Good Morning World

Going to work 2 hours early today. I don't do mornings well so this is interesting. I usually don't get up until 8:15 and work starts at 9. Have to be there so the wiring guys can finish installing our Fiber network!

I don't know how I worked on Altered for a month! I had to leave every day around 6:30 in order to get there before 8. I was late ONE day because my alarm didn't go off and I never lived it down.

Winblows on OSX

I'm installing Windows XP on Mac OSX. I just feel all sorts of wrong right now.

Money Idea's

Courtney and I are currently in the process of trying to find new ways to make money from home or outside of work. Courtney will be staying home after the baby is born so we will be struggling for awhile with money. Especially since my company dropped the insurance plan that we could afford this year. I applied yesterday to iStockPhoto to try to sell my photo's on their site. I'm sure I'll get approved, I just don't know if my photo's are in high demand or not. I will probably have to go out every few weekends to maintain new photos. Or at least photograph objects or SOMETHING. I could probably find some neat things to photograph from garage sales and stuff.

But enough of that. We're also looking at starting an eBay store. What we would sell is none of your business at the moment. Once we have those details worked out and the store started I will be glad to tell you, so you can buy what I am selling :p

Frankly, where I work is in the business of people starting businesses. I should probably take advantage of that, even if it means working my butt off for awhile. If it become successful we won't have to worry about paying our bills for awhile. I would like to have something rolling before Makayla is born. That means we have about 2 months to get started.

Furthermore I still have freelance. I might register a business name soon for a design company and start putting myself out there. Retetched.com just isn't enough right now and the design of the site isn't that good. I could do better for sure. I'm also looking at getting Adobe Certified. But I know that costs a bit of money and would take a lot of time to study. But if I could do it I would get certified in Photoshop, After Effects and Illustrator. I know Photoshop the best and AE/AI so so. Could be some strong key points for my future career, though. Even if I somehow make a lot of money online and don't have to keep working I won't give it up. I would not drop my passion and I love my job. I really do. I love designing. I get payed to be creative, which is fucking awesome. Please excuse my words, I've made it a point to not curse on this blog but that's how I feel about my line of work. Not many people can say they enjoy their job and even half the people that do, don't have the luxury of growth or sometimes job security. With all the new video technology and new products coming out all the time I never have to worry about getting phased out. Nor do I worry about all the kids getting pushed through college for "design". So what if they can move around in an applications and click some buttons. Anyone can do that. The trick is to make it fresh, innovative and original. If a design doesn't get your attention it is bad. I'm not saying all my stuff is great because I don't think it is. I'm still learning every day I go to work. I'll still be learning for the rest of my life.

My point is it takes a lot and I'm confident in my future, just very nervous about staying afloat in these next few months leading into next year.

Humble Beginnings

I was checking out this website earlier today. It basically has a log of all/most the websites on the internet according to date. So you can search websites and see what they said and looked like all the way back to 1996 or so. I went through Apple.com's progression and that was pretty interesting. The top notch computers 9 years ago is like 1/100th of the processor power we have now.

Apple is not what really caught my eye, though. I decided to give Google.com a search. It pulled up this page from back in 1998. Google was created by 2 students at Stanford University. Sergey Brin and Larry Page now (seemingly) own the world! From humble beginnings they created this centuries "wheel". I use so many Google applications day to day. Google Earth, Picasa, Gmail, Google Maps, Google Analytics, Youtube, Myspace, etc. etc. Google is worth billions and the 2 that created it are worth $14 billion a piece. Yet they keep there yearly salary at $1. Even Blogger (what you're on right now) is owned by Google. I would also like to work for them. Currently about 13,748 full-time employees work for Google. They have video game rooms in there office. They encourage their engineers to spend 20% of there payed work time to pursue their own interests. WTF. That's 1 day a work week. Google is in Websters Dictionary. That does it. I need to create a company that is defined in the dictionary. All in all... this was actually a really interesting read and I'm glad I looked at it. If I could amount to just an 1/1000th of their success I would be a very very happy man.

In other news... These just came in today.

YAY OMG LMAOROTFL YAY!

Late Nights

My schedule is pretty messed up. I shouldn't be up right now and Courtney's going to kill me for it but I can't help that I haven't been tired at night.

I've been staying up until 12ish the past few nights. Tonight I fell asleep the moment I walked in the door. I usually can't ever do that. These days have been taking a lot out of me. I slept for about 2 hours. 6 to 8 or so. Got up and wound up getting dinner around 9:30 :p Got Burger King for Court and Taco Bell for myself. BK gave Courtney a purple icee instead of the Coke kind so I just went to 711 a few minutes ago to get her a Coke slurpee. She likes to freeze the drink sometimes and eat it later. She told me earlier not to go anywhere but I did. Got myself an energy drink for the morning because I know I'll need it!

My friend Sarah just sent me a few of the albums on my list so that's good. I've been collecting myself but some of the bands are really hard to find. My friend Dusty is going to have a few for me this week too.

Work has been moderately good. My manager, Matt announced that he's retiring from Worldwide Brands at the end of the month :( - I wouldn't know Photoshop like I do if it wasn't for him. He gave me a tutorial a long while back for Photoshop 6/7 when I wanted to color in a drawing. From there I started learning the application and that got myself where I am today. That was about 4 or 5 years ago. I didn't think he'd become my boss back then :p Long story short... he's a great guy and I really enjoyed working with him. I've learned a lot from him and he has from me. I hope he stays in touch while he pursues his own business (:

On the work front, our server solution is getting close. We got one of the XServe Raids today from Fedex. We expect the computers and the rest of the XServes this week sometime. Every time the door bell rings at work my heart races because I think it might be the FedEx guy with our new computuers! He comes nearly every day lately because we've ordered so much. By the end we'll probably be best friends. Just kidding.

Nothing else is really new. It's August and most of Courtney's families birthdays are this month so we ate with her family yesterday and Sunday. Which reminds me that we need to go grocery shopping to get more food for dinner soon.

Now I am tired. So I shall conclude this blog and I promise I'll make a better one next time!

Good Times

Apple Incorporated bought me lunch yesterday. Let me backtrack, we're setting up a new server solution at work from Apple which I won't go into detail about yet because it's not setup and I don't want to jinx the process. Just excited. A representative came in from Apple to talk about what we need to do and how we need to setup. He took us to lunch before the location scout and we talked about procedures and all. We ate at Sam Snead's. First time I ate there.. was pretty good. Only problem is I already ate lunch so I couldn't possibly eat much. I stuck to a salad. I'll go into details about the equipment in two weeks after it's all said and done. We need to finish our "Asia" project first, which is a mess. Our company went to Asia earlier this year to shoot and interview people about importing product from Asia. Unfortunately there was no set script so we're trying to just fit things together and having to cover a lot with b-roll and motion graphics. It's been a process. We should finish this week. We'll be setting up the following week. Yay!

In other news... I thought this was pretty cool. It's called the "Reactable".

This is awesome. It uses physical modules to manage sounds, filters and loops. I would love to get my hands on this for a few hours. Kind of reminds me of Microsoft Surface. I'm telling you this kind of stuff is the future.

*UPDATE*

I just wanted to add that it's been as hot as sin outside lately. Not even hot, just very very muggy. Like bad. I just took some boxes to the dumpster at 11:30pm and I still broke a sweat just walking to my car. I'm not that fat and those boxes were empty.

Finished the Nursery (and other news)

This blog has been very hard to post on account of my cable modem dropping out on me every few minutes tonight. Photos are being very difficult to upload when I can't stay connected more than two minutes. I'm going to be up late tonight. Every time you see an asterisk it's because my modem dropped (again).

*The dresser I ordered on eBay came in yesterday. It came in perfect condition, the right color and all. It came in two boxes that I had to dolly over from the front office to my 3rd story apartment (no elevators here). I don't know if any of you have tried to lift a heavy* object up 3 flights of stairs or not... but it's pretty hard. Once I got it upstairs and started assembling things got a little more interesting. For some reason "Simplicity for Children" decided to package old instructions with a newer version of their dresser. Normally this wouldn't be a problem but they illustrated completely different pieces than what really was supposed to go. Another problem is all the pieces seemed to interlock into ANY place you put them. Normally furniture is manufactured so you can't make mistakes like putting the middle divider piece on a main support area for the whole thing. I had to disassemble and reassemble parts of the dresser 3 or 4 times. It also took 3 or 4 times longer to build. Today the second dresser arrived. I had no problems with this one except they didn't put the pilot holes in the backs of the dresser drawers so it was pretty difficult to screw the boards in with cracking the wood. Other than this, dresser assembly was a successful project. This was also an integral part for the completion of the nursery.*

Since we got the dressers in, we got to finish this nursery today. Or at least get as close as we could to completing it. I'd say it's 98% there. After I got the dressers in place I put up the themed pictures and then we did the finishing touch. We painted our "letters" and put them over the crib. Putting those letters on the wall* was like a christening the room. It is officially Makayla Malta's room. I knew it was right when after I put them up and Courtney exclaimed "awwwwwwww!". That's how you know she likes something. So the nursery is almost finally finished. We just need to get her chair* that she can rock on, but it's not a rocking chair, mind you. It has a foot stool. It's like a gliding chair. Gliding chairs are two-fold better than rocking chairs. (I'm growing sick of restarting my modem) I'll be happy once we move the cable modem and router into the living room so it's not in the nursery anymore. Then it will feel complete.

On another note; at our office we have baby ducklings we've been watching for a few weeks. We know they will grow up to be ugly Muscovy Ducks, but what can you do? They're cute now and they waddle. I will leave you with ha picture of the ducklings. I'm sick* and tired of restarting my modem now. I haven't even uploaded all my pictures yet so I have to save this and try to upload pictures before I can finish!*

**UPDATE**
I just wanted to say, after I finished this post I realized that my modem and router share the same power cable input. Therefore I believe the modem was suffering from sort of a power deficiency and was basically getting stuck in a restart cycle. It's been fine since I switched the power cables... *gets embarrassed*

Also I have a site up for my music collection... It's a wish list of albums I would like and I will check off the bands as I complete them. I'm asking for help... if you happen to have any of the albums hook a brotha up! I will even give credit if asked to do so! Thanks.

Target, eBay & Updates!

Sorry I haven't updated in a few days. Been kind of busy with work and such. Haven't done much this week until today.

Today we went back to Target and this time with a plan. To make a long story short... we got 150 jars of baby food, 3 pairs of baby pants, 1 shirt and $30 worth of diapers. Our total bill was $117, we left only paying $16 (: The sixteen dollars basically payed for the clothes and a pack of diapers. I will say though, the poor cashier kid had to put in 50 coupons by hand. He probably hates me, but at least he has a story to tell his friends. "Some crazy guy came into the store today..."

eBay. I'm going to talk about eBay now. I have successfully sold two text books for an accumulative amount of $1.04. I know they are worth more than that but oh well. I sold those about 2 weeks ago. Now for the interesting part; For our baby shower my family was going to buy our dressers we wanted for the nursery. They're not horribly over priced at about $230 per dresser and they match our furniture. We know they're sturdy and be put to good use for years to come. That being said, certain family didn't want to buy said furniture ahead of time in case they go out of stock or something. What are the chances? Well I'll tell you, the chances are very good. In fact, they are so good that one of our dressers went completely out of stock until February 2008. Back to eBay. We were frantically searching the internet for anyone that might have one of these dressers. We got "out of stock" from over 10 retailers. Our hopes were fading when we came across the ONE and only auction on eBay for this "golden dresser". It started at $1.00 and only had one other bidder. I outbid him at $50. He outbid me to $100, I went to a maximum bid of $150 (eBay automatically bids for you until it reaches your maximum, other users can't see this). He went to $130 and stopped. I was afraid he might "snipe" and try to outbid me in the last 30 seconds. I was not about to let that happen! I had two computers in front of me, one hand was hitting refresh on the browser while the other one was on the second computer ready to place a bid up to the store price of the unit ($240). It felt like my heart was about to explode from the anticipation. Alas! I won the bid! Hands down! $100 cheaper than store price! The dresser is supposed to arrive tomorrow, so I shall let you know if it came in one piece, if it's the right color and what the condition is. The seller is very highly esteemed on eBay with over 6,000 positive feedbacks (98% of the total feedback). We ordered the second dresser because we found it with free shipping, so each unit cost us about $230. We had to pay outrageous shipping for the eBay auction but it panned out.

Last week we also got the rest of the blankets for the crib, so that's done. Decorations should be near finished this week as we have letters ready to be painted and mounted on the wall and decorations ready to hang. We have the lamp and the window curtain. Last piece of furniture we need to get is the rocking chair for Courtney. We might get a book case from Target. (no, we can't get coupons for that!)

In other news, work is going well. Brian and I are about to finish a project (or two) this week and in the following week are looking forward to some massive upgrades to our video & design system with the latest and greatest technology to make our jobs easier and more efficient. We have a lot of bottlenecks in our work-flow right now and can potentially get things done faster in the very near future once our gear all comes in. I'll probably make a tech-geek blog about it when it's all setup. Right now all I have to say is "xServe" (x2).

Now some photos...

"Todays Target Run"

ABUSE the system!

So last night we decided to go use and abuse the system. The Target system! We needed to start stocking up on baby food so Courtney discovered the wonders of money saving through "coupons". These said coupons are a wonder. We had hoped to save over 80% of our money. I love the internet. We printed 56 coupons and they look fantastic. Worth the ink and paper I say.

As we left for Target we couldn't help but feel like bandits, about to get away with a bank robbery. We cautiously entered the store, keeping our eyes open for a manager. To secure the deal I found customer service center and asked if we could use more than one coupon on multiple products. He said yes, in turn this made us feel better about stealing from a large corporation. Truly, this felt very illegal and immoral.

Once we found the glorious baby food jars (and tubs) we started loading up. We had only gotten about half way done and felt like we couldn't possibly get more, thus we were only half way there. You can't help but feel nervous when you know you're stocking up on food with a long shelf life for only pennies a product. Each jar cost $0.52. Our coupons vouched that we can get 2 jars, then get $1 off. This means we spend $1.04, get a dollar off, then spend $0.04 for two jars! We keep loading up.

Cart, Half-way full...

After about 35 minutes of filling our cart we finally make it to the cashier. We made sure to choose someone that looked nice. We went for an older lady with out anybody in line. Fortunately the particular Target we went to was quiet. Upon presenting the amount of food we had filled our cart with (which didn't entirely fit on the entire length of the conveyor belt) we asked if she can take coupons. She asks "How many?". Out of my pocket I pull out a pile 56 coupons all nice and organized in the order which she should scan them. Our total at this point was about $90. By the time we got rang up for the initial total Courtney had left because she found the situation to be funny! I was left standing there with someone behind me in line, patiently waiting for the cashier to scan through 56 pieces of paper that didn't exactly scan with ease. Meanwhile Courtney is off giggling in an aisle just out of eye-site. I do forgive her, as we were in fact robbing the store with little pieces of paper. We left with spending $15 for all things Gerber. 150 jars of baby food, 2 boxes of baby rice, 2 boxes of finger foods and a 44 pack of Huggies. We did not have a coupon for the $10 pack of diapers. Our receipt was a mile long. Well, at least 10ft, actually.

We had done it! We got away with it! Now we have to carry these up 3 flights of stairs to our apartment and then blog about it :(

Just kidding, I don't mind blogging. Admittedly, we did not do as well as some of Courtney's online mommy cohorts. I have heard stories about people that make a plan of attack, and wind up being owed money by Target. $12 to be specific. We go again this weekend to a different location (preferably a Super-Target) to try this tactic again. Only this time, we are to formulate a plan and buy precisely what we mean to. No longer are we amateurs. We will rise and conquer the free baby food! Some of these vouchers do end this weekend, so we must be swift, quick to the punch.

Poor Car

My poor Jeep. Courtney hates it right now. Anyways; it has been a crazy weekend. Friday we left work early to check out a day-care (which we didn't like at all) then went to go to her aunt's surprise birthday party. We got about half-way there and my front / right brake locked up. My caliper broke (for the 4th time) and locked up my brake on the Turnpike. I couldn't go over 40 so I decided to pull over. I was feeling some vibrations earlier on in the trip, so I was expecting something. Her parents happened to be about 5 minutes behind us so they stopped and we sat under a bridge on the Florida Turnpike for over an hour waiting for the tow truck. Half the trip with the tow truck was covered by my insurance, thankfully. We all wound up just going to dinner then going home instead of going to the party because it took so long.

The next morning wasn't so good. Got a call from the dealership I had to leave it at.. they had to replace both my front calipers and re-surface my rotors and drain my brake lines in order to do all of this. That cost $750. AUGH! We don't have that kind of money right now, (thank you medical bills). My dad decided to help out this time and we're thankful.

I do have to say, though, I have never had any problems with the engine. I've had misc. problems with sensors, relays and my brakes. All the sort of stuff that goes bad after normal wear and tear, but never has my engine itself had any problems. If that was the case I'd get rid of it but now I no longer have to worry about my calipers because they are a "new" type that won't fail. *rolls eyes* I wish they had fixed that before. Because this apparently, was a known issue. The only thing left to fix on it at the moment is some stupid a/c line that is leaking into the passenger side floor. I have no idea why it's doing that, and when I took it in awhile ago they couldn't trace the problem, because it didn't happen.

After we got my car back we ran some errands. We went to Baskin Robins and got ice cream. Well, she did. I got a smoothie. Then we went to the Target and ran into her aunt who we were supposed to go to the party for. We couldn't find what we wanted so we went to Babies 'R Us and got the mattress we needed for the crib. We don't suspect people are going to buy us much off our registry. Everyone just keeps wanting to buy clothes. We already have enough clothes and NEED stuff off our registry. We keep trying to tell people that but they don't seem to listen. Oh well. Courtney will be out of work for awhile so life will be harder if we have to buy most of that stuff ourselves, but we're still trying to save. She won't be going back to work because day-care is too expensive. Well, at least she won't be going back to Worldwide Brands. She might start waitressing 3 nights a week so I can watch the baby after work. I won't charge to watch my daughter (: She made more waitressing most of the time anyways. It's not exactly steady and doesn't have all the benefits of an office, but what can you do? We will survive. We are thinking of starting an eBay store, which people can live off of. Hell, it has to do directly with my business so why not?

Today we just relaxed. Watched some movies. Courtney's taking a nap and I just finished cleaning up. Making ribss in the crock pot today. Smells like ribs! Can't wait to eat! Then we have to go to work tomorrow :( Where did the weekend go?

Converse!

So yesterday we got Makayla's crib! (slide show is at the bottom). We also received the lamp, some sheets, and a blankie. Which I will probably share some of photos of later. We also got some baby Converses, which I LOVE. Cute.

Just as a side note, I certainly hope this blog has been accessible and the least bit interesting to read. I am really trying to keep updating at a steady pace. It's not always easy! Anyways, back to the point of this.

So we got the crib, it took about 45 - 60 minutes to put together. It went together pretty solid and I'm confident it will bear the weight of my child. I'm more concerned with safety more than ever before! Anything and everything better be safe and solid. I didn't skip out on any steps for this one. As I may have for a certain desk or something...

Despite the manual labor of wiring and painting and building; the room is coming together really well now. The fact that the baby is on the way feels very real now. We only have about 3 months left until the day. Between now and then Courtney and I have to decide what she will do for work since day-care around here is outrageously expensive.

And now, for some pictures!


PS: I DO have a picture of the lamp on here, it's just not assembled