 I love coffee. I love the taste, I love the smell, I love how it is such a universal drink. Think about how many movies there are scenes where the characters are just drinking coffee, or one asks another "Can I get you something to drink? Coffee?" Until I quit my job in December I was drinking 2-3 cups of coffee a week day. I just realized today how little coffee I am drinking now that I don't have anyone to sociallize with around the coffee pot. I am probably down to 1-2 cups a week (or less) these days. But what really shocked me is how easily I get tired without coffee. Take today for example. Last night I went to bed around 1am, I got up around 9:30am. That should be plenty of sleep, but come 11am, I'm already yawning and fighting the urge to take a nap. I decided to make a pot of coffee and presto, I'm wide awake and blogging. I guess it's no shocker that caffine wakes you up, I just never realized how much until I gave up the 2-3 cups-a-day habbit. |
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You may have noticed, but probably not, that last week there was a period where you could not add comments here. While that was purely a mistake on my part (upgraded my server and it broke something), it did have me wondering why my email volume was significantly light. You see, every time a comment is added here, or even attempted to be added I get an email. So I get several emails a day about spammers trying to leave a comment. I've built the system to at least not show you the spam comments, but the emails are driving me crazy. I thought that when they saw the comments were denied (I tell them "You are a spammer, go away") that they would give up. Boy was I wrong. Tonight I implemeted a new captcha system you must fill out before leaving a comment. I have used it many times in testing and I can attest that they are relatively easy to figure out. Not near as complicated as some. I am using a service called "reCAPTCHA" that not only implements a captcha system to distinguish the humans from the robots, but also helps make the world a better place by having humans help computers digitize books. When digitizing books, the computer can have difficultly reading all the word perfectly. Human interaction is needed when the computer can't make out the word. That's where reCAPTCHA comes to the rescue. The system will give you two words to type. One of the word images is known, the other not known. If the human solves the known word, it is assumed that the unknown word is correct. It is of course sent to many people to help reduce anomilies. I'm sorry to make you jump through so many hoops to leave a comment, but I'm hoping that now I won't have to ignore half my incoming emails beacuase of spammers. Also, this was all developed in my new dev environment/setup. Watch for more to come. |
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I’ve spent my first full week here down a the lake and wanted to do a quick update of things I’m liking, not liking, and having to get used to. Text version below: Things I love so far about being unemployeed at the Lake. |
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Today is my last day at Nexidia. It seems like just yesterday that I started here fresh out of college. (How cliche is that?) I have really enjoyed my tenure at Nexidia starting in the two man QA team, seeing it grow to six people, and graduating to be one of the first of the newly formed "Software Engineer in Test" team. I have seen the company grow from around 20 people (I think my employee number is in the 20's from my internship there while in school), to somewhere in the neighborhood of 100 folks. I've had seven managers, if you include the brief time I managed myself, and made countless friends through the years. At the time of my leaving, I am the oldest employee in development in years at the company, but still one of the youngest in age. I fully believe in the technology and people at Nexidia and will be looking for big things to happen with them in the coming years. |
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My dad celebrated his birthday the other weekend and all he wanted to do was have us boys home and hang out with him shucking oysters. He bought a big ol' box of them and I ate more oysters than I ever have in one sitting. Here are a few of the pictures I took.
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I took a ride up to north Georgia this past weekend to check out the leaves changing color. The leaves were awesome and the ride was good too. My favorite part was my lunch spot. I grabbed a sandwich at one of the little towns I stopped in and decided to find a place to eat it. I found a nice little grove of trees to pull off in and had myself an Easy Riders moment. I always loved in that movie how they would just pull off somewhere and sleep next to their bikes. No need for a hotel or campsite. Just an open spot to get away. My lunch was nice and peaceful. The only downer to my trip was when a yellow jacket flew into my coat and stung me on the arm. It has been itching for almost a week now and was swollen for at least 3 days. But I'll trade that for all the fun I had. |
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I went to a corn maize the other weekend and of course there are photos. Just wanted to share them with you. Oh and check out this movie of us on the bouncy thingy.
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 Various stages of clean shaven I recently decided that it was time to shave the beard. I had grown it out for a month or so (maybe less, I lost track) and it was just getting unmanageable. One of the things I love about having facial hair to start with is all the combinations that you can create. I tried to create several, but will end up with ol' trusty... just the soul patch. Enjoy these photos from my flickr page: |
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 at work celebrating Guy Fawkes day Today is Guy Fawkes Night. I'm fairly new to the holiday but love the movie V for Vendetta which is tied into the Guy Fawkes story. I was looking for a good reason to shave my beard and figured this was good enough. I'm dressed up at work and feel a little silly but I guess that's life. As the limerick goes: Remember, remember the Fifth of November,The Gunpowder Treason and Plot,I can think of no reasonWhy the Gunpowder TreasonShould ever be forgot. |
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Oh a whim this weekend I took a one day photography class. While I've been practicing photography for years now and know some of the general techniques to use. I've always been confused about how to know what manual settings to use in certain situations. This class cleared a lot of those things up. - We looked a good collection of Ansel Adams pictures. While almost everyone can see one of his photos and enjoy the beauty of it, I have learned to appreciate how far ahead of his time he was. We often take for granted how sharp and clear his photos were, when they were really hard to capture that way. Like I mentioned above, in the olden days, it was hard to capture large depth of field photos (everything is in focus). He went to extreme lengths to take beautiful depth of field photos all around California. - I also learned about shutter speed. I've learned through practice that there is really a limit to how slow you can have a shutter while holding it by hand. I never really knew the limit but learned this week that 1/60th of a second is really about as slow as you want to take photo holding it by hand - Something else I learned recently, though not at this class, is the rule of 32 in photography. I'm not sure who'd blog I found it on, but they were pointing out that a photography teacher they had told them about this rule. In the film days you could usually get 32 photos per roll of film. Out of those 32 pictures you should be able to select 1 photo to keep. In this age of digital cameras we are of the opinion that they are digital and cost nothing to keep taking, which leads us to have lots of mediocre pictures. I am really bad about this. I like to post lots of pictures and share a mediocre picture just because so-in-so is in it. While I'll probably keep doing that for people shots, I'm working hard to stick to the rule of 1 in 32 rule for "artistic" pictures I take. It's hard not to share everything, but I think it will be better in the long run. Put my best photos out there, ya know? I'm excited about what I learned this weekend and can't wait to go take some more photos. For now, here are some random shots I took practicing this weekend. Nothing terribly exciting, but it is close to that rule of 32.
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