And, well, if you’re reading this it was a success.

Lately I could only describe the people that I work with as soul crushing. Regular status is constantly dangled in front of my face and then ripped away by the union or some other idiot. I was becoming quite depressed and unsure of what to do or how to move forward. Quit? Transfer? Bueller?

So Alison suggested I take all the overtime and buy something I’ve always wanted. Like a nice telescope, new camera or drum set. Surely she had to be joking. None of those things are cheap and we have stuff to buy for the house. Well, she wouldn’t let up about how it would really cheer me up and allow me to see past this downturn and finally get a physical object in my life that I’ve always yearned for.

Well, it took only about a day for that realization to settle in and sure enough, work no longer mattered and I was pumped! 2 days later and here we are. Honestly, Alison was pushing for me to get the 20sx, but there was no way I could part with that kind of money and feel good about myself. Granted, this isn’t cheap either, but with the help of Full Compass, it was less than half of the 20sx.

And let me tell you, it seriously does suspend your disbelief. You hit them and it sounds and almost feels like you’re not really playing. Put the headphones on and suddenly you’re a rock god. Or techno, or reggae or jazz, etc etc.

Now there’s going to be a lot of practice to find my coordination and rhythm again.

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.

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.

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….

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

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.