Richie's Blog Always a work in progress

10/1/2008 12:25am

So here we are at October.  I am sitting in a dark, chilled bar.. cold October air sneaking into the open doorway.  The walls are covered in posters of bands with awkward names like The G!ts, The Fire Theft, Hater Truly.  Or they might not be band names… Who really knows.  This is Liberty.  But, the question shouldn’t be where I am, but why in the world am I sitting here by myself blogging?  To answer that question…  most of my friends live on the eastside, so when they party over there, I’m stuck over here.  Though, I can thank my friends for hooking me up with this place.  Its 4 blocks from where I live, it has Wi-Fi, and they serve alcohol.  I mean those are all the requirements of a place that I can sit at and ramble about nothing for long periods of time.  So let the rambling commence.

First, it’s October.  I am going to be 33 years old in exactly 17 days (or is it 16?  I never figured out whether to count the days inclusively or not).  33.  That’s a big fucking number.  I had a plan for 33 at one point in my life.  You know, I’ve had a plan for a lot of different numbers in my life.   Man, if everyone knew the plans for each of those numbers… Anyhow, I’m digressing… Actually I’m not.  Actually I need a refill of my tasty Mojito (we can all thank Robert on getting me hooked on this crappy drink)… Then I shall continue… Ok,  back with my tasty beverage (well the bartender is making it so close enough).  33.  I had plans for other numbers… 16 was one.  18 was another.  23… that was a biggy.  But none bigger than 26.  Those who know me know what 26 was all about and glad I didn’t keep that plan heh… then there was 31.  And now there is 33.  Honestly, it’s not big deal;  Like I said, I’ve always had a plan for some random number of  years I’ve been alive.  Now to the point;  Each of these numbers, each of these plans.  They were meaningless, well maybe not meaningless, but you had your entire lifetime in front of you to figure out what you wanted to change; what you wanted to move towards;  Now?  I’ve been working at the same company for 11 years.  Doing the same type of work and moving up when things worked out.  Still enjoying the type of work I do, just less tolerant of the crap that sometimes comes with it.  I own more property than I care to keep track of.  Have more responsibility then I care to respond to.  And frankly, there isn’t much changing left to do… I’ve spent the last 32 years laying down groundwork, to basically end up exactly where I am now;  Almost exactly as I planned.  Working hard, partying harder.  Don’t get me wrong;  This isn’t some self wallowing whining bullshit about my life.  I think my life is awesome for the most part.  But its a realization; a self realization that things are what they are;  and for better or worse, there really isn’t change coming… the real question is, is that a good or bad thing?

Ok, enough about that.  Second thing.  Seriously guys are fucking jackasses lol.  Some background.  I love going clubbing/dancing.  Only at certain places though… There are clubs that I go to that people go to and they just dance.  I love those places… I’m all about the music and all about dancing.  But then, you go to someplace like LSC or Trinity, and they are fucking meat markets and you realize how pathetically desperate some guys are.  Which brings me to now.  It is now 12:48am and I’m listening to this guy talk to this girl and he seems so interested in what shes saying when no one in god names can be this excited over some show they have never seen (and isn’t really that good to start with… Dexter is the show in question ;) … Body language is fun to watch though… It’s funny, when you watch a girl flirt with a guy.. like laughing at stupid jokes, playing with her hair etc… its endearing.  But when you have a guy hanging on every word and every gesture she is making, its pathetic.  Is that hypocritical?  Oh my god, the fucking guy just gasped… seriously.  Anyhow, does that make it hypocritical?  I dunno…. I guess its not cause girls flirt cause they choose to… (random statement, the guy just goes “what a great show!” just from hearing a synopsis… seriously?!?) … anyhow, back to my thought, its not pathetic when a girl does it.  She chooses to do it… she has options, and chooses that this is the person that they want to flirt with.  While with guys… seriously, they do it constantly trying to win the statistics game… sad sad state of affairs.

Yeah, so that’s about it.  Its getting to be that time… one more shot, and its off to home and bed.  Let’s end with a list of things I want for my bday so people that are reading can feel free to send me shit.

Richies bday wants!

• Canon 5d mark ii
• Canon 24-70 L lens
• 14 1tb HDs (need to replace my stupid raid array)
• 58” Panasonic Plasma (no I don’t need a TV but what the hell)
• 6 series BMW (lol)
• Cheerleader (grin this is only here for lindsey to shake at her at me for)
• and lastly, if I really had a bday wish… super powers… I haven’t decided which power, but I guess Peters since it means I can have any power! :)

R

Photography…

This is just a quick blurb, but I just realized I haven't added any new photos since 5/24/2008 when took some pictures from CLloyds wedding.  Crazy... No drunk pictures, no July 4th pics, nothing!  Definitely need to fix that.  Luckily for me, we will be heading out to Vegas tomorrow, so, with my little Canon SD600 (yes I need to upgrade) and Vegas waiting, we should have lots of pictures soon.

Let's see, the only other interesting thing that's happened is getting an iPhone.  Again, not that interesting.  But really, there are lots of fun apps on that thing.  Oh! And last weekend, we wall mounted our plasma, but alas, we didn't take before and after pictures so there's nothing to show for it.  Bah.

Anyhow, that's really it, will blog from Vegas!

Quick Update

Since it's been a while since I wrote an entry.  Let's see what's going on...

Brix is almost complete.  They are due to finish in August, or so they say.  So it's time to figure out either how to move into the place, or how to sell it.  Either way, it'd be nice to get that off my plate of things to deal with.

North Bend is still a pain in the ass.  For those who don't know.  I have a lease option gone awry out there.   I need the tenant to either purchase the place or get out of it so I can sell it.  Either option is going to take a crap load of my time.

Lake Stevens is still on the market, but I really don't care how long it's on the market for.  The place is +600 monthly on cashflow so whatever.  I do need to figure out rent checks there though.  I hate bookkeeping.  I need to hire someone to do it all for me so I don't have to deal with any of it meh!

Bryan is a cluster frack (yes, you like how I substituted BSG lingo in there!?) ... We just put all 3 units on sale and I'm just hoping we get out of the deal non-net-negative.  This is the first deal I've done with Will and I'd hate to frack it up.  At least Lindsey and I have a working property double meh!

Redmond lease is running out in December which is a good and bad thing.  Good news is, its way under price in terms of rent, but bad news is, its nice to have something consistent.  On the other hand, my parents are retiring this year, and this could be a nice place for them to stay.

Wow, what a boring post... I ended up talking about real estate bleah... guess thats just what I had on my mind at the time.  And now, its tomorrow cause I never finished.  So I will just post this and add more fun stuff later :)

BTW, just went and saw Wanted.  Kick ass...

Back from Scottsdale, AZ

Ok so I'm going to go on again and say how cool Windows Live Writer is because right now, I'm on the flight back and I can put all my fun thoughts down before I forget them.  So, we're going to break this down into 4 main sections.  <note to self, update with a picture or two at description points... wish i had an usb cable!>

First, and most annoying is I lost my fucking sunglasses... seriously, those things were no more than a month old.  Now I have to go out to the store and drop another 200 bucks on another pair of sunglasses.  I don't mind spending money but in the last few years, spending money on sunglasses has been the most dreaded things cause they keep getting destroyed, lost, stolen or chewed up by the dogs.  So hopefully, Sunglass Hut will have some sympathy and let me recoup some cost with their replacement plans.

Secondly, funny quotes... the first is from Joe.  We're sitting around talking about movies and we ended up talking about Braveheart.  So let me give you some background on Joe.  All trip he would deny his involvement with things because of his man card membership (like really, what card carrying member of the man club would watch Pretty Woman and enjoy it?! ;)... Anyhow, we start talking about Braveheart cause of some bag pipe player on the golf course (which incidentally was amazing!  wish I a) brought my clubs b) didn't have a hurt arm and back and c) played golf well enough to go out there solo) and he goes and says how that's his favorite movie and it makes him cry every time.  But these were not normal tears, these were "huge drops of man tears".  So from now on, I shall only have huge drops of man tears, nothing else!  The second funny quote is from uhhh... I actually don't know her name, but we were all getting into a group photo and the photographer starts snapping away, and out of the blue I hear, "Don't worry Amber, we'll photoshop you a guy in later" ... Nearly lost it, it was that funny.

  Thirdly, clubs in Scottsdale blew!  We hit a couple of places and it just wasn't what I imagined especially with all the trouble the ASU cheerleaders get into ;) ... Either way, we did meet one other cool couple there but we lamed out and flaked on them after the wedding.   Other than that, it was dead.  Word has it the students were all out of there for the summer thus it was only the locals left.  Oh well!

And lastly, the ceremony was lovely and I couldn't be happier for my friends Claire and Lloyd.   I think I'm the only one remaining in our core group of friends here in Seattle that isn't married.  Not sure how I feel about that yet, but right now, I'm not sure I care.  USC is next weekend with BT and Tiesto coming to town!  Gonna rock.

And in closing, it was a great trip except for the lost sunglasses and the weather.  Will have to make up a dinner to Lindsey cause it was her b-day and she was a good sport about it.  With that, peace out will have the pictures up from the trip shortly!!

It's mothers day… meh…

Couldn't really think of a better title believe it or not... So here I sigh at Bauhaus with my double tall, non fat, sugar free vanilla latte... Mouthful isn't it?!  Anyhow, it's been one of those weekends.  Not only did I know accomplish jack shit but I think I did more damage than good on this weekend.  But frankly, I don't feel like talking about that right now;  hell, I don't even wanna think about it right now, thus why I am sitting at Bauhaus.

Let's see what has happened lately... Work was rough this week.  We had to do presentations on Friday and we prepped them all week.  There is something about demos and presentations that make people wait to the last minute to do them which means, at the VERY last minute you will re-order, and that of course leads to the inevitable fact that 10 minutes before you go on, your demo will be in jeopardy of breaking.  And as if on clockwork, all those things happened, in that exact order.  Oh well, no big, it all went down fine and it was tight.

Oh, tech blog that I was going to do.  First off, I did set up the hotspot by my Starbucks and I've already had a handful of people register to use it.  I thought it would be a difficult process but there are people way smarter than me out there and many people like me that have done it.  So all I really had to do was install CoovaAP on my wrt54g, an d  configure some pages, fix a bug (which hopefully will make it into their next build, if not, just search their forums for RFC compliant for SMTP and you'll see the workaround).  So yeah, that's it.  Install, configure, and plug in.  The only problem is I don't have the saturation I want that far away, so I'm going to get a bigger antenna when I save up some money.

What else, oh I have a wedding come up in like 2 weeks.  Should be a fun trip.  We'll be headed to Arizona for Claire and Lloyd's (CLloyd for short) wedding.  Never been there so it should be an interesting trip.

Oh well, I really think that's about it.  Let me insert a random picture into here and we shall end this post ;)

Different blogging software

This is just a test of a different blogging software called ecto. Not sure I like it or not but just wanted to make a post to test. Will try posting from this tomorrow morning at Starbucks :)

Wow it worked, but man, does my blog look bad using Safari! What''s up with that! Its barely tolerable and only slight more readable! Bah!

Working from Starbucks this morning…

So there's two things I really despise... One is bad drivers.  Luckily I didn't really run into one of those this morning.  So that's not what I'm going to bitch about.  It's the second thing; and it's two fold, and that's places with Internet connectivity that feel the need to charge and the fact that from where I'm sitting I can see 14 different wi-fi networks and can't get on a single one.  Now, I'm all for Internet safety and shit, but seriously, someone just open your damn AP up;  Spend 20 bucks and get an old router and put up an isolated hotspot.  Hell, you know what, just because of this (and the fact that I live less then a block from a Starbucks), I'm going to build a free hotspot at my place for people to use.  I'll just have to figure out how to throttle the bandwidth and I'll make people leave me little messages telling me how awesome of an idea it is before I give them a free login and password.

I really should start blogging about interesting technology stuff.  I mean I spend so many hours dicking around with technology I should save my findings so when I come across a problem I can search my own damn blog for the answer.  For example, I'm trying to prep for Windows Server 2008 and for some reason, the VPC image I built is just horribly slow and non-responsive.  I actually figured out how to get IIS to work with UNC shares just to find out that it didn't properly return pages.  And now, I'm starting all over from scratch.  Oh well what can you do.  Looks like Lindsey is going to score me some Internet access so time to do some work.

Oh, one last thought.  I need to find out how to xfer my blog drafts and copies from one copy of WLW and another.  Wonder if that's possible hmm...  Sounds like the first Tech post I make after I figure it out ;)

Oh, oh and one more thought (see this is what happens when you don't have instant access to post, you have to keep adding on).  I need to build out the stupid free wifi spot at my place so I'll definitely make a post about the easiest way to do that.

So its not that I'm not posting

It's just that I've made a few posts, saved them locally, and then decide to never finish them!  Let's see what's been going on.

Sasha/Digweed was AWESOME.  The pics are still on the little camera so once I get time I'll get them online.  Reminds me of how awesome clubs were back in the days.  Makes clubbing lately less then idea though.  Oh well, what can you do.

Lindsey and I took a drive to Vashon Island last weekend and that was pretty cool.  You can find pictures of the drive in the Gallery section.  Funniest thing to see the little Kola Bear run full speed after some birds, dive into the freezing water and then swimming his ass back to shore.  I swear I was afraid I had to go after him for a second or so.  It was one of those slow motion things where you see an action, in this case, Kola jump full speed into the water, and then you see your self doing something stupid.... in my case, figuring out what to do with the camera equipment I had on me, figuring out whether I should ditch my shoes or not, etc... all in the span of about 1.5 seconds.  Luckily little man is a good swimmer so he made it back to shore just fine.  But, next time we'll be a little more aware of his speedy nature.  We've never seen the little guy move that fast!

Hmm let's see what else... Oh I so need a new camera.  My stupid 10d is so out of date bah!  I finally went and sold all the "junk" I had laying around the house... old cell phones, portable DVD player, my turn tables (which I actually miss the most).  Now I've got some spare cash laying around, i just need to decide what to do with it!  New Camera?  A Macbook?  An air conditioner for the summer (lindsey's idea :) ...

Speaking of macbooks.... the osx86 scene is awesome.  I'm actually in the process of installing it on my main machine at home.  Of course it is a dreadfully painful process.  I've toasted a bunch of media already and spent over 20 hours on the sucker already.  And no, its still not working!  Must admit though, its a fun little thing to burn time with.

Anyhow, I had more to babble about but my  stupid computer is giving me fits so I gotta see whassup with that.. pfffft....

WLW actually has me posting more!

Seriously... WTF... I get some stupid little program and I actually post more?!  Anyhow, I was doing some research on HDR photography today, and in doing so, it made me bust out my camera and get images off the card.  And in doing so I found some pictures that were left over from Iowa visiting with Lindsey's family.  So this post is to say nothing more than, go look at my Gallery and see where I spent my Christmas.  It was cold and dark, and cold, and dark :)

Actually the worse thing that happened while I was there;  We were out "partying" in one out of two places that were open that night and while walking to an after party, I slipped on the frozen sidewalk and broke a rib or something.  That hurt for weeks!  Almost as funny... Lindsey was drunk and thought she was calling a friend of one of the people we were with;  Turns out she called her mom, who didn't know she drank.  So, when she stumbled home and started crawling up the stairs, her mom walks out.  It was priceless...

Anyhow, that's all.  I'll make another post once I figure out this HDR stuff!

Windows Live Writer – Reason to start blogging?

Ok, so I actually made a really log post here... (really I did), but in my infinite wisdom, I somehow deleted it while trying to make updates.  So instead of trying to recreate it I will now just write some other random thoughts!

First off, the reason I'm even in my blog right now is cause I wanted to try Windows Live Writer.  Now the first REALLY annoying thing is the lack of auto spell correct.  MS Word already has it, just give me the same features!  Capitalize my I's for me... Fix my poor spelling!  Seems pretty easy.  I must admit though, this thing has some pretty cool features, such as inserting photos and linking them properly.

Like this picture of Lindsey and Colie with me from last weekend?  Or weekend before, I can't ever remember things like that.  Sure is fun though.  Now if only I can get the stupid text to wrap around the picture like I want to then all would perfect.  Oh look there it goes... Wonder how I did that :)  Oh well guess we just keep writing and figure it out later.

Let's see what else is going on.  Oh yeah, I'm sick as a dog right now.  This cough and sore through won't go away which is making it impossible to get any sleep or get anything done.

Oh well, what can you do.  BTW, here is a link to said activities from said night.  Speaking of random things, new episodes of shows come on next week!  Thank god.  Was getting so sick of reruns.    Oh another thing going on is Rockband.  I swear, its the only game I've ever seen that girls actually like to play.  Both Lindsey and Caley have put in a good 30 hours into the game in the last week it seems.  Crazy.  Oh well, anyhow, that's all with this post. I had inserted a map earlier, but what exactly is the point?  I guess I will put up a picture of Caley cause she was complaining that Colie was on here and she wasn't... muhahahah.  Man she's going to love that pictures!

Peace out...