It's a windy Wednesday afternoon around here. I got home at about 3:30pm after attending the last of the sessions at the 2010 ISTE (International Society for Technology in Education) Conference at the Convention Center.
It was quite a conference; it didn't have anything HUGELY relevant for Site Support, but considering the scale of the conference, they did their best. Main problem was the demand for sessions. The took the most interesting and relevant sessions and made them by registration only. Except there was no link to click on to register for the classes in the planner on the ISTE web site. I kept asking people whether or not you really had to register for these sessions, given that there was no place to do so, and nobody knew.
So by Sunday when the conference started, most of the sessions I'd chosen in my Planner were registration ones, and I found out on Monday that this was indeed true, you did have to register for them and they were all full. So I had to go to alternate sessions, some a little relevant, some not at all. Plus I had to wait in line for half an hour just it get into THOSE. So that part of it bit, that and the fact that I had to drive into work on Sunday, 6-27-2010, to get to the Convention Center by 4 to attend the keynote speech. Everyone was supposed to go, yet only 4 of us actually showed up, including Kirk. So my Sunday got hosed for essentially nothing. And most of THIS Sunday, I'm assuming, will be spent at Chandra's for the 4th of July thing.
Anyway, if nothing else, the last 3 days have been a huge test of the new phone, and the new phone has passed with FLYING colors. I downloaded Dropbox for Android, along with a note-taking program for getting notes in the ISTE sessions. The phone did everything that was asked of it, and never ran out of battery life. I took plenty of pictures with it as well, and posted some on Facebook. What was nice too was that I even found a place of relative solitude to use it as well. Up by the exhibitor area there's a balcony, with a few benches to sit on. I chilled up there a lot between sessions; weather was perfect for it. In fact it hasn't rained since Sunday, and temps have been in the 90s.
That's why I can sit out here on the front porch in a fairly stiff wind, without being chilly. The down side is that I've had to walk back from the Convention Center to the office every day this week, and it's a hot walk in a simmering toilet of a city believe me. But its good exercise and a nice cleansing as well. All too quickly, temperatures will drop up here so that a wind like this is too chilly to be in--indeed, nights can be a bit crisp even at this time of year. But again, better this than the heat of Denver.
Well, I've got some pictures to work on from the camera, so better get to it. Cynthia's been working nights for a couple of weeks now, and has been sleeping during the day, so hopefully the dogs won't bark when I go back in!
Wednesday, June 30, 2010
Thursday, June 17, 2010
Lazy summer evening --you guessed it--- on the balcony! 6-17-2010
Yes folks, it's another lovely evening on the balcony... not really a summer evening per se, since summer starts on 6-22 I believe, or somewhere in there. It's about 10:26PM, nice warm breeze blowing. It's been a warm week, and around here, only on the hottest days can one sit comfortably out here in Castle Rock; otherwise it's a bit too chipper to be out here. Thankfully, the neighbors have gotten much better about not leaving their rear porch lights on at night, so at least its truly nighttime. There's the train, right on schedule.
The last 2 months have seen some truly remarkable achievements and improvements in the lives of the three of us. Me especially; my geek tendencies have been satisfied 100 fold, more than I would have ever dreamed! It's odd too, one would have thought that a car payment would have a chilling effect on geekery, and in fact with Cynthia's help on the TV I'd have never been able to...
But I'm getting ahead of myself. In fact I don't remember the last time I updated this blog, so I better start from last year.
We got rid of Alex and Logan about a year ago; they'd been living in the basement. We saved their asses in fall 2008; they had no place to live so we took them in. They're both good eggs, but they weren't acting like people whose asses we'd saved; they acted more like a couple of petulant teen-agers. Which they were of course, but I can picture myself at that age, and I think I'd have shown my landlord rather more respect than they did. So they moved out in June 09 or a little before, and that was a big stress relief.
Of course, they're now back living at the Terrys house, Alex Bond as well. They've been asked to move out by the fall, so hopefully they will. Once they moved out of this house, we moved Kevins room downstairs to the basement. He likes it down there, though it gets fairly chilly. In the summer it's probably even worse; all that cold air from the AC collects down there. But he's got his computer down there and the TV, so he's happy. Again I get ahead of myself.
I commented in my last post on how much rain we got last summer, and its worth repeating now. I've never seen the like, not even that year when Chance and Jen and myself played Dungeons and Dragons in the atrium at IHS in the GW building. It hasn't rained nearly that much this year, though it's been enough to keep the plants alive and growing. Not a ton of snow in the spring either.
In late October or early November, Kevin got into a car accident while driving Cynthia's Kia Rio Cinco. Nobody got hurt, but the car was totalled. I'd been thinking for a while before then about possibly trading in the Pathfinder for a Subaru Impreza, either a hatchback or a sedan, and once this happened and we were down to only one car, it seemed like a reasonable time. Now keep in mind, there were cheaper cars out there, and therefore opportunities to have a lower car payment. But did Cynthia insist on such a thing? Not at all; she supported me 100% in my desire for the Impreza. Far to good to me, that lovely lady!
So Cynthia and I went to Heuberger Motors in Colorado Springs just before Thanksgiving and looked at their selection. Keep in mind, my last car-buying experience had been so-so, and the one before that had been atrocious, so I had no idea what to expect. (By the way, I've come to refer to this dealer as Hellbringer motors, after the comic book!) But with Cynthia by my side, this experience was near perfect! We had a great sales rep, June I think her name was, and we test-drove an Impreza sedan in the sleet/freezing rain. It was a ridiculously great drive, as good as I'd ever experienced from any car. (Meredith had her Subaru Impreza WRX here in the fall, and Cynthia and Kevin got to drive it but I never did. If I had, I'm sure it would have been comparable to this one.)
And get this: they had an Impreza in the showroom that was this really amazing bronze color, sorta sparkly. I hadn't seen one in that color on any of the Colorado Subaru dealer web sites, and I just assumed that this one was a WRX or STI or some other fancy model. But we asked June, and she said it was a regular Impreza that just hadn't been spoken for as yet. SCORE!! We signed some papers and it was ours. It took about an hour for them to get 'er ready, but the drive home was probably the best drive I've ever taken, save for the first time we went to Al and Meredith's in the Pathfinder (it was snowing and beautiful in the mountains that evening.)
We didn't actually go directly home; we met Kevin, Paul and Robbie at the Black-eyed Pea in Castle Rock. We showed em the car; they liked! Paul and Kevin strategically placed a "Senior menu" at my chair at the restaurant, the little weasels!! We drive home afterwords and kicked back the rest of the day. I was going to have Cynthia drive the new car, but after much reluctance on my part, we agreed that since Cynthia had a 10-minute commute and I had a 45-minute commute (plus more driving once I get TO work), I should have the Ru and Cynthia should drive the Pathy. I named the Ru Emilia; I always have to name my cars!! The Pathy has for the most part done right by Cynthia, though at the moment we need to get the A/C fixed.
But the goodness for the Doley geek family had only just begun! I got a Flip camera in early December, on sale at Newegg.COM. I REALLY wanted a Canon video camera, but the one I wanted was like a grand and there was no way. And a Flip really was perfect for my needs. Christmas came, and Holly came in from Minnesota. We did xmas at the parents, and I shot some GREAT video at the parents house. We did some great gifts on xmas day, then the next day Holly came with us back to the house in CR. Once there, we opened our gifts from Cynthia. Get this... Cynthia got Kevin and I iPod Touches!! We were blown away!! I'd kinda wanted one for a while, but figured in the end I couldn't justify the expense, so I was overjoyed to get one this year!!
Cynthia and I also got Mom and Dad an LCD TV for the kitchen, and they were thrilled. Mom had gotten OTA high-def TV antennas for the downstairs and kitchen TVs, and it was a simple matter to hook it up to the new TV. Voila, great picture and more desk space. Really good xmas, and I of course immediately started adding apps on the iPod! We took Holly home the next day and she then went home; she seemed to have a good time!
Then... in March we were invited to a party at Shawn Bailey's new apartment, which was in fact right across the street from Vic's apt where we stayed while the house was being built. We went over, and we saw Shawn briefly, before he and his homeys went outside to make burgers. Nobody really talked to us, not even Art really, and he never came back inside. But...while we were there, we saw firsthand the AMAZING picture on his LG electronics 55" LED TV. We had kind of a Jones for such a thing for a while, but assumed the price would be prohibitive. But Shawn gave us the model number, and we found that particular model was in closeout, in preparation for the new model. So a week later we ordered one from Amazon for about $2K.
Now I wasn't exactly rolling in dough at that moment; I'd just paid for another year of Grant Farms CSA (which we LOVE) and it wasn't cheap. So 2K for a TV would NOT have been good. But Cynthia got some windfall from her company, so she paid for half of it, which saved our asses! It took a few days for the TV to get there. I hauled butt home early from work the day that it was scheduled to arrive (it was delayed by a spring storm), and it arrived about 4 PM that day. Kev and I took it in and unboxed it; what an experiece! Best OOBE I'd ever had. Setup was easy, and the thing looked BRILLIANT from the first minute. Pretty amazing to have a wife who not only looks kindly on my geek habit, but even actively supports it!
I forgot to mention that right before we got the new telly, we used our tax return money (which we got thanks to Barack Obama's education tax credits for Cynthia) for some more laminate flooring in the house. Recall that we have laminate flooring in the dining room, and we had the same flooring guys come back out and put it in the TV room, the loft and the office. That was quite the ordeal; we had to move all the furniture and electronics and such out of each room and then back in when it was done, plus we had to rip out all the carpet, padding and carpet tack, and then dispose of it. I came up with a rather unique way to dispose of the carpet and padding: I just stacked it up in the garage. I was afraid that engine heat from the Subaru would set it on fire at first, with that little ground clearance, but it was fine. It kept quite well in there until we had it hauled away.
I connected my Dell desktop machine to the TV, which Cynthia didn't seem too thrilled about at first, but I was able to keep the computer inconspicuous enough down in the TV room that it didn't ruin the look of the room. It worked OK, and was great for things like playing CNET and Youtube video on the TV, but it wasn't good for much else. Text still looked awful, a problem that was compounded by the fact that my glasses SUCKED! So I wasn't seeing very well. I eventually got new glasses in early June, which helped, but it was still hard to see text, even when playing World of Warcraft on the TV. It looked great, and it worked in every other respect, but text viewing just wasn't there. So I'll probably move the computer and used it as a spare parts machine for the remaining desktops.
At that point I thought our little tech binge was done, but something happened in late May that would net us yet another geek win. Kev accidentally dropped his phone in a glass of water one night when Thomas came over. Shouldn't have been a big deal, just get his phone replaced from Verizon. There were a couple of snags with that plan however. Verizon wanted to renew his contract for another 2 years, and they wanted to charge a $9 a month surcharge for Kevs old phone. They're apparently doing that for almost all their texting phones; you have to pay for the privilege of HAVING a texting phone now, in addition to having to pay for unlimited texting itself.
Verizon had already been pissing us off lately about a lot of little things, so one day when I was at Fox St. working on computers, Cynthia called and said that she and Kevin were looking at alternate cell phone plans and companies. That was the first real hope I'd seen in years that we might be finally getting rid of Verizon. Now mind you, I had no problem with the phones that Kev and I had, and I figured that when Cynthias died, we'd just get her a new Envy or some close model to replace it. I was done with cell phones forever, having resigned myself to the cold, hard fact that the newest, coolest cell phone technology (i.e. the iPhone) could not be had without pricey data plans. But Kev and Cynthia found the HTC Evo, and Sprint's plan has unlimited data included, and the rest is history!
So more later, hopefully in less time than a year!!
The last 2 months have seen some truly remarkable achievements and improvements in the lives of the three of us. Me especially; my geek tendencies have been satisfied 100 fold, more than I would have ever dreamed! It's odd too, one would have thought that a car payment would have a chilling effect on geekery, and in fact with Cynthia's help on the TV I'd have never been able to...
But I'm getting ahead of myself. In fact I don't remember the last time I updated this blog, so I better start from last year.
We got rid of Alex and Logan about a year ago; they'd been living in the basement. We saved their asses in fall 2008; they had no place to live so we took them in. They're both good eggs, but they weren't acting like people whose asses we'd saved; they acted more like a couple of petulant teen-agers. Which they were of course, but I can picture myself at that age, and I think I'd have shown my landlord rather more respect than they did. So they moved out in June 09 or a little before, and that was a big stress relief.
Of course, they're now back living at the Terrys house, Alex Bond as well. They've been asked to move out by the fall, so hopefully they will. Once they moved out of this house, we moved Kevins room downstairs to the basement. He likes it down there, though it gets fairly chilly. In the summer it's probably even worse; all that cold air from the AC collects down there. But he's got his computer down there and the TV, so he's happy. Again I get ahead of myself.
I commented in my last post on how much rain we got last summer, and its worth repeating now. I've never seen the like, not even that year when Chance and Jen and myself played Dungeons and Dragons in the atrium at IHS in the GW building. It hasn't rained nearly that much this year, though it's been enough to keep the plants alive and growing. Not a ton of snow in the spring either.
In late October or early November, Kevin got into a car accident while driving Cynthia's Kia Rio Cinco. Nobody got hurt, but the car was totalled. I'd been thinking for a while before then about possibly trading in the Pathfinder for a Subaru Impreza, either a hatchback or a sedan, and once this happened and we were down to only one car, it seemed like a reasonable time. Now keep in mind, there were cheaper cars out there, and therefore opportunities to have a lower car payment. But did Cynthia insist on such a thing? Not at all; she supported me 100% in my desire for the Impreza. Far to good to me, that lovely lady!
So Cynthia and I went to Heuberger Motors in Colorado Springs just before Thanksgiving and looked at their selection. Keep in mind, my last car-buying experience had been so-so, and the one before that had been atrocious, so I had no idea what to expect. (By the way, I've come to refer to this dealer as Hellbringer motors, after the comic book!) But with Cynthia by my side, this experience was near perfect! We had a great sales rep, June I think her name was, and we test-drove an Impreza sedan in the sleet/freezing rain. It was a ridiculously great drive, as good as I'd ever experienced from any car. (Meredith had her Subaru Impreza WRX here in the fall, and Cynthia and Kevin got to drive it but I never did. If I had, I'm sure it would have been comparable to this one.)
And get this: they had an Impreza in the showroom that was this really amazing bronze color, sorta sparkly. I hadn't seen one in that color on any of the Colorado Subaru dealer web sites, and I just assumed that this one was a WRX or STI or some other fancy model. But we asked June, and she said it was a regular Impreza that just hadn't been spoken for as yet. SCORE!! We signed some papers and it was ours. It took about an hour for them to get 'er ready, but the drive home was probably the best drive I've ever taken, save for the first time we went to Al and Meredith's in the Pathfinder (it was snowing and beautiful in the mountains that evening.)
We didn't actually go directly home; we met Kevin, Paul and Robbie at the Black-eyed Pea in Castle Rock. We showed em the car; they liked! Paul and Kevin strategically placed a "Senior menu" at my chair at the restaurant, the little weasels!! We drive home afterwords and kicked back the rest of the day. I was going to have Cynthia drive the new car, but after much reluctance on my part, we agreed that since Cynthia had a 10-minute commute and I had a 45-minute commute (plus more driving once I get TO work), I should have the Ru and Cynthia should drive the Pathy. I named the Ru Emilia; I always have to name my cars!! The Pathy has for the most part done right by Cynthia, though at the moment we need to get the A/C fixed.
But the goodness for the Doley geek family had only just begun! I got a Flip camera in early December, on sale at Newegg.COM. I REALLY wanted a Canon video camera, but the one I wanted was like a grand and there was no way. And a Flip really was perfect for my needs. Christmas came, and Holly came in from Minnesota. We did xmas at the parents, and I shot some GREAT video at the parents house. We did some great gifts on xmas day, then the next day Holly came with us back to the house in CR. Once there, we opened our gifts from Cynthia. Get this... Cynthia got Kevin and I iPod Touches!! We were blown away!! I'd kinda wanted one for a while, but figured in the end I couldn't justify the expense, so I was overjoyed to get one this year!!
Cynthia and I also got Mom and Dad an LCD TV for the kitchen, and they were thrilled. Mom had gotten OTA high-def TV antennas for the downstairs and kitchen TVs, and it was a simple matter to hook it up to the new TV. Voila, great picture and more desk space. Really good xmas, and I of course immediately started adding apps on the iPod! We took Holly home the next day and she then went home; she seemed to have a good time!
Then... in March we were invited to a party at Shawn Bailey's new apartment, which was in fact right across the street from Vic's apt where we stayed while the house was being built. We went over, and we saw Shawn briefly, before he and his homeys went outside to make burgers. Nobody really talked to us, not even Art really, and he never came back inside. But...while we were there, we saw firsthand the AMAZING picture on his LG electronics 55" LED TV. We had kind of a Jones for such a thing for a while, but assumed the price would be prohibitive. But Shawn gave us the model number, and we found that particular model was in closeout, in preparation for the new model. So a week later we ordered one from Amazon for about $2K.
Now I wasn't exactly rolling in dough at that moment; I'd just paid for another year of Grant Farms CSA (which we LOVE) and it wasn't cheap. So 2K for a TV would NOT have been good. But Cynthia got some windfall from her company, so she paid for half of it, which saved our asses! It took a few days for the TV to get there. I hauled butt home early from work the day that it was scheduled to arrive (it was delayed by a spring storm), and it arrived about 4 PM that day. Kev and I took it in and unboxed it; what an experiece! Best OOBE I'd ever had. Setup was easy, and the thing looked BRILLIANT from the first minute. Pretty amazing to have a wife who not only looks kindly on my geek habit, but even actively supports it!
I forgot to mention that right before we got the new telly, we used our tax return money (which we got thanks to Barack Obama's education tax credits for Cynthia) for some more laminate flooring in the house. Recall that we have laminate flooring in the dining room, and we had the same flooring guys come back out and put it in the TV room, the loft and the office. That was quite the ordeal; we had to move all the furniture and electronics and such out of each room and then back in when it was done, plus we had to rip out all the carpet, padding and carpet tack, and then dispose of it. I came up with a rather unique way to dispose of the carpet and padding: I just stacked it up in the garage. I was afraid that engine heat from the Subaru would set it on fire at first, with that little ground clearance, but it was fine. It kept quite well in there until we had it hauled away.
I connected my Dell desktop machine to the TV, which Cynthia didn't seem too thrilled about at first, but I was able to keep the computer inconspicuous enough down in the TV room that it didn't ruin the look of the room. It worked OK, and was great for things like playing CNET and Youtube video on the TV, but it wasn't good for much else. Text still looked awful, a problem that was compounded by the fact that my glasses SUCKED! So I wasn't seeing very well. I eventually got new glasses in early June, which helped, but it was still hard to see text, even when playing World of Warcraft on the TV. It looked great, and it worked in every other respect, but text viewing just wasn't there. So I'll probably move the computer and used it as a spare parts machine for the remaining desktops.
At that point I thought our little tech binge was done, but something happened in late May that would net us yet another geek win. Kev accidentally dropped his phone in a glass of water one night when Thomas came over. Shouldn't have been a big deal, just get his phone replaced from Verizon. There were a couple of snags with that plan however. Verizon wanted to renew his contract for another 2 years, and they wanted to charge a $9 a month surcharge for Kevs old phone. They're apparently doing that for almost all their texting phones; you have to pay for the privilege of HAVING a texting phone now, in addition to having to pay for unlimited texting itself.
Verizon had already been pissing us off lately about a lot of little things, so one day when I was at Fox St. working on computers, Cynthia called and said that she and Kevin were looking at alternate cell phone plans and companies. That was the first real hope I'd seen in years that we might be finally getting rid of Verizon. Now mind you, I had no problem with the phones that Kev and I had, and I figured that when Cynthias died, we'd just get her a new Envy or some close model to replace it. I was done with cell phones forever, having resigned myself to the cold, hard fact that the newest, coolest cell phone technology (i.e. the iPhone) could not be had without pricey data plans. But Kev and Cynthia found the HTC Evo, and Sprint's plan has unlimited data included, and the rest is history!
So more later, hopefully in less time than a year!!
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