Wow… what happened?  Where did my week go??  What’s next???

Well, I know that this upcoming week is going to be kind of crazy.  The center’s hiring for a total of 23 new positions for two high profile projects starting on July 28th.  These projects should have started at the beginning of the summer, but due to not receiving the funding in time, we have to do a little crunch/reorganization of what’ll happen.  Everything feels very condensed and last minute, however, it’s also really exciting to know what’s in store for the center’s future over through-out the rest of the summer.

I’m kind of feeling like, “where did my summer go?” Maybe this is a reoccurring question about a month before classes start up again.  I’m also going to lose vacation time, but maybe I shouldn’t look at it as a loss, but more that I chose to spend more time to do a better job?  I guess in reality, I have a choice though it seems that I’m tide to work more than I am to my own personal time.  Even when I spend time during vacation, I find myself thinking about work related tasks that I need to do.  This whole weekend was all about, “how can I get everything done by the end of Thursday?”  (I’m taking Friday off, maybe I’ll actually clean the house… it needs it)

I did spend much of my time with Corinn helping out our good friends Jami and Tonya move into their new apartment.  It was a nice day on Saturday, much better than the down pour we got on Friday and Sunday, but it didn’t go all too perfect:  I ripped my shorts from seam to seam picking up a TV.  Nothing made me feel fatter than this happening; it was a brand new pair too… Oh well, maybe if I can find the receipt, I can replace them since they ripped along the pocket which suggests to me that it was bound to happen.  Still, it made me feel pretty fat.  Regardless, it was very productive and they were able to move everything into their new abode!  It’s a really great unit out in Essex, near the IBM plant.  It’s 1400sqft of space on two levels and the layout is really convenient and designed well.  I’m kind of jealous, but maybe it’s natural to want something new?  Is it consumerism that really drives this?  At any rate, I’m really happy for them and hope that they don’t kill each other anytime soon so that Corinn and I can enjoy many days over at their place hanging out and having fun.

One thing that I did wish I put more time into was the photo gallery, however, something even more interesting popped up.  While pursuing the ability to read and write XMP data to media files, I stumbled upon a website with an open license media gallery.  I downloaded it, installed it and started to play with it.  It has an open source version that I can modify, however, after looking at it, the gallery offers quite a bit to it.  In fact, I think it would probably be pointless for me to re-invent the wheel.  This is funny/depressing as it happened with this blog as well.  Just when I got excited about developing my own web application, through research, I stumble on someone who developed the exact same product I was planning on creating from scratch.  The benefit of an open source product is that not only can I avoid the cost question; I can further develop the product to my personal liking using existing code/programming languages I already understand.  Another benefit is that while I’m using the product and living life, I can check back in once in a while to the developer’s site and there might be an update to the product that I didn’t need to invest my own time into.

Sounds great, right?  I think so… but my biggest frustration of stumbling upon these cool products is that it takes the fun out of developing a project I’ve already started and really thought about.  This particular gallery product it’s the end all/be all, but it does the job that I would have had to develop over many hours and may not finish until next year.  I guess this is a stream of consciousness right now that you’re reading which is helping me to come to terms with utilizing this already developed gallery so that maybe I can move onto the next project on my large list.  I will be doing a lot of tweaking before the product is launched on our site though.  Got to make it somewhat better than it currently is visually… It simply looks like crap.  But maybe I shouldn’t say anything because our blog’s look may not be the best visually either?

I guess it’s another late posting… Maybe this’ll become habit.

Another thing we did this weekend was watch The Dark Knight, which was FREAKING AWESOME!!!  We highly recommend the movie and I even which that the already 2 hour and 45 minute movie was another 3 hours longer.  This movie sucked me in and is soooooo intricately conceived that I hope they continue making more, especially keeping Christian Bale and other amazing actors in the most current franchise of Batman flicks. The characters alone were impeccably well written.  The Joker was an amazing character to watch on screen, acted out by the late Heath Ledger (sadness), and you will never ever get a better performance by anyone else in this world.  I really hope that he does win an Oscar for his performance, because it was incredible.  I’d go on and on and on about the movie, but I feel I’d accidently reveal too much.  All I will say that the Joker’s role as chaos in a society couldn’t have been a better metaphor in the movie.  Geez… I just want to continue talking about it…

Okay, time for another venture into sleep.  It's too late to continue typing, afterall, I do have to work tomorrow morning.

I’m laying in bed right now with the glowing screen of my laptop and my wife, sleeping to the left of me, typing my blog tonight.  I have a feeling that I’ll be spending many of my blogs lying in bed doing the same in the future.  I guess I find it the best time of the day to quietly ponder and reflect on the day, before I pass out.  In my head, I’m constantly reflecting on every move or decision I make, much like a programmed infinite loop to keep myself in check.  It’s how I function; sometimes I wonder if it’s beneficial or detrimental to my wellbeing and/or mental health… but I’d like to think of it as a reoccurring attempt to better myself.  Do others experience this… as often as I do?

So it’s my first day back from vacation at work and oddly I found it to be… relaxing?  Fitting?  Like I didn’t miss a beat, although it was pretty obvious I was out of work for a week with the sifting of legit e-mail.  I feel like it should have been my responsibility over break to do this, but spending about a day to get back in the know seems kind of ridiculous to get work done.  I sometimes feel like I need to make up for lost time by working at home after work… Maybe everyone feels the same way.

Aside from dealing with the mundane getting back up to speed with things, I was reminded on many occasions why I enjoy my job.  Where else can you mix with a good group of young adults with flourishing minds who sometimes think exactly what you’re thinking or enjoy the same humor as you do?  What’s even cooler is that Ann’s on the same wave length.  It’s cool to be working in an environment with sooooo much craziness going on and yet still feel good at the end of the work day when arriving home to relax for the evening (if I can actually do that at all).  It’s not always a great day, but a majority make me smile.  Corinn gets an earful usually when I get home about what’s been happening at work and today, it was all about how lucky I am to work with the students and adults as well as the projects we will be working on with the United Nations and UVM coming up.  I’ve seen the progress on some of the other projects and I get jealous sometimes that I’m not down in the dirt, like these students are, creating the work they are producing for the projects at the EMC.

I very often feel that I need to be creating and innovating, yet don’t have the time.  I guess that’s why I spent a majority of my time on vacation programming/designing this site.  I find great satisfaction out of producing something that people use or admire.  I guess most people would, but it’s slightly different.  I get satisfaction out of programming or designing something regardless.  I feel that having the creative and technical interests I do open up a world of hurt when I think of all these ideas that could be produced.  It’s somewhat depressing after realizing I cannot do everything myself without having 60 hour days (of which I put in a request to God, but he hasn’t sent me an e-mail back yet).  Like today:  I came home, ate with Corinn while watching a bit of What Not to Wear, and the rest of my time was devoted to coding and mucking around with a photo website that can parse in and out XMP data embedded in graphics/media files like JPEG’s, GIF’s, MOV’s, etc.  If successful, this will help Corinn and I manage a bunch of our photos and other stuff at home by simply embedding metadata that will allow us to simply do a search for specific information like “family”, “shot with a Canon Digital Camera”, “GIV IT”, etc.  Ha, I just noticed I typed 666 words before the beginning of this sentence… Omen or just mere coincidence?   Maybe it’s telling me that I should stop talking technical stuff since it’s boring my audience… Hopefully any at all…

You know… I am about the luckiest guy.  I have a smart, beautiful wife who really cares about me, she gets me and puts up with my excitement of running up to her at 11pm on a work night, all excited about my recent success in parsing XMP data and how it’ll improve our lives.  Granted she’ll smile and roll her eyes, but she gets it.  Even if she doesn’t understand, Corinn will smile and say “that’s exciting” or “that’s great” and it’s a genuine congrats.

Maybe I should post this message now and go to bed…

Sam’s cute right now; he’s curled up between Corinn and me.  For a cat that doesn’t like to be held a lot, he definitely shows affection once in a while in a peaceful, non-meowing-until-his-lungs-are-sore way.

Reflecting on what I just wrote, I cannot tell if this is really good blog material.  Does it really matter?  Should I care?  I think a lot of people think along tangents and don’t really randomly jump.  Everything’s related to a previous experience or thought just before the next one arrives.  Very much like a though process like this:

• I like maple syrup
• My friend and I used to make maple syrup
• Mmmm… haven’t had pancakes in a while
• Wow, haven’t visited Sneakers in Winooski in a long time
• I wonder what Phlip’s doing right now
• Crap, I got to get back to him regarding the game we’re suppose to design
• I really like fighting games, but I really prefer RPGs
• I wanna buy the new Final Fantasy Tactics A2 game
• I really miss being a kid sometimes
• Man, I haven’t played Sim City in a while, I kind of miss that

…Now to get back to my original point…

So my thought process was linear because of my relationships or experiences I had that reminded me of the next thought.  Humans really suck at being organized, specifically being reminded.  How many times have we misplaced something and it took a good darn long time to find it?  Then we had to “back track”.  That’s how unorganized we are and it’s due to how we think.  It’s very difficult to have a leap in thought; in fact, I would suggest that it doesn’t happen at all.  We have a real weird way of relating things to other things in a bizarre network of poorly guided paths of communication and connection within our brain yet we are “smart” enough to actually come up with great ideas.  But they’re not really random ideas, we might say they are, but usually it’s because one thing lead to another.

So going back up to the flow of thought, if we had a conversation and you mentioned something about Maple Syrup (can never beat Vermont’s by the way), I might have that internal monologue saying “I like maple syrup”.  The next thing that may come out of my mouth would be the last piece of thought which is “Man, I haven’t played Sim City in a while, I kind of miss that.” You would most likely furrow your brow and state, “wow, that was pretty random,” and without understanding the context or how I arrived to that statement from Maple Syrup, you’d be right, but in fact, it was not really random at all.  Maple Syrup created a straight and “logical” path to that memory/reminder point in my history.  And if you had a different history than I, obviously you do, then that thought process might have arrived at, “my sister has a pet monkey…”  Naturally I would probably think that was an odd thing to say, but the thought process was the same, but through different experience therefore arriving at a different point in history, but possibly through the same pattern of electrical pulses in our brain through short pathways in our head linking everything together to arrive to the thought we want to convey or the fact we arrived at.

You may look back at the beginning of this blog and say, “wow, this was a pretty weird trip that Ray sent me on.” But maybe the point I have to realize is that the thought I want to convey is through an odd pattern of experiences that might provoke new ideas, theories, inventions, intentions, designs, etc. and that’s why maybe I shouldn’t go back and edit this blog for content.  Maybe this is a good thing that I should continue doing.  A brain dump of today’s work and then a reflection might bring something to mind?  Maybe seeing my though process might have others understand me better?  Is this an open diary?  Idea generator of sorts?  Maybe for me to better understand myself?  Others?  Purposes in life?  Life in general?

…?

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I knew there was a reason why I spent as many hours trying to get this site up!  I guess I’ll just let it be what it’ll evolve into… Hopefully something people will enjoy and learn from.

I guess this is the first official blog on the net... yay! Why did I bother?  What does this really mean?  Will blogging take over our lives?  Will I be able to sleep at night?

All I know now is that I set a goal for myself to FINALLY post a site for Corinn and I and it's now semi-complete.  I am semi-happy. 

Well, now that this is accomplished, I'm going to work on a photo gallery for us to post stuff and maybe some other cool code-ling sites in the (hopefully) near future.  Time to go show the wife and quickly teach her how to use this site!  Boo - end of vacation; yay - the start of our site! 

So I'm sitting inside on this beautiful day creating a blog site and I feel almost confident I might be able to post it within the next week.  I'm currently waiting for Phlip's call, he and Colleen came into town just yesterday as a "surprise", so Corinn and I can head into Hinesburg to meet him for the fireworks tonight.  I'm also hoping to create some of my own using my fabulous spud-gun I made while at GIV IT this summer.  We tried yesterday, to no avail.  Today, I'm hoping the new formula fuel I'll be using will have better results since cheap hairspray not only smells horrid, but is not optimally mixed with propellents created for spud firing.  We'll see how it works out tonight, I'm hoping for good/fun results.

Well, back to coding and happy 4th! 

So today is my very first innitial post!  I guess this is going to pave the way for blogging.  I just added an account for Corinn and hopefully, eventually, we'll be posting much about our lives and what's going on.  Right now the server's still in demo mode, but once things work out well, I'll be finding some hosting and then moving our site!  I'm going to look into programming an album.  I know there's a bazillion out there, but I'm looking forward to recreating the wheel.  Hopefully it's a fast production and I don't run into many walls completing it.  Time usually is the issue, as always.  I wonder if I can switch out these smiley faces for different ones... Hmm.........

Well, I guess I'm on my way to bed.  Must wake up bright and early tomorrow so Corinn doesn't kick my ass outta bed, as it's usually a difficult issue with me being lazy and all.  I guess I should figure out what I should blog about...?  Maybe I'll sleep on it for now.