The fatalaties

Our latest photoset on flickr is from last weekend's trip to the Great Sand Dunes National Park with some friends. It was pretty crazy, I had no idea that sand dunes existed in colorado. They are apperantly the tallest sand dunes in North America, and we climbed to the top of the second highest dune. It was very exhausting, and quite surreal. Just a few hour away, there are miles of sand dunes surrounded by mountains over 14,000 feet tall. And we climbed around and slid down them for most of saturday. Some guy brought his snowboard along, that was really cool. Sadly I have no pictures of that because our digital camera suffered mortally from the extreme conditions. Apperantly 50 mph wind gusts with walls of very fine sand is bad for electronics, go figure. I don't think it's possible to clean that sand out of the lens assembly... ugh. Everyone else on the trip made the same mistake though, I wonder how many cameras fail in that harsh environment.Becca started her new job today, we're very excited about that. Becca's been just a wee bit nervous. Now she's crabby after her big day.Interesting things afoot in the web analytics world. Google released Analytics yesterday. Which is really just Urchin, which they bought several months ago. The big news though is that it's free. Yeah, freaking altruistic google. We had been using Urchin for analytics for a while now, and it's kinda thrown us into a weird situation.

Becca thinks it’s important

I was convinced soon after I finished my big breakfast of pancakes and eggs to take a practice GRE. This wasn't really the best thing I had to do on a saturday morning, ninja turtles was on, but I decided to humor my wife and do it. So I finished the general test (verbal and math) in about 45 minutes. My final math score was a respectable 540, and my verbal score was 600. My dear sweet wife thinks that this score is impressive, she did take a year of graduate studies so I trust her judgement on these things. She wont tell me what her scores were though... hmmm. She is definately better than me at math, but that's no surprise. Just so you know, the GRE is taken by college seniors looking to get accepted by graduate schools. Only about %10 of college grads take the GRE, in this segment of the population my verbal score earned me an 85 percentile rank, and the math score was a still surprising 39 percentile, considering I only took math through college algebra, and that was about 4 years ago.

I sound incredily vain saying all these things about my intelligence, this is really something that Becca wants me to put up here, apperantly she just wants to live vicariously through my verbal score. One thing I really fear is that someone will now get the idea that I should go to grad school. But luckily, despite my GRE scores, I'm certain that my 2.85 GPA will preclude me from attending any graduate schools.

Oh, and work is going really well now. So, I'm pretty happy about that.

Happy Halloween

Watch out, it's the first public vlogcast from Tim and Becca, weclome to our world. Today we bring you the events of last night, halloween night. It's a frightful tale of what we are really like at home. Truly, you may laugh, you may cry... mainly, I just cry.

The Latest Obsession

Becca and I have been been watching a lot of TV on DVD lately. Well, DVD and downloads, we watched several seasons of Scrubs which were downloaded. And we have just started watching Lost on DVD from the the rental place.

So, if you will notice the "recent phots" link along the side, you will see that it's still stuck on some older pictures. I don't know how to get the stupid thing to update.

I should probably take this time to point out what Becca and I are really intrested in right now is Hiking and Camping. If you want to see what the two of us want, and what I just want, check out our/my wish list.

NetPizza

Here's the greatest idea ever. You order your pizza online, but wait! There's more. Not only is the pizza delivered as soon as you order it, you can recieve 3 at a time. When you're done, drop the empty pizza boxes in the mail and NetPizza will send you back 3 more fresh Pizzas for only $14.99 per month! It's genious, pure genious. You can't have it, that's my idea.

What is the point again?

What is the point anyways? You build a dynamic content site, it has all of this data in the SQL Database, and it's being pulled into XML file and then loaded into a flash app on a page. Fair enough. Only problem is there are some >100 menu's with multiple items in each, and no admin interface was built. Some of these rows have descriptions that exceed the character limit for enterprise manager. Which means in order to update those items, I'll have to write a SQL update statement for each one. ... No, wait actually that's all wrong, apparently updating these has always been such a pain that last time, no-one knew how to do it, and instead of updating the XML from the database, we now just pull from a static XML document and that's the only thing that needs to be updated! Wonderful! What a waste. Sheesh!

Teh Flawk

It's a little weird that all of a sudden people will start ditching the underground champion of browsing browsiness for this newcomer known as flock. I just started picking up a few brief mentions of this tool a few days ago. Now I'm trying it out, it uses the XMLRPC protocol to have a built in "blog this" feature. It also has built in support for del.icio.us. The idea, I suppose, is that people are tired of throwing bookmarklets into their toolbar. So now these great websites/technologies/memes that have gained popularity over the past year(s) are being integrated directly into this browser. I also see one big advantage in this piece of software is that it has the ability to just drag and drop images from your flickr account into the blog editor pane. It then generates a little thumbnail and lets you set the alignment and other things for it . It's actually quite a nice feature, perhaps I shall start using flickr a little more often. There is also the possibility that I might start posting a little more often. But don't count on it.

Video Blogging

The waaaaaaaave of the future!

Here's a test video, it's not entire lame.

I'm going to see how videoblogging with wordpress and feedburner is goin to work. Let's hope it's not terrible.



OK, my test with iTunes as the subscriber worked well, feedburner seems entirely capable of managing my feed. But, now that I'm in the advanced edit screen in WordPreess I see that I have the ability to add my own enclosures to the default wordpress feed, no, scratch that, it will automatically add an enclosure whenever I link to a .mov file. Hm, this is interesting.

There I go thinking again…

Sometimes I don't think there is any way that clients can get any slower and less cooperative. Then that phone rings and there is always someone on the other end ready to prove me wrong. Dumb clients don't surprise me anymore. It's the tenacity of the idiots out there that surprise me.

Given a fair chance, Battlefield 2 will own your life. Just thought I would give fair warning.

Also, everyone who is interested in preserving a copy of a DVD movie that they own would be wise to check out DVD Shrink. It's very nice for obtaining a full length high quality copy of a feauture film DVD at just the right size to fit on a 4.7gb DVD-R. Very useful indeed.

No, bad villagers, bad….

I knew when Becca and I got married some things would change. I would start eating better and she would start hiking and doing outdoorsy things. This is the arrangement that was understood. I knew it would be difficult to adapt to living with another person that is so close but I didn't count on the whole actually enjoying doing things together. I thought I would come home and play my computer games and she would... I don't know cook and clean some more stuff. Sure, we only have a one bedroom apartment, but I figured she wouldn't have a problem with staying home all day and just taking care of my stuff. Boy was I wrong!

It's our two month anniversary and it's all I can do to keep her from playing my computer games all the time! And wouldn't you know it, she practically pulls me up the mountains when we go hiking, and we go hiking a lot now. My parents have visited and Becca's sister has visited (the "dreaded inlaws"). It was fun having people over.

We are still searching for a church, I don't know what we're going to finally settle on. It seems almost impossible that there is a church out there that we will feel comfortable at. There are just so many things that combine to make the right church. Some have quality preachers, with little emphasis on evangelism or salvation. Some are so enormous we doubted that we would ever see the pastor, like those brave souls who watched the image of the great Oz, we watched a church service on a video screen, the service could have been transmitted from the moon for all we knew.

Right now Becca is getting ready for a nice dinner at Carrabbas, we have a gift certificate to there. I highly suggest that you ask for dinner gift certificates as wedding presents. We have no money to go out to eat normally, so these make it really easy to get out of the house and do something we both love, eat.

Becca is still searching for a job, we are seeing that the job market in Colorado Springs isn't exactly the most welcoming. We spoke with several people last night at a friends birthday party who told us stories about being in the same place. It would be harder to keep from being discouraged if I didn't know that there were some great things in store for her. She has unique gifts that I'm sure will bring her some great satisfaction. One of the things that she is starting is volunteering with ISI. Internation Students Incorported, Becca has a real heart to serve interational college students and she is starting to really get involved with the people and activities that ISI has to offer. We hosted a foreign student for one night last week. It was interesting... she was from India, and very sweet, I'm really glad we had the opportunity to do that.

I've been taking so many pictures with our new camera. Every time we go hiking we take a few shots. I will have to sort through and upload some of the best ones. I still haven't finished uploading the honeymoon pictures. Alright, time to wrap things up. If things go like they have been this will be the only post for the next 6 weeks. I always have so much I could say, but I never really feel like distilling it all at once.

The Mr. and Mrs.

It's kinda weird to say it, but I have a wife now. Actually I've had a wife for just over 2 weeks at this point. It's pretty freaking cool being married! I seriously doubt there are words enough at my disposal to express the joy and happiness that Becca and I have. There is always that nagging fear before the marriage that somehow the person you marry won't be the same person that you have known up until that point. I believe that Becca (Rebecca Bendt, how weird!) and myself actually have a pretty good grasp of how annoying wonderful the other person can be. So, I am sure it will be quite an adventure doing this whole marriage thing for the rest of my life, but I am very confidant that I ended up with the right woman. And, I still feel pretty bad about that, I totall said that I would never want to put Becca through this whole "married to me" thing. But then we started dating... and well one thing leads to another... you know how it works.

So, the honeymoon was freakin' sweet, we went to Hilton Head Island, South Carolina. It's like a tropical paradise where everyone has a southern accent and drinks sweet tea. Right after the wedding my parents gave Becca and I a new digital camera, it's a Sony 7.2 Megapixel Cybershot, we have a ton of great pictures that are slowly being uploaded into the photo album.

Once we have the apartment a little more cleaned up I will start taking picutres of it so you can see what we have done. Well, it's time to eat some cinnamon rolls that the Master Chef has cooked up for me and then off to check out a church.

The Desk

Searching through the contents of McMaster-Carr led me to the idea that I should build a desk out of modular aluminum tubing and plexiglass. Ideally, I would use extruded acrylic, but I don't know if I can afford that. I started designing this thing and building it in 3D in Blender. This is what I came up with.



It's not the greatest, and it's still pricy. But I can get 8'x4' plexiglass in town for $100 even. Plexi scratches easier than other things but... I don't know, glass would be so heavy and brittle. The tubes fit together in specially made connectors that clamp down on the tubes, the surfaces are about .25" thick and would rest on the tubes, probably with some silicon caulk dried on top of the tubes to give it a little padding, and tackyness to hold them in place. The idea is this desk would be very light weight, minimalistic, and easy to take apart for moving.

Anyways, I will probably modify this design many times before anything comes of it.

My dream would be welded titanium rods for the frame, and polycarbonite surfaces.

Begin Stream of Thought

I guess this little chapter in my life is rather short, and I don't expect to remember it for long. I will be getting married in 3 weeks. I graduated from college and moved to Colorado Springs to begin my career as a web-designer about 2 months ago. I am very anxious to be married to Becca, but it still feels weird to think about the fact that I will soon have "a wife". It's a crazy thought, but exciting at the same time. Becca has been completely focused on getting each of the multitudinous items on her list completed before the big day.

So, I was wondering if this is technically my bachelorhood. I’m out of college, and living on my own, but I have felt so close to Becca for the past 3 years of my life that I hardly consider myself a bachelor. The balance between work and every other priority in my life will never be easy. Right now I have few immediate priorities. Becca and the wedding are certainly a priority above work, but there is little chance for conflict there considering the geographical separation between myself and upcoming matrimonial event..

Being so far from my fiancé is difficult, we have a long distance relationship with each other before, yet this time it feels much different. I feel a much deeper connection to her, and along with that comes a more profound concern for her well-being.

I suppose I have gotten on to this track in my mind because she should be here any minute. I am sitting in my our apartment writing this post and waiting for her, along with her parents, to pull up with fully loaded vehicles. We will be unloading massive quantities of her belongings into this miniscule apartment. We already have boxes stacked to the ceiling in the living room. OK, that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but there is one stack of cardboard cartons that brushes the ceiling. It’s truly the summit of the mountain that has only begun to take shape.

When you sort through your belongings during the process of moving, you feel like you are sifting through a record of your life. You see real tangible evidence to confirm the validity of your memories. I wonder if sometimes we find ourselves unable to throw certain belongings away because we feel like we might lose those memories. The line between memory and reality is only an instant wide. Therefore memory is often our perceived reality, what we would call the present may actually be nothing more than a vast set of memories encompassing the past minutes, hours or days. We tell ourselves that we live in the present, but the present is all memory. So, in reality, our thoughts are always processing data from the past, we are always thinking in the past.

To be continued...


Several Days Later...

The realm of thought encompasses our entire existence at the most basic verifiable level. Descartes held this as a part of his philosophy. He began with the assumption that scientifically could not prove any of his assumptions. He called into question the very nature of the universe, and ultimately his own existence. He was only able to recover from his precipitously close call with thinking himself out of existence, by realizing that they very fact that he is able to think is an indication that something must exist to think those very thoughts, and be conscious of them, therefore he must exist as a consciousness.

My philosophy professor would probably be appalled at rough interpretation what I remember from that class, but what I do remember serves to further the point I am attempting to reach about memories.

We live in the past, through our memories, always filtering new data to see if it is related to any of our memories, and then storing that new data as memories for future use. It’s a necessary and integral function of our brain. If I get caught up thinking to much about the past I start to doubt the validity of certain memories. I have feelings associated with some memories, and those feelings seem to lend a certain verification to those memories, but feelings are just feelings, less concrete that memories, but in so many ways more real. I think Becca doubts her memories less, and sometimes recalls things more vividly because of the strength of her feelings. She, like many women apparently, lives and thinks with her feelings more often than reason or logic. I sometimes wonder how she is able to function at all without the reason and logic that I find so necessary. Yet, her memory is far greater than mine, it may be unrelated, but I wonder if the strength of her remembered feelings adds a whole new layer to memory that I could never hope to experience.

Objects that we keep to remind us of certain events and people are very nice to have around, but are ultimately just clutter and most are useless. That’s the logic and reason talking, I think memorabilia stir up feelings more than memories and are therefore more important to someone that has strong feeling associations with memories. Everyone has some amount of objects that help anchor their memories in reality. Destroying or removing these objects is sometimes so difficult because it is destroying your own life. If you live in memory all the time, then keep-sakes are something that anchor your own existence in the reality that you perceive, and throwing out these things can seem like killing a small part of yourself.

Ending stream of thought, Goodnight.

Reformat and Pray

The title is my solution to my current graphics card performance problems. My machine isn't exactly shiny anymore. I mean it's a little long in the tooth, and isn't performing up to my standards anymore. A new video card and updated drivers have done nothing to remedy the strange graphics card performance problems I have had since the last reformat. I don't pretend to have the faintest idea why this has been happening, all I know is that I am seeing really bad performance problems lately, and I hope that it isn't a hardware problem, because that means only one thing, replacing my motherboard. I just can't afford to do that now. I have this laptop from work that is really good, but a laptop just isn't a gaming machine. So that mean's doing the old reformat dance again. Copy the entire My Documents folder to another drive, then reformat and reinstall. Or, as they call it at my new place of employment, "slick" it.

The Altitude

Sioux City is at about 1500 feet above sea level. Kearney is a little less than 2500 feet above sea level. My apartment is almost exactly 6000 feet above sea level. The altitude is a fact of life for people in Colorado. It makes the weather quick and unpredicatble coming out of the mountains, and it make physical exertion difficult at best. I am far from acclimated to this altitude, yet I went mountain biking at around 7500 feet today near Palmer Lake. I went mountain biking with professional bikers who go to races and such. They had pity on me. They pushed a pretty good pace at the beginning on an uphill climb through a state park. I had to stop after about 10 minutes and catch my breath. After that the couple guys who were really hard core mountain bikers split off on their own, which I was very thankful for.

I have never been mountian biking before, and I borrowed a bike from the boyfriend of a gal at work. It was a pretty nice bike. Once I made the climb up the hill It was great fun. Hurtling around corners and between trees about 4 feet apart, going downhill, then up-hill for a little ways, then downhill a long ways again. I became much more confidant of the bike's ability to bounce off rocks and tree roots and still keep me in one piece. I think I only really fell down once, but I wiped out and knocked the chain off it's sprokets several times. Rule #1: Any front brake at all while going down hill is very dangerous. We of course stopped to let me catch my breath several times, when I started turning white they told me it was OK to take 5 minutes and sit down. It's not like I am a physically fit person that just happens to be adjusting to the altitude. I am a chubby lazy computer geek that is doing his first real excercise in a long time and trying to acclimate himself to this altitude. It was a blast, and it would be a ton more fun if I had a little endurance. I hope I can go again soon.

The weirdest thing about this adventure was that it actually felt good to excercise, I pushed myself and had a good time doing it. Not boring or monotonous like running, it was exciting and really hard work. I know my body will be reminding me of my stupdity for the next day or so, but I honestly feel like I was actually able to get some excercise that was fun.

Now, there are two directions I can go from here, remember the great time that I had and never really commit to this as a hobby. Or, I could possibly actualy find myself doing this more often, there are plenty of trails near-by. My biggest obstacle right now is my bike, it's a little on the old and broken side. Completely rigid frame with no shocks in front or back, the brakes are decent, but need to be adjusted to work properly, and my gears are definately not adjusted properly, I can't get into first without rubbing the heck out of the derailer. It was a bike my parents gave to me probably in the eighth grade, and it probably came from a department store. I need to go into a bike shop and find out if it's worth my money to upgrade this bike or if it would be better to just get an entirely new bike. Or, if it would be wiser to just not excercise at all and save my money for more important things, like a honeymoon, and food...