Hemlockin and poppin!

Took a trip to Hemlock Cliffs near Marengo, IN yesterday. I've got to say it was a perfect day. Weather was right around 70F, I got to ride the bike to and from there on some of the best roads around this part of the state, and several of my friends as well as I got great news this week. Had nothing else to do the entire day except have fun. Anyways, onto the important part, the pics! Im not going to narrate since I already commented on the Flickr site and you can view the comments there.





























And finally a shot with me in it!

On the Road again!

Well, finally got a nice day that I was actually off of work, and had some free time. Went on the first trip of the spring, and here are some photos.

Started out good, perfect weather. Had a friend tag along with his car and finally got some photos of me riding. Here's the gas station:


And here is a shot that turned out way too dark, but I like anyways:


Finally got to some curves:


And got to stretch the bikes legs a bit:


Until I started feeling comfortable again after the months of not riding:


And of course no trip is complete without rain:


And more rain! This was actually the hardest I've seen it rain recently, but gladly it passed and we had clear skies once again!

Season of Paint

Well, got just a bit further on the painting situation and we almost have all of the white(yuck!!!) walls gone. It's been a long and hard job, but well worth it. I just feel more relaxed in the house now.

Here is a before picture, its a bit messy though:


And some after shots:




The color is called "Greecian Helmet"

More memories

Here are a few more pictures I got scanned and cleaned up.



This picture actually won an outdoors related photo contest I beleive.


Dad in colorady many years ago. We still have that Motorcycle jersey and it's almost falling apart now.


Another Pic from Colorado.








And finally one of the coolest dogs we ever had, who actually just showed up at our house as a stray.

Memories

Well, Finally got a chance to digitize some of the old family photos. Still a lot more to go, but got a good start on them. Here are a few gems I cleaned up and put up on my Flickr page. Some are just good photography (well, with the equipment we had back then which was mostly disposable cameras), or a picture that brought back memories of the olden days (well, at least for me anyways).







This is just an altogether funny picture, especially if you knew the guy.










She's not really a native american, rather Vietnamese. I guess thats the irony that mademe post this pic.

Pics, Sunset mania

Well, I have taken a few pics recently and thought I'd post them since I have not posted anything original in a while.


A cool sunset I captured on the way home from work.


Another beautiful sunset. It did turn out well, but the camera just could not capture all of the "mood" that it had.


This one was on my camera after a few people came over one night. I have no idea who took it, but it turned out well I think.


And this is what happens when you mix alcohol, a Furby(ie?) in the road, and several people who detest furbies.

I just enrolled at USI in an attempt to get my BS knocked out of the way, so this next year will be very busy with classes and all. So far the experience has been good, but I've only been to one day of classes thus far. I had several issues with my transfer from Ivy Tech, but I'm sure many were at least somehow related to procrastination on my part. Also, this month marks the 2nd year of Perfected-Insanity. Happy birthday!!!

VOTD

I must say, this guy has the coolest job.... EVER!

I have been slowly working on getting a Web server running on my home connection. Insight recently upgraded all of our town to 10Mbps up/1Mbps Down for free, which will make a web server somewhat feasible now. I have a FTP server and domain name and such configured, but I cannot tell you any details just yet.

Bad Blood?

I recently ran across a FSF site called Badvista. It's aim (I always type this in CAPs first, then must correct thanks to AOL IM) is to inform consumers of some of the stuff that is happening in Vista that most of not heard, and to recommend free alternatives . I have to say, seeing as I have not had the chance to play around with Vista, yet I will have to support it (both personally and professionally), that this is a great resource.

While a lot of the info is whining and just common sense, and general Microsoft-Bashing, some useful information can be gleaned from articles like this: (check out the ad in the top right hand corner of this page, pretty inventive and not too intrusive)
"1. SMB2
Vista introduces a new variant of the SMB protocol called SMB2, which may pose problems for those connecting to non-Microsoft networks, such as Samba on Linux"

I never heard about this happening. Or this, which sounds awesome, as long as it doesn't require some ludicrous licensing scheme like so many other "standard" technologies recently:
"20. HHD
Hybrid Hard Drives. These are potentially a huge performance booster, but there's little information and support is available (even though should be available)."

Or this:
"25. WordPad
Ability to open .doc files has been removed."

This really sucks, because I've had a need to do this often. I can't imagine a legitimate reason why this functionality could not be moved to Vista. Just looks like a means to push "customers" to buy Office, which sure isn't cheap. Most of the Other articles right now seem to be Microsoft bashing, and are just cherry picked articles that contain speculation about what could be bad things about Vista. But I do hope they update with some more legitimate useful tech articles that will help me integrate Vista into existing diverse networks which contain anything from DOS,Linux, to XP.

On another note, is has been oddly warm the past week (Highs in the low-to-mid 60's in Mid December!). This has given me the chance to ride my motorcycle a few times, but I have not had a chance to ride anything longer that commuting due to other activities. I did manage to add a Flickr Badge to my profile info, as well as setup a Linux file, SSH, and FTP server at home. I chose Ubuntu server, and I must say this was pretty much a piece of cake if you know your way around the command line. I also have been playing around with TiddlyWiki, which I must say is pretty cool once you adjust to it, but confusing as can be when you first (attempt!) to use it. I think it will work great as a note-taking application for school, so I will experiment with it next semester.

This is why I love mobile phone companies.

I know I've had the run-around on the phone with these people, but this guy's call truely takes the cake.

VOTD

This looks like the coolest and most dangerous thing I have ever seen. I definately want one. Here's another video.

Sadly, probably the last trip of the year.

Well, by some freak act of nature we got a 70 degrees day on November 29th. Since I was off of work I decided to take advantage of this and take one last ride for the year on highway 66. Here are some pics from the trip.

It was quite overcast as you can see, but I didn't get a drop of rain and stayed warm.






I didn't get too many pictures as I was busy riding most of the day, but the few I took turned out decent. As always, click on the pics for larger images.

VOTD

Well, sorry for the lack of legitimate updates, but it's the holidays and time gets scarce. I'll try to upload some new pictures soon.

Here's a video to hold you over. I saw it quite some time ago, but still funny.


Also, ran across this today which just cracked me up. This might be the explanation, but I thought it would be funnier if it were Sony who they were referencing.

VOTD

Nothing much interesting as of late. Here's a video that pretty cool.