Ramblings of a geek with a few hobbies…
Tomorrow afternoon we’ll be leaving for a relaxing vacation in Michigan. It has been a couple years since our last real vacation so it is long overdue. Unlike most of our other travels, we’ll be taking it easy and don’t have a packed agenda.
More to come as we’re on our way.
We made it back from camping in one piece and had lots of fun while we were at it. Best line of the trip occurred at Starbucks drive-thru on Saturday morning before leaving:
Cashier (after looking in the bed of Justin’s truck): Oh, going camping?
Justin: Yep, sure are.
Cashier (and two others): With a lawnmower?!?
Justin: Yeah, we have to mow the campsite. This is serious!
Here are a few photos.
This weekend I’ll be heading out into the local “wilderness” for some camping. For the event I’ll be getting out my telescope, something that hasn’t happened much in the last year (once actually) so I’m really looking forward to it.
Just last weekend I got the scope out and stayed up late and remembered how much I enjoyed the hobby. That evening I was able to get setup, view, and tear down in well under 2 hours so it proved that I shouldn’t use the excuse of it taking too long. Which is good, because in 7 months time will not be in my favor 🙂
I’ve purchased another filter for my camera (a neutral density one for those interested). Hopefully it’ll arrive before we leave on vacation; it sure would piss me off if it arrives 5 hours after we depart. Anyway, I wonder why my hobbies include high precision optics (astronomy and photography)…. sure isn’t cheap.
Today I should be receiving the last shipments of my camera purchases in preparation for our trip to Michigan at the end of the month. The inventory will then be:
I’ll probably (hopefully) spend the weekend outside taking pictures and playing around with this stuff. Every now and again I’ll put a picture or two in the gallery.
Here’s a way to find out….
Today Ana and I announced to our families that we are expecting our first child, God willing, this December. We’re very excited, to say the least!
This week I made the long sought after purchase of a digital SLR camera – the Canon 30D. I spent a few days doing some research, reading anything and everything I could find on cameras and lenses in particular.
It’s amazing how hard it is to take a “bad” picture with it. I’ll be using it in Chicago this weekend so I’ll be posting some photos soon.
Ana and I are headed up to Chicago this weekend to see the Yo-Yo Ma concert I purchased tickets for back in November. We’ll be staying downtown, just a couple blocks from the Sears tower. I’ve really only spent a day in downtown Chicago in the past, so it should turn out to be a good weekend.
We’re both working full days today so we’ll be getting a relatively late start on the drive. Hopefully we won’t find ourselves sitting hours upon hours on the interstate.
I generated this today, and ended up not needing it. In the spirit of conservation, I’ll put it here so it doesn’t go to waste.
I’ve used FireFox for a few years now and have been quite happy with it. It was always faster, had better features than IE, and was very stable.
I’m about this close (forming a gap about an inch wide with my index finger and thumb) to dropping FireFox and going back to IE. Why? FireFox has been crashing left and right on me and it’s really pissing me off. I realize I’m running Vista on 2/3 of the machines I use daily, but it’s even crashing once a day or two on my XP machine at work.
Take last night, for instance. I was filling out a form online (a Google one) and I hit Enter on the keyboard. BOOM. FireFox died and took 3 or 4 wizard pages of data entry with it. Nobody should have to think about their browser before entering data into forms online, but that’s exactly what I’ve been doing lately.
Now that IE7 has the tabs and seems to be pretty fast, I’m wondering why I’m still sticking with FireFox. It may not be that way for long…
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