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June 1st, 2011
04:25 pm - life update
It's been a long time since I've written a blog.
Since I've last written, I proposed to Marina, we'll be tying the knot in November on our 5th anniversary as a couple. Some people on here may have already heard about it on Twitter or Facebook. It was Halloween morning after we'd gotten back from a Bad Religion concert and I had made her a mix cd and case for the cd and ring to be in with the question "hidden" in the track list.
Finally got to see Dresden Dolls play in concert. Seems like we saw a decent number of our favorite acts this year.
The house we were looking at about a year ago went off the market and then came back on it recently, someone did a lot of work on it in the meantime. But since December we've been in negotiations for a different house and looks like we will be closing on it this month. House needs some work but most of it can be spread out out over a couple of years. Couple of things I learned, 1) no matter how long someone tells you a short sale house takes to buy it won't prepare you for the waiting for a reply from the bank, 2) Bank of America are asses when it comes to negotiating, 3) when saving for a downpayment on a house remember to also save up the closing costs and all the little things you will need to buy or repair for the house after closing.
We went canoeing on the Wakulla River during the Memorial Day weekend. We had two manatees swim directly underneath us! I've only seen them at Seaworld or Disney previously (I can't remember which place I saw one at). I had forgotten just how fucking huge they are in real life. Also saw a couple of gators hiding in some weeds.
Current Mood: accomplished
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August 21st, 2010
08:20 pm
Marina and I got back from a little over a week vacation up to the north shore of Lake Superior in Minnesota. I have family up there in a small town called Grand Marais. We had a pretty event filled time there between Fisherman's Picnic, hiking up Eagle Mountain, picking blueberries in the wild, and briefly seeing the Northern Lights at my family's cabin. We nearly had a wolf run into the car, during the drive there, and it was carrying the ass half of a deer in it's mouth. I've gone on vacations with my family to Grand Marais for over 10 years easy and have never seen a wolf there in the wild, though I have seen a couple moose. We both managed to get slightly sun burned twice while there, kinda embarrassing living in Florida all our lives and getting sun burnt in Minnesota.
We visited several National Parks during the drive up but was always too late to go into the visitor centers to get our National Park Passport stamped (yes, we're are nerds). Though we did get a few lovely shots of the sunset at Indiana Sand Dunes.
On the way back we missed our chance to go to the Space Center in Huntsville, AL and see the Star Wars: Science Meets Imagination exhibit. If I had know it was there before we went on the trip I would have left Minnesota earlier to make time to visit on the way back.
So now life has finally settled back in just in time to viciously rearrange it again.
We gotta start packing for DragonCon soon and we started looking for a house to buy. We're both pretty excited about it and it looks like Tallahassee has plenty of cool places up for grabs and at decent rates. There was one place in particular that is in foreclosure that we like, but it has been vacant for at least 3 months during Florida summer. So it could possibly have a mold problem and the roof may need work, won't know until we can get an inspector to look at it. In the meantime we are trying to view as many places so we don't get too settled on that place, though it has an awesome deck out back and cool floor plan.
Current Mood:  good
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May 3rd, 2010
06:15 pm
At the beginning of April Marina and I took a mini vacation up to Atlanta. She got color added to some of her leaves, still has a couple more sessions to do before they are finished. We went to Six Flags, the roller coasters are fun but the rest of the place is just basically a carnival and a bit annoying, it's definitely no substitute for Disney or Universal. FYI if you go to Six Flags and you happen to wear a wallet chain be prepared to never see that chain again as they will confiscate it and never return it, unlike Disney or Universal which will normally let you where one or at the very least return it to you as you leave the park. I have learned I never want to live in Atlanta due to rush hour traffic alone.
If you happen to be in Atlanta or don't mind driving to get a good tattoo at clean, reputable shop then I recommend Timeless Tattoo.
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January 17th, 2010
04:38 pm
Just before my vacation time kicked in we got three letters (one for each person on the lease) from SHS claiming that we were 6 months past due on the supposed damages we had caused in the old apartment. So I then had to spend part of my day chewing out various people working for SHS, had to go to my bank to get a copy of the check I wrote printed out (costing me an additional $11.50 as it had to be dug out of the records). And the reason I had to go through all of this because the manager, who checked us out of the apartment, didn't follow procedure and keep a copy of the payment with our records. Still waiting on the confirmation letter from them... Marina wonders what would have happened if all three of us had sent checks in at the same time, at this point we think SHS would have just kept them all.
I had a pretty good winter holiday, the upshot of working at a university. I took a few extra days off since my birthday is Dec. 23 and I figured why not have my birthday off and get my holiday started. Got some good gifts which included Marina playing a game of Warmachine with me for my b-day.
Marina got me this awesome R2-D2 light up sign. I'm still waiting for the garden jawa to arrive.
I had a bit of a Star Wars x-mas as you may be able to tell. :D
I couldn't resist buying myself a tauntaun sleeping bag, it came in before my holiday started so needless to say I spent many a free hour in this in front of the tv playing games and watching movies.
Managed to roll out the first beta of Marina's app for her shop. Creating the basic database and interface is so easy in Cocoa. Once I get back all her feedback on it, I can't wait to figure out how create and display graphs of the data she enters.
Looks like my birthday game of Warmachine has gotten Marina interested painting and playing Warmachine more often, as she bought some new Warmachine models.
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December 5th, 2009
02:04 pm
Still eating leftovers from Thanksgiving at my parents' house and Marina's parents' house. Marina managed to recreate her dad's sausage dressing to take to my parents' dinner. Thanksgiving has always been one of those holidays where I could manage to eat more than I usually do for a meal, it's like my body knows to create an extra stomach for all the delicious food. Today we started eating the soup my mom made from the turkey bones and scraps.
I'm learning how to use the Core Data API for Mac OS X. I'd forgotten just how easy it is to start assembling a polished looking program with what Apple provides by default in the XCode environment. Marina wanted a way to track customers and inventory for the piercing shop she works at, which eventually led to me promising to write her a program to do that for her. Doing this project for her gives me a project to learn new stuff and forces me to actually finish the project, instead of getting bored or frustrated and wandering off to something else.
I've decided that I'm going to try to get as much of my shopping done this weekend and if possible online. I like X-mas and I like giving gifts, but I dislike the actual gift hunting process or possibly just the people I have to deal with while shopping. I am definitely not a fan how stores seem to think that X-mas shopping needs to start as soon as possible, especially when it stomps all over my favorite holiday, Halloween. Someone needs to force the stores to start advertising for holidays only when it's 30 days or less before the actual holiday. Sorry old cranky man rant over. :P
Nice thing about working for a university, I get the week between X-mas and New Years Day off and paid for it! Plus I'm going to take off the 23rd and 24th, since the 23rd is my birthday. Hopefully I'll have the program for Marina done before my week off, because then I can spend my time painting my Warmachine miniatures (I have a backlog of them to paint) and playing a lot of video games.
Couple of previous blogs I posted on SG and forgot to post here too:
Sept. 21, 2009
In the last three months:
Marina and I moved into a new place with a bunch of our friends, including Adam. So far the house has been awesome and everyone seems to be getting along, good thing with five of us living here. The house has plenty of space, which means I finally have a place to start working on building my R2.
Got screwed out of a bunch of money by my previous landlords, Student Housing Solutions. Don't ever rent from them, their property managers will find a way to get the maximum amount money from you without making it worth while to hire a lawyer. Gotta remember to file a complaint against them with the better business bureau.
Went to DragonCon and had a blast, as usual. We dressed up in steampunk costumes this year and got some good ideas on how to expand on the costume for next year. Talked with some of the other R2builders from the Yahoo group and Astromech.net. They invited me to help out with the robot table next year if I feel like bringing my R2 up there (depending on it's state of completion).
Looking forward to our annual Halloween party here at the house. Got a couple ideas for things to do around inside and gonna setup a graveyard out in the front yard. And I want to play around with making some sort of interactive app to run on the tv during the party, something like using it like mirror (with the help of a webcam) and adding ghosts to the room.
July 4, 2009
The one downside to my job seems to be rearing it's ugly head this weekend. It's my turn to be on-call, so when various servers throw tantrums the beeper goes off and wakes me up. It doesn't bug me so much when there's a straight forward problem and either I fix it or I call someone else and they fix it; but this weekend it seems that some of the databases want to fill up all their disk space. The first time it happened Thursday night (or Friday morning depending on how you want to look at it), it was simple call the database admins (I'm an operating system admin) and they went in and adjusted a few things and moved some stuff around and I went to sleep after waiting up for an hour until 3am. Happens again with the same databases as Thursday night except this time the db admin doesn't know why the databases are chewing up space but they seemed to be slowly fixing themselves, so crisis adverted...I am now fully in the belief that I will be woken up by the beeper later once I've fallen asleep.
Some days I just want to take a big magnet to certain servers.
Current Mood: happy
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April 14th, 2009
09:34 am
Wow! I haven't updated my blog in 3 months?!
Well let's see what have I been doing...erm.
Marina and I threw a party on V-day, it was mostly just a reason to get a bunch of our friends together and be geeks while drinking and eating.
We went to the Renn-Fest in Tampa in early March, while there we went to MOSI and saw the Our Body exhibit there, went to the Castle for the first time, and toured the Salvador Dali museum. I bought myself and Marina a dozen Dunkin' Donuts (we don't have any in Tallahassee anymore :( ). I also picked up this awesome long coat at the Renn-Fest!
( Picture )
I took off a week from work, I had nearly maxxed out my vacation time after which it would have started converting into sick leave.
I've turned a Mac Mini into tv recorder and web server, I need to work on putting a decent webpage on it now.
We're almost done with our current lease at which point we will be moving into house, once we find one we like to rent. I've been living in the same apartment for about 7-8 years. I'm really looking forward to having some yard space and I can buy a big HDTV finally (I've been waiting until we move so we wouldn't have to deal with transporting it multiple times).
Last week the R2 dome finally came in, I was bouncing off the walls with giddiness. Now I need to gather a few more parts and tools, before I start assembling R2-D2's head. :D
( Picture )
UPDATE: Marina has bugged me for the "adorable" picture without specifying so here are both the photos I took of her from Renn-Fest.
( Picture )
( Picture )
Current Mood: geeky
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January 17th, 2009
05:22 pm
Still waiting on my R2-D2 dome. It's a good thing I am reasonably patient and that I knew going in it takes a while to for aluminum parts to be made. Also the guy making the domes has been doing it for a few years and is well known and trusted in the R2builders groups.
Trying to get back in the swing of things at work after the winter break. Actually managed to accomplish a number items on my to do list this week for work. Good thing I was starting to feel a bit depressed that I shouldn't be at this job.
I started learning to program the iPhone before the break, sadly I didn't make a lot of progress during the break on that (though I did make progress in a number of video games :P). Hopefully I'll be able to shortly make some nifty apps and maybe make some cash on the side.
The search for a house continues, I'm pretty much firmly set on renting a house for this year. I don't have enough in my savings for both a down payment and any possible incidental problems that always seem to crop up when buying a house. Also, while I'm fairly certain my job is secure for another year, I don't know what next year is going to be like at my job since they are expecting another cutback to the university's budget next year, and it might be a good idea to have savings buffer just in case.
Current Mood: good
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December 18th, 2008
08:56 pm
So I've had a busy couple of months since I last posted. Between work, personal projects, and the holidays.
I managed to move a major website for a university department, upgrade their server software, and tweaked their config files for the newer software all without the department being aware of the real reasons for the upgrade. I won't comment on that other than the old server was really old and ready to collapse any day now, there's more too it but probably not wise saying any more on a public blog. Needless to say it was a bit stressful and a fair amount of work to sort out all the kinks.
I've gotten my R2-D2 display circuit boards and LEDs, so now I just need to put them together. I'm hoping to get that done over the holiday break.
Also I finished the basic design for my tattoo, so I need to go in and discuss it with an artist and set up an appointment to get it done. This will be my first, unless I wuss out.
I've been reading up on iPhone programming lately, I'm already somewhat familiar with Mac OS X's API and it's pretty similar to the iPhone's API. So maybe I'll be able to crank out a couple simple cheap apps and make some extra money on the side.
In another 5 days will be 31, I think that qualifies as officially over the hill. Course the baby boomer keep moving middle age back so who know what is over the hill these days. :P
Started looking for a house to rent or buy, depending on if I find one at a good price and what my credit union is willing to give me for a loan.
Current Mood: geeky
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October 16th, 2008
10:19 am
While I'm still waiting to electronics package I ordered for building my R2, I've added myself to a list for the next run of the 300mm Dome. So I will finally have a part that looks like something recognizable as R2. Hopefully once the electronics come in and a few other parts ordered, I will start assembling my R2 dome and all the bits that make it up. And I'll start working on torso. I'm going to have be careful with the dome, it's going to run about me $450 + shipping. Damn being a droidbuilder is expensive, though I guess I could go cheap and use a plastic dome.
I finally uploaded my dragoncon pics, about a week or two ago, and weeded out some of the worse shots.
We rented Mulberry Street last week and it sucked in my opinion. Someone classified this in the horror/zombie genre and while I'm not sure what it is (maybe monster infection/curse) it is not a zombie movie. People get bit by rats and become rat-man creatures. I'd say it's more like a werewolf movie than a zombie flick. You have been warned.
( Mac Fanboy Rant )
I've been considering getting my ears pierced and gauged up to 2g. So anyone got any thoughts or comments?
Current Mood: chipper
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September 8th, 2008
05:08 pm - dragoncon 2008
Well I still haven't uploaded my pictures anywhere that others can view them. I will rectify that this weekend.
Dragon Con was a blast. Got to see a bunch of bands: Abney Park, Voltaire, Cruxshadows, and Mindless Self Indulgence. I really enjoyed the Abney Park show, it's a real fun show to watch.
Managed, with the help of Adam, to convince Marina that the Firefly crew are some of the few celebrities that fun to go listen in their panel (in particular Nathan Fillion and Alan Tudyk).
Stopped by the R2 Builders table and got to look around inside one of the R2-D2s and talked a bit of shop with some of them (the builders not the R2s).
Went to the Weird Science Experiments panel, how the hell some of these people get grant money for these experiments I will never know, but funny shit.
Spent a ton on art from the art show. Gonna have to start rotating artwork out on my walls or get a bigger place.
This year Marina and I actually wore costumes around the con. I wore my Doctor Who (Tenth Doctor) costume from last Halloween with a few improvements, a steampunk costume, and managed to kinda half-ass a Master (John Sims) costume from my steampunk costume (and a master laserdriver).
We definitely need to get in line sooner for the burlesque show.
And now I bring you giant robotic spiders attacking Liverpool, England.
Current Mood: busy
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