I have had little time to post lately. Even with a decent LJ app for the iPhone and countless topics to write about, time is the one thing that no Apple gadget will ever create for me. They are inventive after all, but not THAT inventive.

How about that 27" iMac, though, eh? Man, that thing is sick.

First, a note about my userpic. I finally uploaded a "default" userpic, after having none for so long. I find little time to create new userpics for each of the various topics, not that I would use them much as I never have time to write anyway. But recently I needed a userpic for another site, and Jamie and I have been watching Azumanga Daioh, so yeah, there it is. When I get a chance I'll get rid of the animation, cause that's gonna get old quick.

And now it's time for a total ripoff from Bryan Lambert, my new hero of written prose, and the one person on the internet to use more curse words per post than I did in my famous Belkin wireless post back in 2004: Spastic Topic Monkey Friday Saturday!

Nike+

Been going pretty well so far. Did between 80 and 90 miles for three months in a row, and was hoping to break that record this month. But then I got sick at the start of the month and missed over a week of walking. Looking back, I should have just gone to the gym, dressed warm, and walked indoors on the treadmill, cause I'm still not 100% well and all that not-walking didn't seem to help much. I'm almost to 350 miles since I started the middle of August, and December is 43 miles so far. A long way to go to get above 80 miles now, but I did catch back up on the cruise. Multiple walks many days, with some getting over 7 miles in a day, so I'm excited to make a big push over the next two weeks.

Juggling

Started doing 4 balls a few weeks ago. Oddly enough, I only tried it for the first time while in NC with the family, after my Dad asked if I could do 4 balls yet. I was explaining how 4 balls worked and just tried it and hey, it didn't feel hopeless. So I practiced a lot on that trip, despite the low ceiling in the hotel, and by the time I got home I could comfortably qualify 4 balls. Didn't take the balls on the cruise, though, so practice starts again this week. Also getting more comfortable with 441, and trying 531, but I can't seem to get it even in our house. Gotta practice in the clubhouse at Carillon Lakes. Hoping to make evening practice in there a regular thing, but time is still so hard to come by.

Cooking & Baking

Haven't had time to do any baking lately. The stand mixer sits unloved, but then I haven't really had a weekend at home in forever. Between traveling for work, Thanksgiving, Jamie in Houston one weekend, and this bday cruise with my folks, it will be January before I can have anything approaching a normal schedule. That said, I did work my way through several other recipes in the Williams Sonoma bread cookbook. I posted about the dinner rolls, but I have also made white bread, wheat bread, cinnamon raisin bread, oatmeal bread, cornbread, blueberry banana bread, and I forget what else. I do miss baking, but exercise is more important right now. I could use some bread this week, though, so perhaps I can bake a loaf at home tonight instead of buying one in the store. We'll see...

Time to vent, as calmly as I can. I'm sick right now, so I don't have the energy to get really upset, but this is still pising me off.

I had to recreate my iTunes library over the weekend. Before Thanksgiving, I hooked up my harddrive to the laptop to sync one album, since I didn't take the harddrive to work that morning. After syncing, itunes decided it wanted to "determine gapless playback information" for my entire fucking library, a process it has already done, and a process which resulted in iTunes freezing after awhile.

but I was going on vacation, I didn't have time to fuck with it. when I got back, I hooked it up to my desktop, and yay, same problem! The result was an unusable itunes library, because no matter how many times I told it to stop the process, it would always start again once I did anything at all. Thank you, iTunes, for somehow losing all that information and rendering my library totally fucked!

well, with each problem I can always find a way to make myself feel better by spending money. so I bought a new harddrive and began creating a new itunes library from scratch. It took the better part of two days, but I got it working, and no more "determining gapless playback". It did that for a few albums as I was adding them, but now it's all ok.

but yay, I lost information by moving the songs to the new library! no more ratings (so fuck that shit), no play count (completely meaningless, now that I've had to redo my library multiple times), and none of my playlists are there. I have to recreate each of my playlists, if I can remember what they were, and fuck the ratings. I was using them to create smart playlists for certain artists, but fuck that shit in it's fuck hole. it's a lot of fucking work to put ratings on all your music. I had only done the tiniest fraction, and it still took forever. fuck it.

now I'm trying to sync my phone. yay, more uncertainty! it says it's deleting everything off the phone and syncing the new stuff. from the sound of it, it would delete all my data in all my apps, and install them as if they were new.

fortunately, it does not actually do this. It only updated the apps that needed updating, and all my previous data is still there. I did have to rearrange the icons on the home screens, though. it put them in some random order, but I compared it with the phone prior to syncing and put everything in place so it wouldn't change.

losing a lot of the itunes data is annoying, though. I had to replace a fair amount of album art, but that was pretty much just for ones I had previously downloaded via itunes anway. now at least I can sync again, so back to the nike+ and whatnot. I do need to get a backup solution for this new harddrive, though. it's 500gb, and my backup drives are all only 250gb. time to invest in a 500+ gb drive for backing up. perhaps a 1tb drive to backup both my personal drive and jamie's drive as well.

Hm... I need to make a userpic for my Nike+ posts... No time for that now, but time for a quick post about the week.

Yesterday marked the end of my first full week since starting Nike+. Pretty good week, over 17 miles thanks to the two big walks on Friday and Saturday evenings and two trips around the lake. Still need to calibrate, and this number might be a bit high depending on how accurate the treadmills at Snap Fitness are.


I'm going to take a screen shot of each week as I progress and post them here. I think it's a nice way to look at my workouts.

Been a couple weeks since I ordered additional MMX Plus balls from the WJF store, but they finally arrived today. I'm happy because it was getting hard to practice in the house with my yellow balls, and now I have enough that Jamie could practice with me if she wants. I got out of practice again, after starting the month so well, so today is as good a time as any to start again.

Behold... four blue MMX Plus juggling balls atop a very messy desk:

Ever since we upgrade to the iPhone 3G S, with built in support for Nike+, I've been wanting to try it out. Jamie got into it first, and after seeing her progress and understanding more about what the Nike+ website does, I had to order it for myself. I got the sensor plus a little pouch that will allow me to use it on any shoes. It's important that I get to stick with my Ecco shoes and not have to get Nike shoes, as Ecco is the only shoe I ever wear.

Gave it a quick test walk/run today, just out the building and down the walk to the far corner and back. Tiny bit of jogging, but I'm only wearing my work shoes, so I'll look forward to testing it on a real jog later. What I do want to test out is the Nike+ widget. Stupid thing is designed for facecrook, so there are no options for making it a size that I want, but I at least want to see how it works.

EDIT: Took the widget off cause it won't work worth a shit. Nike has the worst fucking website in the world, I swear! I have my profile set to public and it still claims it's private when I try to load the widget half the time. Piece of shit. Nike+ is a great technology and workout tool that is GREATLY IMPAIRED by a shit-ass flash-heavy website. Memo to the entire world: STOP TRYING TO MAKE EVERY GODDAMN WEBSITE ANIMATED!!!!!!!1 It doesn't so SHIT for anyone over the age of 3.

Amazon is finally selling Jean-Jacques Goldman albums in their mp3 store! If you don't know me well enough, you may not be aware of this artist, as he is French and not nearly as popular in the US as he should be. His music is some of the best I've ever listened to; he is one of the few artists I have continually listened to since discovering him in late 1999. He was, by far, the greatest inspiration I had when I was a singer/songwriter back in the day, and I regularly performed his songs during my gigs, despite any understanding of the language.

I was just listening to one of his live concert recordings, and halfway into the first track I was just so taken by the music that I had to share. Here's the original video for Nuit, and if you like that one, check out other videos on YouTube. You won't be disappointed.

Been awhile since I had anything to post about with regard to iStock. I haven't had any time to prepare images for upload in over a week, and my last three pending images have finally reached the end of the queue. One was rejected, two were accepted, both from Hawaii. I really want to take another cruise over there now that my photography has improved a lot. Wish it wasn't so expensive.

Here are the new files to be added to my Hawaii collection:

Hawaiian Coast (one of my all-time favorite shots from that trip)
Hawaiian Countryside (same area as a couple of my other shots, but with no road in the frame)

Holy instant-gratification, Batman! Two more photos were just approved for iStock, and one of them has already been downloaded! I've never had a photo get a download this fast, and it's only been viewed twice! Can you tell I'm excited? Just a bit?

The new photos are both from Hawaii (that lightbox won't show the two new files right away):

Hawaiian Road
Hawaiian Tree

I need to fix my website asap, as I now have multiple images in iStock that are still visible in my personal portfolio from the show in January.

Ah, it's so nice to see something other than meerkats get some action on iStock. ^_^ This marks my second non-meerkat file to be downloaded, and I'm happy my Alaska photos are getting some views. Now that I have links to my lightboxes within each photo, I have to wonder if the person who downloaded this photo found it via a different Alaska photo that took them to my lightbox? I can hope.

And oh yeah, I finally made some banner links for my lightboxes. It's a common practice on iStock, and every artist has their own style, so it was a challenge to come up with something that I liked. Now when you look at the majority of my photos, since most are either meerkats or Alaska, you will see one of these links below it:

It's been some time since I posted about juggling. It's fun to read my original post right after the MMX Plus balls arrived and I was up to 12 catches. Now, anything under 100 is considered easy, and I've broken 200 on numerous occasions. But, I haven't been consistent with my practice, and as such my throws are still not as solid as I'd like.

I've begun practicing in the evenings, trying to get at least 15 minutes a day in right now. I originally wanted 30 minutes, but since I'm also doing strength training at the gym, 15 minutes is about all my arms can take. One thing I've discovered is that my MMX Plus balls are not the best for indoor juggling, at least not in our house. The deep yellow is hard to focus on against our off-yellow walls and the yellow light coming from various light bulbs. I really wish they had the blue ones in stock, but right now they don't show any MMX Plus in stock regardless of color.

I could order some SRX Russian balls, which looks very similar, but are a bit lighter than my MMX Plus. I'm not sure I want to do that, though. I like the weight of the MMX Plus and would prefer to get more of them in blue. I just wish it was easier to find this stuff.

Downloads have been pretty quiet since that big hit last month with the two extended licenses, but today I got my first download of August, and a large file at that! It's still one of my original 4 meerkat photos. Would be nice if something else would sell, but hey, I'll take it. lol

I also have two new photos, my first submissions for the month. We have one more Alaska from 2006 (about the last one left, wish I had shot more good photos back then), and a vertical of the tree in the fog. I was hesitant about that tree since the sun no doubt blows out the highlights in the middle of the shot, but I figured the mood and composition was usable in design and gave it a shot, so I'm glad it was accepted. I just wish I had more photos like that. We haven't seen fog like that since winter, but this year I'll have to spend some mornings out with the camera and see if I can get more moody shots.

I've been a bit busy during the day to keep this updated, but over the past few days I've had some new additions to my portfolio on iStockphoto.com. We've got one more Alaska photo, my first photo from Hawaii (I plan to upload more), and one of the first photos I shot with my D300 back in 2007, the tree in the fog, which is my first photo to garner more than a single rating!

As of right now I have no more photos pending approval, so I need to get some stuff uploaded. I've found that many of my old D70 photos are still quite good, so I'm trawling my collection for anything that will help expand my current portfolio. Hawaii is a natural choice, and I wish I had more photos from that trip, but hopefully I can return with the D300 one day.

Another new photo was accepted today, a shot of the entrance to Disenchantment Bay, looking away from Hubbard Glacier. I got this shot when the ship was turning around, and I'm glad I took it because the weather was just right. I think it makes a nice addition to my Alaska collection. I have two more photos waiting approval, but they are from 2006 and may not do as well. I have yet to upload any D70 photos since I started, and the only one I uploaded during my application process was rejected for artifcating (due to medium ISO and low lighting in the shot, makes for a great art piece, but not great stock).

Update: The two D70 photos have been accepted, bringing another two photos to my Alaska collection. Just added:

Mountain Reflections
Snow-covered Mountaintop

I did some baking this weekend, some Saturday evening and some on Sunday. I baked whole-wheat buttermilk biscuits, followed by blueberry muffins and homemade granola bars. The biscuits turned out the best, and were by far the easiest to make. As such they are the only ones of which I have photos...



Here they are fresh out of the oven. ^_^ I only made a single batch, which I could easily double to get a better yield for my work. Everyone who ate one enjoyed them, though I would prefer them just a bit flakier (I'm thinking less time kneading the dough?) and I plan to include some cheddar cheese next time for a sharp flavor.



The other two did not turn out as perfect, but they still tasted great. The muffins were only a problem because of my muffin pan, which is oddly shaped and must have some special trick to keep them from browning too much. The granola bars were a pain to cut, as always, but the taste is the same, so once I figure out the secret to cooling and cutting without sending granola flying around the kitchen, more photos will follow.

Oh yeah, here's the recipe. I skipped the whole "brush with milk" part at the end, but they were fine without it.

Our Bromptons are here! They arrived just before lunch. We opened Jamie's first, then mine. Kinda busy at the office today, so we only took a short ride around the parking lot, but we'll ride more later in the day when we don't have so much to do. Here's a quick photo of my Brompton sitting in my office...

Today is the day, our Bromptons are on the FedEx truck for delivery! Not sure what time we can expect them, but there will be an unboxing ceremony for sure, with photos and the like, following by a ceremonious ride around the building. Or in the case of rain, a ride around the warehouse.

Just a quick update, another of my Alaska photos has been accepted. This one is from last year, Snowy Mountains in Glacier Bay. The weather was very gloomy and overcast, so I didn't come away with the kinds of photos I did this year, but it's nice that I one was accepted for stock. Two others from Glacier Bay have been rejected because of lighting, and there's not much I can do about it. Just gotta try some more.