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.