Sparktoblog!

TEH PAIN AND HEALTH!?

So The last couple of days have been fairly painful. About a week ago I decided that I need to get in better shape so I started walking and jogging. At around the middle of last week I got the brilliant idea to get back into running. Friday was my second run in years, and the first time I’ve run a hill since I was 14. I’m still in a lot of pain today on Sunday, primarily in my calves and thighs. According to the training plan I’m supposed to do a light run today and I’m dreading it. I think I’m going to do it, but stop before I die as it’s supposed to be a light run. I’m hoping that if I can keep this up for a couple of weeks I’ll be back into the swing of running every day and be ready to finally drop the last couple of cigarettes that I smoke every week.

Why am I doing this? There are a couple of reasons but primarily because I want to be healthy again. It’s been a long time since I’ve been really healthy and I think the complete lack of exercise over the last couple of years have really contributed to that. The other main reason is that I want to be hot. I’m sick of having a (IMHO) decently cute face, then a beer belly to go with it. I want to walk down the street and have people look at me, and not just ignore me – to do DAMN, he’s hot... I know it’s kind of shallow, but if it helps me get into better shape then all the better!

Well, I had better go stretch and figure out what I’m doing today for a run. I’m thinking of walking up to Broadway, jogging to the end, then running down 10th to Roanoake. That gives me a decently flat run, and then a 1.8 mile cool down as I walk back.

Week of treading water...

What a long busy week this has been. Last weekend I got out quite a bit and got to see a lot of my friends. On Saturday I hung out with Tres and Jake in the morning, then spent the afternoon learning in the presence of the grandmaster 1337 Ellziots. He taught me a few tricks for audio/video processing and helped me price out a giant RAID array to store my creations.

Sunday was a fairly lazy day mostly spent catching up. In the afternoon I walked over to my friend Ian’s place and we hung out before going to get him a god-like television to replace his old one. I really want to get a new TV, but I have a lot of other things that are higher on my priority list.

This week has sucked at work. I’ve gotten a lot done, but I’ve been fairly pissed off at my co-workers for a variety of reasons. I’ve been making progress on a lot of deals, and managed to get my friend Ryan a sweet contract, but it’s been frustrating. Next week the chairman of the company is in town and I always hate that. He’s got a different view of the world than I do and it’s always difficult to have him around. When he’s around everyone actually gets a lot less work done because we have to be so busy looking busy rather than getting actual work done.

Tonight I’m going to go for a walk and get some exercise and then just chill out and watch a few movies. I want to catch up on some of the rentals I’ve had of late and take it easy so I’m ready to face the final day of the week. Fridays are always annoying because not much business happens, and on weeks like this 45 hours just seems like too much.

Initial response to the Etymotic ER-6 earphones

Today I got my ER-6’s in from FedEx. I was not expecting them until Monday so that came as a pleasant surprise. Here I sit during my lunch break giving them a bit of a torture test with various bits of music that I have with me. I have to say that I’m impressed – they offer amazing bass for being earbuds, and the noise isolation is incredible. I put them on and the normal noise of a busy phone sales office vanishes away leaving me with no phone conversations, no computers beeping – NOTHING! They are a tad annoying to insert given that you have to pull your ear out in a weird way to expose your ear canal to get them in there far enough to create a good seal and give real bass. I'm using the foam tips rather than the rubberised plastic ones because they seem to be a bit more comfortable and I'm used to putting in foam earplugs so It's a more comforting motion for me.

Once I had them inserted I plugged into my iPod and started off with a few tracks that I’m very familiar with and know exactly how they should sound. Good bass response – could be a little tighter, but impressive given their size. The midrange is slightly less clear than other high-end headphones I’ve used, but certainly acceptable given the $100 range on the price. The high end is crisp and accurate – the psytrance tracks I’m throwing at them are coming through with every detail. The only real complaint I could have with the sound is it might be a touch brighter than I tend to like, but that’s more of a subjective thing than a comment on their quality.

Given their difficulty of insertion (supposedly that will get easier over time) I’m not sure if these make ideal all-purpose headphones but they certainly have their uses for any noisy environment. I would hesitate to use them while doing vigorous exercise outside given that I would completely unable to hear any thing but my music, but they should make excellent buds for walking and ignoring my co-workers.

TubercuSARS

The last couple of days have been really miserable - I've been halfway sick with a nasty cough and been getting sicker. It started off this weekend with some congestion and a mild cough and it's been getting worse and worse every day. I'm worried that I'm pushing myself too hard at work and this is going to end with me getting really sick. I really should just take some time off, but given how busy things have been I know that I'll get buried if I take any time off. I guess I'll just keep at it and hope that taking care of myself and resting/sleeping a lot during the evenings will get me back on track for good health.

On a side note I'm really excited about some stuff coming up in my life, but I can't talk about it yet. Hopefully within the next month I'll be able to give out some details about a project that I'm working on and publish the whole damn thing :)

Fun couple of days

The last 4 days certainly have been fun-filled and entertaining. On Friday my team at work got to take off early and go have some fun because we had made a fairly major sales goal last quarter. We all left at noon and headed to Daniels Broiler for steak and cigars. I had forgotten how good Daniel’s does steak, and it was nice to have such a forceful reminder. After lunch we wandered over to the cigar bar for some stogies. I’m usually not the biggest cigar fan but James had some nice ones and I took a stab at it. It ended up irritating my sinuses and jumpstarting a cold for me, but it was a small price to pay for such a relaxed afternoon.

Saturday was filled with various excitements. Jake, Tres, and Ian came over to my place and we frolicked around with Morrowind, Lexx, Milk of Magnesia, and Robitussin. Good times to be had by all. It really got me interested in Morrowind again and has me thinking I might have to pick my game back up and get into it again. We laughed, we jested, we ate brisket. Afterwards I was pretty beat so I ended up heading over to Randy’s place to hang out for a little while before I went to bed and crashed.

Sunday I got up and took a few Sunday best pictures for some friends of mine on their way to Easter Service at church then had breakfast with my parents as they passed through town. In the afternoon my friend Tombro and I went up to Mount Vernon for the Skagit Valley Tulip Festival. It was a fun little excursion but not really all I had hoped for. The tulips were impressive, but I’m really not a landscape photographer and it was not my ideal subject.

I’ve been really grooving on my ipod. I’m torn as to whether I want to go for the ipod mini. I’ve been digging the ipod sound quality and user interface but I wish it was a little smaller. I’ve read that the ipod mini’s have had some problems with the PCB and the headphone jack separating so I’m still undecided. I’ve also been looking at the ER6 earbuds, but I’m not sure if I want to spend that much money on a pair of headphones that the ipod might not be able to drive. All the sites that I can find that sell headphone amps say an ipod is not quite powerful enough, and all the sites that don’t sell headphone amps say the ipod is able to power them, but just barely. I guess if all else fails I can build myself a cmoy amp and be done with it.

Regular readers and commenting

I’ve been reviewing my access logs for giantchoad.com for a while now and found that I have a small posse of regular readers. I’m pleased and heartened to find this, and will continue to blog as long as I feel the need, and readers keep reading it. One thing I have noticed is that out of more than 1500 unique visitors I have gotten 2 comments. I’m thinking of disabling commenting in my blog to help save on bandwidth for when I’m moblogging. If anyone has a reason that they want me to keep commenting turned on please email me, or add a comment to this post. If I don’t get any response it will be turned off within a week.

That is all.

Love the iPod – hate the job

So every day it sets in more and more how much I hate my job. It’s been striking me how much the simple pleasures have been keeping me going. My iPod for instance – it’s not that I’m that materialistic, or that simply owning the iPod is bringing me joy, more the fact that I enjoy it’s user experience, and the manner in which it enables me to enjoy my music on the go. While I admit I’ve only had it for a day, I’m already very impressed with how easy it is to use, and how “transparent” it’s operation is. I’m really going to have to give it to my Mom when I go for the iPod mini as I think she would get a lot of use out of it.

I’ve been struggling with my job since shortly after I started. I don’t like the work, and think I have a lot more to offer the world than simply being a recruiter. I have a lot of projects that I want to devote more time to, charities that I want to help, and of course my photography. Most of the people I work with are money grubbing bastards who really don’t care about other people, or the repercussions of their actions long term for the rest of the world, or even themselves it seems.

Of late (since the beginning of the year really) I’ve been putting in a lot more effort at my job, and it’s helped a little bit. My performance is up, and I’m making more money because of it, but I still feel hollow inside. The hardest thing I do most days is wake up, put on my work clothes and drive in to Bellevue to spend the day despising myself.

Why don’t I quit I might ask myself? I’m not really sure… I guess there are a lot of things that go into it. For one I’m a pussy – I hate chances and I have a stable job right now so the idea of making a change terrifies me. Secondly I don’t like to think of myself as a quitter – I’ve never quit a job, and somehow I hope never to have to. Lastly I simply don’t know what I would do. It’s not for a lack of other opportunities in the job market, but given how much of a passion I’ve had for photography and a few other side projects I’m just not sure if another 9 to 5 job would make me any happier. I know the environment would probably be better, but would I really be happier? I would still have to spend 50% of my time focused on other projects, and probably would end up feeling the same way about the new job as I feel about my current one in less than 6 months.

So what am I going to do about it? I have no idea and that’s probably what’s bothering me most of all. Most likely I’ll keep doing it until either my photography picks up to the point of where I can do it full time or I crack – whichever comes first. I guess I’m doomed to be like 70% of all Americans and hate my job.

Bling to Apple!

So I got an ipod today. I’m sick of waiting for the ipod mini to come in at the apple store and not having any portable music player and storage drive has been bugging me. I went to Best Buy to get it so that if I change my mind I can exchange it for a mini later. It’s not that much bigger, and having the extra 11 gigs of storage will be nice. I feared that 4 gigs would be too little. It's a slick little player and I'm extremely impressed with the sound quality and the engineering that went into designing it.

I had a couple of caps from Pepsi bottles for free songs on iTunes so I tried out the iTunes store user experience. I have to say I’m impressed with the store but not with the purchase. It’s a slick little interface, but the AAC rights management system is a pain, and the two songs I downloaded had very poor sound quality compared to the MP3s I rip myself.

Progress made

So here I sit watching Kill Bill Volume 1 for the first time and I’m in awe. It’s the most gratuitously violent movie you can possibly imagine, but it’s well done, and I am digging the way that it tells a powerful story.

***KERPOW***

So Tres just called me and interrupted my movie watching and blog updating experience. I am going to join him and da peebs for some dinner at the Six Arms. More to follow.

***INSERT COMA***

So after a nice dinner with the gang I came home, finished Kill Bill, and promptly passed out. I got a decent nights sleep, but I’m still exhausted this morning. This week is really flying by – two more days and its Friday. My team at work achieved a major goal we have been working on so Friday afternoon will be easy for us while we dine at Daniels Broiler and smoke some cigars.

The picture above is the final version of my green phone #4. It’s a crop of the original with slightly different DOF, and a better border. Thoughts anyone?

Four-way fading into Obscura throwing fish into Walla

The past couple of days certainly have been interesting. Thursday morning I got to get up a little bit late and then headed to my doctors. I have not been feeling that great of late and I finally found out why – I’ve had a latent staph infection that’s been dragging down my immune system. Luckily the antibiotics he gave me have been helping quite a bit. They did make me feel quite a bit sicker on Thursday but once that passed I’ve been getting noticeably better every day.

I then drove down to Walla Walla to see my family and give a presentation to the Camera Club down there. I had planned on flying but the only flight would have conflicted with being able to visit my doctor. Once I made it to Walla Walla I chilled out for a little while before heading down to the school district to give my presentation. It went fairly well and I’m glad I got a chance to share some of my knowledge about Photoshop and color manipulation with a few people in the hopes that it might push them from the film world into the digital world.

Friday was a fairly chill day. I spent most of the day hanging out with my dad and Tye. Come the evening my parents and I joined our friends the Scribner’s for a very nice dinner at Bob’s Backstage Bistro. Walla Walla really is on the up and up – more and more nice restaurants are being put in and none of them seem to be failing. After dinner I went over to hang out with my friend Adam. It was good to see him and catch up – we have known each other for a very long time and rarely get to see each other.

Saturday brought many things into my life. In the morning my Mom and I went down to the 1st Presbyterian church to put the finishing touches on the MP3 broadcast system that I had set up. No thanks to the Churches hired gun IT moron this process has taken almost 7 months to complete. Needless to say we were both overjoyed to have it off our backs and done with.

After a quick lunch I hopped back in my car and headed back up to Seattle. I put in an MP3 CD that I had made of all the tracks on the Obsucra label, and rocked my way back. I drove fairly fast (no Mom, don’t ask how fast) and made decent time. I stopped a number of times at wineries and parks to enjoy myself, and got a couple of really good shots out of the deal.

Upon getting back into Seattle I headed over to my friend Ian’s place where we were joined by Tres and Jake to go get some Sushi at I love Sushi on Lake Union. It was a wild meal, and we managed to offend most of the other people in the restaurant (par for the course really). After dinner we all went to a friend of theirs party. I was kind of tired so I ended up going home early to rest.

AND NOW I AM HERE.