Tuesday, January 18, 2011

Alex Lambert

@TrueAlexLambert posted some crazy stuff on twitter last night. This kid is REALLY talented. He honestly has one of the BEST National Anthem Renditions I have ever heard in my entire life. And you can ask my wife I always listen to how an artist sings the National Anthem. Everytime I hear this kid sing, the rawness that he brings is amazing. I honestly didn't pay him much attention when he was on American Idol because I wasn't a fan of his look, and he seemed like he was very scared and intimidated. None the less saw him for the first time again on If I Can Dream on Hulu and the kid was amazing. The show almost focused on him which I was ok with :).

None the less I want to do my part to help this guy out. I dont have a grip of followers, or even people that read this blog, but none the less I want to help where i can :). Follow him on twitter, and get this guy 100,000+ followers. In the words of my Mother-in-Law "He deserves it."

Additionally Alex, if you stumble across this lonely little blog, I want to just say DO WORK :). While you would love to give your music away for free, you have to make money first. I would also like to apologize for giving you shit about retweeting your Mr. Twitter stuff.

That is all.

Sunday, January 09, 2011

Took the dogs to the park



Originally uploaded by ruffyen.
So in an attempt to get some more practice with the new camera I decided to take the dogs out to a school near my house and let the dogs run free while I took some pictures. Overall I was very impressed with the pictures that I am getting even at this stage of learning. While most of the pictures are not perfect, they are very impressive to me and my wife's amateur eyes heh. Click through on the picture to see a few more that were taken of that day.

All the photos are taken with a Canon Rebel XS with a 50mm f/1.8 lens. The camera settings were all over the place as I was just testing out some of the settings and playing with some of the stuff that I have learned while scouring the net.

All editing of these files was done in the same fashion. Nothing too fancy, I just import the files into GIMP and do any blemish and major color edits then save them to a location where Picasa can get a hold of them and and make the final adjustments. One thing that I am learning...I have a LOT to learn about photography and photo editing. Editing the RAW image is nice but there is a LOT of stuff you have to do with them to make them look presentable.

Friday, January 07, 2011

Just bought a DSLR (Canon Rebel XS)


Palmer Chilling on the couch
Originally uploaded by ruffyen.
So I finally purchased a DSLR. I got a Canon Rebel XS after Jill decided to break my fujifilm point and shoot. Decent trade up if you ask me heh. None the less I purchased a starter lens after refering to my Photography friends both on IRC, IRL, and on the web. The lens I purchased was a Canon 50mm f/1.8 which is so far a really fantastic lens for the stuff I have been playing around with. The photo linked on this entry is a pic I took which is up on my flickr page in a set of a few photos that I have taken so far. Overall with 3 days of use under my belt im really impressed with the photos. I plan to do some more shooting this weekend around town to see what I can come up with and will post here.

Also this is the first post I have had since 2009. Over a freaking year...certainly going to have to change that. Either way 2010 was a great year and I hope to update this blog more often to keep better track of 2011 :).

Sunday, March 08, 2009

My piece of earth


My piece of earth
Originally uploaded by ruffyen.
So yeah, first blog post of '09 and a great '09 it has started off as, and yes I know I am already into the end of the first quarter of '09 but its still been a great start :). I finished up my degree in Management Information Systems Friday. Took the exams, and I feel pretty confident that I did well enough on them to get passing grades :). In addition to finishing up school it means that I will be afforded a little more free time. With this free time I plan on starting a garden.

The picks are up on my flickr.com page and I plan on keep it updated on a week by week basis to keep track of everything as well.


In addition to this I am also going to try to keep a comprehensive log of how much I am spending and saving. I would like to do this for like two or three years and see if it is actually financially sound to own a garden. Sure the vegetables and such of are of possible better quality and all that jazz, but I am talking strictly about if I am saving money as opposed to making a grocery trip, and buying all the vegetables that I plan on planting. The log will first be made available here on my blog in and around the time that the first full harvest is over and I can not get anything else out of the garden. The first year I am going to factor in all the tools and such, the second year should look a lot better than the first considering I wont have to purchase as much.

So what am I planting? Right now I have seeds for regular tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, onions, and corn. I would like to get some more seeds and do some type of bean, cucumbers, lettuce, and possibly some watermelons. The garden that I have is 50-60 sq feet. So I have a good bit of room for the aforementioned vegetables. Plus I bought a really small herb garden thing that I am going to do on the deck so we will see how that goes. So yeah, wish me luck and a bountiful harvest :).

Sunday, October 19, 2008

Updates

Well as usual its been a while since I have written on here but lifes busy and who really has time for blogs and punctuation :). Since my last writing I guess a lot has happened. I got Lasik, which by the way is freaking amazing. No more glasses, and I can finally wear some real sun glasses. Aviators on? heh. But yeah. Jill and I celebrated our 1 year anniversary. I finished up a couple more classes four more left till graduation. I have to call the school and apply for my diploma must remember that. I backed my car up...door open...into a damn pole...not real happy about that. Dogs are crazy as usual, cant take them anywhere. Found a website I designed deployed overseas in '04 that had a bunch of pictures that I thought I lost of when I was in the desert. Backed those up :).

Lets see what else. Work is the same been really busy as of late though because we had like 4 installs that all happened at the same time just about. Monday we are going to do some more of the local install.

Life is good...I am still trying to figure out what kind of cell phone application that I would like to write...if you have anything you think would be cool to have on a cell phone post it in the comments.

If I think of anything else ill come back later and write some more.

Sunday, August 24, 2008


So if you haven't heard Google is in the works creating an operating system for cell phones. That's right we have another clash of the titans. coming up. And instead of the classic Microsoft vs Apple fanboi shinanigans we usually get to wade through its Google and Apple. Even Mac people are fans of Google so it will be interesting to see how the battle pans out. I am sure Google doesn't want it to seem like they are making a direct attack on the the "fruity" iPhone, but somehow saying that they are just trying to get in on an emerging market doesn't cut it with me. None the less I am going for Android and Google. I personally downloaded the SDK that Google put out and started playing around with the emulator that is supplied. According to a video on the Android site working with the emulator and porting to a device should be exactly the same experience. That is for all to see of course. The emulator comes with different programs that showcase a few of the things that you can expect to see from applications and such. How transition effects are done etc. After sitting throught the 1 hour developer video on the Android site they said that there will be no approval process for the applications. This is a double edged sword of course, and with all great powers one much use discretion. What this means is that anyone including myself will be able to develop for the platform. This is good and bad because I am, for instance, a shitty programmer. I have very little experience in a production environment let alone any experience developing a program for the masses. But I plan on making an application for the OS. It will be my first installment in this realm and I can only hope it is a good one :).
The first phones have not been released yet, but some pretty big names are in the mix. For instance LG has said that it plans of releasing a phone for the 2008 Holiday season, but says that may be a little optimistic. None the less LG is one of my favorite phone makers and I would be really stoked to get an Android phone from them. Well that should wet your appetite a little for more info check out the Android developer website and see what people are clamoring about.

Thursday, August 21, 2008

Diet Update, Work, House

So it has been exactly one month since I started the diet. And so far everything is going as planned. I have actually lost 10 pounds since it all started. I made my goal weight of 175 and have plateaued. I am still doing the diet though. I am also still running. I do it M W F, and run/walk around 2.5ish miles. Right now I am doing .5mi run .25mi walk 3 times with a .25mi walk at the begin as a warm up and the end as a cool down. I should be running 3 miles straight pretty soon. Baby steps though.

As for everything else...tonight I am bored as shit. Should have maybe done some school work but I am tired. Didn't feel like it. Work has been what it will be. I started creating a database for inventory control. I would like to try to incorporate RFID into our inventory control. It is a cheap and simple solution to keeping inventory. We could even reuse the tags as the inventory is RMA'd through the course of its use. The tags are pretty cheap anyways. Looking online I can get tags the size of a quarter that are like 90ish cents each. Considering the amount that we could save with a well kept established inventory system this is small potatoes in my mind.

Also I was tasked with finding an upgrade for our ID card printer. The one we have now works but the printer tapes are expensive. You get 50 cards out of a tape and around 3-4 of each of those cards is a waste. The tapes cost like 30 bucks too making the per card cost pretty high around $0.64 each. I found a model of card printer that is a bit expensive on the initial side but the cost per card is only like $0.36 or something. I know that you would make up the price of the printer ($1600.00) after selling like 700 cards or so. Considering the old crappy one cost around 1300 and didn't have an automatic hopper (ie you don't sit there and manually feed cards) I would say this is a freaking bargain. In the card cost I also figured in the labor cost due to the fact that we would have to sit at the machine for the old printer. A costly en devour. None the less I did what was asked and have not heard anything back about it.

Also got some new toys for the house. An insecticide sprayer...well not really just for insecticide but it fits the job. I am using it to spray a "barrier of protection" around the house that is like 2" wide. According to the bottle that will keep the ants and stuff away for like 8 weeks. So far I love the sprayer makes the job way easier then that home defence bottle I was using, "pull handle spray for like 15 secs, pull handle 15 secs etc. This is pump for a about 15 secs spray for half the house, and pump again...and actually i only re-pump because i like the volume of spray when you first pump...the can will actually spray the whole bottle on just the first 15 secs...nice. Well I wont bore you tonight with any more I will tell you more later.

Monday, July 21, 2008

Diets/Exercise/and me???

So I started a diet exercise routine today with my wife. We are training for a 5k and figured why not diet along with it and drop a few pounds. I am weighing in around 186 [the scale we have is a little light so i have to add like 2.5 pounds or so to 183] None the less right now I am as heavy as I have ever been in my life. Granted a lot of it is muscle but a great deal is fat as well...more than I like to admit of course. Everything I read says I should be down around 155 to 160 but I dont like how I look at that weight. I much prefer 175. But if I get to 175 with no problems I will probably get down to my "Healthy Weight" and start lifting again to round it all off.

As for the diet and exercise...its going good as they always do at the start right? heh. But we only bought good for us foods and I actually found out that I am about starving myself NOT on the diet so I am actually eating more and gettting correct calories and making sure I get my calories not from fat etc. Using a great site called FitDay.com and combining that with DietFacts.com They work pretty seamlessly and DietFacts.com is a really comprehensive database of food fact/nutritional information.

So I am weighing in at 186lbs and started the running regimen today. 20 mins of walking jogging intervals. Baby steps...gotta walk before you run.

pDub

Monday, June 09, 2008

Legends Still Fall

Today is not really a happy day for me...One of the most influential human beings on the face of this planet...in my life at least, passed away today. My grandmother, Kimiko Sato Warner. She has been battling cancer for some time now, and it finally got the best of her. I am not upset really so much as sad. I was lucky enough to spend Christmas with her and the rest of my family. I think the most difficult thing for me will be when I return home for the funeral, because she will not be there, in her typical fashion. I'm going to keep this short for now as I don't really feel like typing too much, maybe I will be inspired to write why she was so influential to me in a future post. I love you grandma...R.I.P

Wednesday, April 09, 2008

Termites ZOMG

So this is about a day late but whatever. Jill and I have been noticing that in our bedroom that we keep feeling dirt on our feet. For the first few days we chalked it up to the fact that was have never had wood flooring and maybe it just needed more tending to then carpet in terms of sweeping, vacuuming. Then one evening before bed Jill noticed that there were these little dirt piles...I figured maybe the dog dragged in some mud...it had been raining. Upon further inspection, The mud clumps had air pockets, or burrow holes or what ever you want to call them...so i crumbled it and out crawls a termite. They were pretty much all inside this one board. Holes everywhere in the board and actually they were compromising the board. None the less I grabbed my flashlight and started poking around. I think the whole family was in there :). So I called the termite people that have the bond on the house...they should have caught this during the inspection they did early march...they didnt though. He came out yesterday and treated the board and retreated outside. But I was flabbergasted the board was ruined...and then just before he left he said..."Sorry I missed that, I will be back in 2 weeks to fix that board." So all is good :). I was freaking though...

On a side note Jill and I also got a new dentist. Mountain Brook Smiles. The dentist there I think his name is Wes Samford...dont shoot me if i screwed it up...but it is wes, but he is really awesome. None the less I would say that it was one of the most pleasant dentist trips that I have ever experienced. Now granted my only experience with dental work is through the military...I am sure that they,the military, are a bit more brutal and could really care less about patient comfort. This place on the other hand was very clean, very accommodating, and they were quick to fill you in, no pun intended, if you had a question. One of the things that was very awesome to me was that I had requested an apparatus for my teeth. It is supposed to keep you from grinding your teeth at night. I was curious about the price, but I was already getting a cast of my teeth made so I didnt really worry about it. They made sure before they did anything though that I was aware of the price and if my insurance would cover anything. On this matter they didnt cover it so I passed on it for right now until I get a chance to chat it over with Jill...its like 600 bucks.

So yeah...thats the update.

Tuesday, March 25, 2008

So we live there now...

So on Saturday Jill and I with the help of Daniel, Jason, and Chris, moved everything major from the old apartment to the new house. Hannah Home came and picked up the living room furniture and some old clothes for charity. We still have a few items that will go to charity but they didnt have room on the truck for it this run. Sunday we cleaned up the grill and threw down some inch thick ny strips, some chicken, corn on the cobb, roasted some fresh peppers, and a couple brauts, and did a little shindig with the fam. It is finally a home.

On a side note it is looking like Daniel may get this business of his going, which will bring some goodwill my way. I am going to design his logo, website, and get him on the web so that he can sudo get his presence known. He already has a few clients going so good for him. Hoping that maybe the work I do for him will get me a couple of clients as well.

Chris and I are on a top secret project that will be posted about here. So far we almost went down in a blaze of flames and glory, did a little destruction, and left a mess to be cleaned up...I know its vauge but I will put more into this later when the project starts to turn into something more substantial and we are able to talk about it.

Oh and on a side note I fixed the mirror the fucks from Arizona broke in route to Alabama. Its basically brand new. I can tell where I had to fix it but unless you really look close it should be ok for the living room or dining room...i think jill wants it in the dining room. Oh yeah and we bought a dining room table.

So yeah...that was the weekend.

Friday, March 14, 2008

New House

So um...yeah...maybe the title didnt really give it away...but Jill and I bought a house. We are so freaking stoked its pretty hard to contain the glee. we closed today at around 1130am and they gave us the key to the palace. We do not officially get to start moving in until Wed the 19th (maybe later but I will explain that situation in a sec.) We already purchased a bunch of new stuff for the house, furniture, and the likes. We also bought a bunch of bedding and are really looking forward to owning a house and finally paying ourselves instead of paying a rental company.

So yeah why we may get delayed on moving in....the couple we are purchasing from is pregnant..well was pregnant. She went into labor and had tripplets last night...so as you can imagine they are probablly going through some shit right now :). We originally told them they needed to have everything done by Wednesday, but concidering their circumstance Jill and I told them if they needed it they could have until Friday morning...Because we planned on moving in that Sat anyways...And we would give them more but we are expecting furniture on Sat...so yeah.

The only bitter sweet part of the whole transaction would have to be that our apt. complex wouldn't let us out of the lease early. Which is understandable but they could be getting a resident for 12 months as opposed to 3 months...but whatever. And the early termination is like 2500 bucks so paying 3 months rent although not cheaper is the better option...we pay like 100 more but get 3 months to move :)...a big plus for me.

All in all it was a wonderful day so far and I will put pics up of the new house as soon as we get a chance to.

Friday, February 29, 2008

Procrastination

I recall this quote that stated something to the tune of:


Procrastination on your part does not constitute an emergency on mine


I thought this was a great quote for today. I thought it was great because here I am sitting at work dealing the the multitude of things that need to be done and what do I hear...the tell tail sign from Outlook stating someone has sent an email...and with the little red "!" no less. They want some where around 20 changes done to their registers and all before open tomorrow...yeah give me a break. I am suppose to drop EVERYTHING I am doing and just work frantically to get what you need done. As if not only are you the only person existing on the planet...but definitely the only client that I work on. Fucking tools.

In other news the computer is still broke but I made some changes this morning that will hopefully bring about some stability to the system. There are only like 2 more things I plan on doing to it until I get a new MOBO for it. And while I am at it I might as well get another GB of RAM. Yeah that will do :).

As for everything else...life is good...



Thursday, February 28, 2008

So Yeah

So here I am sitting at work, nothing really that I feel like doing so I decide that I am going to blog. I have not written on this thing in quite some time and maybe I should change that. Maybe post a little something every couple of days about my wonderful life. People seem to like reading about other peoples lives and such.

And without further adieu here is today's post.

A lot of things going on recently such as:
  1. Closing on a house in March
  2. School (full time)
  3. Work (full time)
  4. Computer Problems
  5. Exams next week
  6. etc
So I have a lot on my plate but I guess that is a good thing. Closing on the house is really fucking exciting. We are furniture shopping, measuring the house the whole nine yards. It is all coming really quick...but I cant wait because Palmer really needs some space...the dog is a basket case after getting out of the kennel and being there all day. But I let him out today around 12ish...we will see how he does in the house...he got out recently and didnt destroy anything...I am hoping for the same outcome today.

School is good. 1 week until the exams and I only have a little bit of my web project left for one class so that is good. I should be graduating soon, I thought it was December but it is looking more like May :(. All for 1 damn credit...I am going to see if there are any 1 credit classes that do not take that much effort and try and cram that in to my normal schedule.

Work has been good. Steady and not too overwhelming. I am starting to get the hang of how things are supposed to work although there are still some iffy points of responsibility that I am hoping will iron out over the next few months.

Also still thinking about a joint venture with some friends into our own business. Cant really go into details about what, how, or anything like that but just know that when it happens..."it" is going to be life changing...mainly for the four of us. I actually think I may redesign a lot of the web page now that I am just finishing this web development class. I am seeing a lot of really good uses for ASP.NET and may incorporate it into the website.

And as for the computer problems...I am about fed the hell up with ASUS. This damn mother board has been giving me fucking problems since just about when I bought it. I think I might have the damn problem licked now though. The skinny of the situation is that the board can not boot from SATA drives...dont know why...its stupid and ridiculous but whatever. It can manage it. So I have to have an IDE drive in there...I installed the damn OS on the SATA drive...and I am hoping that it wont be too much of a problem. I had to change some configuration settings to allow the IDE drive to be the main drive and then everything booted right up...now its a fucking waiting game because it is not something that I can reproduce at the drop of a hat...for what ever reason the damn thing will just lock up, stop recognizing the IDE drive and then fail to POST at the acpi driver or whatever....but i think i smashed this fucking bug this time...and I hope I smashed it good and dead... That should be all for now...more to come hopefully tomorrow.

Sunday, March 18, 2007

St. Patrick's Day


Rotated_009
Originally uploaded by ruffyen.
Well I finally got to go out this weekend with Jill and all her friends. We had a freaking blast. I posted all the pictures of the event starting with the wine/getting ready over on my flickr.com account. www.flickr.com/photos/ruffyen I think otherwise click the "originally uploaded by ruffyen" link to see the rest.

We Started out at Maloney's at freaking 8pm and the line was WAY out the damn door. So we were in the mind set of screw this we just want to get a drink in our hands and chill the hell out. So we strolled to The Shanty which by this time started to get a line. Jill and Alex decided that waiting in this line sucked too so they made a group effort to find us a place to go. The found a place called the Hut that was located part inside and part outside with a tent or something. None the less we got drinks and the fun began. I saw a bunch of people I know while we were there too. Lacy, some people from work, and then on top of that met like 5 or 6 people too. One guy was talking some bullshit about owning a business and needing a web page set up so we started talking. I'm thinking of sending him a few pics of what I can do and then seeing where that takes me. But The Hut ended up being a decent place to be...although their bar tenders fucking sucked in my opinion there werent enough of them was the big problem. But we all had fun and the night was an overall success.

Sunday, July 23, 2006

What a wonderful Weekend

DSCF0160
DSCF0160,
originally uploaded by ruffyen.
So yeah this weekend was freaking awesome...first Jill and I started out with a movie...Click. and i must say that movie is freaking amazing. Such a deep movie and Adam Sandler nailed the part. I mean this movie really gets you thinking about life. Then later that night we went and had sushi which was amazing from RA sushi.

Then on Saturday we did a wine tasting at 58 degrees in Tucson. I thought it was pretty neat. I have never done it before but i think its pretty cool. It was like 20 dollars each and you get to sample around 6 wines and you get appetizers. It was neat. After that we went to a little house party at a friend named Jen's house. Met some people and drank a little it was fun.

Then sunday i had homework, and me and Jill basically just chilled out...none the less it was an amazing weekend.