.: bistan.net :.

So far, 2010 has not been a great year . . .

In January:

• Kimberlie’s mother died

In February:

• Mackenzie gets kid-mono.  Between the two of us, we spent almost two weeks away from work, doing nothing but this:

  

In March:

• We went through a tough eating-out hiatus.
• T-ball.  Need I say more?

In April:

• Tristan learns to stick things where they don’t belong.
• Tristan has a major accident during a day trip.
• I went to the doctor (for the first time in 20 years).

In May:

• A house catastrophe.
• No raises at work.

In June:

• I ended up in 2 graduate classes during a 4-week summer semester.  Of course, I ended up with A’s, but it was a tough month.
• Mackenzie ended up sick (and very irritable) for half of our trip to Philadelphia.

And now, July:

• The cat chewed up my Macbook power cord.
• We lost our “free” cable and I my iPhone and digital camera went for a swim . . . in the same week.
• Ants seem to invade a different room of our house everyday.

Of course, there are things that have been happening (or not) all year:

• The stock market has really sucked for the last few months.
• I’m 31 and still not rich enough to retire.
• Publisher’s Clearinghouse still hasn’t knocked on my door.

Don’t get me wrong.  I still love my life.  But even number years just never work out for us.  2008 was equally as bad.  2007 and 2009 were fabulous.  Let’s hope I can make it through the next five months alive!

This has not been a good month for technology at my house.

A few weeks ago, I noticed that my Macbook would no longer charge.  Then I discovered that my cat had chewed through the power cord.  No biggie — I was a little ticked off (especially since this is not the first time that its happened), but I ordered a new one from Amazon.  Small setback.  Nothing major.

On Tuesday, I we discovered that we couldn’t channel surf past channel 20.  We technically only pay for channels 2 – 19 for a measly $16 a month.  A long long time ago, when we had high-speed internet installed, the tech “forgot” to put the trap back on.  The lack of this trap allowed us to go all the way up to channel 70.  That’s $52.00 worth of cable for $16.00 a month.  Do the math and that is $3168 for savings since we moved in.  Of course, we are very dependent on those upper channels — CNN and History for me, TLC and HGTV for Kimberlie, and of course, Disney for the kids.  Restricting us to local and public access channels really sucks!

We went tubing in Helen two years ago and had a great time.  This Saturday, we decided to do it again.  I wanted to take the small point & shoot camera and my beloved iPhone with me.  I knew it was risky so I took a ziplock bag to keep them safe.  On the way down the river, I took photos and tweeted and checked email and facebooked.  Everything went fine.  At the end, it was time to get out so I put the camera and phone in the bag and proceeded to get out of the tube and wade to the riverbank.  The water was only about a foot deep so I put the bag in my pocket.  All of a sudden, the river got really deep.  The water was so cold that I wasn’t concerned with my technology.  Somehow, the water seeped through the bag and ruined both: my $170 camera and my iPhone 3G.

Needless to say, this has not been a good month for technology in my house.  It looks like we will be going with Dish Network in the very near future to get our channels back.  And, since I’m eligible for an upgrade with AT&T, it looks like I’ll be getting the iPhone 4!  To cover the costs, I’m dropping my $30 data plan to a $15/month plan.  The only problem: there is a 3+ week wait to get the new phone.  I am about to lose my mind here!

Here we go again. I blog about how I resolve to blog more. Then I make about 3 blog posts. Then you don’t hear from me for a few weeks. Then I make an excuse about why I haven’t been blogging and then I resolve to blog more.

I guess that means this is the excuse post. Let’s see . . . I’m swamped at work, swamped with class, and swamped in my personal life.

Work: I won’t bore you with the work stuff.  I doubt you care about Windows 7 imaging and Drupal modules anyway.

School: It was stupid to commit to doing this masters degree in the first place. My first masters degree didn’t get me anywhere, yet I sign up for another one. My classes this semester are Object Oriented Programming II and Advanced Graphic Design. “Advanced Graphic Design” is what Mercer calls a video game programming class when they want employers to pay for it.  Since my language of choice for the program is C#, I’m developing a game in XNA Game Studio 3.1.  I have a project in OOP2 due next week on secure code and wikis and a project in the game class due the following week on 2D game programming.  My game is pretty sweet and when I compile it, I’ll publish it here and you can download and play it too!

Running: My heel is still freaking killing me.  I can barely walk when I get out of bed in the mornings. I only ran 7 miles this week, but I need to knock out at least 5 tomorrow to exceed 70 miles for the month.

Personal life: We signed Tristan up for T-ball.  That should be interesting. I’m not particularly looking to spend 3 nights a week at a ballpark, but we want to get him involved in something.  Kimberlie is now up to 60 – 70 hour weeks so I have the kids by myself in the evenings for a while.  She works with two other Occupational Therapists.  One is in Africa for a month and the other just went out of maternity leave.  And then on Monday, as if we didn’t have enough going on, her mother died.  After this week, we are both certainly looking forward to a new week.

A few weeks ago, I mentioned that we attended part of the taping for the Disney Parks Christmas Day Parade.  I also included a few of the 500 pictures I snapped and one of the videos I shot.  Here is a tilt-shift video, created by Disney of the Christmas parade.

As you can see, tilt-shift is a cool technology.  I consider it analogous to HDR photography, but even cooler.  Here are links to two other tilt-shift videos with short explanations by Disney if you are interested in the technology:

Magic Kingdom Tilt-shift
Epcot Tilt-shift
Tilt-shift Explanation

Here are some screen shots from the video, so that you can see where to find us in the parade.  It airs tomorrow, Christmas Day, at 10:00 AM on your local ABC channel.

Mackenzie went on her first field trip yesterday to see Santa at “The Fish Store”, better known as Bass Pro Shops.  Due to a light day at work, I was able to flex my lunch break around and meet them there.  Of course, I took the law school’s 50D with me.  When folks see you show up with a camera like that, you end up becoming the offical photographer.  I did photos of all of the children individually with Santa and class photos with Santa . . . all on a lunch break!

I created a photoshop template of a 5 x 7  Christmas card and included for each child their individual print, class print, and school name, teacher name, and date. I also did 8 x 10 class prints for the teachers.  Sam’s printed them for about 40 cents each and I just donated them to the preschool.  In hindsight, I should have printed photo packages to sell to parents at next week’s Christmas Open House.  Preschool parents will pay anything for Christmas photos.  Oh well, I’ll get them next year!

Below are a few of Mackenzie:

Stay tuned . . . Tristan’s kindergarten class is making Christmas cookies tomorrow and the D50 will be there to capture the action!

Bibb County residents voted this morning on a continuation of the ESPLOST. I know that the ESPLOST will pass and in reality I could care less, but here is why I voted no:

• New facilities do not translate into better performing students.  This is a fact.
• In all of the propaganda, Heard Elementary was supposedly at the top of the list.  On the actual text of the ballot, Heard could not be found. Other schools were mentioned by name, but not my child’s.
• My local school board member visited Heard PTA last week to pitch the vote.  It was warm in the auditorium, and she mislead the audience by telling them that a new building would provide comfort.  The rednecks in the room may have bought that, but I know that classroom temperatures are strictly regulated by central office, regardless of the newness of the building.
• A significant portion of the money is going for technology upgrades. I believe that technology purchases should be included in a regular budgetary process. As a technology professional, I can’t imagine only getting new equipment when people feel like voting for it.
• For the past few weeks, proponents of the ESPLOST have continuously stated that 71% of sales tax in Bibb County is paid by non-residents.  I worked for several months as a statistical analyst and I can tell you that 95% of statistics are fabricated (including this one!).  Bibb County is no tourist mecca.  If you told me that 71% of sales tax revenue in Vegas or Orlando was paid by non-residents, I might believe you, but not Bibb County.

5 - AM wake up
9.1 – miles of running
15.5 – times around the block to make 9.1 miles
80 – minutes it took
4 – minute shower because running made me late
3 – times Tristan was told to not get a warning at school today
13 – mile drive to work
350 – suite number
5 – servers rebooted after 8AM because running made me late
1 – poptart
2 – bottles of water
2 – missed calls
1 – voicemail
4 – napkins to clean up Fred’s spilled coffee
5 – day weekend coming up
79 – messages stuck in the exchange queue because Microsoft sucks
25 – dollars to Amazon for completing a vendor survey
51 – videos encoded and uploaded
7 – sent emails trying to clear up email issues
1000 – things I would rather be doing

So I looked at the calendar yesterday . . . and it’s August? 2009?  Where does the time go?

Instead of apologizing for not posting in the last week or so, I’ll just tell you what I’m up to now:

Tuesday we are headed to Six Flags.  We only go when we have free tickets because it sort of sucks.  We scored two free tickets off of mycokerewards.com and bought a $15 ticket for Tristan off of a twitter special.  Mackenzie has been taught that being two at Six Flags and WDW saves Daddy lots of money and I think she’s OK with that.

Thursday my boy starts kindergarten.  25 years ago, that was ME starting kindergarten, but the blur between then and now called life happened so here we are.  He’s going to the same elementary school that I went to and believe it or not, there are a lot of teachers still there . . . including my 1st and 3rd grade teacher and the principal!

Work is hell. School starting back is enough, but over then summer there has been over $1,000,000 worth of construction in our building and the technology that comes with that isn’t just going to happen by itself.  On top of that we are suppose to have a new website (first time in 5 years) by September and our web developer conveniently quit in June.  That leaves me working literally 7 days a week, sometimes around the clock.  This weekend was spent getting familiar with Drupal, our chosen (but not my me) CMS.

My half-marathon training plan is on.  That’s all I’m going to say about that.

I’ve been sick pretty much all week, but I don’t have a choice except to keep going.  I went 120 hours without drinking coke, which was a major feat for me!

Also, classes start back for me in a few weeks for that stupid graduate program I put myself into.  This semester I dropped everything but one class so that I can deal with all of the above.  I’ll be taking a class that deals with artificial intelligence in game programming (fuzzy logic, probability, and a few other things I could spell out here to make myself sound smarter).

So obviously, I’m still working on “getting all of my ducks in a row”.  (That’s Rachel’s phrase.)  And when I do . . . this blog will be BACK!

The past few weeks have been so busy!

We enjoyed our trip to Colorado. While we were gone, temperatures in Macon reached 102 but in Boulder the high was only 75 on the same day. Boulder is the healthiest city in the country and bike and pedestrian trails were everywhere! If only Macon could do something similar.

We travelled to Rocky Mountain National Park — perhaps the most beautiful place that I’ve ever been to. We drove up Trail Ridge Road, which is the highest paved road in the country — 12,000 feet above sea-level. At that altitude — even in June — there was six feet of snow remaining on the ground. The wind was blowing 40 mph and the high temperature for that day and location was 48 — much better than the 102 that Macon was experiencing! Of course, none of us had ever seen six feet of snow, so we stopped for a while to play around in it. As usual I had sandals on and couldn’t really feel my toes after a few seconds but it was a blast!

We also visited Columbine High School and Jon Benet Ramsey’s final home. Morbid? Perhaps, but I won’t digress into the “American history or pop-culture” argument that I had with a co-worker.

When I returned to work the following week, we basically were given a blank check to purchase whatever technology we wanted. You just have to love that end-of-the-year spending! The kids had a week of vacation bible school and then two weeks of swimming lessons. Mackenzie celebrated her third birthday. And I neglected to blog about any of it. I’ll add some photos over the next few days of Colorado, swimming, the birthday, etc.

I’ve also had two freelance web projects in the past few weeks, one of which I’m wrapping up today. After doing web stuff all day for pay, blogging hasn’t really appealed to me.

I’ve also come up with an ingenious hustle. I’ve been making about $100 bucks a month for doing pretty much nothing! This isn’t a work-at-home pyramid scheme, but more of a “Jonathan is outsmarting the system” scheme. Nothing illegal of course, but it certainly falls into the “It’s better to ask forgiveness than permission” category. I may blog more details soon, but I think that if too many people get in on it than there is less reward for me (not that anyone is reading this blog anymore anyway).

Tomorrow we head out again . . . this time to New Orleans, Louisiana. Kimberlie has NDT training at a hospital there and I plan to tag along and explore the city with the kids. That should be interesting considering that New Orleans is not exactly the most kid-friendly place around. I’m sure I’ll have some blogging time while I’m there.

When you see this many posts on my blog, that means I’m procrastinating.  I have a huge project due tonight at midnight and I’m avoiding doing it.  Its a database design project.  The design is done, but the report that I have to submit is not.  I would rather watch paint dry.