Life

I need to get back in the habit of writing again... and maybe include some photos in it. Perhaps telling my Japan story through my photos... We'll see if it actually happens though. New photos are up by the way.

I'd get started but now is not a good time. I'll make it up by putting up one of my better photos or something.

Graduation

I finally got the final solid clue that I will finally graduate. The petition for my classes to count towards my degree went through. Now all I have to do is wait for the senior residency waiver to go through (which I'm told it will and its really just a procedural thing) and I'm set!

I'll finally have my hard won BS... muahaha.

Incidentally, I started applying for jobs today. Maybe the heavens were just waiting for me to get off my lazy ass and make something of myself.

BTW, job hunting is fun, there's so many interesting engineering/technician/scientist positions out there. Unfortunately most of them require some sort of security clearance (which I don't have). I dunno how much of a burden that will bear in the future... but whatever, I'll deal with it as things come along.

Also incidentally... my new email counter is at 777. my gmail one is stuck at 35 so that doesn't count... but it is divisible by 7... and 5... 0.o

Thankgiving 2008

I've been busy today. Stayed up late last night writing a bunch of emails, mostly to friends in Japan. Sent out a batch of thanksgiving emails in hopes of resparking conversation with some people I haven't talked to in awhile. Unfortunately I wrote it in english thinking everyone in my list was fluent enough to understand. Definitely woke up to an incomprehensible email this morning. Apparently I misread a name last night. Thinking it was someone else, I wrote that email in english with only a Japanese title. Oh well.

The rest of the morning was talking to some friends... Problems seem to hit groups of people and in waves as opposed to isolated incidents. Maybe there is some invisible luck field that can be described by quantum mechanics. That'd be cool. Yeah... I'll keep dreaming about pursuing that career in scifi.

The rest of the day was more or less spent muscling a lighter body out of my oke. It's still ugly as heck, but the walls are a little closer to what I want. My mom seemed pretty happy that she got a bag full of wood shavings that she can use on her houseplants. I just hope they can handle whatever oils are coming off of that wood, cuz I don't think rats can handle it, i dunno about delicate houseplants.

Finally, the rest of the evening (after a 1.5 hour food coma induced nap), i worked on photos for mom, and then tried to accustom myself to digikam so I can start processing photos and putting them up for people to see. Digikam isn't too bad... there are a few annoying things I have to do to get the program to cooperate, but so far it seems to be okay. The great thing about it though... is that its fast. A LOT faster than LightRoom... hopefully Raw Therapee will pull through tomorrow.

I put the sakura pictures back up on the photopian site. Not sure how they ended up off it. but yeah. Hopefully I can have a few more albums up soon.

For those of you that are wondering about what I ate today... since Turkey day is supposed to be all about eating... we had home-made pho. all beef. No bird.

Back to Writing

Got back from San Francisco last night. The concert was pretty amazing as expected, despite quite a few number of gripes I had with a number of things. I won't elaborate on them as some of the critiques are fairly personal (to myself, not really to other people). One thing I gotta say though, Sukeroku's set made the use of "ma" more clear and awesome than I have ever seen in any other group. 20 seconds somewhere in their set made the entire trip worth it.

On a tangent, I took apart a camera lens today. They're pretty complicated pieces of machinery, but not impossible to decipher. I still don't know how the zooming part works exactly, but that's ok. I did what I needed to do, clean the lens elements. We'll see whether or not I destroyed the lens for good.

Hong Kong and Macau

Photos are up.

When I have more time to reflect on my travels, I'll talk about them.  For now... enjoy the photos.

YARGH!

My laptop... the one that had a cup of tea 5 months back... decides it wants to work again.  Unfortunately, my previous archive drive is likely to be dead for good.  Great news... My laptop is working.  Bad news, I still have to give Lenovo a piece of my mind about their warranty policies... That, and my Sansa clip is still non-operational.

HDD

Ugh... Found out I can't recover my lost hdd at home.  If I want some of the photos back, I'll have to send it in to a professional to get it fixed, and unfortunately that'll cost too much.  I'm missing most of this year's earlier photos, the last bits of when I was in college.  Fortunately (or unfortunately) I wasn't taking too many photos early in my trip to Japan, so the loss isn't as great.  I think I've also lost some important documents too... but I think those are somewhat recoverable as I go along.

Sigh... what a pain in the ass.

On another note:  Life is starting to settle down and I'm starting to become productive again.  Let's see if I can keep it up today.