Personal

Decorating

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Several months ago I went online and purchased a few prints to decorate my apartment. I have been really lazy and they have sat in the corner of my living room for ages. Last Sunday I finally hung them with my mom’s help. Now that they are up I love them as much I thought I would, but I also realize I still need more of them to make the room look great. I have been browsing on Allposters.com all weekend looking for additional prints that I like. The problem is that I find too many great items I want to buy. I used allposters when I bought the first 3 pieces and I am planning on sending them some more of my money for 2-3 more pieces this month.

I also have been looking for a site where I can make a collage of photos from digital photos and have a large poster made up that I can have framed. I finally found out that HP offers exactly what I want and they are partnered with Flickr. I can select the photos I want right from Flickr and but the poster. I am happy about that but after counting all the places I could put a big poster up in a frame with photos of my niece and nephew I realized that I don’t even have the room for what I wanted. It is good information since my mom likes making collages of photos. I will end up with smaller frames of 2-3 photos of the kids on a wall or two.

I am also trying to upgrade my kitchenware. The plates I have are over 5 years old and they are getting all chipped in my dish washer. I am trying to find something that looks good but is also affordable to replace them with.

The last few items I need to find is a bookshelf, and an end table for my couch. I need a place to throw my keys and stuff. My mom suggested I look at Chiasso. They seem to have nice stuff, but were more expensive than I thought it would be.It is looking like November is decorate month. And to think I was trying to cut back on the spending, but I do want to make my place look nice!

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I am hoping I can go to the corporate HQ more often. The cafeteria was really nice.

13 Days With an iMac

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As my bad luck would have it I went out and bought a 24″ 3ghz iMac the weekend before the announced the new Macbooks. Now I admit I knew they were going to announce new laptops. It wasn’t really a secret. At the time I had given up hope that Apple would come out with a regular Macbook that could use their 30″ displays. I gave up on an affordable solution to have a 30″ display. I wanted the display but didn’t need the Macbook Pro, or Mac Pro that I would need to own in order to run the display. Since my new job gave me a laptop that I need to use for work I didn’t really need my Macbook as much so I settled on the cheaper option of the iMac. I gave up on the larger screen but got a more powerful desktop.

So when the new Macbooks came out and could solve my original requirements I was not happy. I had already owned the iMac. This was of course the week I was out of work sick. I was contemplating selling the new computer for a loss on ebay and just getting the Macbook. I didn’t realize that I could return the iMac to the Apple store and just pay the high restocking fee. I opted to pay the restock fee since I could never sell the computer for what it was worth. I returned it with 1 day to spare on the 14 day return policy. I went ahead and picked up the low end aluminum Macbook. I thought about the more expensive one, but the hard drive space wasn’t an issue. My extra $400 would get me 400mhz in processor. As much as that would be a nice boost, it wasn’t worth the money. Instead I spent a little over $200 and upgraded the unit to 4gig’s of RAM and put in a 320gb 7200RPM hard drive. For less money I than buying the higher end laptop I think I speed up the unit more by getting a better HDD and RAM.

I just finished upgrading the new hard drive today. It was a as simple as running Carbon Copy Cloner on my old drive to a USB drive. Then I booted to the USB drive after installing the new 320gb drive in the laptop and ran CCC again in the reverse direction. The process took several hours to copy the data, but only required my interaction for a few minutes. When I was done my entire computer was cloned onto the new hard drive. I could never do something that cleanly with Windows, trust me I have tried over the years.

The only downside to note is yes I can use a 30″ Cinema Display with the new Macbooks, however the cable that will allow me to do that is not yet available or backordered that it will take several weeks to get. That means I am still on my 23″ display until I can get the cable and buy the new display. Why is going from 23″ to 30″ so important? My eyes aren’t the greatest, so the more screen that I can get the better!

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My Crazy Week

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I have been off the grid so to speak for a week. It was a really not fun week. I want to write about it a little, but I also need to keep in mind this is a publicly visible site. Lets just say I had the biggest medical scare in my entire life. I am fine, really but if what happened to me happened to a friend I wouldn’t believe them. It all started with some dizziness, and ended with a hospital stay. All I can say is you cannot get any sleep in a hospital. I felt worse when I left than when I got there.

I really want to write more about what is going on, but reality is I have said enough publicly. This is the perfect example of this blog not being an accurate representation of my life since I almost didn’t mention this key event at all. I would rather stick to more uplifting topics. On the possitive note I would have gone crazy without my iPhone to read stuff and listen to music while I was away from home. I guess that means I wasn’t really off the grid, but I didn’t check work email for a full week so maybe it does count.

Highlights from the week, and observations:

• ER the show might not be that accurate about the medical procedures they perform (or so my dad says) but the controlled chaos of the ER is well portrayed. While I was in the ER a fight broke out between two patients. It was interesting to say the least.

• Do they really have to wake you every few hours to take your temp and blood pressure? Probably yes, but it really sucks when you are trying to sleep.

• MRI’s are really loud even when you have ear plugs and head phones for music in your ears

• Some of the die they gave me for a scan made me feel like my hands were on fire.

• The entire hospital is dependent on the transport staff to move people around. The reason things take so long is because said staff is really slow either because they are slow or overworked. The operations side of me observed that. Also you don’t hold staff meetings for an entire shift that everyone depends on at the same time. You break it up. Again my ops side talking.

I am off to continue my resting before I am back to work tomorrow.

Recovering

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Today I didn’t do very much. I wanted to take it easy after having a migraine Saturday. I had the fun tasks of cleaning my apartment, doing laundry and watching TV. What a fun filled day!

The Do Nothing Weekend

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I did nothing this weekend and really enjoyed it. Lately I have been so tired from the week and busy until almost 10PM every night that it is nice to just relax on the weekends. It is a bit anti-social, but I just don’t want to be tired. I did clean my apartment this weekend, but you wouldn’t realize that from the amount of clutter I have accumulated already. Where does it all come from? Next week is John’s wedding so I doubt I will get rest then. The weekend after that I very well might be in St. Louis and working on Saturday so I am living up my free time while I have it.

Relaxing

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Yesterday was Friday, so that meant another night meeting up with friends by my old Redcats office. I meet up with a bunch of people at Blaggards and hung out. It was Stanley’s birthday. There was a nice turn out. Luke was out of course. Jeannette, Vanessa, Herbie, Ben, & others also came out. I lost count of how much I spent. I think we had an obscene amount of shots, but I don’t fully recall. I don’t normally do that. Below is a before and after shot of one round.

I had a really good time in spite of my neck killing me again. Last month if you asked if alcohol would stop the sharp pain in my neck I would say no since I tried. Last night it must have been the Jameson shots because the pain went away. It is back again now, but I felt great last night! I now look forward to a restful weekend.

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Just a note on the photos. I only had one, and it was for Stanley’s birthday so we kind of had to do a round. We had a nice turn out!