Personal

The Furniture Move

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I got my new furniture friday as planned. It looks as good or better than I anticipated. Most of my stuff is put away now. I only have 1 issue with were to put all my home entertainment components. My Tivo & DVD player don’t fit where I wanted them to go. I need to cut a hole in the back of the wall unit in order to move them somewhere else. Other than that things look good. I need to hang my large map now that I know where my couch is. I have a massive map of the US with marks on every city I have been to. It was fun doing and is nice to have around. I will probably move my DVD collection to the new wall unit also. It will make room in my front closet where they are now.

I need to have my old wall unit removed. it is in pieces in the corner of my living room while I figure out what to do with it.

The really big foot rest in my bed room is making it hard to walk around, but it goes with my new comfy chair so I am torn with what to do with it. I pushed it against the wall and am hoping it is out of the way. You really need someplace to put your feet up on when you sit in a comfy chair. My Pier 1 chair had a small foot rest. That chair is now on my patio. it will be for warmer weather use outside.

This entry was written while listening to Farmhouse by Phish

Visiting Friends

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Spoke to my friend Jayson today.  he is planing on coming into NYC for a week in february.  He is going to take a Cisco Voice Over IP class.  I think he is a punk for needing to take a class in it, but he owns his own buisness.  In order to get clients he needs to not just prove he knows the stuff, he needs certification in it.

He may stay by me while he is up here.  I don’t see him much so I think it would be fun.  I need to get down to New Orleans and hang with him, joe and gretchen soon also.

I told him he should come to work with me and see a Cisco Call Manager in action.  He was at the our "parent" company office when Jeff & Dave where there, but hasn’t ever made it to our current office.

Hopefully that will be a fun visit.  I look forward to it.

Lazy About Packing

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Well not really packing, but I am lazy today. I know I need to break down my old wall unit so I can get my new stuff friday, but I just am not in the mood to do allot of manual labour. I will wait till tomorrow. Hopefully then I will be up for it. I need to carefully take apart all my electronics and store them for a day. I also need to make sure my cable modem stays on while I do this or else I won’t be able to get on the internet. And that would be bad.

Snow, Snow, And Some Cold Weather

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It is freezing in New York City today. It is also currently snowing. I hope it doesn’t snow that much since I actually want to goto work tomorrow. I am working from home friday so I really could get stuff done tomorrow at the office. As of now it is a crap shoot. Who ever knows how much it will snow. The weather people have no clue and I have stopped listening to them years ago.

All I do know is it is freezing. And on that note I just got a new Pea Coat. My old one had buttons falling off and my new LL Bean one just showed up tonight. I am just worried it is not as heavy as the current one I have. For the amount I paid that thing better be warm. I have a real navy surplus Pea Coat I got from my dad. Unfortunately it is too tight on me now. That was an awesome coat. He got it from a Navy base in the 50’s. It was used in WWII and has the guys name still embroidered on the inside of the coat. You could seriously throw a bucket of water on someone when they are wearing that coat and they would still stay warm.

Migraine Streak Continues

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For some unknown reason I am still getting head aches. I was stuck in bed all day sunday with a migraine. I attempted to not take drugs since I was at home, but I ended up taking a bextra and sleeping all day.

Today I also took 2 fureset (butabital). I am hacking the spelling of these drugs! I felt better after taking the drugs today, but if I didn’t I would have a big problem. Butabital is a powerful pain medication. Thankfully I was able to make it through the rest of the day. Hopefully tomorrow I will feel better. I will try to goto bed early tonight.

Ready Or Not Work Starts Tomorrow

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I had one last day of rest and now work starts again tomorrow. I did my laundry and cleaned a bit today, but other than that I took it easy. I still have a nasty cough, but other than that I feel allot better than I did last week. Not 100%, but better. My parents came over to measure stuff. I am getting my new furniture (there old furniture) in a few weeks and we wanted to make sure that everything will fit. I did an awesome Visio of my apartment and all the furniture in it. it was to scale and everything. Unfortunately I cannot seem to find it. It was lost when I had my hard drive issues a few months ago. I cannot seem to find it in my backups. I am not happy about it. A work skill finally put to use for my house and it is lost. I found it so funny that my sister was amazed at that visio, and it only took me like 1 hour of measuring and about an hour an a half of work in Visio. 🙁

My mom talked me into getting more stuff than I anticipated on. I am getting this huge plush chair for my bedroom. I need to get rid of my Pier 1 papizan chair to make it fit. I love that chair but it is starting to break anyway. It is take this chair from my parents or buy another $300 papizan chair. The only think I will need after this furniture arrives is a small kitchen table. I am not even sure if I need one, but I will have the room for it. I can always eat on the dining room table.

OK, I am off to bed. This will hopefully be my last night on Tylenol PM. I need to wean myself off that stuff.

This entry was written while listening to American Girls LP from the album “Hard Candy” by Counting Crows

Why Am I Still Sick

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If you have been reading this blog you will have noticed that I have been complaining of being sick on and off since October. Well this is disturbing since I normally get sick with a cold once or twice a year and that is it. Well I have counted what can be 3 cold’s and the flue since October. Needless to say I am not happy.

This whole week I have been coughing allot and had a stuffy nose. It is weird, some colds you just feel like crap and don’t want to do anything. This one I just coughed like crazy and sounded like crap, but I was able to work. Thankfully I had off Thursday and Friday. I left a bit early from work Wednesday and started taking Tylenol PM. I have been in a haze ever since. I woke up this morning and wasn’t tired anymore but I could not concentrate at all. I ended up watching movies and lying in bed most of the day. I couldn’t do anything else if I wanted to.

Late this afternoon I felt a bit better and decided to rearrange my desk a bit. I took my Athlon XP desktop out of the closet and set it up on a corner of my desk. I totally cleared off my desk when I got my iMac but I decided that I had some use for my XP desktop to be out. So I shifted the iMac over and placed the monitor for the XP box in the corner. I have less desk space now and things look a little more cluttered, but it isn’t that bad. If I don’t use the computer I can always put it back in the closet with my server.

I am also giving the apple pro speakers that came with my mac a try. They don’t use a subwoofer and so at first I didn’t want to use them since my creative speakers have a subwoofer. The only thing the apple speakers have going for them is they don’t take up much space. They don’t actually sound so bad now that I have been listening to music on them for the past 2 hours.

The only problem I have now is that I think half of my computer table is not level. it is not visible when working on it, but I know that it is, so it is driving me crazy. I am to much of a perfectionist…

This entry was written while listening to Unwell from the album “More Than You Think You Are” by Matchbox 20

The Photo Album

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I have for years been scanning my images into the computer. I started with camp photos I took back in the summer of 1993. Scanning stuff was my first experience with a mac. I used the scanner at the Mac lab in college. But that is not what this blog entry is about:) Like I said I have been scanning stuff for a while. Because of that I have cleared out most of my backlog of photos. I have a few left to do from my cross country trip back in 1989, but other than that I am good. All my recent photos are digital, so I just upload them to the computer. I have been doing that since 1999.

I have been telling my parents to digitize there photos, movies and stuff for years. My mom doesn’t want to look at them on the computer so she never cared. The problem is most of our family photos are in 3 big baskets in my parents house. These baskets have been near windows when it rained, baked in the sun, and other damage has happened to them. Allot of them are totally screwed up. When you view them after scanning you can see the imperfections here and there. Some images have ripped or bad areas to them. I scanned them anyway because the originals will only get worse. Some of these photo’s are 30 years old and they never kept the original’s.

The first batch of 150 or so photos I did Wednesday I created as TIF’s. Everyone says the uncompressed file format is the best so you can edit or compress the image later. Well a regular size photo at 300dpi comes out to 4.3megs as a tif. I used over 800 megs doing images as tif’s. My entire collection before that was only 2 gigs. I am going to have my dad categorize the photo’s for me and then I am just going to convert them to JPEG. then I will burn the TIF’s to DVD and put them away. No need to keep them on my hard drive. The second batch I did, I used high quality (low compression) JPEG. Each photo is only 2-300kbytes. Much better size. I cannot tell the difference, and I don’t plan on printing many of these photos. if they look good on my high rez 20″ flat panel, then they will look good on most computer displays. I am going to take a few and have prints done, just to see.

Next up is having my dad scan slides into the computer. My Mac does not work with my old HP scanner. Like 1 1/2 – 2 years ago I bought a nice $200 scanner with a slide attachment. I scanned some slides but got busy with work. Now I have a mac and since I never thought I would buy a mac, I didn’t think to check if the HP scanner had OS X drivers when I bought it. I now have a Canon CanoScan LiDE 30 USB scanner for my Mac. My sister has my HP scanner, but doesn’t use it, so I am giving it to my dad to do slide scan’s.

Once the photo’s are done we are going to pay someone to move my dad’s old 8mm film to DVD. That is the really big project, but would be really cool to do. once it is on DVD I can do edit’s on it with Final Cut if I want. With all this scanning and stuff going on my dad wants to learn how to burn CD’s & DVD’s. I forgot his new computer has a DVD burner in it. That will be a fun lesson.

It Was Cold, But Fun

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I had a really good time in manhattan last night. It was dam cold, but it was fun. Went to a really great steak house. Keen’s. It was as good as I was told. Thanks Gus & Tori for the advise. Vindigo wasn’t too helpful about review, but Zagat’s on the Palm rocked. My Vindigo subscription is up, and I am thinking of dropping them for the Zagat’s online subscription. it is more, but I think it may be better.

We saw the tree. It was as cool as I remember it. The ice skating line was huge, so I am glad we decided not to do that. That is a day unto itself.

Went to FAO, and I found out that the store is closing. I knew they were having financial problems but I didn’t think they would close there flagship store. The everything in the store is on sale signs gave away the closing.

While at FAO I saw the really big stuffed animal I wanted to get morgan when she was born. It was awesome. It was also HUGE. My sister would have killed me if I got that thing. Glad I didn’t.

Note to self. I need new leather gloves, mittens, or any other hand covering device!!!

This entry was written while listening to The Great Beyond by REM

Shopping In The City

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I am off to spend the day in manhattan. It is cold, and I am probably stupid for doing it, but I am off anyway. Going to see the tree. If you don’t know which tree, you don’t live in NYC. Then maybe the coolest toy store in the universe, FAO. I have nightmares about the dam song they play there, but it is still really cool.

The hard part is finding parking at the LIRR…

This entry was written while listening to Long, Long Way To Go from the album “X” by Def Leppard