It rained earlier in the day and it was a full moon last night, so I went to the Strip last night to shoot some more photos. This time it was the middle of the Strip, around the corner of Flamingo & Las Vegas Blvd. I forgot most of what I learned from the last time I went (shooting in ASA 200 seems to be better than higher ASA), and I barely remember towards the end. Have to go shooting more often.
Click the photo to get to the full set, or click here.
Am doing okay over here. Life hasn’t changed all that much. Miss everyone back in L.A.
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I was feeling pretty restless last night so I went out at about 11:00 PM and spent a couple of hours shooting some photos on the south Strip. Check out my photostream for the full set. I hope to do this once every other week or so.
There’s also a few photos of from Matt’s visit and Michele’s birthday dinner last weekend. as well as of my new place.
General, Uncategorized
Been having major server problems, with outages, missed emails, and the like, culminating in my box going down while reviewing some work with a client (embarrassing!). Technology has not been good to me this week. Hopefully it’s been all fixed, and I am now sitting on a faster server to boot.
One of my pet peeves about technology is when it glitches after a period of reliability, with no changes to infrastructure. It just drives me up the wall. Server glitches, sometimes my Harmony remote doesn’t switch to the right input, sometimes my Media Center box doesn’t come out of standby correctly, sometimes Outlook doesn’t recognize contacts, etc.
We use tech as a mechanism for stability in our lives, and have freakouts like Rachel Bilson in Chuck whenever technology goes wrong. In my day-to-day life, I would rather take a product that performs a basic service that does 50% of what I need it to do, 100% of the time, than something that does 100% of what I need it to do only 50% of the time. That frees me up to work on other things as opposed to having to try to troubleshoot something that should have worked in the first place.
Application development is a different story - maybe more of that later.
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According to Jon, one must observe the following rules when playing Rock Band:
* It’s okay to play the drum parts by yourself.
* It’s okay to play the guitar parts by yourself.
* It’s okay to play the bass parts by yourself.
* It’s NOT okay to sing by yourself.
You have been warned.
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I’ve got a decorated World War II veteran in my family. Pretty cool.
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Yesterday I ported over Maxim’s Hottie Weather for Facebook to an iPhone-friendly version. If you’ve installed the new 1.1.3 firmware for the iPhone, you now have the ability to move icons around on your home screen. This makes a good replacement for the standard Weather app that comes with the phone.
I am really digging iPhone’s web apps system. If you keep it within the scope of creating a very small app that serves a single function (e.g. serve up weather and hot chicks), it’s really quick to build.
Anyways, feel free to point your iPhone to:
http://apps.maxim.com/iphone-hottieweather/.
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Head on over to Pitchfork’s Top 100 Tracks of 2007 list - several of the tracks are available as downloadable MP3s for putting on your ‘Pod. As someone who is too old to keep up on bands these days, this is a great way to check out new music in a list culled by people who generally know what they’re doing.
My discoveries:
* Blone Redhead, “23″
* Sally Shapiro, “He keeps me alive”
* Caribou, “Melody Day”
* LCD Soundsystem, “All My Friends”
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I can’t sleep so I am going to ramble for a little bit.
Florida was nice. My parents have moved to an area that is one of the hardest hit by the housing crunch. Well, let’s not call it a “housing crunch” - let’s call it “thousands of individual people taking out loans they couldn’t afford from companies that had no business giving out loans to these people, creating a giant financial house of cards which is quickly and painfully collapsing for all parties involved.” There, that’s better. Anyway, in this area of Florida, there is construction *everywhere*, it all seems to be half-finished, and prices have been dropping like a rock. For the price of a 1-bedroom condo here in LA, you can get yourself a new 3-bedroom house on a golf course.
We went to the dog track one afternoon, just to go check it out. Coincidentally, there was a story in the paper that morning about how the dog track is in decline - cruelty to animals, it’s not cool, etc. As long as it’s not cats, I think that is a great way to spend an afternoon - get a bunch of friends, drink some beer, and make $2 bets for whatever reason.
My attempts are building a new PC for my dad this Christmas kinda went awry. Pretty much everything didn’t work, including the Webcam I bought for them. This is the first time this has ever happened in about half a dozen builds. Ouch.
Am back to flying Southwest when I can. It’s not so bad.
I think I am headed back into the breech again. I am addicted to what I do for a living.
Time to go get the laundry out of the dryer.
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In a couple of hours, I am off to my folks’ new place in Florida. Never been to this part of Florida before, so I look forward to it. It’s dreary and cold here in Marina del Rey and from what I can tell it’ll be sunny and warm, and my dad got the pool up and running, so it’s all good.
It’s the end of the year and I am feeling reflective but I will spare you the long drivel. I did a lot of cool things this year - shit, I never though I’d ever stand on the Great Wall of China - but overall, 2007 was a transitional year. 2008 might be another one, which worries me, but I guess I can stand being outside the comfort zone for awhile longer in order to experience more.
Looking forward to the UFC fight on pay-per-view next weekend.
Happy holidays everybody! I hope you have a good [insert holiday day here].
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Some girl gave me a coupon for a free $25 gift card at the CVS in Marina del Rey the other day. Whomever you are, thanks!
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