My thoughts, rants and musings on technology, life, or otherwise

Christine and I have planned a trip to Europe for the beginning of September.  Two weeks of traveling and adventure.

Downside is, I’m terribly out of shape.  Europe is going to be a lot of walking… “urban hiking”, if you will.  Those that know me realize I have a mostly sedentary life style.  I write code most of the day and spend my evenings veg-ing in front of the TV.

So with the trip looming over my head I’ve decided to impart on a sort of lifestyle change.  I’m now off to my local gym every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 5:30am for an hour work out with a co-worker.

We’ll see how this pans out.

Today Christine and I lounged around. I’ve been itching to put up some retractable sun shades on our patio for a while now. Today was the day to do it. We stopped by our nearby Home Depot and picked up some Coolaroo sun shades. We picked out two 8′ shades for the sides of the patio and two 10′ shades for the larger front of the patio.

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Each shade went in with relative ease and each one rolls up out of the way when not in use. Pretty nifty if I do say so myself. Check out the photos of the finished job.

After today’s training class I went for a drive from Bellevue, to downtown Seattle again. Yesterday I had been at the Pike Place Market for dinner at Cutter’s. Tasty.

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Today I went down to Seattle Center. I took some pictures of the Seattle Music Experience Project and the Needle. No, I did not go up to the top of the Space Needle. I’m going to save that experience for when I can travel here with Christine. After a futile attempt to find some food around the Center, I decided to go for the sure thing and head back down to Pike Street. I hit up the Pike Place Brewery and Pub.

A few pictures of the Pike Street Market from the window I sat next to in the pub… fish and chips… some live drunken mexican music (Cinco de Mayo today) and I was on my way.

I took the I-90 from downtown back to Bellevue. On my way I realized that this is the same I-90 that cuts through Buffalo. For a split second I pondered how long it would take me to drive to Buffalo from Seattle, and what Hertz would say about me “borrowing” the car and returning it to them in Buffalo.

The company that pays the bills has sent me to Seattle for a training course evaluation. This is the first time I’ve ever traveled to Seattle. It is very beautiful. The mountains, the trees, the views are just awe inspiring. I’ll be here for two nights and I’ll take a bunch of photos and get them posted up here.  This first shot is of Mt Rainier from my seat on the plane into Seattle.

So that trip to San Diego was pretty awesome. We took the wife’s VW Bug cross the desert and through the mountains. I’ll just say it corners really well at above average speeds.

Life has taken on an incredible amount of insanity lately. I digress.

Switch56 is chugging along as we work to finish a project for PivotalPath.com. Our focal project, txtMovieClub.com launched a new social site and new look. I like it and I think Mark did a great job pulling it together.

My pursuit of a Master’s in Engineering continues. I’m already starting to tire of school and I’ve got another year to go. This semester’s Information Assurance course is… well… exhausting? No. Uninspiring. Yeah, I’ll leave it at that.

My folks have been visiting since early March. After some time spent at my Aunt’s home in central Phoenix, they are currently staying with Christine and myself. Since my mother cannot sit still we’ve been doing different home renovations on the weekends.

Work is work. I’m still doing some V.150.1 development and there’s talk of porting my work to other platforms. This is pretty neat and offers me some really good visibility up the ladder and across divisions.

So that’s it in a nut shell for now. I’ll pull some more symfony stuff together and post it up here in the future. ‘Til then, keep on keepin’ on.