The O’Blog

Wes and Annie English, originally uploaded by eaghra.

Couldn’t have asked for a more perfect day and night for Annie’s wedding. I tried to not take many pictures as to not annoy or get in the photographer’s way, but during the formal shots, I couldn’t help but snag a couple. They were always off angle and they weren’t looking at me, but this one worked, so I figured I’d post it to summarize the event.

After the meeting and pictures at the Monona Terrace, we headed out on a Betty Lou cruise where the ceremony, mingling and food took place. We witnessed a beautiful sunset and moonrise from the middle of Lake Monona before heading back into dock. After that it was off to Restaurant Magnus until about 11:30. It was all very pleasant and frankly, I couldn’t help but be shocked all night long at how gorgeous Annie looked. Congrats to both of them.

Tags: flickr, photos

Not quite sure when that became slang for Wisconsinite, but I’m liking what’s on the rest of sconnie.com. So much so that I went up to State St. tonight to pick up the Favre shirt, only to find they closed about 10 minutes prior. D’oh!

This is mainly for anyone not on facebook that might care, but the story of my current relationship has moved on. I pretty much knew from the get-go when I “re-met” Alison that things were looking good and it took less than a couple weeks for me to realize I just might have found my one. Actually, I practically melted about 2 hours into the class reunion when we first started talking, but that was really just my impetus to learn more. About a 1-2 months later we both kind of admitted it and we started those crazy conversations about how we’d be when we were old folks. However, she just kind of assumed tying the knot was one of those things that for one reason or another took a long time to finally come to terms about and commit.

Well, I finally decided somewhere around December or January and was waiting on some stronger signals from her to know that it was ok to move on. In the meantime I went on a slow shopping hunt. Finally, during March it dawned on me that waiting around is rather pointless. We both know where we’re going and to me delaying offers no benefit, and neither does rushing into it. So why not just pop the question and then we can take our time in finalizing any details because to me, the larger and most important part of the whole process was the proposal. That’s what solidifies it. A marriage just legally binds you to death and gives you some random benefits in the eyes of society. That is unless you hire a lawyer at some point to undo your apparently poor decision.

Well, to me it wasn’t going to be a poor decision. So, on March 31, I devised a clever and innocuous setup, popped a ring, proposed and she said yes.

So I went through all the used game places in Madison a couple days ago. While at the new location for Video Game Xchange, there was a kid there with his dad who was probably my age and his kid about 7-9 or so. His dad is looking through the old Genesis and Master System titles and I hear the kid say, “Yeah, I know about Sega games, but what’s a Sega? You played it?”

Le sigh…

And on that related note, when the hell did all the old original prints of just about any RPG game pre PS2-era suddenly become worth its weight in gold? I’m wishing I had never gotten rid of anything I used to own as it appears the only semi valuable game I have left is the original Final Fantasy Tactics.

And also on that note, over the weekend I picked up an on sale 8 gig Memory Stick Pro Duo ($35 at Office Max or $39 at Best Buy) and proceeded to realize how cool a hacked PSP can be. I ripped all my PSP games to the memory card and played them from there. Talk about friggin’ sweet! Practically zero load time. Wipeout is truly a pick up and play game now, Crisis Core is no longer the bore of load screens and I still have over a gig left on the card. And then of course there’s the longer battery life as a result. Way too cool. So then I looked into emulators….

Parker Nolan English, originally uploaded by eaghra.

For those not in the know and would like to in case this is on your RSS, Annie had her second baby today. 3 more pics by clicking through.

Parker Nolan English
3/26/09 @ 12:09am
7lb 10oz, 20in

Tags: photo

RAW decoding comparison, originally uploaded by eaghra.

Ok, so last night I tried to go capture Comet Lulin, and frankly I chickened out from the cold and lack of a tall tripod. However, I did manage to catch it in a few shots and I thought it looked good on the lcd, but upon getting them into Aperture, they looked like utter crap. Noise galore. So I remembered reading about some pro who decided to give the native (it was either Nikon or Canon) software a whirl that comes with the camera and lo an behold, he got less noise on RAW images.

So, time to find those CDs and install. Not much later and I couldn’t believe the difference. Here we have the untouched RAW files merely being interpreted by each program with Aperture on the left and Canon’s RAW Image Task on the right.

I think I found my new software to convert RAW. I think I’ll just dump them out into Aperture after adjusting any details available on a RAW shot as a TIFF for further editing from now on.

Tags: photo

Yeah, so that pic over there, it seems to becoming an annual tradition. Last year was -2 I believe, year before that was about the same. I’m not sure what the actual temp was today where I was, but I listened to NOAA a few times in the early afternoon and Madison was at -7. Not nearly as windy as they said it would be, but when it did hit, trust me when I say it wasn’t pleasant. Other than that, same as usual. Wasn’t feeling cold at all except for the fingertips every now and then and whenever the wind hit me in the face. I guess 5 layers of clothes will do that. In the morning I jokingly said in the Randy voice, “I can’t move my arms!”, but in reality, I realized I couldn’t really bend over and pick anything up off the ground.

Tags: photo

…or so I hope.  The internet transition is finally finished back to what I had in Madison.  If conditions prevail as they did in the past, this shouldn’t be disappearing once a week for a full day or more.

Tags: oharaweb

Yeah, so since I moved, I can’t take my land line with me so I’m going back to mobile only. Unfortunately, my phone absolutely sucks in Stoughton.  Well, outside it’s fine for the most part, but step in a house or building and it’s dead.  So I switched to US Cellular, which just about everyone in this town seems to have, and picked up a new phone to boot.  MotoRAZR VE20 (aka Vegas).  Unfortunately this introduced a whole new set of problems as OS X had absolutely no way of syncing with it.  No contacts, no nothing.  I was even trying to do it up within XP inside of VMWare with WMP, but still nothing.

So, after much searching, firmware updates and failed 3rd party iSync plugin attempts, the one method that should work but didn’t was manually sending vCards over Bluetooth ( I believe that’s an OBEX Push ).  That is until I thought to check the prefs of Address Book and found that I could change the version number of the vCard export.  Knocked that sucker back to 2.1, exported my contacts as one vCard file, sent it over and it worked flawlessly.  Well, it transferred what it could given that format, but jebus… way too much wasted time.   And I still can’t figure out how to get music on the thing.  I managed to accidentally discover how to create ringtones, but the music player refuses to load.  I think they’ve somehow made it so files transferred with Bluetooth are tagged as pirated and therefore unplayable, because I’ve done everything the instructions say for USB transfer, but the sucker won’t show up.

Tags: osx

Ok, this grows tiring.  New internet is coming soon and will hopefully rectify the constantly changing IP addresses that causes the domain name to disappear until I notice and can update the A records on the registrar.  Some time next week, or so I’m told.

Tags: oharaweb