a weekend of awesomeness!

I got a lot done this weekend and managed to have a bunch of fun too! How’s that for a productive weekend?

First off, website updates. I posted 4 new galleries of pictures (Grandma Mack’s Disneyland trip, Grandma Mack’s 82nd birthday, Easter, and Picnic Day). I also organanized them and prepped them for long-term achival with the rest of my data. I realized that I’m running out of disk space in a bad way (shooting raw will do that to ya), so I need to figure out what I’m going to do for long term archival and backup. Ideally, I’d build a new server with a couple of TB of storage, but I don’t think I have the budget for it. My desktop PC is 5 years old, so building a new desktop machine may be a possibility. I could then convert my current desktop into a server, but I’d probably either add more disk to it (not a fun possibility because things are cramped now in the mid-tower case it’s in and it only has 2 SATA connectors and they’re both in use), or move the disks that are in it now to the new pc and drop bigger disks into it. For now, due to budget constraints, I think I’m going to have to settle for a nice external hard drive. Newegg has some nice enclosures and1 TB drives seem to be pretty cheap.

I spent a lot of time on interstate 10 Saturday and made 3 separate trips to Santa Monica. I started off by heading out there about 9:30AM to pick up Shae. We jumped in my XRunner and sped off to La Verne where we were meeting my photography classmate Andrew. Andrew’s a cool guy with an awesome job….he’s a flight instructor. We met him at Ballard Aviation for a flight over Los Angeles. We hopped into a small, single engine aircraft and were in the air by noon. We were headed out to the Santa Monica airport for lunch. We took a few loops over downtown and snapped a bunch of pictures. He would slow the plane down, we would open the windows and stick the camera out the window to take some incredible shots of LA. I shot a roll of Plus-X 125 on the way to SM. On the way back, I switched over to digital. It was an awesome experience and I hope that I have the opportunity to do it again. After landing, I ran Shae back out to SM. I think it only took me 3.5 hours to get there and home! It was worth it to spend an incredible day with my sister in the air. I’m going to go to school early to develop the film tomorrow.

The only bad thing that seems to have happened this weekend is my Logitech bluetooth mouse seems to have finally died after 5 years of service. It won’t charge, even with new batteries. I stopped using the BT keyboard a while ago (got a nice Microsuck ergo keyboard). I’m using a crappy dell PS2 mouse. It’s such an old mouse that it’s not even optical…it’s got a ball in it! I’m contemplating getting a nice replacement mouse. I’m leaning Microsuck because I may not agree with their software, ethics, or customer support, I think they turn out good peripherals. I have a 5 button mouse at work that is pretty comfortable. This time around, I think I’m just going to get a wired mouse because the Bluetooth one I had really didn’t add any value. On the other hand, when I used my BT keyboard, it added tremendous value because I could crank up my music and then just take the keyboard downstairs or wherever to control volume and other music player controls, but since it wasn’t comfortable to type on, I’m back on a nice ergo wired keyboard.