andy’s place…

Ok, so my oldest nephew Jameson (Jamie) is a fan of the movie Cars.  A little too much of a fan… he has just about every single toy version of each car in the movie.  And by each, I mean he has at least 2 of each (he has 8 McQueen cars).  Well, the other night as part of my experiment in learning to make Creme Brulee, I had the family over to test out the first batch, then play with the boys for a while in my place.  The brulee was awesome, and everyone stayed for a while afterwards to play with Jamie and his little brother Alex.  PlayDoh time is fun with a 3 year old.

Of course, my Dad is very good at building/modeling things, as he is a contractor by trade.  So he was making forklifts (boom lift with raising arm), tractors, trucks with trailers, etc… while I made a crappy airplane.  So tonight, I decided to test myself a bit in my PlayDoh skills.  I was going to make Lightning McQueen for my nephew.

Not perfect, but not bad for a first try.  We’ll see how Jamie likes it…

For years, I’ve been interested in, and involved in, photography. Usually it’s just small gatherings, office events, family stuff, etc… and in the past years, there have only been a few cameras I’ve used.

1. A wide variety of the Canon Digital Elph series. I have an SD850 IS myself, but I’ve used the SD1000, SD400, SD600, and SD700.
2. Office camera, which currently is a Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ7. Has been a Mavica FD20
3. Played around a bit with an XSi…

While I have very limited formal training in my photography, and a little more in my digital image editing work, I’d like to get deeper into this activity. As the nephews grow up, I think a solid camera with more zoom and features might be in line.

So, I started thinking XSi or T1i from Canon… I’m usually a Canon fan, but that’s not saying Nikon doesn’t make good stuff. They do, just a preference thing. But what does everyone else think?

In the DSLR game, what models have you tried/liked?
What lenses are the must-haves? The nice-to-haves?
Anything to avoid?

Shortest post I’ll make… I made my first goal this AM. I’ve dropped 30.4 lbs in the last 65 days… Today though, since weigh in is completed for a while, involved donuts, wings, and such… too bad the wings had little to no sauce and the fries weren’t done.

I’m celebrating step 1…

Well, the contest is about over…  After 2 months or so, my little diet contest will end Wednesday morning about 7:30 or so.  With both of us being very, very close, and I’m fairly certain I was past our mark at one point, we decided that it would not be far to give me an extra week or so while the other competitors are out of town at conferences with far too much food.  So, hopefully on Wednesday morning, I’ll have a little extra cash in my pocket and less of me to spend it on

Oh, by the way, Kanye West is a douchebag.  I’m not much for award shows, but that earned him a full fledged lifetime membership to the Douchebag club.

And yes, I’m bringing back the photo…it’s not totally their fault, but still.

Tonight, I went to have dinner with the family out at my brother’s campsite east of the city.  Steaks, campfires, smores, fresh colorado peaches (one of my favorites) and maybe a beer all while playing frisbee with my older nephew and watching the little one kick and goo around.  In all, a good Saturday night.

Well, it would have been stellar had there not been so much stupid in the campground.  This location has about 70 sites in one ring and 40 more in a second ring.  All connected by a one-way loop of road with speed bumps, recent college grads/students working as “park rangers” of sorts, and a whole mess of motorhomes, pull-behinds, and fifth wheels.  Now while my family has always used camping as a good way to get away from everything (minus what cell phones bring us into and taking a laptop/aircard for radar watching) so we can just relax and play with the kids, a lot of people just gather in large groups to drink very heavily while letting their kids just run around the loop all night.  Bicycles, roller blades, wagons, carts, and whatever else the kids are on all taking the children away from their parents.  Which is apparently exactly what the parents want, very little to do with parenting so they can get drunk as hell.

Hell, the folks next door were so busy yacking and drinking they didn’t notice that their own kids were trying to lock each other in the storage compartments of the fifth-wheel camper they had.  But that wasn’t the worst part.  Right out front of our campsite was one of the speed bumps meant to keep everyone at 10 mph or less on the one-way street loop.  That speed bump was causing quite the trouble for the kids.

1. Brilliant “thug life” wannabe 11 year old thought his skateboard (with 2 inch clearance) could just ride over the speed bump (4 inch high).  FAIL.  And a skinned knee.

2. Roller blading kid…  same thing, skinned hand.

3. Little girl hanging onto the back of another girl riding a bike.  Riding girl decided it would be fun to “ramp” the speed bump and forgot about her sister on her back.  That resulted in dumping her sister onto the asphalt…  and she had a helluva cry.  Where were the parents?  about 1/4 mile away… thankfully a nearby mother helped the girl out in a hurry.

Now, a lot of that is just kids being kids… accidents happen, I’m ok with that.  Kids get hurt.  But what bugged me the most was the fact that the parents were still letting their kids ride their bikes, roller blades, etc… around the campground after it is pitch black minus the moonlight.  The only lights in the campground are those on the structures for public use (shower area, restroom, and that’s about it)  Heck, I had a hard time determining if a marshmallow I had on a stick only 3 feet ahead was burnt or not.  So now the drunk parents have no idea where their kids are, and they are dropping like flies to bike wrecks, getting lost, walking into the wrong campsite, and worst of all, just SITTING ON THE SIDE OF THE ROAD WITH THEIR HANDS INCHES FROM BEING RUN OVER!

At one point, a parent (drunk as ever) looked at her daughter who was laying in the road, in the dark, in prime run-me-over position and said “that’s nice honey, play nice”

It was a nice evening worth of food and conversation, but we were sitting there expecting to see a kid get killed.  Thankfully, when I left, no one was dead…. but I’ll call out in the morning to be sure.

Please, if you become a parent, do not discard brain…  and teach your kids to stay close.

You know the expression “When the going gets tough..” etc…  well I have my version.  When the going gets tough, the meek get desperate.  And by meek, I don’t mean Michael

As I think I mentioned a while back, I started up another little diet contest with my older brother.  It’s coming to an end.  Not by a time period, but by the fact that both of us are approaching our goals.  I think I have only about 3-4 to go, he’s got about 6-8 to go… I think.  We aren’t really telling each other what we are at.  Either of us could be lying to the other.

Well, I started digging into my routine a bit more, and I found some information on the whole interval training concept.  I’ve spent most of my time just dieting and doing “static cardio”.  Started with 30 minutes of biking or a 3 mile walk (sometimes both, sometimes two of one/both in a day).  Not sure I want to stick with that, as it’s slowing down.  Need to vary my routine a bit more…  so I hit the gym for a brief bit of weights today (not too crazy)… and then you dang people and your 5k’s somehow convinced me that I should try to run a mile.  Now, I’ve never run a mile.  It was always canceled in gym class when I was a kid, and I just never did it on my own.  I hate running…  esp in a circle.  I get nowhere but tired.

I tried it anyway.  Found the executive park in town and decided to give it a shot.  Didn’t have my stopwatch, just my mp3 player and the Blackberry.  Knowing the thing is about 1.1 miles, I took off.  And while I did shave off almost 2 minutes from my AMT machine mile time, I still didn’t break the time I was hoping to.  And it wasn’t a total run.  Run, walk, run, walk, run, walk, walk, walk, run… you get the point.  Imagine me running next time you do a 5k and think what it would be like if I beat you.  Never let that happen.

But I finished the mile, and walked a bit, went to the car, drove home.  That was a mistake.  No water in car, and not enough cool down.  10 minutes later, I’m done with the post-run cough…

Oh, did I mention it’s a 25 mph wind day and half my run was into that wind?  That doesn’t help my cause.

If you guys are still doing 5k’s in say.. 2 years, I’ll join ya.  Maybe seth’s couch to 5k thing will help if I keep going.  But if I get another post-run headache like this, screw running…

Finally had to have a semi-nerd activity after the last few weeks. So I installed the RTM code of Win7 on the work laptop. Ultimate x64 of course, what else.

Early impressions: Other than software that is not compatible, I’m loving it. Beats Vista like a rented mule, was a very quick install like the beta/RC was, and had no problems with any of my hardware. Yay for that.

The pain with this is… all the reinstalls. Management software, productivity suites, all the little things I’ve put on the laptop for the last 18 months or so, the file sync’s… I have to redo everything that isn’t picked up by the roaming profile. Which thankfully does grab a lot, but not everything. I do really need to try and get a master list of everything I do to my production machines put together so I can have it all locked in and documented.

The worst one is my geospatial software…. that one is a solid 90 minute install, plus recaching all my primary PGDB’s and their related files. For those that don’t know, that’s a lot o’ data, and there isn’t a good way to speed that up. Here comes a 50 gb index operation…

Oh, and we got an extension to my grant writing activities, so the fun of that piece won’t end for a couple more weeks. At least it will be better…

As I write this, I’m finding myself more relaxed than I’ve been in 2 weeks.  Work has been very, very busy with crazy, short term deadlines recently, and it’s not letting up anytime soon.  While I enjoy having a long term project with a known deadline, a known goal… I don’t enjoy having a series of short term deadlines for a project that none of us want to be on.  But, sure enough, the top, top brass decided that we need to be the primaries on this.  That, and that he doesn’t want to be involved in much of it…  We got to build a team as we wanted, but unfortunately, the schedule for the project has deadlines when half of the team (the top end of the team) are running a conference out of state, so they are heavily out of communication.  That leaves the top top, a middle guy, one other engineer, and me.  And the skill set required for this project is mine, not theirs.

The positive thing is the universal overtime clearance, so I at least get some cash out of this.  But I’m maxing out on my vacation leave too, so I will most likely lose some vacation time to an overage.  But there is a rule that prevents me from getting OT and taking annual in the same pay period (Week I can understand, but not 15 day pay period).  So, sometime around September 15th, you may find me taking a random trip to SF for a break.  Or maybe I’ll just take a day off and sleep a bunch.  But I do need to get to a Lowes and see the new backsplash I may be putting in into the kitchen.

Outside of the work projects, the diet contest has me hopping…  down 20 in a month.  Not bad, but still got a ways to go, and have to beat the other competitor or I lose some cash.  And I hate losing cash      I did have the dog for the last couple weekends, so I had some company.  Tomorrow I’ll have to run out and hang with my nephews for a little while, as they will be away for 5 days or so.  Gotta get some uncle time in, as I’m sure you new “aunts” can attest to.

Also have had to learn how to fix Mac’s again, and I have a grand opening ceremony for the university location in town on Wednesday.  Given that I was the first instructor in the new building, I better make an appearance.  But that requires a shirt and tie…  I hate those days.

Again, I have a boring life

Another weekend with dog sitting duties, another weekend with a marathon of a show I’ve kinda meant to get into, another weekend where I find myself getting hooked on another show that I really should watch from start to finish.  I know some of you already watch it, but I’m getting started on Burn Notice…

Good characters, enough pseudo action to keep things interesting, random shots of Miami scenery (both the skylines/environment and the other scenery)…  where do you go wrong?  And I’m convinced Fiona does nothing but sit-ups during breaks on set.  That woman has some serious abs…

Of course though, I didn’t get started at the beginning (although I thought about it when I first saw the previews), so I’ve watched a good part of season 3 now, which of course is kind of missing a lot of the story.  A couple episodes in season 2 were on during the marathon as well, watched it all.  Still got 4 to watch on the DVR, so that’s Sunday.  Waiting to get the rest in Season 1 and 2 watched someday.  Should keep me busy until House Season 6 starts…

Well, the petition to take the smoking ban to a vote failed.  After the signatures were challenged, enough got thrown out that they did not have enough signatures to push this to a public vote.  So, the result is, once the AG decides when the ban kicks in, we will have a lovely smoke-free bar environment.

While I’m not much of a bar-hopper, I am happy with this result.  I’ve grown tired of the “coming home smelling of bar” routine whenever we take someone out for a night, etc…

Yes, there are going to be people that are mad at this.  Business owners want decisions to be made on their own property by themselves… I can understand that, but good luck enforcing it.  And a lot of folks think this should be to a public vote…  fine.  Challenge it again at the next opportunity (like we know will happen, abortion ban anyone?), and get it to a vote.  Pay all the costs for it, and still lose.  Last I knew, it was 3:1 in favor of the ban.  And I’m on the side of the 3…

So, next Sioux Falls run I make, I’m hitting up a bar with a crowd.  And coming back not smelling of tobacco…

Happy Andy.