Caught In The Whirlwind
Jason
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Posts by Jason
Cavern Exploring
01038 days
by Jason
in Uncategorized
I was hoping that I'd have a more interesting blog post for you about the activities on Friday, but I do not. I forgot to bring my camera which pretty much killed all of the visual aids.
But in any case, my friends and I went out to Howe Caverns. I haven't been there in quite some time and it ended up being a pretty nice day to do so. Thankfully the tours weren't overly busy and our tour group didn't have large amounts of screaming kids with us. So bonus.
It was pretty neat walking through there again and seeing all the various rock formations. Which is why I wish I had brought my camera along with me… Because there were some amazingly cool looking things in there that I wish I would have gotten pictures of. Dah.
So yeah, if you've never been there and find yourself in Upstate New York looking for something to do…check it out. But bring warm clothes. It's about 52F down there year round.
QotD: To Infinity and Beyond!
01041 days
by Jason
in Uncategorized
Are you interested in intergalactic travel? What would you hope to discover?
Presented by Intel, Sponsors of Tomorrow.
Yep. I'm interested in intergalactic travel. Not quite as much as I was when I was a kid, exactly, but I keep my eye on the goings on of the space program.
I think I'm most interested in finding other planets that could support life (specifically our kind of life). Beyond the fact it would be interesting to view another planet that is similar to our own, it'd be a good idea in case of some sort of large disaster, like an asteroid or something, were to befall the planet. Gives a potential escape route.
Not that I hold out hope of that ever happening. Space exploration seems to be taking a backseat when it comes to funding. Seems like it's more important to spend our resources beating each other up than trying to explore the universe. Sigh.
Grandmother Update
01042 days
by Jason
in Uncategorized
I mentioned a while back that my Grandmother had been diagnosed with breast cancer.
Well, it's quick update time. She had her surgery yesterday and everything went really well. The operation was successful and the cancer had not spread to the lymph nodes. She even said that after the surgery she wasn't really feeling any pain at all (unless she pressed on the incision), even without any drugs or whatever.
She was discharged this morning and is currently on her way home.
So that's some very good news.
Nature
01042 days
by Jason
in Uncategorized
Well, the first half of my vacation is pretty much over, so I figured I'd report on the trip out to Whetstone Gulf State Park on Monday.
The weather ended up being beautiful. We were a little iffy on going because of the forecast of rain in the afternoon, but the entire time we were out there, the weather was perfect. Sunny, but not too warm… excellent outdoor activity weather.
The activities ended up getting cut a little short. There's a trail that runs around the gorge that the park is built on and we were going to try that…but it ended up being a little too much to handle and eventually we turned back.
The picnic area was as awesome as I remembered, right next to the creek. The park was pretty much empty once you got away from the swimming area, so we found a nice shady spot next to he creek and settled in for the grilling of steaks, the eating of deviled eggs and the peanut butter pie that was made for the occasion. Hopefully we can wander back out that way some weekend for another picnic and to attempt one of the less aggressive trails…
It was a little weird going back there as I really haven't been out there for years. It was more a place from my early childhood memories and less an actual place. Naturally, the biggest thing was that the park seemed so much smaller than I actually remembered it. The road running through the park was much much smaller than I thought it was, thinking of it.
All in all it ended up being a pretty nice day. Like I said, hope we get a chance to wander back there in the future. Well, I will be back there in August probably, as we're doing a family meeting type thing there. Whetstone is the official campground of my moms side of the family, so it makes sense that's the venue for the gathering of peoples.
I took a couple more pictures, which can be found over here
Must Collect More Stars…
01044 days
by Jason
in Uncategorized
I have been consumed by a game. Which is handy because this week is a pretty laid back/vacation-y type of week. That game is Suikoden Tierkreis for the DS.
If you're not familiar with the Suikoden series, the basic overview is that you play some hero type guy and you come across some wrong in the world that needs righting (usually they're politically based storylines. Warring kingdoms, that sort of thing) and eventually stumble your way onto a castle. Then you begin to gather your army with 108 recruitable characters hidden across the game world. Some you get automatically, some you can stumble upon…others are very hard to recruit.
I've played Suikoden 1 and 5 (wish I could play 2…but that's so freaking expensive these days) and really enjoyed them. So it was to my surprise that there was a new DS game that was released in the series. I actually stumbled onto it via browsing around gamefly…
I've been playing it pretty much nonstop all weekend It's very good. It's not exactly like a main Suikoden series game in several ways, most notably all the characters are different since they consider it a spin-off game. Other differences include a story line that's tilting a little more fantasy based although not much more than a normal game really. They also chucked the large scale army battles which is understandable and got rid of the leveling up of weapons in favor of a more standard inventory system. But overall…it feels very suikoden-y.
It isn't without it's problems. Mainly the voice acting is HORRIBLE. Why do companies keep insisting on trying to put voice acting on DS games??? It's stupid, serves no purpose and is almost universally horrible!
But the story is good and engaging, the battle system is fun and I'm finding myself pulled in enough to try to find all the extra hidden quest characters and stuff on my first play-through. Definitely think I'm going to be using the keep it option on this through gamefly.
Phew!
01046 days
by Jason
in Uncategorized
I just finished a majority of the new development on this large project that I've been doing for work. Just in time for my 4 day vacation. Woohoo!
I've been pushing up against this deadline (after sorta missing the first one. Oops) all week and I didn't know if I was going to be able to make it. But I spent pretty much all last night working on finishing up one section of the project at home and all day today getting the rest done…and it's done. Major stress level decrease.
The stress levels weren't helped at all though by the fact that the host of my personal website nopurpose.org was hacked Wednesday evening. This wouldn't be a big deal, since I don't really use the website for anything critical, except that I DO use the e-mail as my main account. So I've been without reliable e-mail for the past couple days.
I eventually decided I was going to jump ship to a different (more reliable) host that I've been using for several years already. And that I was going to move my domain's e-mail over to Google Apps. So now my main e-mail address is powered by Gmail pretty much. It's working pretty well so far. I've had it set up for 4-5 hours. It's pretty neat having gmail be your webmail interface.
Which clears the deck for a relaxing little vacation. My friends and I are going to go out to Whetstone Gulf state park on Monday. Whetstone is the source of a lot of childhood memories for me since my family went up there camping fairly often when I was younger. It's been a VERY long time since I've been there. But we're going up Monday to do some hiking and some grilling of steaks for dinner. Looking forward to that a lot. Also some other activities planned, but I've been looking forward to the trip to the park so much that the other stuff has slipped my mind…
I'll be sure to post some pictures from the trip up here later in the week.
EDIT: Oh, maintenance situation update. We got our oven fixed, thankfully. The leak situation still remains, but they're putting gutters up this weekend…so they say. I'll believe it when I see it, of course.
Exhausted
01049 days
by Jason
in Uncategorized
I'm not really sure what it is about the past couple days, but while I've been sleeping it hasn't been really restful sleep at all. I woke up this morning basically stumbling around in a zombie-like state. I'm still sorta stumbling around actually. Blargh.
Not sure if I mentioned it on the blog here or not (I did on my twitter feed…hard to keep track of what I've mentioned where these days) but at the apartment we've been having a bit of an issue with a leaking roof in the living room. Which is a little concerning when you realize that the living room is on the second floor of 3. As near as we can tell the rain (when it gets really heavy) is coming off the roof, hitting the air conditioner that's upstairs and when it gets too much for it to run off normally, it'll run back into the wall, down through and pool on the ceiling in the living room, causing it to leak pretty decently.
Added to that we've now got a problem with the oven. Over the weekend when roasting a chicken, Wassy noticed that the heating element inside the oven had a bit that was glowing bright white and buzzing (like, electrical current buzzing). Looks like something melted off the protective coating and now we've got exposed electrical elements down there. So needless to say, we're not using the oven until we get it replaced.
The replacement bit is the stressful part though. When you can get a maintenance guy out to look at it, they tend to fix things pretty quickly. But the problem is getting them out… The leak issue has been happening ever since Thursday of last week and the only assurances we got was that they were going to put gutters on the building sometime this week. Thanks guys. Real helpful. Hopefully we get somebody out soon.
I really like the apartment, but it's in an older building so there's definitely going to be some issues with the appliances and stuff. I just wish they'd be a little more prompt with the fixing things bit…
Battery Woes
01051 days
by Jason
in Uncategorized
Getting the Wassyart.com redesign done this weekend was tempered a bit by an unplanned fairly major purchase involving my laptop.
My MacBook Pro is roughly 3 years old at this point, and while it's still holding up as far as my computing needs are concerned, the battery was not. Not that I should be surprised since batteries typically last only a year or two before they die and mine was at least 2 years old (I got a battery replacement back when they were doing the recalls). So a couple months ago, I noticed my laptop was starting to shut off randomly after a few minutes of not being plugged in. Not to mention the fact that it was charging really weirdly (when it decided to charge at all). I had been putting off getting a new one since they're so freaking expensive ( $130ish dollars) and I had other things on my mind.
Unfortunately, my MacBook made the decision for me. While I was working on Wassy's website on Friday, I noticed that the bottom of the laptop was feeling a bit funny. So I turned it over to look and sure enough, the battery had started bulging. Sigh. Turning off quickly I can ignore. A battery that starts bulging…not so much.
I made an emergency trip out to the Apple Store in Syracuse that afternoon to grab a new one. On the plus side, I now have at least 3 hours of battery life again which is very nice. Haven't had that in a long time. Of course, my wallet is now $130 and change lighter. It's always something.
Sunday was notable in that I went to spend some time with my family. One of my nephews was having a birthday party and because of my grandmother situation, my aunt invited the entire family to the party so we could all get together. It was quite cool hanging out with the family, as I hadn't seen many of them in quite a while since we didn't do the traditional Christmas Eve party. We left pretty quickly after the kids got the squirt guns out though. There was a lot of splash damage going around after that.
It's Done!
01053 days
by Jason
in Uncategorized
I can now reveal what I've been working on. The newly redesigned Wassyart.com! This was my work from start to finish (aside from her artwork bits of course). I'm quite proud of how this turned out. I was a little worried that I wouldn't be able to come up with something acceptable given the graphics heavy nature of the design. I've always thought that I couldn't do graphics type stuff…but this helped prove to myself that I might actually be able to do it after all…
Definitely some room for improvement, both in the theory of it all and in the technical aspects, but going through this process made me realize that this sort of thing could be something for me to look into further.
Update
01054 days
by Jason
in Uncategorized
Just wanted to post a quick update about my grandmother, so as to not leave people hanging.
She apparently has stage 2b breast cancer, but it has not spread to the lymph nodes as far as they can tell which is a pretty hopeful diagnosis. I did some scouting around on the internet and that seemed to indicate that at this point it responds really well to treatment options. She's scheduled for surgery on the 14th of July.
So that's pretty good news, considering the situation.
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