Damn, it’s already been a year since the last time I got old? I guess your perception of time goes with age, eh?
Honestly, the first half of the year was absolute crap. Things got worse before they got better - as always happens with any good story. Overall the year was worth it though as in the end I got a new job, car, out of school, and am no longer in constant college-student poverty.
But just upping my standard of living from crap to normal isn’t enough. Well, it is, as long as I ensure the next year of my life is going to be even better. I’m not talking the typical start your 23rd (or any other) year with drinking till you don’t remember a damn thing, something better.
I needed to think outside the box...or perhaps outside the country?
I’m being shipped overseas – to Japan. Yes, kick-ass. Copious amounts of ass.
Lockheed needs some people over there, not for a long duration, only one to two months, but still long enough to enjoy real sushi without having to pay cool-tax to eat it. Needless to say when I found out I’d be going I was dancing around like a little schoolgirl with a crush (er, um, yeah, something like that).
The dust is still settling on these plans, as they are very rushed (is there any other way?); however it looks like I’ll be leaving sometime around Dec 28. I’m definitely going to be there until the end of Jan with the possibility of the assignment lasting till the end of Feb or maybe even a little bit longer. I can only be over there 90 days without a visa, so it won’t be any longer then that.
I’m not quiet sure how everything is going to work out, what I’m going to be able to see, etc. The work is in Okinawa (the island to the south). This is good because things should be a lot cheaper then they would be if I was in Tokyo - meaning I can actually live off the daily allotted money. I’m going to try to swing it so I can at least stop in Tokyo for a day or so on the way back though, just to get lots of pictures and be in Otaku heaven.
Work’s going be boring, at least from the details I heard. The work days are 12 hours long, and there is not internet access on-site. On the up side, I’ll be getting three-day weekends. I guess that balances things out. I’ll at least have plenty of time to see the island with those weekends, aside from the coding I’ll still have to do.
Yeah, heh coding – go across the ocean and I can’t escape my free-lance work. As such, I finally invested in a laptop last (they have DSL and a laptop in the apartment we stay in, but it’s a Lockheed laptop so no way I can get Photoshop, SSH etc on it). I got the Compaq v2413 – which I have now affectionately dubbed "Ping" (its silver, MegaTokyo character, read the damn comic). It’s a nice little AMD64 Turion processor widescreen laptop for about $1k after all the annoying rebates. I wanted a PowerBook, but the one I spec’ed out would have been over $2k. I can’t justify spending that much on a laptop right now when I still have a nice desktop (did I mention I love my G5?). Plus I didn’t want to spend all the money I’d be making on the project on the laptop. I hate having to go back to windows (it feels like I betrayed a close friend), but the AMD64 makes it speedy enough so it feels like the G5, just running CrapOS(tm). Pretty screen too.
Oh, needless to say, don’t try to catch me on my cell once as I will not get the message.
What started out as "I’ll update once I’m settled in" quickly turned into "I’ll update when I have something worth posting." Ultimately that desire transformed to "I need to redesign the site before I do anything else on it." The old design had served its time, but I’ve always felt it too crowded, disorganized. I needed something simpler. The quest for this holy grail of designs spanned over six months, and as far as I can count, four distinct layouts. Sleep was lost during this quest of epic proportions; blood was shed. Finally after too many hours in Photoshop and SkEdit, the design you see before you was born.
The changes are many: vastly improved usability, new feature within the archive system, redesigned photo gallery, Gravatar icon caching, integration with my delicious account, feed improvements, and many more. The first two, usability and the archive system, I feel warrant some further discussion.
However, that discussion will have to wait for later.
All that matters for now is that I finished the design in time for my self-imposed deadline of the Fall Reboot. The Reboot is an effort to get web designers to relaunch their sites with spiffy new designs all at once, promoting standards compliance though the use of CSS. I didn’t get to finish everything I wanted to in time — I’m probably at 90%. You may still see a few things change a bit over the next little bit, but the bulk of the work is done.
More importantly, this is the point where I’m expected to summarize what has been going on in my life over the past six months since I got down here to Maryland. Well I’m not one to dissapoint.
The job at ’heed has been going well. I found a department that does web-work for other departments in ’heed and I’m on that project for a year or so. I still spend my time in the "holding pen" they have set up for people waiting clearance, but at least now I actually have work to do besides read every web comic I can find.
Otakon happened in August. Of course, being the only one of my friends living in Maryland, I was the host this year. Isaac showed up, unexpectedly, with three computers. We never got to gaming but many computers were built over the weekend. Maura had dictated earlier in the year that as a group we would be cosplaying characters from the online comic Dominic Deegan — Tragically, there are pictures documenting this over in the album I put up for this year. The con itself was as enjoyable as last year, and somehow I managed to walk away without purchasing a katana.
Around the apartment things have slowly come together. A comfortable bed was acquired, for free, from a co-worker. Ikea trips helped populate rooms with furnishings. I’ve replaced the old Playstation 2, that Arielle took, with a nice new slim one. I built a computer, which stays connected to the TV, to act as a media player that doubles as a Tivo recording all the shows I’m not around for.
Free-time wise I spent an entire weekend (OK, OK, week) obsessed with the recent movie Serenity. I’ve become a follower of the ABC show "Lost". I haven’t been playing World of Warcraft nearly as much as I’d like even though I’m up to level 56. Art stuff has been on hold too. Maybe now that I’ve finished and launched, I’ll have time for those things again.
No promises, but now that I’ve gotten back on track with this site I’ll be trying to keep up a weekly posting schedule, hopefully more useful things like articles (gasp!) as opposed to blog entries. Maybebe even get back into regularly CGing Megatokyo strips. We’ll see how that goes. For now, go look around, get used to the new design, and tell me what you think.
Well, I found a place. Wee. I’m going to be living in Columbia. As Maura put it, its the shopping Mecca of the area. Although don’t let the idea fool you, we are in Maryland here. It isn’t crowded at all. Nothing like Exton back home. You go a few minutes away from the center and you’ve got trees everwhere.
I’m going to be living in Columbia Landing. Its this nice little apartment complex thats close to the highways I’ll be taking to work, but it feels like its out in the boonies. Nice woods around it with walking paths, almost no noise. Plenty of room for a one bedroom too. And wallspace, it had the most out of all the ones I looked at. Very nice. $930 a month, but thats including gas. Pretty good find for the area since the average was about 1k.
I have to much crap I need to take care of over the next week. Two presentations, one group paper (due 6pm today), study for finals. Need to pack up things down here next week, move everything down on the 8th. I have the week after finals off so I have time to go and get settled in - need to get food, new desk, lots of stuff. I’ll probably just live down there from the 8th - 13th.
On side notes: Tiger should be on my doorstep Friday. The trailer for Serenity comes out later today on Apple’s Trailer site. And I need sleep. The last item is of course only a note, not something that will actually happen like the other two.
The day has come. Mac OS X 10.4, Tiger, is now available for pre-ordering, and will be delivered on April 29th. Needless to say I already ordered my copy with that nice little educational discount I get. Why did I pee my pants when I saw that it was finally able to be ordered? Lets review.
Spotlight: Imagine google for all the files on your computer. But not just files - emails, contacts, everything. And also imagine that every search happened in about a second. This is the beauty that is spotlight.
Dashboard: Widgets. Its all about the widgets (mini programs). Press F13 and you see a calculator, check the weather, translate something, even see the status of a flight. Press F13 again and it all disappears and you’re back to what you were working on.
Automator: This is going to make my life at the NSSF a lot easier. A nice program to automate tasks - like resizing 100 images and adding a watermark. Also going to speed up Isaac’s porn-gathering.
Safari RSS: If you aren’t using RSS feeds like mine then you don’t know what you’re missing. Its a great way to keep up with content on a bunch of sites all at once. The new Safari integrates a RSS reader into the browser, making my life of keeping up to date with many sites a lot eaiser.
So if you haven’t already go order your copy or go buy a Mac with it already loaded.
Simply put, Sin City was brilliant. Great plot, wonderful acting, intense action, and perfectly placed one-liners. Best bigscreen adaptation of a comic ever. Its in your best interest to go see it, soon.
Its not that I’m lazy, I just figured there is no point in posting right now. My life as of late is the same school-work-sometimes sleep schedule over and over again. Just trying to survive till I start at Lockheed. However there have been a few highlights since Katsucon so I guess I’ll write about those so people can stop yelling at me *cough* John *cough*.
I set a start date with Lockheed, monday May 16th. Two days after I graduate. Blah. I figured its better to get started right away then wait a week or two and live on Circuit City paychecks for longer. The plan is to move down during finals week or something along those lines. Still gotta look for a place, but that comes in April. In other news my mum picked up tickets for the Ben Fold’s concert on the 13th (Ben Folds is teh awesome!) so its going to be a busy weekend.
March 12 was the Nike Indoor Nationals, the 7th track & field event I’ve attended to date. Its scary I’m starting to recognize athlete names. Now of course it wouldn’t be much of a track meet if the internet worked, right? Halfway through the first day the track admin got it kinda working, except for the fact it was slower than AOL. Mike and I didn’t have the ability to upload images because of this. As a result I’m still trying to finish getting the galleries together a week later. In my defense it does take a long time to sort through 10 gigs of images, and I don’t exactly have lots of free time right now.
Speaking of lack of free time - I’ve cut back a lot on WoW. No, I haven’t lost my mind or interest in the game. Right now I just can’t afford to stay up that late every night questing. I figure I’ll get back into it once I move. Its going to be odd having every evening free, so I’m sure I’ll need something to fill the time.
I have however gotten back into art, although I’ve moved away from sketching and more towards computer work. I’m trying to get my Photoshop skills up to where I want them to be so I’ve started CGing Megatokyo strips. Pretty basic work, but its helping me get shading and other simple effects down. I’m throwing the ones up that I do in the stetchbook incase you want to take a look. Its going well so far - the people in the Megatokyo forums seem to really like them which is encouraging. Its going to take me a long time to be able to do what I want to with Photoshop, but at least this is a start. I’d like to get up to the level of Anna or Merekat. Long way to go. Sigh.
Lockheed had a dinner for all the Penn State grads that accepted a job with them last night up at the Tavern on main campus. Three hour drive for free food lol. It was worth it though. The manager that sat at my table had a lot of good advice so I’m glad I went. I was hoping that someone there would be working at the same location I am but alas no. There are a few people working at one that is about 40 miniutes away, but thats a bit far. Looks like I’m only going to know Felicity and Maura when I move down there. I headed up to campus a bit earlier then I needed to so I could see Angela again for the first time in a while. Her dad stopped in the Shitty a few weeks ago and said I should get back in touch with her, so I did. ’Twas good to see her again. Hopefully we’ll remember to IM each other this time instead of getting burried in work and forgetting.
Time for sleep - I have a class in five hours. Boo.
Took the weekend off and headed down to Katsucon (anime convention for the non-dorks out there). Maura was nice enough to let everyone coming down stay at her place. For those unaware, she works about 10 minutes away from where I will be working. As such she had me come down early so I could check out the area. We spent friday afternoon aimlessly driving around. We visited two of the malls and drove around some of the towns I may be living in. Maryland is odd - there are no real cities, its all one big set of highways and some houses bumping up next to them. That and the drivers suck. They make Jersey drivers look good.
Everyone else started getting to Maura’s around 7 or so. After some quick food and waiting for Katie and Maura to get in their costumes, we headed down to Arlington to Katsucon so we could get registered and check out the place. Of course we got lost on the way. Multiple times. HOV lanes suck. We warndered around the place looking at the few cosplayers that were there that late and then went to the Hentai panel at midnight. It was funny, but nothing special. Got back and Mike finally showed up, the punk.
Saturday was much more eventful although started badly. I managed to leave my camera battery charging in the wall at Maura’s place when we left. She was nice enough to let me use her camera for the day. This is the reason that half the pics in the gallery look like they were taken with my old Olympus. Sorry.
Anywho we tried to make it in time for the AMV showing, but the line was way to long. Instead of getting a crap seat we volunteered (and by that I mean we were abducted by someone without warning) to help with security for the convention for two hours to pass the time. Katsucon was in a much smaller space than Otakon so the hallways got very crowded. We got to yell at people to keep things moving. It was a bit boring simply because I got stuck with some 14 year old who was incapable of conversation. Got to see a lot of the costumes this way though.
Next came my wandering of the Artist’s Gallery. Anna was there with a table selling artwork; Mike bought some things from her. I ended up getting three Teen Titan works and a shirt from other artists. Then the award presentation for the AMVs began. I wouldn’t say they were quite as good as the ones from Otakon last year, but two or three of them were pretty cool. Following the awards we waited in line again for two hours for the main event - the Cosplay Masquerade. The skits were very entertaining and well worth the wait. Now very tired, we returned home to a night of video games and lack of sleep.
Sunday morning the video games resumed bright and early. The sideshow was Katie’s new computer being built. Mmmm AMD 64bit machine. I stuck around till 4ish.
Life. Hrm. it gets worse before it gets better, right?
Enter Worse.
Two days ago car desides its time to stop being nice to me. Would have to drop some money (read: good amount) to get it running safe again. So back to Isaac and I sharing a car, although now its me without the car.
Worse exits. Better, which has been just out of our hero’s reach for some time now, slowly enters stage left.
Instead of wasting money in a lost cause that was to be replaced soon anyway, Aunt Susan is coming down this weekend and we are gonna go look at an RSX. Wasn’t planning on getting one this soon, but it may work out. We’ll see.
Along with the possible new car goodness I got my cat back, woo! Decker is now living with me, sitting on my lap all the time as I type. Very good to have him back.
Also got two couches and a chair offered to me from Maura’s mom. This saves me money, I am happy. Now all I need is a bed and a table and I’m set on furniture. This continue to look like they may work out for once.
Continuing with the things that are good, going to Katsucon in two weeks. Anime cons are always good. Anyone going that I don’t already know of lemmi know so we can meet up.
I’ve been thinking of getting a VW GTI for my new car but now I’m having second thoughts. I think I may not have looked into my options well enough. With the time quickly approaching for a new car I need to start really looking at what is on the market.
Currently considering an Acura RSX as a better buy. Better milage, pollution rating, and a bit cheaper. Plus doesn’t have the VW stupidness that occurs when one removes the factory radio, which we all know I will do.
Any other suggestions in that price range? And no Isaac, no RX8!
I got in my car and drove for seven hours through a snow storm to a place I’d never been before. All to see someone I’d never met face-to-face.
I left it all behind: work, school, coding. For the first time I said fuck it all.
It was the best four days I’ve had in a long long time.
Thank you.
For the non mac-fanboys out there, today was the MacWorld Expo - home of things that make us go oooh ahhh. This year’s expo was by far the most impressive one to date.
The first of two major releases is the new Mac Mini; Apple’s first entry into the "cheap" PC market. They nailed it, hands down. The first thing you will notice about the machine is it’s size. Its about the size of your average CD case.
The specs of the machine are on target with what the average home user would need - up to a gig of RAM, a G4 processor, 40 or 80 gigs of hard drive space, and a dvd/cdrw drive (optional dvd burner). Wireless and bluetooth options too. Even comes with a real ATI video card unlike your typical cheap PC with their "intel integrated graphics" using shared memory.
The best part is of course the price. The 40 gig version is $499 and the 80 is $599. Perfect for the many people who already have a PC and have been thinking of switching to Mac but don’t want to spend $1499 for a machine. Just buy this, plug in your keyboard, mouse, and monitor and you’re set. Time to convert you heathans!
The second major release at the expo is the new iPod Shuffle. This thing is pure genius. Apple so far is dominating 63% of the portable player market with their iPods and iPod Minis. The only part they haven’t touched yet was the lower end flash-based players. Enter the iPod Shuffle. Its as small as a stick of gum and weighs less than an ounce. It doubles as a thumb drive and works with any USB interface.
The main difference between the Shuffle and the rest of the market is its lack of screen. At first I wasn’t happy about it, but then it made sense. Most players out there have screens that show maybe one or two words of text at a time, and are so small you don’t bother using them. If you’re out running or driving you aren’t going to be there playing with the controls switching to specific songs every few minutes. You’ll do what I do - turn it on and hit shuffle. Especially since you aren’t dealing with 20gigs of music you just don’t need it.
Apple did with the Shuffle what people wanted them to do with the Mini - price it cheap. Currently the flash-player market mainly sells 256meg players, priced around $149. Apple blew them away. Their lowest end model is 512megs and priced at $99! $50 less, twice the storage, double as as thumb drive, and about half the size of most other players. They have a second model, the 1gig version, priced at $149.
I think Apple finally did it. They have a full range of products spanning from the high end to the cheap end - and all of them rock. I hope they start taking back market share from Microsoft this year.
