So here I sit, a wednesday June 30th, feeling older and wiser. I can only hope that I will have grown from experiences this month and over the recent events in life. Some interesting things have occurred, mostly nothing of note though. I have worked, I have moved, maybe more then physically moving, I have moved on to a different part of my life. I am no longer the college kid, I have moved somewhat further into the Adult real world. I have had the chance to learn many things, and I have learned a lot about myself, and the world from this. I should probably stop writing as I am just rambling on.

I did play with Dad’s old Canon AE-1P, I have learned some of the finer points of photography. Well some of the basics anyhow, some of the more interesting things about light settings and film speed and all that stuff. I took a roll of pictures, which I guess all ended up under-exposed. I also had a few issues holding all the weight of camera still while using the telephoto lens. But after getting those pictures back, and having a few digital prints done over at Walgreens. But that being said, and a trip back to the Camera Center to talk with the old timers out there, a check of the camera for issue. The camera seems to be in perfect condition, just need to adjust a few things to take pictures a little better. I hope to throw another roll of film in there and check if I can’t make the adjustments for better pictures.

On a happy note, as of tonight, the White sox are top of their division, alone after defeating the Twins in Minnesota. Go Sox, keep the lead, and whip on the Cubbies this weekend.

Here is the apartment floorplan.

So there wasn’t too much special that happened this past weekend. There was the lack of plans to go out on Friday night. After a slow night at work, I stopped in East town, and got russelltee out of his apartment and we headed to Mulligans. It has been a while since I have been over there, so that was a good time. Granted it was just the 2 of us, but we sat up at the bar, split a pitcher, had a shot of apple jack and some dogs. IT was a good night, not too many people, not a massive crowd that I can’t hear across the table. A good and relatively early evening was a good friday night, all things considered with working 1st shift on the weekends.

Work was pretty slow, I had enough to keep me moderately busy, but otherwise I was just browsing the web and drifting off somewhere. After work, I did a bit of driving around mostly to be able to pick up a few things, and then listening to the Sox game on the radio, because apparently I was not able to get that on the television. I was definately able to catch it on the web, but that isn’t as exciting and biased as a webcast. Before the end of the game, I ended up grabbing dinner with Bern and Flo, Enfuego joined us a bit later. The wait over at Famous Dave’s was around an hour, or so they told us, so we ended up getting on the list and headed over to Circuit city for some browsing and time killing. The 4 of us ended up tackling and polishing off the All American Feast. That was amazing, and we were all fatter after that. A little browsing at the mall, followed by a stop at the theater for Farenheit 9/11. It was an interesting movie, but I don’t know how much I got out of it. I learned a bit about the history of the Bush family, and their connections and encounters with the Saudi’s and the Taliban in the past. Mostly the film appeared to be a propaganda filme, and got a fair amount of Bush bashing done. I have no problem with that, but I was expecting, nay hoping for a bit more to the film. I am not disappointed that I saw it, but still. I ended up going ahead and going to discuss the movie with the guys at Friday’s afterward. Then enfuego was kind enough to drive me home, as he lives in the same complex. A bit scarier than the fact that he lives int he same complex, he lives 3 buildings down, and we share the parking lot. What a small world.

Today at work, we upgraded to HEAT 8.0, but webcenter and Autobahn went down, but otherwise there were really no issues with the process. I was quite tired after Saturday night, so I was browsing the web and doing my typical stuff, I drifed off a time or 2, which wasn’t that bad, but you know the phone scares the hell out of you when it goes off. Same thing with the damn pager, because even though they rebooted the monitoring software today, it was still paging out when it was unable to reconnect servers. What a paint in the ass. The Sox ended up winning the Crosstown classic series today so that was awesome, Let’s see how they do next weekend at Wrigley. But I guess we now have a new pitcher that should help strengthen the pitching staff of the Sox. While playing around the apt, I was playing with the Canon AE-1P, dad’s old SLR film camera. I took some pictures of the squirrels outside the apartment, I am amazed at the power of the the teleconverter and telephoto lens. I was able to get right up on the squirels. Though it almost seemed that they didnt want to have their picture taken. If I was focusing too long, they just scampered off and out of my field of view.

I have updated my gallery this evening, addind pictures to the Chicago group, both from father’s day and some more pictures of the old house. Added a picture from my drive across Michigan to the Misc pics, but I still have yet to add my moving photos. There was that pretty good sunrise that I got a shot of when I was driving in to work one morning. But that about does it for me tonight, I suppose 4:30a is a decent bedtime.

So after watching the History Channel for a while after getting home from work last night, I was able to learn a little bit about the history of Arthurian legend and refresh my memories of England. This was particularly interesting to me as I had a conversation with Al and a female friend of his Monday night at the bar about the new King Arthur movie. Don’t get me wrong the movie does look good, but I don’t know how true to form, and what that form should be. A few of the key things that I picked up on was the time frame that the Arthurian legends speak of. Contrary to my thoughts on the time, it actually represents a time between the 5th and 6th centuries, at the same time as the fall of the Roman Empire. I always figured his time to have come a bit later in the middle ages somewhere in the more romantic era.

Obviously I was mistaken. I was also very intrigued to learn a bit about how the legends grew and brought this potentially idealistic representation of the medieval hero to life. Part of me was so deeply enraptured in the show, some of me was thinking to Video games, and how all of the legends of Arthur and Tolkien’s worlds all merge with some added imagination to create wondrous fantasy worlds and some of the names and icons adapted directly from history and literature.

As many of you may know, I was quite the fan of the video game Diablo and Diablo II, both great games, albeit somewhat prone to hacking. But I never realized that the setting of the Original game was the town of Tristram, which borrows its name directly from one of the knights of the round table. This does make sense as you play the hero and fight the ongoing battles of good versus evil, the everlasting dichotomy. The fight for truth, light and all things noble wins in the end, but like Arthurian legend can only last so long before falling to the darkness from within.

Another glaring example comes from Warcraft III, yes another Blizzard game. While playing the missions in single player mode, in the Human campaign, the Hero controlled by you is Arthas, quite the same model for the name Arthur, coming from Art which I believe was Celtic for bear. I am almost surprised that the flag of Lordaeron did not have a bear on it. His mentor is the Lord Uther, which is remarkably the same as Arthur’s father in legends. But beyond this was the unbelievable similarities that Warcraft seems to have shared with Middle Earth. Granted there were no Hobbits in the game, there was a good selection of Human, Dwarf, Elf, Orcs and Undead. Again it is the ultimate struggle for good and evil to see what will happen, how will good triumph in the end.

Not that any of this was particularly important to anyone or really even worth reading. It was just a few of my thoughts from when I was watching TV. Seeing as parts of the Arthurian legends come from France, here is a random thought. I had not mentioned, but young Cassandra is overseas now. I remember talking to her and apparently she left to go over there on Monday, and I see that I have received a few hits from France.

After dragging myself through work fairly uneventfully on Sunday, I headed into Chicago for some bonding time with the family. I got to celebrate Father’s day with my father and just generally have some fun over there. He appeared to enjoy the gift that I got for him, so that made me happy. I hope he will get the time to actually go ahead and play with the teleconverter for his digital camera. He also enjoyed the “smudge pots” that my brother got for him. Little sphere shaped tiki torches that remind him of the construction beacons of his childhood.

Monday was a gloriously lazy day. I really didn’t do anything of note during the day, watched some TV and slept mostly. Once the parents got home, we had some grub and I got to talk with dad about his old SLR. Which he is letting me use to play around with. I didn’t realize that he had all the accessories to this camera, well not all the accessories, but at least a decent selection of lenses. from the telephoto, to wide angle to the diopters for close up shots. I really look forward to playing around a bit and seeing what kind of quality that I might be able to achieve with a real film camera.

I did end up running into Todd and paying him for the LATE ride, so I look forward to doing that in the beginning of July. That would make 3 years of doing the ride, and I hope to bring along the camera this year and getting a few shots of the sun coming up over the lake. That is just something that I cannot seem to do here in West Michigan. After talking with him and his attractive female friend, I decided I needed something else to do. Amanda disappointed me again. So I called Al, we ended up leaving his frined that were so filled with inertia they didn’t want to move. And we headed to the Willow for some pitchers of brew. After a while, we were hoping that Tim might be able to come out to the bar to play, but he got off work after last call. So we finished up our beer and headed to his apartment. A nice little place in the city, unfortunately it had hardwood floors that creaked something fierce, but it was a nice time to visit.

Tuesday started off by seeing my father as he was getting ready for work, as I came home from dropping Al off. After my little nap. I did some cleaning and throwing out stuff in the bedroom and decided that I really did want to go to the Sox game. So I tried to convince Dad that we should go to the game. I also decided to play with the camera. After tracking down one of those little 6v photo batteries, I was able to play a bit. Now I need to go and get those pictures developed and see what is the issue that dad was saying that he was having with the prints. Granted, they might als o turn out like garbage, as the film was in the camera when we started playing with it, I have no idea how long it was sitting in there with the camera.

We went to the game, and it was good. Unfortunately we had to see the Sox blow a 8-0 lead, but fortunately they did end up pulling it out in the bottom of the 10th. But It was a good time of bonding with the old man, seeing some of the things that we haven’t seen in a few years. Actually getting to have a beer at the ballpark, that was awesome. We weren’t disappointed by the hitting by the Sox for the most part either. It was really nice to see Frank knock one out for a 3 run homer, as well and seeing Valentine knock that 2 run homer out to end the game. The Sox were definately out there to win, it was just a little unfortunate that Loiza wasn’t able to hold out until they put someone else in the game for him. After the game a few pints of Leinies for $1 ea over at the Willow Crossing, and back to bed with me.

Today I was able to leisurely drive back up north to my apartment, and get back in plenty of time to make it to work, however there was some problem with that due to a few accidents out there on the road. I was able to get the rest of the dishes put away, and Chouse so kindly set me up with Gmail. I will have to play around a bit with that later.

So I was talking to an old timer about photography, specifically digital photography. He suggested that I check out a site on the web. Being slightly amused that the old guy knew what the internet was, I went and checked out his suggestion and searched for the first stitched Gigapixel Image. After staring and marveling at this image and the way he created the image, I went and browsed pretty much the rest of his page and looked at all of his image galleries. WOW, is all I can say about some of them. I didn’t realize that you could capture some of the things that he had with a digital camera. The images of star trails and other highly contrasting light and dark images was definately somethign to look at for a while. I bet that fulljeff could easily duplicate this kind of work and possibly even surpass it, but as far as I know he hasn’t yet. I am really itching to get back out into the woods and mountains to go and give my hand a shot at attempting to caputre some beautiful images and try to digitall stich them to high res pictures.

I also found a few different places to produce prints of digital pictures. I took to FullJeff’s suggestion of Shutterfly and registerd there, I just need to claim my free prints to see how they look. Otherwise I found York Photo, where I would be able to get 100 prints for around $20. That sounds really cheap to me, so I think I will register and see what their free prints will look like. See if it is worth the $20 to get some pictures printed out.

As a side note, I brought The Lost Moon to work to start reading that. It is a book of the Apollo 13 mission that was actually written and somewhat used in teh production of the movie Apollo 13. The bookis written by Jim Lovell and another gentleman, but just the whole astronomy and technology absolutely fascinates me, as I know it also intrigues Darrin. But browsing for other mosaic and panoramic images, come across the images from the Mars Spirit rover. I would agree with a lot of discussion, The gentleman that created the gigapixel image seems like the perfect person to be hired to do some of the stitching of the Mars landscape and other NASA projects, to avoid the badly blended seams and whatnot. That is just IMHO though.

I have accomplished the move. I now live somewhere else, somewhere nobody really know but me. Which is kind of a nice idea, but then again not really. This goes to my thoughts that have been running through my head as of recently, but the move to a new locale, and nobody but my family knowing where that is. I am disappointed that many of my friends really don’t seem to care where I moved, but that was most probably just to avoid helping me move. Now that is accomplished I expect that I might actually hear from one or two of them.

After a long and arduous week, I come to the weekend, the time when I am actually supposed to be busy working my job. I sit here in the office, and things have slowed back down. Apparently a little while ago, SBC decided in their infinite wisdom to switch some cabling out at the Holland Main Office, which subsrequently took most of the Holland Data and some voice down. That made the phones go crazy, because, go figure we actually operate on the weekends.

I still have much unpacking to do at the new apartment, but at least all of my stuff has made it over to the new place. Now it just needs to find a home at the new place. As I unpack I plan on attempting to find more things to get rid of, granted I should’ve done that before moving. But silly me, I didn’t. The new place is a nice layout, I attempted to find a floor plan to post online, but I could not. I think the fact that it is a 1st floor apt, with a patio is my favorite part, a nice place to just sit out there and chill out and commune with nature. If I want I can crank the stereo up just a hair and hear that throughout the whole place, so that is definately cool. I should also be able to hear the door from my bedroom, unlike the other place. I do need to post those pictures from the move.

After attempting to locate a father’s day gift for dad yesterday, I ended up having to call on my brother to do me a favor and see if he can pick up what I want for dad. He says he should be able to, so that is cool. I should give him a call and see if he has gone and done that yet. I got the stereo hooked up and got some other basic things taken care of around the place. I headed to meet the guys for a drink or 2, and that was semi-enjoyable. I really was not feeling in the mood to go to the bar, but I just didn’t want to sit around the apt all night alone. I spend enough time just chilling out and being by myself at the apartment. Talking to people on the internet doesn’t count as spending time with people. But I don’t really know where to meet new people, nor do I want to go and leech off other people for their friends. We will see what happens.

It was my brother who at one time pointed out that my building shared the same number as the army unit in the series M*A*S*H. I found this to be quite amusing, as I do very fondly like the show. That has been something of some amusement for a while, but all good things must come to an end, some will bring greater beginnings and a brighter future, others will not. I really don’t know where tomorroe might lead, I hope on the path to onward and upward, down the path to the brighter future, but I can only do what I can to stay the course and see where I am guided. The day of moving tomorrow ought to be something off enjoyment. The parents came up and will be assisting with that. I feel loved, they have taken off 2 days of work in the last 2 weeks to spend some time with me. I just hope that Dad and I can handle some of the larger things, like getting the sofa down the stairs.

Today was spent gathering more stuff into boxes and doing a little cleaning, mostly gathering things together. After I was able to accomplish a lot of that I went in to work and got to tackle a few new issues, some just procedural, some fun, but mostly just playing substitute Darrin. Unfortunately I do not have the mad skillz that he does, so I was not able to help people as quickly with some of their issues. But all in all I took about 35 calls between 5 and 10 tonight at work. I took just a few others while I was there before. I was specifically told to not answer the phone if there are TSC folks that are just chit chatting and not actually working. Post 6 the phone just rang off the hook, crazy style until about 9:20 ish and I was finally able to enter some fo the tickets that I was just logging by hand, and get some of the other NOC things taken care of. Though I did not have to do the Nextel’s or open the mail. so that was cool.

I do have to post this up here as it kinda relates to the beginning of the post.

I was looking to update on Sunday morning at work, but who would’ve guessed I was actually pretty busy the whole time I was here on Sunday. That was somewhat of a nice change, but I definately could’ve used some sleep after Saturday night.

So after work on Saturday, I decided that I did not want to go ahead and just do nothing all afternoon. But I was also not particularly motivated to go and do anything requiring a whole lot of energy. I called a few people and watched part of the Arena semifinals. Then I decieded it would be a better time if I were to go ahead and do something. I called Tod and ended up grabbing some beer and heading over by his place to chill out. We had good times, beer, video games and a small fire of scrap lumber. Since I had to pass on the opportunity presented to me on Friday night by Tyler at 1:30am, I decided to give him a call. I ended up meeting him and his buddies down at the Anchor. That was fun, some attractive gals down there.

Sunday morning came entirely too early. I don’t know what it was, but I didn’t even hear my alarm go off until 5:30a. That would be fine if it didn’t take me 25 minutes to get to work. I got dressed and skipped a shower and booked into work, to only show up 2 minutes after I was supposed to get there. I arrive in the middle of the DataCenter upgrades again. This time there seemed to have been less problems. Only the Citrix stuff took a while to propogate.

After work I booked it over to Dundee, and by booked it only took me about 2.5 hours, maybe a little less. There was some horrid traffic and construction along the way. Once I got there I was really kind of amused to see that Abby really lived a lot more out in the country than I would’ve thought. She just doesnt exude country girl qualities. But that was a good time, chilling out with her family. I love that group of people as well. Everybody seemed very easy to talk to for the most part. I had some fun talking to Abby’s old man and her attractive mother. That was enjoyable, then some time watching the Pistons game, and the halftime trip over to her old man’s place to catch the end of the game. I had a decent amount of beer for the day, so I ended up crashing over at Abby’s place. We had some great conversation as always, and eventually around 2 we decided to call it a night.

Today I woke up over there and took a shower. Then after Abby was ready we headed for some lunch over at Tubby’s. They do make some delicious sandwiches over at that there Shell station. I also got to see where she has spent so much of her time over the last couple summers. Then a quick trip over to Cabela’s just to browse the camping section. They had some fun toys, but it was just a trip to browse. After that the drive home was fairly alright. The band of rain that I had to drive through was horrid, there were times I couldn’t really see anything on the road. But maybe that was my fate for taking 94 to 131 to get home to avoid all the damn construction. I made it back to GR by about 4, just in time to go sign my lease and get the keys to the new apt. I like it, at least as far as I looked at it today. I need to spend some time over there with the windows open to air out the paint odor. But it is all good.

Tonight work was horrid. Darrin called in sick, I guess he could barely speak. But there was a really decent number of calls that came in. Thankfully, a few letting us know that the circuits were back up. But my average time between calls for the night was 3 mins 27 secs. That was a busy night. Though there was really only one call that I wasn’t sure on. I will have to ask Joe when he comes in. Or just clear it up when I come in tomorrow for second shift. I do have off on Weds, so I should still be able to have my folks come up and help me move. I look forward to that. I have a bunch of stuff to move, maybe I can get some of it before I come to work tomorrow night. I also want to knwo if the food over at Founder’s is any good, I might want to take the parents there for dinner.