Apparently someone has created a device that, when activated, simply deactivates itself in the same fashion. Now all someone needs to do is mount that somewhere and put a sign on it that reads 'Do Not Flip Switch'.
I was looking for something the other day and was unable to find it in my closet.
Big surprise.
So I decided to (finally) begin the massive undertaking that was cleaning out my closet. After about 3 hours, I was a bit more than half done, but ready to call the operation off for a while. There's still a few boxes on the top shelf i need to go through...
Still, the office closet looks at least 327% better, and I know where stuff is now (which has the added bonus of preventing things from falling on my head while looking).
The picture shown is roughly a third of the former contents of the closet. A lot of it got boxed up and put downstairs or just thrown away. Mostly what was in there was *ton* of old/useless/semi-functional computer parts that are boxed up and i'm still deciding what to do with and at least as many old cds (burnt & otherwise), some of which were unidentifiable. I even found an old mix cd kev & i made our sophomore year at milligan.
Anyway, its almost a usable space now. Hopefully i'll get the chance/motivation to finish it up sometime soon.
Ok, so I was up well past stupid o'clock last night, but I think i've got Hikaru's upgrades & imports complete. Aside from some minor glitches, it was mostly painless and I'm quite happy with the results.
Not too much to report or make note of, but here's the gist -
Had a great gaming session on saturday, which was lots of fun. I'm enjoying that game quite a bit.
Saturday night we went to the Midcity Grill in downtown JC. Hadn't been there before. The atmosphere is very relaxed and the food was great and cheap. We were scouting the place as a potential hangout for the Oots meetup we're planning for the end of june. The owner wasn't sure if he could handle our crowd (it's a small place and we may have 25 or 30 people), but we're hoping in addition to trying to come up with a plan 'B'.
Yesterday we went to the Milligan vs Team USA softball game - or, at least most of it. The cold + wind + rain eventually caused us to leave a little early. We all pretty much knew that Milligan was going to lose terribly to the olympic team, but i figure that wasn't really the point of it. I saw the point as seeing what Milligan could accomplish against them. I was told the final score was 24-0 in five innings, but Milligan did keep USA from scoring one inning and even managed to get one or two people on base.
Last night we had some tasty quasi-mexican for dinner and a sort of video game night with Ginger, Nick & Tony. There was Dragoon, Gauntlet, Contra, Lifeforce and Katamari. A good time was had by all. Oh, and Nick and I are heroes that saved the universe. Booya.
Whew, I've made it back. That's a lot of driving for a 24-hour period. Still well worth it though. Much fun was had (although, I hear the jeep was misbehaving while I was gone). ....Oh, and what would a trip to see Kevin be without the subsequent inheritance of fun-yet-obsoleted tech toys?
So yeah, i've downloaded the concert pics from my camera, sorted through them, pulled out the best ones and posted them on the site in the Cat's Cradle Gallery. They're a little noisy, but the exported jpeg's clean up pretty well at the small, web-friendly resolution and I'm quite happy with the results. I think i got some good stuff there. :-)
Now to expand on something I previously mentioned in passing...
Yesterday I drove out here to Kevin's place in Durham to see the Weakerthans play at the Cat's Cradle. I'm currently reclining on his futon (where i crashed last night) doing some work (i love how i can work from anywhere with a net connection) and generally hanging out (cause those two can go together quite nicely for me).
It was kind of a crazy thing to do - drive 4 hours (each way) in the middle of the week, pull some rather complex car-switching (special thanks to Ginger) and orchestrate things around work and play schedules just to go to a concert and hang out with an old friend... ..but it occurs to me that I don't do crazy stuff all that often, so i figure i'm good. And it's totally been worth the trouble.
The show last night was awesome. The opening acts were good, and the Weakerthans are great in concert - very talented, energetic, animated, and entertaining to watch. They played a lot of their upbeat stuff - which is great at concerts - though I'm also a big fan of their much mellower stuff as well. They played most of the songs that I really like - including Plea from a Cat Named Virtue, which is probably my favorite.
I (of course) took my camera and, by cranking the ISO to 3200 (and possibly using some under-exposure), I was able to get what I *hope* are some pretty good shots with my lens (which isn't particularly fast). If I had a lens that could open up to 2.8, I think I could have done a lot more. Still, very fun. I found the burst drive mode to be very handy in this application as well. Anyway, I'll be posting the best of them after i get back to the Igloo, as I don't want to mess trying to pull them off my camera and convert them from raw from here.
My plan for today is to hang out here in Durham and head back to JC sometime this evening.
It's been a few minutes since i've written up a blog entry...
Been doing a lot of gaming - as it happens, every group i'm in or running (total = 4) has met or is meeting in this two-week span. It's been fun.
We had a cookout for Justin on saturday. He has successfully defended his masters thesis and, though he's not quite out of the woods, things are looking good. It seems none of his family or out-of-town friends are going to be around for his graduation - which is sad. We needed to celebrate, so we did.
Sunday (yesterday) was spent in Erwin - the first time we've had to do that in few weeks. It was a beautiful day and we went down to the Linear Trail (which follows the river). I took about 240ish pictures - granted, a lot of those were duplicates. I've developed the mantra that any shot worth taking is worth taking (at least) twice - just to make sure you get a good one. I created a gallery for the Erwin Linear Trail and put a few of the best shots in it. Speaking of taking pictures, I put a couple really nice ones I took at dusk at Milligan a while back in its gallery, and I also posted some pictures of the dogs (Ally and Abby) from saturday evening.
Tonight we have Robb's Exalted game, which I'm looking forward to. It's the only game I'm a player in. It's nice to be on the other side of the screen (as it were) once in a while... ...and it's also nice to take a break from d20.
On wednesday I'm planning to drive out to Durham, NC to visit Kevin and go to a Weakerthans concert - that should be pretty sweet. :)
I've just been outside for the past 30-40 minutes (it's a nice night - probably 60 degrees or so here in JC) taking pictures of the random scenery surrounding my house - using the sky and clouds as background since, despite (or perhaps due to) the absence of a moon in the sky, appear extremely lit up tonight.
Attempting to manually focus on an object (or outline thereof) that is barely visible in the ambient light has been my biggest challenge here, but as i'm getting more experience with my camera, i think i'm getting better at it and most of the shots i made tonight were pretty well in focus. I've posted a few others in the General Scenery Gallery.
On "Midsummer Lull"
On "Midsummer Lull"
On "OotSCon 2010"
On "Return from AR 2010"
On "A Weekend in Athens Grease"