till 11 the next morning, played some Age of Conan for a few hours, went for a 2 mile run, and then headed up to Upland for Louis’s Memorial day party. He made some wonderful burritos, and just as we were going to get a poker game started, I got a call from work yet again, and it was then that I found out that Louis did not have internet. I tried logging onto his neighbor’s but it was locked down, so I was forced to drive all the way back home and miss the rest of the party.

I worked till about 1 am again, but this time we finally managed to get everything worked out so I was looking forward to another full night of rest, and thankfully I got it. I got up at noon, played Conan for an hour or so, then went to get some lunch. When I was done I started on washing and waxing the car, sprayed down the side patio, then I carried my cleaning spirit into the bathroom where I did the counters, mirrors, toilet, tub, and floor. I also swept and mopped the kitchen, and then waxed the kitchen floors as well as the bathroom, and then I went for a 2 mile run.

I sit here now totally exhausted, but satisfied. While I didn’t get extensive leveling done in Conan, I did get a lot of other work done that I have been meaning to do, and that is fine by me. Most of my weekend was spent working, but since I could use the money, that worked out just fine. Sometimes it is good to be hourly.

I know she checks every once in awhile, so this link is just for her. The rest of you might enjoy it as well.

Panda!

I had a great time at my sister’s wedding, it was fun hanging with all of our family and her friends. I got to take lots of pictures (I will post there here soon, but they are already up on photobucket), but I haven’t gotten to a chance to play around with the camera since I got back. If tomorrow is as pretty a day as today was, I might hit the beach and see what kind of pictures I can take. I saw some great picture opportunities on the way home, I was just in dire need of a nap.

So I have been contemplating getting into photography for a good long while now. The only thing that has been holding me back is expense, and lack of time to devote to it. I would love to take a photography class to learn all the details about lighting, aperture, shutter speeds, and focal length, but I just haven’t found the time. Joe and I are planning on taking a trip to Ireland this fall, and I have fell in love with so many pictures of Ireland, I really wanted to be able to take a few shots myself. Of course in order to do it right, it would be best if I got a camera a few months before hand so that I could get comfortable with something that was labeled as ‘point and shoot’. Not only that, but my sister’s wedding was coming up this weekend, and it would be nice to have a new camera for it. It really did seem like a good idea…

This weekend, I just so happened to be walking through the worst impulse buy store on Earth, Costco, when I noticed that they had two camera packages on sale. The Cannon EOS Rebel XTi and the Nikon D60, each with two lenses and a starter kit, and both hovering around $1000. This of course got the juices flowing again, and while I didn’t immediately pick one up, I did go home and start doing some research. I also talked to my friend Frances to get her input on things, and she recommended what everyone else online seemed to recommend, which is to get one step up from those offerings and go with the top of the line amateur camera. Of all the reviews I read, the Nikon D80 had very little negative comments, and plenty of gushing, happy comments. I started looking around and Costco carried the D80 as well, and it was only a few hundred more than the packages I saw originally. Unfortunately, that price was a more expensive than I could afford, and I continued to look around a bit more. I eventually discovered that BestBuy had the best price on the camera around, and with a 10% off coupon Kenny recommended from the post office, it would put the camera down into my ‘will definitely buy’ price range. Unfortunately I checked the inventory listings online, and none of the local stores had the camera in stock.

I decided to try my luck at the BestBuy near the fencing center, just in case, and sure enough, they had one more left in stock. Of course you can’t just get the camera, I also got a starter kit with a spare battery, a getting started with digital SLR book, and a camera case, as well as a memory card to hold all the lovely picture goodness. I got the new camera to the fencing center, but didn’t get to take many pictures as work kept me busy, and I had to wait for the battery to charge up. I did get to play around with it some, and I can already tell that I want to get a better lens than the one in the kit, but I also feel that it will last me a little while till I can get some more money back into the account.

My only hope now is that I don’t annoy all my family at the wedding while I play shutter bug the entire time.

Things have been so crazy recently, I have barely spent any time at home. The month of a 1,000 concerts is finally over, and while it was very very awesome, I am ready to just chill for awhile. This Sunday I had absolutely nothing on my schedule to do. My friends were going to go see Forgetting Sarah Marshall (yay Kristen Bell), so while I waited to hear from them, I did absolutely nothing.

A blossoming writer by the name of Brandon Sanderson will be finishing off Robert Jorden’s last book in the Wheel of Time series, and I wanted to get a little bit familiar with his work before it came out, so I picked up his first book Elantris. Too say that I enjoyed this book was a total understatement. It really drew me in, and I spent all day Sunday reading. I got up, read for a few hours, started getting hungry so I jumped in the shower. Got out, read a bit more, went out to Taco Surf on 2nd ave where I read some while waiting for my meal, then, since was such a nice day out, I decided to take a walk on the beach. I found a nice spot in the sun, I pulled out my book and I read some more till it got too chilly out on the beach. I went back home, crashed on the couch, and read until Brenden called me letting me know he and Adam were coming home, and they were going to go out and get some drinks, so when they arrived, I went out with them for a bit. After a couple of hours of beer sampling, we got back home and I read till about 2am. I didn’t manage to finish my book Sunday, but I got a good chunk of it taken care of…

I never did hear from my friends about the movie, and while that did make me a bit sad, I was nice to not have to jump in the car and drive anywhere for an entire day.

For many years, I have known about this RSS thing. Some sites had them, some sites didn’t. It was basically a page with all of the updates to the site on it, and when the site was updated, so was the page. The glory of this setup is that there were programs, aptly named RSS readers, which could parse these pages, keep track of what you had and had not seen, and presented you with a nice orderly list of pages that had been updated since you last checked.

This is one of those technologies that could change the way you use the web, if only you would use it. Since I check some sites at home, and some at work, I really didn’t want to bother with trying to find a good program, since I would have to sync both locations up so I could use it the way that I wanted to. Plus if I checked at home, my work RSS reader wouldn’t know that, and I would end up having to constantly cull the things out that I had already seen. This was not appealing to me at all, but when Joe mentioned google’s new effort, http://reader.google.com/, I was immediately intrigued.

This little application seemed to solve any problems I might have had with an RSS reader. Mainly that I don’t have to worry about keeping my various computers synced up, because everything is stored on the server. Sure google now has more information on my web browsing habits, but I think it is a small price to pay for not having to manually click on 3-4 dozen bookmarks each day. Plus I get to put in some of those sites and blogs that rarely get updated (like mine), and which I rarely check, and I then get notified when they get a bit more active again.

I give this application 4 out of 5 stars, and the only thing that could make it better would be if I could also store all of the sites that don’t have RSS feeds. A list of simple bookmarks that I could store in the same application would be totally awsome.

Has this changed my web browsing habits? Absolutely. An RSS feed is the first thing I look for on a new site now, and I curse those people who have pages that don’t use them.