June 2004 Archives

This photo doesn't even do it justice. This dog has MAD slobber. It just hangs there. You'd think Slimer had been around with the trail of slobber this guy leaves. You have been warned.

I don't think I could ever get tired of sunsets and skyscapes.

Ok so this panoramic shot is wasted on my blog's narrow space, and it demonstrates some sloppy shooting in stitch mode, but I thought I'd give it a whirl.

(Thanks Shalene for giving me a nudge to post ;))

Ok so you can't read it, the picture is blury but that's what the license plate holder says.

Um, is this car supposed to be evidence of this statement?

Ugh. Among the problems of working for a company with so many women is the inevitible periodic newborn baby in the office. Someone has a baby and of course brings it in one day for everyone to see, because, naturally all the other women are dying to see the baby.

Today someone brought in their baby of maybe a week or 2. I was unfortunate enough to have them get caught right outside my cubicle. Yes, once someone heard that she was there, women SWARMED to her and begin fawning like it's their job.

"awwww! She's just darling!"
"ohhhhh look how sweet she is!"
"she's soooo cuuuute!"

All at the same time. I could handle one or maybe even 2 people fawning over a baby at the same time. But to have this big crowd of women just going gah-gah over a baby is more than I can handle.

Perhaps I'll understand better when I become a father. But part of it comes from my own personality-- I don't like attention. I especially don't like having a lot of it at the same time. Some people thrive off of the attention of a large group. I, on the other hand, avoid it if at all possible. This is perhaps why I also don't really care much for my own birthday. I appreciate it being acknowledged, I just don't like a big deal made out of it.

So what do I do? I pull out my headphones, turn on the iPod Mini and block out the annoying fawning of these women. And feel sorry for the baby, heh.

We picked up a grill at Costco Saturday for my dad for father's day. He wasn't fooled of course, he knew the grill was for everyone else, heh. There's nothing quite like a flame grilled piece of chicken or steak, or even a burger. So for dinner tonight I marinated some beef strips in 불고기 양념 (a sort of Korean teriyaki marinade). Mmm.... that's all I can say. Ate it with some rice-- good eats. My summer will now be complete, heh.

p.s., where has June gone?

They'd be right. Guess when this photo was taken-- Yep, Saturday night, the night before Father's Day. I was amused to see all these women looking for Father's Day cards last minute, all lined up. Unfortunately taking a shot on the go without a flash is pretty much a guarantee that the shot will be blury, but you get the idea.

crashed hard on a LoveSac after returning home from he and Bo's "excursion"

Last night around 9:30 pm an enjoyable Unreal Tournament 2004 fest was interrupted by my sister's sobbing announcement that the dogs were gone, that they had run away.

So everyone went out to their cars and started combing the surrounding neighborhoods for the dogs.

These dogs just go nutty whenever they even SEE their leash, let alone when you put it on. Don't let those lazy pictures above fool you, they turn into wild savage beasts. I guess Mel in a panic let go of their leashes because the other dog, Gus (a little white geriatric mutt) got out and she was worried about him getting away. Well, stinker one and stinker two (otherwise known as Indy and Bo) used the diversion and bolted.

After a couple fruitless hours of searching surrounding neighborhoods, parks, etc., Dad calls the police who tell him someone had called having found a couple of dogs, and that they had wanted to know how to get in touch with animal control and/or the humane society, both of which were closed at that hour (about 11:30).

I guess this morning when Dad called animal control they had the guy who found the 2 dogs on the other line-- so they gave him our number and he called us directly, after which Dad went and picked up the dogs. We did indeed get lucky... these dogs could have easily been history.

They did what we hoped they hadn't-- they crossed 2 fairly busy streets (Highland Dr. / 2000 E. and 9400 south) to get to this guy's house, which was probably a 5-10 minute drive northwest of where we live. Apparently a dog lover himself, he couldn't stand the idea of a couple lab puppies wandering loose (they had their leashes on and everything-- he figured maybe they'd been abandoned) and took them into his house for the night.

Lucky, diki pooches. Needless to say, everyone was sad when they were gone and now feel much better to have them back.

What else do you do with the free diapers that come in the mail? Use them as a hat, of course.

I recently learned (yeah I'm behind the times-- by about a month) that the new version of Movable Type (3.0) is out but that it's no longer a free, unlimited use application. Sure, it's free for one person to do one blog or something ridiculous like that, but any more and you'll have to pay. As I said, this news is about a month old-- I'm just out of it.

What surprises me is that Blogger has improved so much while remaining free-- they now provide a comment system, you can e-mail blog posts and they even have a photoblogging tool set up. So I guess it's time to weigh my options and see if MT 2.661 has what it takes...

I logged into my old blogger account today on a whim. I had over 100 posts on that blog-- and I only used blogger from maybe February 03 - June 03. How sad I have become at blogging, hehe... I down-right suck now, heh.

*prays for I.T. to hurry and order him that new PowerMac G5 so that he can blog and web design at work*

Some of my friends use Movable Type, some use Blogger. What are the pros and cons of each? I'd have to get back into Blogger a bit to decide, but the first thing that jumps out at me is that Blogger was a bit more friendly to design templates for. I'm piecing together a new blog, and I have to wonder if it wouldn't be easier to hash out the design for use with Blogger. Hmm....

Update: Looking at Blogger, one main difference I see is that MT allows you to create categories and sort posts based on categories. I don't see any kind of flexibility for that in Blogger. Of course, for a simple blog, and simplicity is something that I'm currently shooting for, categories are not a big deal (I don't even use them now. Even when I did, I never made use of those categories for sorting purposes). I'll have to play around with some design tonight and see if blogger gives me the artistic ease and flexibility that I'd like.

The only other pro that MT has for me right now is that I have it hosted on my own domain-- I don't have to visit a 3rd party web site to update my site, etc.

Anyone else have any thoughts?

Portaphile: Portable Audio Enthusiast

Those who know me know about this disorder that I have. I not only love music but also how I listen to music, and portable audio is a bit of an obsession of mine.

I suppose it had it's roots in my early days. I don't recall just how old I was when I recieved my first cassette walkman for Christmas-- it was made by Toshiba. I had to have been in my first few years of elementary school, and at that time the only tapes I probably had were Niel Diamond, Lionel Richie, and maybe a California Raisins CD... good times, hehe. Towards the end of my elementary school days I began acquiring more pop tapes and had begun making mix tapes. Ah, mix tapes, that's a whole other subject. Needless to day I claim to be of the mix tape generation.

In 7th grade I got my first Discman-- the Sony D-11, started acquiring CDs and continued making mix tapes for use in the car as well as for other people. By 9th grade I had what I thought was a pretty pimp Sony Sports Discman with skip protection. That thing didn't leave my side all through high school-- riding the bus, studying in the library, riding on road trips-- I always listened to it.

Fast forward to 1999-- in Korea with nothing but a crappy tape player, I bought a Panasonic CD player with an LCD remote and began acquiring CDs there. Later that year, I became obsessed with MiniDisc. I'd seen it years earlier (1992-ish when it was brand new), but now it was within reach as I could go to Korean electronics stores and actually see and hold them. In December of '99 I got my first Sony MD recorder-- the MZ-R90. I was in heaven-- the best of both worlds: digital like CD players with tracks, etc., and recordable like cassettes-- and quite a bit smaller than either! At this point Obsessive Portaphile Disorder (OPD) began to be apparent-- I spent any time I could recording mix discs and listening to them.

When I returned from Korea I got a job, and with cash to spare, OPD started to take even more control. From 2001 - 2003 I bought a number of different MiniDisc units as well as different headphones. OPD was in full bloom. I frequented web sites discussing various technologies, portables, and headphones.

Soon other portable audio formats began to mature and in the Fall of '03 I purchased a hard-drive based mp3 player made by a Korean company named iRiver (the fact that it was Korean had little to do with my decision to buy it), after which OPD settled down for a while...

Well, it's been flaring up again. I ordered a bunch of CDs today-- probably about 10 total. Yeah. And since I often don't want to wait to listen to them (meaning I often don't want to take the time to create MP3s or MiniDiscs before listening to CDs), I went out and bought yet another piece of portable audio electronics-- the Sony D-NE300 CD/MP3/Atrac player (pictured above with the Sony MDR-EX71 earphones, which are pretty decent for their price range of about $35).

Sadly, this setup represents the cheaper end of this hobby / disorder!

To be continued...

I always thought that seagulls bombed cars while flying. While that's indeed the impression they give us, I'm not longer certain that it always works that way.

On Monday (the 31st of May) while I was sitting in my car waiting for some friends to show up at Jordan Landing, I saw these seagulls. They weren't circling these cars, they were hopping around directly on these cars. They probably get even more satisfaction out of sitting right there crapping on people's cars, just because they can. Stupid birds.

Speaking of which, my car is due for a wash.... just be glad I didn't take pics of my bombed car.

From atop the Utah One building, downtown Salt Lake City

Dreamhost is my current web host. I love dreamhost. Almost a year ago I moved sloanie.com to dreamhost because

a) I couldn't set up Movable Type on my other host, Yahoo Geocities web hosting, which was

b) Over-priced and under-powered feature-wise (unless you want silly cookie cutter templates, not this web designer, uh-uh.) I don't remember how much it was, something like $20 a month for only 50 MB of storage! Such a rip...

So I stumble across dreamhost.com and they seem like a pretty cool host, and seem to offer good value on their service, not to mention being capable of running MT. I sign up for $9.95 a month for 200 MB of storage space. TONS better than I was getting at Yahoo. (a bit tricky to switch hosts but worth it).

Sometime late in 2003 they upgraded my plan for free to include 500 MB of web space rather than 200. More than double! Without costing a cent more!

Then today I find I've been upgraded again--- I now have 800 MB of storage space (4 times what I started with!) and they've also upgraded me from 5 subdomains to 15, and from 25 GB of bandwidth to 40 GB (Eat your heart out Joel :P), etc. -- and I still don't pay any more than I originally signed up for.

So I just had to say I love my web host and give them a plug. Thank you, that is all.