Personal

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

The Company Holiday Party

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Yesterday was my companies holiday party. I unfortunately didn’t go. I wasn’t feeling well yesterday and migraines don’t care that a party is planned. That was 2 days in row for migraines for me. not good.

It was suggested that I need to be at the party, but I just couldn’t make it. I ended up leaving work at 4PM. I figured I was up for one of the company awards they do at these events. I was up for one last year, but didn’t win. I figured if Gus was telling me it was a good idea to show up, that I was going to win something. I won the award for most savings to the company. To us that is a big thing. it is one of 3 or 4 awards. I got some Champaign. Supposed to be really good champaign, but I don’t drink the bubbly. My sister already offered to take it off my hands. I will save it for a special occasion.

I await the video to see how everyone acted crazy at the party. The didn’t allow hard booze this party since one we had in June had allot of people getting really drunk off of many shots.

From what I hear many people bailed on the party this year. Keith had to pack and didn’t go. Glenn our CEO was a no show because he threw his back out earlier in the day.

In any event it was supposed to be a load of fun. We do know how to have a good time when work stops…

This entry was written while listening to American Girl by Everclear

Lazy Day And Hardware Upgrades

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Today was a lazy day. I caught up on what I had on the Tivo. I also did some email and just hung out. I did some food shopping since they say it may snow tomorrow. I had no food left, so I figured it was a good time to do that.

I also installed 512 more megs in my new 20″ iMac. Now I have 768 megs in it. I can put a full gig in it, but apple decided to only include 256 with them machine. If I want to get a full gig, I need to remove that 256 and put a 512 meg chip in its place. The only problem is you cannot get to that memory without going to an authorized repair center. It is sealed within the machine. The other slot is not. So for now I am at 768 megs, it should be enough for now. I also put my airport extreme card into the mac. I don’t have the laptop anymore so I figured I would use it. Since my server is in the closet on wireless, I get no extra speed by leaving the mac wired to my 100megabit switch. I cannot transfer files between the desktop and server any faster than the wifi anyway. Now I just have 1 less wire plugged into the iMac.

In my free time I also imported most of my online photo album into iPhoto. Photos imported allot faster on the iMac then they did on either of my Powerbooks. I need to get photos from my parents to scan and increase my album a bit.

Also today I watched some DVD’s. I just got 2 more shows on DVD. I got Firefly on DVD. It was a scifi show that didn’t last too long on tv. It was actually very good, and I was surprised when it came out on DVD. I didn’t watch too many of them, so I decided to buy it. I also got Buffy season 5. I mocked that show for years, and then Rich gave me season 1 to watch and I actually liked it. Go figure.

This entry was written while listening to Maybe Katie from the album “Everything to Everyone” by Barenaked Ladies

Friday

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Friday was a good day. Work was crazy since justin isn’t around, but Keith and I got by. We had to move 5 people’s desks to get ready for a new guy starting monday. We got 3 of them done, and will do the rest Monday. Keith got the brunt of the grunt work. I had to deal with some Kingston issues, 2 meetings, admin work, and I had to free up disk space on our main file server. All while trying to build a new desktop for the new hire and help keith with some of the moves. It was a busy day.

Friday night the president of our company had a holiday party at his house in Jersey. I didn’t go. It is a really long trip, and I had other plans. Last year I got stuck setting up a wireless network in his house.

I ended up going to a pretty decent italian restaurant for dinner. It was nice. Didn’t know what to do after dinner, so we ended up bowling of all things. It turned out to be a load of fun.

Been Sick Again

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Every year I get 1 or two colds and that is it. 2 weeks out of the year I take Nyquil and complain allot. Then I am fine except for allergies and migraines the rest of the year. This year is not going according to my normal plan. I had a cold in AuGust. I got the flue for two weeks in October and a cold. Now I have another cold this week. I am not pleased. I took yesterday off to try and kick the cold. It helped a little, but I still feel it.

I went from the soar throat phase monday and tuesday to the ears and nose problems Wednesday and thursday. Then today I have the nose and cough going on. What fun.

A Clean Apartment

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Why is it that I clean my place right before the cleaning lady shows up? I don’t dust or use cleaning stuff, but I neaten up. I always seem to do it the day or two before the cleaning lady shows up. It is really weird.

I started cleaning because I needed to tidy up, but I finished because I will probably have company later. I don’t want this place looking like a whole in the ground. Of course it is kind of empty when it is clean and I still don’t have a couch or dining room table.

This cleaning frenzy also got me wondering how to you clean an iMac when the white starts getting dirty? My tan logitech keyboard is greying because of dust and dirt. This iMac is snow white, and I don’t want to think how dirty it will get over time.