Can't wait for this season to get underway! Something else to think about besides how crazy work has been. In fact, I'm taking this Friday off since we get Monday off for Labor Day anyway... I need a break. Need.
We're going over to Brian and Debra's for the game. He just got his new HDTV not that long ago and has been waiting for an Gamecock football game to be in HD so he could invite folks over to watch. He has Time Warner Cable, which is a good thing because if Tropical Storm Ernesto is over South Carolina Thursday PM then we may have problems with reception on DirecTV when the thundercells pass over. Hopefully not though, because I'm recording the game on the Tivo to burn to DVD later.
Our first five games are all under the lights - great news. I love night games a lot more than day games. It's hard drinking beer at 8 a.m. for the noon kickoff when you feel like you're still asleep. We play at Mississippi State tomorrow, then Georgia, Wofford, Florida Atlantic, and Auburn at home before heading out on the road again. And the Auburn home game is going to be another Thursday night game here in Columbia. Fun, except that Auburn is really good, so it'll probably be a loss. I'll still take that Thursday and Friday off work that week in September.
Pictures for the Graniteville job are coming along okay. Might have to take another trip down there because there were two shots I missed the last time. I went down there myself early last Saturday morning... Christina wanted to sleep. Turns out she made the right choice. I was heading down early on purpose because I thought the sites I needed to shoot and re-shoot were backlit in the afternoon sun. It was the exact opposite. So, I had to kill a day in Graniteville SC/Augusta GA until the afternoon sun was right. I know the city of Augusta, GA pretty well now to say the least. At least Hooters had a motorcycle show to check out after lunch... a huge parking lot was roped off and they had all kinds of choppers and such, so that killed a couple hours looking at the bikes. Well, the bikes and the Hooters girls in swimsuits washing the bikes for the owners.
I'm still working on editing the ones I have taken, but I'll make sure to post a gallery when I'm done. I'm trying to give him some choices of the images - full color, selective color objects with the rest of the image black and white, and full black and white copies as well. It's a lot of editing and I haven't had much time lately to work on them.
Anyway, I should get back to the grind - didn't really have the time to post all this but since I worked through yet another lunch I figured it'd be a nice break.
Work has been nuts lately. Start of classes is today and I swear everyone came back from vacation this summer right before classes and needed everything done then.
On top of our 35-40 requests in progress right now, we also had to reimage the lab machines and we've had to deal with completely dead hard drives, one of which I had to send off to a data recovery company for one faculty member. That tab will run him about $3,000 for 1-2 day service on getting some data restored from his dead drive. He could have spend around $1,850 or so and gotten 5-7 day turnaround service, but his tenure promotion evaluation is coming up in a couple weeks so it was urgent.
The lab imaging is basically taking one computer out of the lab, setting it up how you want it with all the different programs and such, then making an image of that one computer, and pushing that image to all the other computers in the lab so that they're all identical (for the most part) to the original computer you set up.
Well, that should have been done by Marty a week ago, but instead we spent that day getting that base system set up right and didn't start imaging the lab until 4:15pm or so that day.
Anyway... not a lot else other than work going on. We took a trip to Atlanta last weekend to visit with Nicki and Miguel and see Anna. Anna was sick and running a fever so she would go from happy and calm to not so happy and not so calm from time to time. We also got to go out to dinner and see Michelle and Ben too while we were there. Went to a mongolian grill type place in downtown Atlanta called The Real Chow Baby and it was pretty good. After all, when you make your own combination for them to cook up, it's harder to complain about the food since it's your fault if it's bad.
This weekend we may drive down to Graniteville again for more photos - hopefully get a better, blue sky this time. Then next Thursday is kickoff for College Football - our game is on ESPN that evening at Mississippi State.
Went down to see Carolina's scrimmage this afternoon and just walked right in the media entrance out onto the sidelines. Sometimes being 'the guy with the big camera and lens' is a good thing. :)
Media can only shoot for the first 10 plays so a lot of the photos are from warmups and practice drills...
Got our tailgating spot today. It was a saga trying to get one too. For the entire summer we've been waiting to hear back from the guy running the lot where a couple of co-workers tailgate.... we were going to join them this upcoming year. Well, the guy didn't know his cost yet, so he didn't know what the lot would cost per space until August 10th.
Last season it was $125 so we prepared for that... maybe a slight increase. Found out yesterday he wants $250/space this season. We're not paying that, so we found other reserved spots in the Farmer's Market across from the stadium for $125/space. It's not that close to the group we were going to join, so it may end up just being Brian & Debra, Dave & Janna, and Christina and I. Still, it's a spot and the whole hassle is over now.
Tickets should arrive next week... been to a practice... a scrimmage in the stadium is open to the public tomorrow at 4:15pm, so weather-permitting we may be going down there. It's definitely football season... even watched some NFL preseason last night and there's another game on tonight in about 10 minutes or so. Gotta love it!
I'm playing fantasy football for the first time this season. It's been comfortable living under this rock, but I figured eventually I had to do it.
So how do I kick off the season? Showed up 25 minutes late for our online live draft. I thought it was at 8pm last night, not 7pm... glad I signed in a bit early... at least I got to start making my own picks in the 7th or 8th round instead of the computer picking all my players.
Anyway, we'll see how much time and effort I put into it... I like and follow college football a lot more than the NFL.
Not much else going on... the phones are still getting pretty clear reception in the house and pretty much everywhere else we've used them, so I think they're keepers. We also find out about our tailgating spaces tomorrow, so that's another step towards the season starting. I even hear that season tickets will be showing up soon... late this week, early next week.
Boy am I glad we had the new phones this morning... we would have never made it to work without them!
Okay, that's not really true, but there's an application you can download to your phone on Verizon called VZ Navigator and it's slick... basically turns your phone into one of those talking GPS units. "Turn right in 400 feet onto Sumter St", then, "Turn right onto Sumter St", etc, etc. It did a great job on the trip to work this morning with one exception - it pronounced Huger St as Hooger St and it's supposed to be pronounced Yougee. I guess you have to cut it some slack on those weird French street names.
The trial of that software is free for a month, after that it costs $9.99/month. Which compared to a full color talking GPS with map updates it would take around two and a half to three years before you spent the cost of one of those.
Also, last night I managed to get dial-up networking set up with the phone. Took some obscure software from a message board to edit the internal Service Programming of the phone a little, but now I can attach it to my laptop with a USB cable and use it as a dial-up modem. Gets about 64k download speed in the house, but it's supposed to be around 115k, around twice the speed of a regular dial up 56k modem. Only it works over all of Verizon's network for the most part. Not something I'd use a lot, but it's nice to have if I needed access somewhere.
Anyway, I should get busy... going to be a long week. Robert's out for the week and we're pretty busy already.
Christina and I had older phones and as any of you I've ever called with my cell from our house know they didn't get the best reception. Understatement of the century... I would get dropped calls and bad reception all the time.
Anyway, we thought we'd give Verizon one last shot with new phones. They have a 15 day return policy where they take the phones back and everything, including your contract, reverts back to the way it was before upgrading. So if these wouldn't have worked, at least we'd know and then we could move to Alltel or another company like that.
In the first few calls as a test, it's been great... no dropped calls and calls sound clearer.
We each got one of the new LG Chocolate phones from Verizon. It's official model is the LG VX8500, but it's called the Chocolate because I guess it resembles a small bar of chocolate. The phones have an okay camera which sure beats the piece of crap on my previous phone. Where they shine though is with music. They look kind of like an Ipod and they have a slot for a memory card to upgrade your storage amounts so you can have quite a bit of music on them.
We'll see if they last the 15 days, maybe today's calls being better were just coincidence.
Also, last night we went to the first full team practice for Carolina Football. Brought the camera and the new zoom lens from work and got a few shots. After 15 minutes they come around and you have to stop shooting plus they put the offense on the further of the two practice fields so they're at least 65-75 yards away.
