Turning 25

I don’t know what there is to say. I’m older. I got some awesome stuff. I went on a treasure hunt. Enjoy some pictures from the event . I’ll have more info on a few of these items when I get a chance.

Kerry got me a huge BBQ, this thing rocks like you wouldn’t believe!

The sign reads “Beware: Poker Players and Loose Women Are Known to Frequent This establishment” (From Keith)

USB Controlled Missle Launcher. Hell Yes. (From Meghan).

My parents got me a new desk chair, but sent me on a treasure hunt to find it first.

http://www.vimeo.com/1051802

Birthday Wishlist

My brithday is May 21st! Woohoo!

I have an Amazon Wishlist that you can go look at, but although Amazon would have you think otherwise, they dont have EVERYTHING. so take a look through my wishlist, but realize that there are more things, or more information below.

Geek Gadgets

I’ve always thought the iRobot Roomba were cool and now with the second generation (something like the iRobot Roomba 4210 Discovery Vacuuming Robot) they really seem to be pretty good little cleaners. They are a bit pricy though, and unfortunately I don’t think getting one used is the answer.

I could really use a larger USB memory key. I like the one I’ve got, but I’m constantly filling it up (its 2GB). Lexar has a new larger one out that I’d really like to have: 8GB Jumpdrive Firefly JDFF8GB-431

All my geek gadgets need a garage

For the home/apt

There are a few things that I would really like to get for the apartment, that I haven’t for some reason or another. A few of these things you’ll probably want to just tell me, and we can both go pick it. Some of them I have specifics with maybe some ifs, ands or buts.

A new office chair would be greatly appreciated. I think I’ve had the same one for at least 6 years now and its getting tired. I recently went on a shopping journey for work looking for an office chair at a reasonable price that I liked so I’ve done quite a bit of butt tests and determined that the Office Depot Baymont Black Leather High-Back Chair (#735854190477) is the chair for me. The Office Depot in Folsom has them for $130 (its almost $200 online) and when I was in there a few days ago they had quite a few left.

A stand up BBQ, something like the one in this picture (haha, just kidding… something like this)

I still would like to get the headboard that matches the rest of my furniture. Target still sells it online.

A larger, possibly wrap around couch. Used is great, Craig’s list for the win on this one. I just don’t want to do the searching myself . Something like this (example only) is the kind of shape I’m looking for, it needs to fit in the apartment.

Computer & Electronics

I’d like to have a harmony remote for the bedroom as well. The Harmony 880, 890 or 550 are all fine. OR you could get the Harmony 1000 and I’ll put that in the living room and move the 880 to the bedroom. Used is actually OK with me, as long as its not abused.

Another Dell 24″ monitor would be really sweet. Although, to be honest. I’m not sure if I could give you any practical reason for it. It would just generally kick ass.

An HD TiVo would tickle me pink. It also serves as a gift to Kerry too, since she’ll probably be using it more than me.

24 Years in the Making

24 years ago, on this day a child was born. Out of a world of darkness and silence, the child brought hope to millions. That child was me, and now, nearly a quarter of a century later, the world is a better place, and there is to be celebrations all over the world.

Haha. Just kidding. But today IS my birthday, and so its a day of celebration for me anyway.

Yesterday I had a BBQ out at the Folsom City Park with a bunch of my friends, many of whom I hadn’t seen in a while so I was very glad to have seen them. To the surprise of a few people here at work, I didn’t go out drinking at all this weekend (I suppose maybe I am getting old…). I really just enjoyed the day spent with friends.

Tonight I’m headed up to my parents house to spend the evening with Family.

Jumping back to Friday, Cody and Becca invited a group of us over to their new place for some burgers and beers and a little bit of Disc Golf HORSE. I’m proud to say I came in 2nd and gave Cody what I hope was a run for his money in the game.

Going back even further (yeah, this post is in reverse). The lady still has yet to call me…

Amazon Wishlist Plugin

Chadd had asked me a while back for a birthday wishlist, I hadn’t responded back to him yet because I wanted to try to get my Amazon wishlist directly on my blog. And thanks to a slightly tweaked version of the Amazon Wishlist Plugin by Ryan Prins I am proud to present My Amazon Wishlist kindly formatted to match the rest of my site.

Slightly tweaked you ask? Well although this plugin does an awesome job of getting my amazon wishlist, it did it with pages and in a markup I found difficult to format. So I created a new function, which is mostly a clone of the original calling function but this version aggregates all the items onto a single page, and in a format I could more easily work with. I did however, ditch the use of images that the original function had.

Anyway, if your in the same boat as me, and want to get all of your wishlist items onto a single page, this may just be the function for you. All you have to do is append the following code directly before the closing ?> line in the amazon-wishlist.php file, and change the call in your wishlist page to this function. I’ve included the CSS as well. Enjoy.

/**
  * Print a single page with the entire wishlist for all eyes to see!
  */
  function displayPagelessAmazonWishlist() {
  global $listDetails, $imgSize;
 
  /* Get the complete, and formatted list of items */
  $niceItems = array();
  $listData = prepareAmazonWishlistItems(1); /* Initialize the data */
  for($i = 1; $i <= $listDetails['TOTALPAGES']; $i++) {
  $listData = prepareAmazonWishlistItems($i);
  foreach ($listData as $item) {
  $nice = prepareAmazonWishlistEntry($item);
  $niceItems[$nice['PRODUCTGROUP']][] = $nice;
  }
  }
 
  /*
  echo '<pre>';
  print_r($niceItems);
  echo '</pre>';
  */
 
  if(!empty($niceItems)) {
 
  foreach ($niceItems as $group) {
 
  $h3 = $group[0]['PRODUCTGROUP'];
  $output .= "<h3>$h3</h3>\n";
 
  foreach ($group as $item) {
 
  $dateAdded = date('m/d', strtotime($item['DATEADDED']));
  /* Cheap fix to assure XHTML compliance, this should really happen in prepareAmazonWishlistEntry() */
  $item[TITLE] = htmlspecialchars($item[TITLE]);
  $title = "<a href=\"$item[DETAILPAGEURL]\" title=\"$item[TITLE]\"><span> $dateAdded </span> $item[TITLE]</a>";$output .= "<div>$title</div>\n";
 
  unset($item);
  }
  unset($group);
  }
 
  } else {
  $output = "<p><strong>Error!</strong> There was a problem building your wish list, please try again later.</p>";
  }
 
  echo $output;
  }

Bad weekend for the tC

The tC has taken quite a beating this weekend, and through no fault of its own. Saturday was Nick’s 21st, so Friday night we went out to dinner and the bar at Midnight (so technically on his birthday). Nick got thoroughly drunk, and I had volunteered to drive him home.

We didn’t make it 15 minutes without Nick’s body deciding that enough was enough, and he threw up all over the passenger’s door. Disgusting yes…. It was a very long drive home, and I took the car through a carwash at 4am to get the outside cleaned, and then got up early to do a very thorough cleaning on the inside of the car. Nick and I took the passengers door apart to clean it and at this point it’s probably the cleanest it’s been since it left the factory floor.

The rest of the day Saturday, and Sunday I didn’t really go anywhere, so the tC avoided any conflict, but last night I spent the night at Kerry’s house, and when I got to my car this morning, somebody had thrown an egg at it, and it appears to have scratched the paint where it hit . THEN on the drive home I rock hit my windshield and put a good nickel sized star in my window.

GRRR….

Happy Birthday Jessica!

I don’t know if she reads my blog at all, I think the only reason she will be on here is to read about the hike. But her birthday is today, and so I thought I would take a second to wish her Happy B-Day.

Winding Down at Work

Wow, so the past few days goes down in my book of records as busiest extended weekend ever. I’ll try to keep this post short and sweet, but no promises.

I took Wednesday & Thursday off work (I don’t work Fridays, so I had that day off too), and spent pretty much all day Wednesday driving around with Keith getting everything packed up for our camping trip. I swear that Keith and I spent literally half the day driving, trying to get cars where we wanted them (between my house, my parents and his apartment) and making sure we had everything we would need. We did take a short break to meet up with Damon of Maita Scion to have lunch at In and Out, but after that it was back to shopping and packing.

Thursday morning, I had to get up at 4:30 to go out to Elite Power to put in a few hours of work before we left my house to drive down to Lawson’s Landing in Bodega Bay. The drive was pretty easy, 2.5 hours with little or no traffic problems. The spot we had hoped to snag for camping was already occupied, but Matt and Tiffany found us a pretty good spot close to the dunes and ocean. I ended up taking almost 400 pictures over the three days that we were there, including some decent night sky shots. But I haven’t had a chance to upload any of them yet, so I’ll leave most of the details of the trip for when I get the pictures uploaded and I can link to them.

We came back Saturday morning, made a slight detour down Highway 1 because I wasn’t paying attention that wasted almost 45 minutes, so by the time we got home and brought the truck up to my parents we barely had enough time to get everything unloaded, grab some delicious stakes steaks, wish my Dad happy birthday and head down to RPM to begin our next event.

RPM was the beginning of Mikes Bachelor party, and was an absolute blast. I should see if I can scan in my time slips for the three races we did. Those little carts are wicked fast. My average speed per lap was around 35MPH, and I have little doubt that given a long straightaway they could get up to 50 or 60mph without a problem. Cody ended up taking first place overall, but no offence to Cody, with the particular course we were on and everybody’s driving level it was more a matter of where you started than your ability to push to the front (Read: it was nearly impossibly to pass without breaking rules).

After RPM we headed over to get dinner at Chevy’s in Elk Grove. Fairly un-eventful. To wrap up the night we headed back to our house for some typical bachelor night partying, but the details of that are for those people who were there

After some hard partying Saturday night, I still managed to get up at 7:30 Sunday morning and out to the Sacramento Raceway by 8:30 (including time for a carwash and a stop at Starbucks) to join Damon and the extended Scion family at Wide Open Scion. While the event was sponsored by the local Scion dealerships it was generally open to the public, so there were quite a few Honda owners there, and even 4 or 5 American muscle cars. I helped out by directing traffic and parking cars for the first few hours I was there. By the time Keith showed up the number of cars coming in was low enough I figured they could take care of themselves and so I went out to enjoy the event. Keith ran his car on the track a few times, did respectably, but ended up running really low on gas and had to stop before any real racing happened. The event was hoping to draw about 500 people, but it didn’t seem to get anywhere near that, so I’m not sure if it will happen again next year or not. Too bad really, Damon put a lot of work into it and it had a lot of potential, it just was lacking the necessary marketing and awareness in my opinion.

Keith and I left the raceway early so we could finish up the last of our unpacking. We ended up stopping at his house for a few hours, ordered a pizza and watched the Never Ending Story before we finally got around to going up to my parents. When we got to my parents we unloaded and cleaned up the last of our camping gear, and mostly just crashed, by this time I was ready to just sleep anywhere. I got my hair cut while I was up there because it was starting to get really out of control and I keep forgetting to call Kelly.

I got home around 10:30, and finally had more than just a few minutes in front of the computer, but I was really tired so I only spent enough time to copy all the pictures off the camera of camping and Wide Open Scion. I didn’t get around to uploading the camping pictures, but I did get the Wide Open Scion pictures up. They aren’t very good though and I’m not really happy with them. There seems to be a lot of dust inside my camera too that is really upsetting. I’m going to have to take it somewhere and have it cleaned or something because I can’t seem to get it out.

So that pretty much concludes my extended weekend, I’m at work now, trying to wind down mentally and catch up on some things. I’m still really tired, and coffee seems to have little effect this morning. Oh well, I may pass on magic night tonight to facilitate an earlier reunion between me and my pillow.

Fun at 6000′

This page/post needs an update. Likely the images, or image links do not work (due to switching from gallery2 to flickr), or some piece of formatting is visually broken. Please excuse the mess until I can get the time to update the post

I had an awesome weekend up at Cody’s parent’s cabin at Donner Lake. Took a TON of pictures, turned myself into a lobster, and traversed a raging river!

Just a note about this post, there are LOTS of links, ALL of them are to pictures, so I highly encourage you to click on the link has you read the word/phrase thats associated so you can see a picture of what I’m talking about.

Friday:
I ended up having to go to work in the morning, but I headed home around noon and meet Becca and Kelly to start heading up the hill. We meet up with RikiLee and Matt off of I80, and from there went all the way to the cabin, which is maybe a few hundred meters from the lake. We went on a walking tour of all the cabins up there, there are some really nice ones. Including this one that is like a circular building cut in half.

When we got back to the cabin after our walk, the girls attempted to make a cake for ReikiLee’s birthday and while it didn’t necessarily look like a traditional cake, it still tasted great. we caught the edge of a thunderstorm and a pretty sunset, and after there was nothing left outside for us to do we ended up putting in the Chronicles of Narnia movie. I don’t think anybody stayed awake long enough to see more than half the movie. Becca may have because she was worried about Cody driving up after his show that night. Cody made it up fine around 12:30 or 1am, which woke me up and I finally crawled upstairs to sleep.

Saturday:
Becca made awesome pancakes and much needed coffee for breakfast, and while we didn’t rush we made it out to the public docs at the lake around 9am. The water was great, not a whole lot colder than my pool, so I’m guessing high 70’s maybe even into the low 80’s. I should have known better, but I went most of the 4 hours that we were out there without sunscreen, and now I look like a lobster . But otherwise, we had some fun just jumping off the doc, hanging out in the sun and relatively cool weather.

Cody broke out his old Mac Plus, which he spent a good deal of time playing around on. We BBQ’d chicken (well, Cody did) and ate out on the front porch.

After dinner we went out to go see “split rock” behind Cody’s grandparents’ cabin. It was a pretty cool hike up the hill to see a giant boulder that had been split. I’m not really sure how, but if I had to venture a guess it may be that two layers of granite got turned up by a glacier so they were mostly vertical, and the layers separated over time, but honestly that’s a pretty random guess. We also went over and checked out a little creek, but more on that Sunday.

We played a game of Cranium. It was Guys vs. Girls, and I’m sad to say that the guys lost (but not by much). Did some BS-ing, and then it was off to bed for everybody.

Sunday:
Another fairly early morning (for camping). I had trouble sleeping because of my sunburn, and so I was up around 7am or so. Had a fabulous breakfast of eggs and toast, and spent a while in the cabin just kind of chilling. We had decided that we would trek up the creek that we visited on Saturday. At first Kelly and I were going to stay behind with the dogs, I don’t remember why she was, but I was still hurting from my sunburns. In the end though Kelly changed her mind, and I didn’t want to be the only one left behind so I went, and was very glad that I did. I even took my camera with me (keep in mind we were trekking up a creek, in the water), and again was glad I did. I personally had a great time and although it was somewhat difficult to move around with burnt legs, the cool water was refreshing. I think just about everybody slipped in once except myself (which was good because I had the camera). Sadie and Tully needed quite a bit of help to get around though, and we finally stopped when Tully tried to jump up a 5′ or so rock, and didn’t make it. He fell a full 4 or 5 feet onto another rock. Luckily other than being a little cut up, appears to be fine and 30 min later was his normal self.

Back at the cabin, we watched Pirates of the Caribbean, and a few goofed off. And after a slow packing (always sucks to leave) we headed back down to the valley where it was a blistering 118 degrees

A few other items of note that I thought I should point out about the weekend: I found these really cool beer/soda cozy’s that we all used to tell our drinks apart and Becca bought Sadie a doggy life jacket.

Folsom Lake

Alright, so I may not have a bunch of time to post about it, but thats probably better anyway because the long posts end up boring most people. Myself and a whole slew of friends (I’ll get to names shortly) went out to the rattlesnake bar campground at folsom lake over the weekend.

But my story begins on Friday (hmm, this may be a long post anyway). My Mom’s birthday was on Friday so I went up the hill to join her and the rest of my family for dinner at Tahoe Joe’s in Folsom. If you know my Mom well you know she is impossible when it comes to birthday and christmas gifts so I figured I would cover all bases and I got her flowers, a box of chocolates and a starbucks card and packed it all in one bright yellow bag. Anyway, after dinner I went to my parents house to get the stuff I needed for camping and ended up helping Chadd setup his blog until about 11pm (it looks awesome BTW). So I didn’t finish gathering supplies until 11:30, and didn’t get back to Elk Grove until a little after midnight.

Once I got home though, I decided that since I was wide awake I would just get everything ready for the next day right then. So I packed up everything I could and finally went to bed around 2am.

The next morning I got up at 5am so I could throw everything in the car and head up the hill by 6am, and meet with Kerry around 7am to go out and do the shopping. We had intended on leaving the Cameron Park area around 10am to be up at the campground early … we didn’t even get close.

The first problem was a slight misunderstanding on my part. I had gotten all the gear together the night before, but left it in a pile for Mike and Jenn to bring up in the truck because I thought they were leaving around 2pm. Turned out they weren’t going to be leaving until close to 4pm so Kerry and I drove all the way back down to Elk Grove to pick up as much of the gear as I could fit in my car. Then when we got back to Cameron Park we ended up waiting another hour or so because the rest of the group that was going up with me wasn’t ready yet.

Never the less, we made it up there and had no problem getting our campsite. I thought it was a pretty cool campsite because it was way up on the hill so you could see a lot of the lake. The rest of the group didn’t think so because it was somewhat of a long walk to the water.

We all had some fun in the lake, which was really warm, before the rest of the group showed up. So at this point everybody was there, Kerry, Candice, Kristi, Cody, Becca, Mike, Jenn, Amy, Nick and myself. I was in charge of food and cooking, and generally I think the food went without a hitch. Smores were a little boring because the wood I had was still wet and had a lot of trouble sustraining a flame without the assistant of accelerants.

A group of people went skinny dipping, I myself passed on that adventure and enjoyed the quiet of a mostly empty campsite. It was really really hot all day, and even in the eveing, combined with a fairly large amount of beer everybody was pretty tired Sunday morning, and a little slow so we didn’t do much except pack up and head home.

I did finally get to use the Bivy that I bought all the way back in April, but I’ll post more on that another time. Needless to say, I have no complaints.

Catching Up

Yeah, so I wrote a post and thought I published it, but it seems to have disappeared and I don’t have the enthusiasm to re-write it, so I’ll re-cap.

I haven’t had a chance to announce the newest addition to our backyard yet. If you religiously check my page at work you may have figured it out because I did upload the pictures. 4th of July, Becca, Cody and I went out to Target and bought the Intex 10′x3′ Round Metal Frame Pool and set it up with the help of everybody that was over. It’s an awesome deal at only $80 which included everything necessary for water lovin’ fun (except the water of course). Becca and Cody liked it so much they went out and bought one for their backyard the next day. Not many pictures, but you can see it here: Pool Pics

Keith’s 22nd Birthday was on the 6th, the whole family had dinner at Fat’s in Folsom to celebrate.

On Saturday I went to Chris and Michelle’s Wedding. I was really happy to see them finally tie the knot; I know they will be happy for a very long time to come. They are currently in Hawaii on their Honeymoon, but Chris has challenged himself with keeping a Blog of their time there. Check it out here, there are lots of pictures and even some video for those that don’t like to read. And for the few pictures that I took at their wedding, check out the website I made for their wedding, and particularly the wedding album. I was in charge of Video for their wedding, so I didn’t get a chance to take many pictures unfortunately.

I’ve been out of the office at work almost every day for the past two weeks and its killing me. I worked a half day on the 3rd (was the only one in the office too). The 4th was obviously a holiday. I was in the office on the 5th (Wednesday) and had a boatload of things to do which I couldn’t get done. Then Thursday and Friday I was in the AMP Act 1 training which is “Installing and Connectorizing LAN Cabling Systems”. Monday I had a Vision User Basics training that I did from Home. Tuesday I was in the office and again trying to catch up. I worked a 13 hour day and still couldn’t get everything done that I wanted. That brings us up to Today, where I started the Act 3 portion of the same AMP training (Designing Premises Cabling Systems) that will take me through the end of the week. I did get approval from my boss though to work all the overtime I needed to get my tasks done, so although I’ll probably complain about working a lot, there should be some nice paychecks in my future.

Going back a few days, I did sell my Altima. I had made a mistake in the asking price that I put on the listing, so I feel like I could have gotten more for the car, but that’s water under the bridge at this point. I did still come out about even with when I bought the car as far as taking home about what I put down on the car originally so I can’t complain too much. The guy paid me in cash, so it was kind of fun to have a HUGE wad of 100 dollar bills in my pocket. I should have taken a picture to go with the one from when I sold my Eclipse, but I unfortunately already deposited the cash.

I do want to note that talked to Melinda night before last. She was in Chris and Michelles wedding (if you look in the pictures she is the Bridesmaid with blond hair). I had a fun time catching up with her on what she’s doing and such. She’s living in Utah at the moment, but at the beginning of September her contract with the performing company she is with will be up and she may be coming home. For those who don’t know, I did go on a couple dates with Melinda, and I think we both had a great time but she moved down to UC Irvine and although I visited her once it never really went anywhere, but who knows the future could hold anything. I did bring up going to Ashland when she’s home to see the Shakespeare festival since she likes theatre and she seemed to like the idea. If nothing else, she is just a really fun person to do things with.

So anyway, I think this post is actually longer than the one that I wrote earlier so I suppose it was just my Blog making sure I was creating worthwhile posts that you could use to pass at least 5 minutes at work with, but I’m done writing now, so get back to working… or leave me a comment and you could easily pass another minute or two.